The Seventh Door

The solicitor’s letter was very clear. The house at Ravensmere was hers, free of all debts and encumbrances, on a single condition: that the door at the end of the east corridor was never to be opened.

Nell read the letter twice on the train and once more in the taxi, and by the time the car turned up the long, overgrown drive she had decided the condition was a rich old woman’s joke.

The house did not look like a joke. It rose out of the fog in grey stone and black glass, three storeys of it, with a tower at one corner that leaned very slightly, the way a person leans when they are trying to hear something in another room.

The housekeeper, Mrs Greer, met her at the door with a ring of keys and no smile at all.

“The east corridor is on the first floor,” she said, before Nell had even taken off her coat. “You’ll know the door. It’s the only one without a handle.”

“Why doesn’t it have a handle?”

“Because,” said Mrs Greer, “nobody has ever needed to open it from this side.”

That night, lying awake in a bed that smelled of lavender and dust, Nell heard it for the first time: a slow, patient sound from somewhere down the corridor, like fingernails drawn very gently across wood.