I was 17 when Grandma Amy died and left me her house in the will. Nobody else wanted it. My parents called it "that creepy old place where mom did her weird rituals," and my older brother Derek said he'd rather live in his car than spend one night under that roof. But I'd always loved visiting Grandma, loved the way she'd bake me cookies and tell me stories about the old country, even if some of those stories gave me nightmares.
So when the lawyer read the will and everyone else declined, I said yes without hesitation. The house was mine, along with one very specific condition written in Grandma's shaky handwriting at the bottom of the document:
"Jack must continue the salt ritual every night without fail. Every doorway, every window. Never forget. Never question why."
My parents had laughed nervously at that part. My mother said it was just dementia talking, that Grandma had gotten paranoid and superstitious in her final years. But I remembered the ritual clearly from every visit I'd ever made. Every single night at exactly 9:00 p.m., Grandma would take her ceramic bowl filled with coarse salt and walk through the house, sprinkling a thin line across every threshold, every window sill, muttering words in a language I didn't recognize. She'd done it for as long as I could remember, and she'd never explained why beyond saying, "It keeps them out, Jack. The salt keeps them out."
I moved into the house three days after the funeral, bringing only two suitcases and my laptop. The place was exactly as I remembered it—slightly musty and smelling of lavender and old books, with photographs covering every wall and Grandma's collection of ceramic angels watching from every shelf. But there was something else too, something I'd never noticed during my visits, maybe because Grandma's presence had masked it.
The house felt watched. Not by the angels or the photographs, but by something I couldn't see or name. The feeling was strongest near the doorways, like the air itself was thicker there, pressing against you when you crossed from one room to another.
I found Grandma's salt bowl on the kitchen counter, right where she'd always kept it, next to a handwritten note in her distinctive cursive:
"Jack, you promised you'd continue this. I know you think I was just a paranoid old woman, but there are things in this world that don't follow the rules you learned in school. The salt works. It's worked for 63 years since I bought this house and learned what was here before me. Don't test it. Don't skip even one night. And if you ever do forget, if you ever break the protection, remember this: they can't cross running water, they can't enter without invitation after sunrise, and they fear iron more than fire. Keep Grandpa's old railroad spike under your pillow. You'll need it."
The note was dated two weeks before she died, like she'd known her time was running out and wanted to make sure I had instructions.
That first night, I followed the ritual exactly as I'd watched Grandma do it countless times. At 9:00 p.m., I took the bowl of salt and walked through the house, starting at the front door and moving clockwise through every room. I sprinkled salt across the threshold of the front door, the back door, the basement door, the bathroom door, bedroom doors—even the closets. Then I moved to the windows, every single one, creating unbroken lines of white crystals on the sills.
The whole process took about twenty minutes, and when I finished, I felt ridiculous. Here I was, a high school senior who'd taken AP Physics and was planning to study engineering in college, performing what was essentially a superstition ritual because a note from my dead grandmother told me to. But I'd promised, and something about the way the house felt after the salt was in place—something about how the watched feeling diminished slightly—made me want to keep that promise.
The first week went smoothly. I established a routine: school during the day, homework in the evening, and the salt ritual at 9:00 p.m. sharp. My friends thought it was weird when I refused to hang out past 8:30, but I made excuses about early mornings and strict house rules I was supposed to follow. Nobody questioned it too much because everyone knew my family was a bit odd, and inheriting your grandmother's house at 17 was unusual enough on its own.
It was on the eighth night that I first heard them.
I'd just finished the salt ritual and was settling into bed with my physics textbook when I heard scratching at the front door. Not loud or aggressive, just a soft, persistent scraping, like someone was dragging their fingernails across the wood grain. I froze, listening intently, telling myself it was probably a branch from the old oak tree in the yard. But the scratching continued for almost ten minutes, moving slowly from the bottom of the door to the top, then back down again.
When it finally stopped, I heard breathing on the other side of the door. Not human breathing, but something slower, deeper, with a wet, rattling quality that made my skin crawl.
