Door Wide Open: Two Short Creepy Stories

I was looking back toward my roommate with her hand over her mouth as she tried to hold in her laughter. I wanted to laugh too, but managed to hold it in. As I stepped closer to Amanda's door. It was dark inside, and all I could see was a blue light from the outside seeping in through the blind Amanda had no curtains in her room except for the blinds given to us from the university housing department, but she kept them open. I looked at the door handle on the inside of her room and took a half step inside. I grabbed onto it and was about to pull it when I saw a tall sillow wet standing in front of the window by her bed. Amanda was tall, but this one had broad shoulders and what appeared to be a large coat, and most distinctly, a hat. Had frozen plays and stared right at it, completely ignoring the whispers from the other roommate down the hall. She wasn't laughing anymore. My name is Edwin, and here it's a scary story. I felt a hand grip around my arm and pull me toward the hallway. What happened I could hear like on delay. My mind was racing to catch up to what I had just seen. She was being serious now as we both looked at the wide open door down the hall. It was supposed to be a dare, a silly card game when everyone else went out to parties while we stayed in. Amanda liked to sleep with her door wide open, and it wasn't like we cared for understanding why or anything. We actually didn't like her very much, but her little rules kept getting in the way of everything. Her dishes were to be kept separately. She said something about an allergy that nobody quite understood. The community adviser from the university had a meeting with us and Amanda's parents to talk about it, and all we did after that was laugh and complained to our other friends about the whole conversation. They had requested so many things, including removing Amanda's door, but it was a rule from the fire marshal to keep it on noise levels. Smells and even visits to our unit were discussed, and we came out with a contract type of thing. But I'll tell you neither me or the other roommate, her name was Denise liked it in a way. That's how we became friends. Hating on Amanda, I felt bad for her in the beginning. Then I understood why she was bullied. She was annoying, complained about everything that the strangest things that annoyed the heck out of us. That night, the night of the day, when I tried to close the door, everything changed though, And it was the first time I had seen the figure by the window, the same one that Denise had been talking about for months, almost immediately after we moved in. You see, the unit had four rooms, but it was divided into two, so the two of us would share one bathroom and Amanda would have the other bathroom to herself. One room remained completely empty, no bed, she or anything, and it was on her side. That's the room where Denise had claimed to see someone standing in the door faced a living area and we could see right in. I didn't believe Denise, and up until that night I thought that it had been a type of a prank. After all, Denise had a problem with keeping a straight face. So we walked right back to the living room area and sat down quietly as I gathered my words to explain what I had seen. In her excitement, Denise waved her arms and kept interrupting me to say that it matched exactly what she had seen. What if it's her, she asked, and I stopped talking and waited for her to continue, like what if she's haunted or something? I gave her a little more silence before we both let out our laughter. The idea sounded so absurd, and we had no better solution than to laugh. That was a mistake. Amanda rushed out of her room silently like she used to roam around the house without making a noise, and stared at us. Then her mouth opened, did you know what time it is? We both stayed quiet, and then Denise pointed at the clock. Freaking Denise, We both started laughing again. It was ten thirty. By the way, Amanda tried to give us that stare that she always did, the one that showed us how much she wanted to punch our faces but would get in trouble if she did so. Plus, she was so thin that she would probably tumble over like a falling tree with a single push. Just remember the contract, okay, she said, rushing back to her room. This is the part where you would normally hear a door slam, but instead nothing. The door stayed wide open, just like it always did. Remember the contract, Denise murmured, making the stretched out horse face that Amanda would do when she would get mad at us. I'll remember the contract, she said, looking at me, and then cracking up again, covering our mouths one more time. We continued with her card game, stopping briefly to bring up what we had just seen. I was wondering if we were just going to pretend that neither of us had ever seen a strange, dark figure roaming around the unit. I thought that maybe it was the reason why the room was empty, that maybe something had happened there, and that no student ever wanted to stay there because of a ghost that would haunt it. And yet I knew that the money hungry institution would find a way to rent it out either way. It was almost midnight and we were both on our phones when the topic of Amanda's door came back up. Denise wasn't having it. I knew she hated being told what to do and always held something against Amanda even more than I did. But then, without saying a word, she got up, rushed toward Amanda's room, grabbed the door handle, and closed it shut. I stared from the living area, not believing what I had just seen. There's your contract, Denise said, laughing again. But almost immediately we heard a loud scream coming from Amanda's bedroom. It was shrill and terrifying, loud, like from an animal, things that neither of us had ever heard before. We stared at each other with white eyes, not knowing what to do. As the screams intensified, we could hear Amanda banging on her door, crying and yelling. I didn't know what to do, so I ran tow her door to open it. When there was another knock on her front door, I asked the niece to open it while I continued to Amanda's and grabbed onto the doorknob. It swung inside without even trying, and suddenly Amanda went quiet. She went toward the window and crouched under it. Next to her was that same tall figure. But I wasn't going to wonder anymore. I reached for the switch and flicked it on. There was no one next to her. Out in the living room, I could hear two other voices, God one of the community advisers and one of the other residents of the building. Who we knew. They went to speak with Amanda while Denise and I sat in the living room for a couple of hours. Eventually, Amanda's parents arrived and then the resident director. They moved Amanda's things out without saying a word to us. We didn't get to see Amanda leave. Within two weeks, we had two new roommates and our unit seemed somewhat normal. But during one of the meetings, I asked the community adviser about Amanda and what had happened, and obviously he couldn't say much to Denise and I about what it was, but did tell us that Amanda's housing contract had included two rooms, one to be kept empty as part of her co signers agreement, which I'm assuming