**Hands**

It all started when a light bulb burned out. As usual, I was working at night, staring at my computer monitor with reddened eyes and finishing my fourth mug of coffee, when the bulb flared with a loud crack and went out. I didn’t attach any importance to it at all—there were five bulbs in the chandelier, after all. One more, one less—no big deal. At least, that’s what I thought then.

When about half an hour later a second bulb burned out, I grew a little tense—I really didn’t want to end up in total darkness. The thing is, I’ve had a phobia since childhood—I’m afraid of the dark. No, not just afraid—it sends me into panic, hysteria, a state close to fainting. I don’t know where it came from. As long as I can remember, I always had to sleep with a night light on. That’s why I usually went to bed at dawn—my job allowed it.

The third bulb didn’t just burn out, it exploded, as if the voltage in the network had suddenly jumped by fifty volts. Yet the computer kept working as if nothing had happened. Muttering a brief but colorful curse, I grabbed a flashlight from my desk drawer just in case and went to the kitchen for a broom to sweep up the shards that had covered the floor of the only room in my apartment like a predatory carpet. That was when I heard something strange.

The sound was coming from the front door. Soft slaps. As if someone were tapping the metal with the palm of their hand. Armed only with a flashlight and a broom, which I held like a sword, I moved toward the sound.

Automatically flicking the light switch in the hallway, I looked through the peephole. No one. Just darkness. The very thought of opening the door—let alone stepping out there, into the pitch-black stairwell—filled me with terror, so, thinking, *“No way, you won’t get me,”* I turned back toward the room. That was when I heard another sound that sent a trickle of cold sweat down my spine. The unmistakable creak of the front door opening. Need I mention that just seconds earlier, when I looked through the peephole, it had been securely locked with two locks?

The next events happened almost simultaneously. I turned toward the slowly opening door, aiming the beam of my flashlight into the gap, when the bulb above my head flared and went out. I was left in complete darkness, barely pushed back by the narrow beam of the flashlight. Somewhere in the darkness of the stairwell there was a rustle, and I saw a pale child’s hand feeling its way along my door.

Children? At night? In the stairwell? A hysterical chuckle—almost a sob—escaped me. Soon a second hand joined the first, slapping its palm against the doorframe. Then a third. A fourth… I think I began to lose consciousness when I noticed that all the hands seemed to belong to a single creature, and that it was searching for something to grab onto so it could pull itself up, drag its body inside.

Then, already half-delirious, I remembered where my phobia had come from. I had seen this creature before. Long ago, in early childhood, it had come to play with me. I remember that back then those childlike hands probing the pantry door didn’t frighten me at all. It had such a coaxing, pleasant voice—a low male baritone. I remembered how, as a foolish child, I had even gladly helped it open the door myself. And then, I think, I saw it—and nearly went mad. At this point my memory offers only blurred outlines of something repulsive in the darkness of the pantry.

All of this took a fraction of a second while I stood there, shining my useless flashlight into the void. That’s where my coherent memories end. The last thing I remember is collapsing onto the floor with a sharp pain in my chest, crawling toward the phone, and dialing for an ambulance.

I came to in the hospital. As it turned out—cardiac arrest. I had been dead for a little over a minute. I was lucky not to end up a vegetable. I might have thought it was all a hallucination, but when I asked the perfectly reasonable question of how the doctors had gotten into my apartment, I was told that the door had been standing wide open.

It found me. After all those years, it finally found my door.

Of course, I told no one about this. The last thing I wanted was to end up in a mental institution. There are so many doors there… and absolutely nowhere to hide.

Barely discharged from the hospital, I packed my things and fled. I covered my tracks like a hare running from a fox. From city to city, never staying longer than a day. Finally, I decided I had confused it enough and calmed down.

Now I live far away—very far from my hometown—and here it won’t find me. Right? I finally managed to hide, didn’t I? I hope so.