I grabbed my phone to call the police, but the sound stopped the moment I touched the screen. The silence that followed was somehow worse than the noise had been.
I didn't sleep well that night, and when I checked the front door in the morning, there were no scratches on the wood, no signs that anything had been there at all. But the salt line I'd carefully placed across the threshold was disturbed—pushed outward from the outside, as if something had tried to cross it but couldn't quite manage. The salt itself looked burned, darkened and crystallized in a way that wasn't natural.
I took a photo with my phone, then carefully swept up the damaged salt and replaced it with fresh grains before leaving for school.
Over the next two weeks, the nocturnal disturbances intensified. Every night after the salt ritual, I'd hear them moving around the house's exterior—sometimes scratching at doors or windows, sometimes just walking in slow circles around the building. I could track their movement by the sound of footsteps on the gravel driveway, except the footsteps didn't sound quite right. They were too heavy, too deliberate, and sometimes there seemed to be more than two feet making the sounds.
On the fourteenth night, I worked up the courage to look out a window when I heard something pressed against the glass.
What I saw made me stumble backward and nearly drop Grandma's iron railroad spike that I'd started carrying everywhere after dark.
There was a face at the window, but calling it a face was generous. It had the basic structure of human features—eyes, nose, mouth—but everything was slightly wrong. The proportions were off, the eyes too large and set too far apart, the mouth too wide and filled with too many teeth. The skin, if you could call it that, was a sickly gray color and seemed to writhe slightly in the moonlight, like it wasn't quite solid.
The thing was smiling at me, and when it saw me looking back, its smile widened impossibly further, splitting its face nearly in half. Then it pressed one hand against the glass and I saw that it had too many fingers—long and spider-like, each one ending in a black nail that scratched against the window with that same sound I'd been hearing every night.
I don't remember moving, but suddenly I was in my bedroom with the door locked, sitting on my bed and gripping the iron spike so hard my knuckles were white. I stayed there until sunrise, listening to the things—plural now—moving around outside. There were at least three of them based on the different sounds and locations.
When morning came and light started filtering through my curtains, the noises stopped abruptly, like someone had flipped a switch.
I checked every window and door that morning before leaving for school, and every salt line was intact but disturbed, pushed at from the outside but not crossed. Whatever these things were, they couldn't get past the salt. Grandma's ritual was actually protecting me from something real, something that had probably been trying to get into this house for decades.
The thought of what might have happened to Grandma if she'd ever forgotten her nightly ritual made me feel sick.
That day at school, I spent my lunch period in the library researching salt protection rituals and supernatural entities. Most of what I found was folklore and superstition—stories about demons and spirits that couldn't cross barriers of salt because it was a pure crystal, blessed by the earth, naturally preserving. But one obscure forum post caught my attention, written by someone who claimed to be a paranormal researcher.
They described entities called "the threshold dwellers"—beings that existed in the spaces between places, that fed on the transition from one state to another. According to this researcher, threshold dwellers were attracted to houses built on certain types of land, places where multiple property lines converged, or where old structures had been torn down and new ones built on the same foundation. The entities couldn't exist fully in our world or fully in wherever they came from. They lived in doorways and windows, in the transition spaces, and they wanted desperately to cross over completely. But they needed an invitation, a breaking of protective barriers, a moment of vulnerability when the house was unsealed.
The researcher claimed that salt worked because it was a substance without transition—a stable crystal that disrupted the threshold space the entities needed to cross.
The post ended with a warning written in all caps that I now knew was deadly serious:
"IF YOU EVER FORGET TO SEAL YOUR HOME, IF THE SALT LINE IS EVER BROKEN, YOU HAVE UNTIL SUNRISE TO EITHER RESTORE IT OR LEAVE PERMANENTLY. THEY WILL NOT WAIT. THEY WILL NOT FORGIVE. AND THEY WILL NOT STOP TRYING TO FINISH WHAT THEY STARTED."
I screenshotted that post and several others, then spent the rest of my lunch looking up the history of Grandma's house. What I found made my blood run cold.