were her parents a room for that thing. Denise asked as if the CA would know what she was talking about. He stayed quiet for a bit and then asked us about it. We told him about the dark figure that we had seen in the unit. He took a note of it, saying that the housing director had asked him to let him know of Amanda's roommates, which were us ever mentioned something strange in the unit, that it was all he knew and all he could tell us. We never found out what was up with Amanda, And every time we tell the story, someone has a new theory or a new idea to share with us about it. I don't know what to believe anymore. When someone tells me a story of a dark figure standing by the bed, I believe them. I don't know who or what they are, but I've seen them. Denise has seen them, and I'm sure Amanda, wherever she may be, I had seen them too. I spent a lot of time writing for editors who genuinely care about my work. They have lately taken the role of keeping tabs on how I'm doing. Let's just say I had some problems at home, things that everyone else found out before I did. My wife left me with the guy from work. My adult children don't even know or care that I got a number. But even though I had a small bar made in the basement of the house for friends that I no longer had, all the bottles and glasses were intact, gathering some dust, sure, but I hadn't touched any of it. That was part of that. It seemed like I had to convince everyone of that, though, But I'm being straight with you when I tell you that I was fairly all right, just things that happened. I guess there was one thing that was bothering me, and it made convincing my editors a little bit tougher. You see, some of the writing gigs I get are fourteen fiction, sometimes horror books and magazines. So I get sent to a lot of gifts, creepy posters and independent movies on DBD, candles and books, the whole thing. But there was one thing that never quite felt right. Small doll made of composite material that came with a note in this note. This letter said that her name was Veronica, and according to the letter, she had been involved in the success of several poets and songwriters over the years. Her name Veronica Porto, was how she was credited in some works and had even listened to them back in the day. Famous stuff things that you have probably heard about. The thought of crediting an object for a creation of something, some material like that that became so famous seemed absurd, and I thought it was an interesting joke when I read it, and I guess that's what writers are supposed to love, you know, that kind of stuff, and I did so I kept it and I set Veronica high up on a shelf with some of the many books that had been sent to me from where I worked. I would get to see her by turning my neck a little bit to the left. She had dark green eyes, rare in a doll like that. Normally they would pick blue and make the eyes extra shiny, but these were deep and dark. It would be green only around five or six in the afternoon when the light hit the shelf. The doll had been giving to me Right around the same time when I was awarded the John L. Marx Award for writing at the University. Many contracts came from that, and one of them had been for a new piece for a major motion picture company. Thinking that they needed to convince me, they sent it along with a box, and in that box it was Veronica. The contract eventually fell apart, not on my end but on the companies restructuring or whatever, and I wasn't a buying to turn over the words. I had already started with them because I wanted to keep them for myself. They were good, some of the best writing I had ever made. But after a firm letter from a lawyer I turned everything in. It's a strange feeling when you make something that you genuinely like. It's like a sense of pride, mostly followed by the fear of never being able to make something like it, a feeling that makes you selfish and wanting to keep everything to yourself, never accepting another contract again, and working on your own. But they get the buyers. They know how to distribute what you make, and it's a necessary evil, if you will. But back to my problem, that one I was telling you about in the beginning, This doll Veronica didn't belong with me. There had been a short request through the text messages made by one of the many numbers that reached out to me during the times of those contracts. One of them said, return Veronica, and that was that. Now I didn't know to whom or how to do so, and I for sure didn't want to reach out to the company again, bitter from what they had done. But days went by and it was forgotten, lost among the rest of the messages filling up my phone. Story circled in my head, stories that told me that Veronica was unhappy on that shelf as she wanted to go back. That would turn my head to the left every once in a while during my writing sessions, and I would see her an uncomfortable, vengeful face for making her sit there. I thought it would end there, But as time passed, I kept noticing small changes, little things like the position of her arm or the strands of her hair. Could the wind be so strong to move it away from her eyes and then back again? I thought I was losing it. And yeah, the contracts kept coming, and the book sales increased. Editors kept pushing for more. Their publishing companies were raking it in big time, and I was out there struggling to understand where all of these tales were coming from. And then one day I felt compelled to write, and right at the end of a poetry piece for Homeword Magazine, a special thank you I wrote to Veronica Porto. Immediately, I had my editor call me and tell me that he had reached out to the magazine to have that last line removed from the online and the print editions, warning me to never put such a thing in the credit, that the works are mine and mine only. But I disagreed. The stories I was able to write were nothing even close to my own experiences. There were trails of sentences that I would watch after my fingers typed them, and in astonishment, I kept reading as these beautiful, dark works of art kept appearing on my word document stories of love and loss, strong descriptions of people I've never met, and clothing I had never seen before being described perfectly in words right in front of me. Of course, I don't want you to think that I've lost it too, just like my editors. Do you believe me? Right? I'm all right? Trust me? What's that? All right? Okay, all right, hold on, I gotta go back to writing. Scary Story podcast is written and produced by me Edwin Kovarubiez. Thank you for your recent messages and dms. I was out due to the passing of my best friend. It was a time for stories that turned to memories and some I hadn't heard for the first time. We're also remembering other stories and memories that we had made together. It was a rough time, and I mentioned this on my channel on Instagram that friends or family that we get to choose, So I just want to remind you call them up every once in a while. Life cannot get in the way when they're a part of it already. Thank you for showing up once again. I appreciate you so much, and I'll be back with more stories. Thank you very much for listening. Keep it scary everyone, Seya soon