The property had changed hands eleven times in the eighty years before Grandma bought it in 1960, and seven of those ownership transfers were due to the death of the previous owner. Not just death, but unexplained death. Violent death. Death that happened inside the house under circumstances that were never fully explained in the old newspaper articles I found in the library's archived records.
The pattern was clear once you knew to look for it: someone would buy the house, live there for a few months or years, and then one morning they'd be found dead in their bedroom. Faces frozen in expressions of absolute terror. Bodies showing no signs of violence but appearing somehow desiccated, like something had drained them from the inside out.
The last death before Grandma bought the place was in 1959—a school teacher named Margaret Holloway, who'd lived alone and was found by a concerned neighbor after she didn't show up for work. The neighbor's statement to police mentioned that all the doors and windows had been open when they arrived, which they found strange because it had been winter and Margaret was known to be very conscious about heating bills.
I thought about Grandma living in this house for 63 years, performing her salt ritual every single night without fail, protecting herself from entities that had killed at least seven people before her. And now that responsibility had fallen to me.
The weight of it was terrifying, but I was more determined than ever to maintain the protection, to not become the eighth victim of whatever was trying to get inside.
That night, I performed the salt ritual with renewed focus, making absolutely sure every line was unbroken, every threshold perfectly sealed. I added extra salt to the window where I'd seen that face, and I placed Grandpa's iron railroad spike on my nightstand instead of under my pillow so I could grab it faster if needed.
The scratching and walking sounds came again after dark, but I ignored them, focusing on my homework and trying to convince myself that as long as I followed Grandma's rules, I'd be safe.
Days turned into weeks, and I fell into a rhythm: school, homework, salt ritual, sleep interrupted by nocturnal visitors that couldn't cross my protective barriers. My grades started slipping because I wasn't sleeping well, and my friends stopped inviting me to things because I was never available.
But I was alive and unharmed, which was more than Margaret Holloway or any of the other previous owners could say.
Then came the night I forgot.
It was a Friday in late October, about six weeks after I'd moved in. I'd stayed late after school for a study group, working on a group project that was due Monday, and I didn't get home until almost 10:00 p.m. I was exhausted and distracted, thinking about the project and how much work we still had to do.
I made dinner, ate while watching videos on my laptop, and fell asleep on the couch around 11:30 p.m. without ever thinking about the salt ritual.
I woke up at 3:33 a.m. to the sound of my front door creaking open.
Not violently, not forced—just slowly swinging inward, like someone had gently turned the handle.
I bolted upright on the couch, my heart already racing, and in that moment of confusion between sleep and waking, I realized with absolute horror what I'd done.
I'd forgotten the salt. The doorways were unsealed. The windows were unprotected.
And something was coming inside.
I could hear it moving through the front hallway, that same too-heavy footstep pattern I'd heard outside so many nights, but now it was inside. In my house. In my space.
I grabbed my phone from the coffee table and turned on the flashlight, pointing it toward the hallway. The beam illuminated something standing just beyond the living room entrance, and my mind struggled to process what I was seeing.
It was roughly human-shaped but wrong in every proportion. Too tall—maybe seven feet—with limbs that were too long and seemed to have too many joints. The head was the worst part, though. That same face I'd seen at the window, but worse somehow. More detailed and more horrible up close. Its skin wasn't gray in the light but a sickly translucent color that let me see the shapes of things moving underneath—things that weren't organs or bones, but something else entirely.
When my flashlight hit it, the thing didn't recoil or shield its too-large eyes. Instead, it smiled that impossibly wide smile and took a step closer.
I remembered Grandma's note suddenly, the instructions she'd left for exactly this situation: "they can't cross running water."
The bathroom was just down the hall behind me, and the house had old plumbing that made noise when you turned on the faucets. I ran, not looking back, hearing that thing's footsteps accelerating behind me with a clicking sound like claws on hardwood.
I slammed into the bathroom and immediately turned on both the sink and the bathtub, water rushing from both faucets. The thing appeared in the doorway behind me, reaching one of its too-long arms toward me, but when its fingers got close to where water from the sink was splashing onto the floor and running toward the door, it jerked back like it had been burned.
The arm retreated, and the thing stood there in the doorway, swaying slightly, that horrible smile never changing.
It couldn't enter. The running water was creating a barrier it couldn't cross.
I pressed myself against the far wall of the bathroom next to the tub that was rapidly filling and stared at the creature that was now trapped just outside the door. We stayed like that for what felt like hours but was probably only ten or fifteen minutes. The thing didn't leave, just stood there watching me with those too-large eyes, occasionally reaching toward the water barrier and pulling back when it got too close.
I could hear other sounds now. More footsteps in other parts of the house. There were multiple entities inside, and they were searching.
I pulled out my phone with shaking hands, thinking about calling someone, anyone, but who would believe me? Who would come help fight monsters that shouldn't exist?
Instead, I did something that probably saved my life: I started Googling emergency salt rituals and banishment procedures on supernatural forums, looking for anything that might help me reclaim my house before sunrise.
One post from the same researcher I'd found before had a procedure that seemed possible: if you forgot to seal your home and entities got inside, you could still force them out by creating a salt circle around yourself and using iron to mark symbols of banishment while speaking words in what the post called "the old language"—the tongue spoken before tongues existed.
The post included phonetic spellings of the words and detailed drawings of the symbols, which I screenshotted immediately.
The only problem was that I needed salt and iron, and both were outside this bathroom. The salt bowl was in the kitchen and the iron railroad spike was on my nightstand in the bedroom. I'd have to leave the water protection to retrieve them, which meant being vulnerable to whatever was out there.
But I couldn't stay in this bathroom forever. The tub was nearly overflowing, and I didn't have infinite water pressure to maintain the barrier. At some point, I'd have to either act or wait for the things to find another way to get to me.
I made my decision quickly, before fear could paralyze me. I turned off the bathtub but left the sink running, grabbed the heaviest thing I could find in the bathroom—which was a metal plunger handle—and prepared to run.
The thing in my doorway seemed to sense my intention, because its smile widened even further, splitting its face so wide I could see that it had no throat behind those too many teeth, just an endless dark void.
I counted to three in my head, then moved.
I swung the plunger handle at the thing's head as I burst through the doorway, not expecting to hurt it, but hoping to surprise it enough to get past. The metal connected with something that felt like hitting cold jelly, and the creature recoiled just enough for me to slip past it into the hallway.
I ran toward the kitchen, hearing multiple sets of those clicking footsteps converging behind me. I grabbed the salt bowl from the counter, nearly dropping it in my panic, and turned to see three of the things blocking the hallway behind me. They were moving slowly, deliberately, backing me toward the corner of the kitchen like predators who knew their prey was trapped.
But I wasn't trapped yet.
I poured a quick circle of salt on the kitchen floor, just big enough for me to stand in, and stepped inside. The creatures stopped at the edge of the salt circle, unwilling or unable to cross it, and I used that moment to catch my breath and look at the symbols I'd screenshotted on my phone.
The symbols were geometric and complex—combinations of circles and lines and angles that hurt my eyes to look at for too long. According to the post, I needed to draw them in salt around my protective circle while speaking the banishment words. The problem was that drawing them would require me to break the circle, to put myself at risk again, unless I could use something with a longer reach.
I looked around the kitchen desperately and saw it: a broom leaning against the wall, just outside my salt circle. If I could reach it without stepping out of the circle, I could use the handle to draw symbols at a distance.
I leaned as far as I could, stretching my arm until my shoulder ached, and just barely managed to hook the broom's handle with my fingertips. One of the creatures lunged forward when it saw what I was doing, but stopped at the salt line, its hand hovering just above the barrier.
I pulled the broom toward me slowly, carefully, and when I finally had it in both hands, I started using the handle to draw symbols in the salt on the floor around my circle.
The creatures watched with what I can only describe as curiosity mixed with growing alarm. As I drew each symbol and spoke the phonetic words from my phone screen, the entities began to change. Their forms became less solid, more translucent, like they were being pulled back toward whatever space they'd come from.
The words tasted strange in my mouth, making my tongue feel thick and my teeth ache. They weren't sounds humans were meant to make—consonants that required clicking your throat in ways that shouldn't be possible, and vowels that you had to shape with your entire mouth cavity. But I kept speaking them, kept drawing the symbols, and the things kept fading.
The one that had been at my bathroom door was the last to go, and as it disappeared, I could swear it spoke to me. Not out loud, but directly into my mind, in a voice that sounded like wind through empty spaces:
"We were invited in by your forgetting. We will be invited again. You will forget again. They always do."
Then it was gone. All three of them vanished like they'd never been there at all.
But the house felt different now. Violated in a way that had nothing to do with broken locks or forced entry. Something had crossed my threshold and touched my space, and I knew that feeling would never fully leave.
I spent the rest of the night sitting in my salt circle, too terrified to move, too wired to sleep. When sunrise finally came and light began filtering through the kitchen window, I carefully stepped out of the circle and began the process of checking every room.
The house was empty of visible entities, but I could see evidence of their presence everywhere: wet footprints that weren't made by human feet tracked through the hallway and into several rooms. Deep scratches in the walls and floors that definitely hadn't been there before, made by something with claws or very long nails. And most disturbing, all the photographs on the walls now showed figures standing in the backgrounds that I didn't remember being there when the photos were taken—shadowy shapes barely visible in the corners of images, watching the smiling people in the foreground with those too-large eyes.
I spent all of Saturday performing an intensive version of Grandma's salt ritual, not just sprinkling lines across thresholds, but pouring thick barriers that would take deliberate effort to cross. I salted every doorway, every window, even the vents and air ducts. I went to three different stores and bought fifty pounds of salt total, using almost all of it to seal the house as thoroughly as possible.
Then I went through the basement, which I'd been avoiding since moving in, looking for anything that might help me understand what I was dealing with.
That's where I found Grandma's journals.
They were stored in an old trunk underneath dusty boxes of Christmas decorations—forty years worth of leather-bound notebooks documenting her experiences with the threshold dwellers. I spent the rest of Saturday and all of Sunday reading them, learning the history of this house and the entities that had claimed it long before any human structure was built here.
According to Grandma's earliest entries from 1960, the land this house stood on had once been part of a much larger property owned by a man named Silas Murdoch in the 1880s. Murdoch had been obsessed with spiritualism and the occult, and he'd conducted rituals and experiments trying to communicate with what he called "the spaces between spaces." He'd succeeded too well, opening doorways that shouldn't have been opened and inviting things through that couldn't be easily sent back.
When Murdoch disappeared in 1889, his property was divided and sold off, but the doorways he'd opened remained. They stayed dormant most of the time, but every few decades they'd activate again, and the threshold dwellers would try to cross over fully, drawn by the original invitation Murdoch had extended.
Grandma had bought the house not knowing its history, but she'd experienced her first encounter within a week of moving in. She'd been terrified, nearly left, but an elderly neighbor who'd lived in the area for sixty years had explained about the salt protection and the entities. That neighbor, a woman named Dorothy, had given Grandma the ritual and warned her to never miss a single night.
Dorothy died in 1962, but Grandma had continued the protection faithfully for 63 years, keeping detailed records of every disturbance and learning as much as she could about the entities.
One entry from 1983 particularly disturbed me. Grandma wrote about a night when she'd been sick with the flu, running a high fever that made her confused and disoriented. She'd gone to bed without performing the salt ritual, and the entities had come inside, just like they'd done to me. But Grandma had been too sick to fight them off properly.
She wrote: "They touched me before I could complete the banishment. One of them put its hand on my shoulder and I felt something cold seep into my bones. Since that night, I dream their dreams. I see what they see. I know things I shouldn't know about the spaces between places, about the hunger that drives them to cross over, about what they want from us. They feed on transition, on the moment of change from one state to another. They want to catch humans in that moment between sleeping and waking, between living and dying, and drain the energy of that transformation. That's why they target doorways and windows, thresholds—that's where transformation happens."
The entry continued: "I managed to banish them before they could drain me completely, but I'm marked now. Part of me will always be connected to them. I can feel when they're watching, feel when they're hungry. The salt protection still works, but I have to be even more careful now. If I forget again, if I give them another chance, they won't just drain me—they'll take me back to their space, trap me in permanent transition, neither alive nor dead, neither here nor there. I've seen what happened to others they've taken, seen them in my dreams, frozen in doorways that exist between dimensions, aware but unable to move or scream or die. I will not let that happen to me."
Reading that made me understand why Grandma had been so insistent about the ritual, why she'd made it a condition of inheriting the house. She wasn't just paranoid or superstitious—she was protecting me from something real and terrible, something she'd spent 63 years fighting. And I'd nearly undone all her work by forgetting one night.
I couldn't let that happen again.
I set up redundancies: alarms on my phone to remind me about the salt ritual, notes posted in every room, a backup bowl of salt hidden in my bedroom in case something happened to the main supply. I started sleeping with Grandpa's iron railroad spike under my pillow again, and I kept a flashlight and my phone fully charged on my nightstand at all times.
The entities came back that night, testing my newly reinforced salt barriers. I could hear them outside, moving around the house in greater numbers than before. It sounded like dozens of them now, clicking and scraping and sometimes whispering in that language I'd spoken during the banishment. They stayed outside, though, unable to cross the salt lines, and eventually they left before sunrise.
This became the new pattern: every night they'd come and test the barriers, every morning they'd leave without getting inside.
I continued reading Grandma's journals, learning more about the threshold dwellers and their nature. They weren't demons or ghosts or any traditional supernatural category. They were something else entirely—entities that had evolved or been created in the spaces between dimensions, beings that fed on transformation and change. They couldn't die because they'd never been fully alive. They couldn't be destroyed because they existed partially outside our reality. The best you could do was keep them from crossing over completely, maintain the barriers and never give them the opening they needed.
One journal entry from 2015, just a few years before Grandma died, contained information that changed my understanding of everything:
"I've been researching the other properties on Murdoch's original land. There are six houses total, built on the locations where he performed his rituals. Mine is one, but there are five others scattered around the neighborhood. I've tried to contact the owners to warn them, but most think I'm crazy. Two houses have protective rituals in place—I can sense it—but three have nothing. I can only protect my own house; I can't force others to believe in dangers they can't see. I worry about what will happen when I'm gone, about whether Jack or whoever inherits this place will maintain the protection. But I've done what I can. I've written everything down. The knowledge will be here for whoever needs it."
That entry was followed by a list of addresses—the other five properties from Murdoch's original land. I looked them up on Google Maps and felt my stomach drop. One of them was only three blocks away.
The next day after school, I rode my bike to that address, needing to see it for myself. The house was similar to Grandma's in age and style, a craftsman from the early 1900s, but there was something wrong with it that I couldn't quite articulate. The angles seemed slightly off, like the house was leaning even though it clearly wasn't. The windows looked dark even in afternoon sunlight, and I could swear I saw movement in those windows—shadows passing back and forth.
There was a "For Rent" sign in the front yard, and according to the property management website listed, the house had been vacant for six months. The listing mentioned recent renovations and "great bones," but the photos showed a space that looked wrong in the same way the exterior did.
I thought about the pattern Grandma had documented—houses changing owners frequently, unexplained deaths, people driven out by things they couldn't name or understand—and I realized this vacant house probably had no salt protection at all. The entities there were free to roam, waiting for new victims to move in unsuspecting.
I took photos of the house and added them to a folder on my phone where I was documenting everything. I'd started a blog too, anonymous, where I was posting about my experiences and Grandma's research. I figured if something happened to me, if the entities eventually succeeded in their efforts to get inside, at least there'd be a record. At least someone else might learn from my mistakes.
Winter came, and with it, longer nights and more aggressive activity from the threshold dwellers. They no longer limited their attempts to after dark. On overcast days, when the sun was hidden by thick clouds, I'd sometimes see shadows moving past the windows, testing the barriers even in daylight.
The scratching sounds became more insistent, and I started finding strange symbols drawn in the frost on my windows—symbols that matched the ones I'd used for banishment but reversed, inverted. According to more research on those paranormal forums, inverted protection symbols were actually invitation symbols, ways of weakening barriers and drawing entities closer.
Something was trying to counter my protection, possibly the entities themselves, learning and adapting.
I spent a weekend making iron crosses from old railroad nails I bought at an antique store, following instructions from one of Grandma's journals. I placed these crosses above every doorway and window, adding an extra layer of protection beyond the salt. The iron hurt the entities more than the salt did, according to Grandma's notes—salt prevented crossing, but iron caused actual pain or damage.
The night after I installed the iron crosses, the entities' nightly visit was noticeably shorter and less aggressive. They stayed back from the house, maintaining more distance than before, and I actually got a full night's sleep for the first time in weeks.
But the reprieve didn't last. Within a few days, they'd adapted again, finding new ways to press at my defenses without touching the iron directly. I'd wake up to find objects in my house moved, things from one room appearing in another, even though all my doors and windows remained sealed.
At first, I thought I was going crazy, misremembering where I'd left things. But then I set up my phone to record video overnight, and the footage confirmed my fears: objects were moving on their own, sliding across floors and shelves, not being carried by anything visible, but clearly being manipulated by something.
The entities were finding ways to affect my space without physically crossing the threshold, reaching through somehow and exerting force from their side of the barrier.
I consulted the forums again and learned about "threshold bleeding"—a phenomenon where the barrier between dimensions became thin enough that entities could exert limited influence without fully crossing. The solution was to reinforce not just the physical thresholds, but the conceptual ones, using symbols and rituals that strengthened the boundary itself.
I spent an entire weekend performing a house blessing ritual I found in one of Grandma's later journals, burning sage in every room, speaking words of binding and protection, visualizing walls of light surrounding the property. It felt ridiculous doing it, my rational, engineering-focused brain rebelling against what seemed like pure superstition, but I couldn't deny the results.
After the blessing, the object movement stopped. The entities' nightly visits became less frequent and less aggressive, and I started sleeping better. The watched feeling that had been constant since moving in finally diminished to a background awareness instead of a pressing dread.
I made it through that winter and into spring without any major incidents. The salt ritual became as automatic as brushing my teeth, something I did without thinking about it consciously.
I graduated high school and decided to attend the local community college instead of going away to university. I couldn't leave the house unprotected, couldn't let it sit empty and vulnerable. Grandma had protected this threshold for 63 years; now it was my responsibility to continue that protection for however long I lived here.
Some might call that being trapped, stuck maintaining a ritual against monsters that most people didn't even believe existed. But I called it keeping a promise to someone I loved, and preventing those entities from claiming another victim. Because I knew what would happen if the salt protection ever failed permanently. I'd seen it in Grandma's dreams, recorded in her journals—the fate of those who were taken—and I would do everything in my power to keep that from happening to anyone else.
The threshold dwellers were still out there, still waiting, still hungry.
But as long as I kept salting those doorways every night, they couldn't touch me.
And maybe that's enough.
The months rolled by. Summer came, and with it, a false sense of security. The longer days meant the entities had less time to prowl, and their visits became sporadic, almost predictable in their rhythm. I started to relax, just a little. Started to feel like maybe I had this under control.
My friend Jason started texting me more often, inviting me to hang out. He'd been persistent all year, never quite accepting my excuses about being busy or needing to stay home. By August, I was running out of reasons to say no.
"Come on, man," he said one afternoon when he stopped by unannounced. "You've been a hermit all year. Dick and Sam miss you. We all do. One night. That's all I'm asking. We'll hang out, have some beers, play some games. Like old times."
I stood in the doorway, very aware of not inviting him inside, of the afternoon sun that was still high enough to make me feel safe.
"I don't know, Jason. I've got a lot going on—"
"Bullshit." He grinned, but there was concern in his eyes. "You've been alone in this house for almost a year now. That's not healthy, Jack. Your grandma wouldn't want you isolating yourself like this."
He was right about that, at least partially. Grandma had been social, had friends, had a life beyond these walls. But she'd also been vigilant. She'd never let anyone interfere with the ritual.
"One night," Jason pressed. "Friday. We'll come here if you want. Bring everything to you. You won't even have to leave the house."
That was the key that unlocked my resistance. If they came here, I could still do the ritual. I could control the situation, keep everything safe. And maybe Jason was right. Maybe I did need some normalcy, some connection to the world I used to know.
"Okay," I said. "Friday. But you guys have to leave by nine."
Jason's face broke into a genuine smile. "Nine o'clock? What are you, my grandma? Come on, at least give us until midnight."
"Nine-thirty," I countered. "Final offer."
"Deal." He clapped me on the shoulder. "You won't regret this, man. It'll be good for you."
I spent the days leading up to Friday in a state of low-level anxiety, planning everything out meticulously. I'd do the salt ritual at exactly 9:00 p.m., just like always. The guys would probably think it was weird, but I'd come up with some excuse—a house rule, an OCD thing, whatever. They'd laugh, maybe give me shit about it, but they'd let me do it. Then we could hang out for another hour or so before they left, and everything would be fine.
I had it all figured out.
Friday arrived with unseasonably warm weather, the kind of late summer evening that made you want to stay outside forever. Jason, Dick, and Sam showed up at seven with two cases of beer, a bottle of whiskey, and enough snacks to feed a small army.
"Jack!" Sam pulled me into a hug before I could protest. "Man, it's been forever. You look like shit, by the way."
"Thanks," I said dryly, but I was smiling despite myself. I'd forgotten how much I missed this—the easy camaraderie, the stupid jokes, the feeling of being part of something beyond salt lines and shadow creatures.
We settled in the living room, and for the first couple of hours, everything was perfect. We played video games, told stories about the people from school, caught up on gossip and news. Dick had gotten into State. Sam was working at his dad's auto shop. Jason was taking a gap year to figure out what he wanted to do.
"What about you?" Sam asked, cracking open another beer. "Community college, right? You still want to do engineering?"
"Yeah," I said, though the word felt hollow. My academic ambitions seemed so distant now, so irrelevant compared to the nightly battle I fought to keep malevolent entities at bay. "Still figuring it out."
The conversation flowed, lubricated by alcohol. I wasn't much of a drinker—couldn't afford to dull my senses, not with what lived outside my walls—but tonight I let myself have a beer. Then another. The guys kept offering, kept pushing, and the warm buzz that spread through my limbs felt so good, so normal, that I didn't resist as much as I should have.
By 8:30, I'd had four beers and two shots of whiskey that Dick had insisted we do "for old times' sake."
By 8:45, I was laughing at Jason's story about a disastrous first date, my head pleasantly fuzzy, my body relaxed in a way it hadn't been in months.
At 8:50, Sam suggested we order pizza.
At 8:55, Dick was demonstrating a terrible dance move he claimed would "definitely work" at clubs, and we were all doubled over laughing.
And at 9:00 p.m., when I should have been taking the salt bowl and beginning my ritual, I was on the couch, surrounded by my friends, arguing about whether pineapple belonged on pizza, with absolutely no thought in my head except how good it felt to be normal again.
The alarm on my phone went off—I'd set three of them, just to be safe—but the sound was muffled under a pile of coats someone had thrown on the coffee table. I didn't hear it. Didn't even register that something was wrong.
We kept drinking. Kept laughing. Jason put on music, and the house filled with noise and light and life in a way it hadn't since Grandma died. Since I'd inherited this responsibility I'd never asked for.
At 10:30, Dick suggested shots. I'd already had too much, my vision slightly doubled, my thoughts slow and syrupy. But I said yes anyway, because saying no meant explaining why, and explaining why meant revealing the truth about this house, about what I did every night, about the things that waited outside.
And I couldn't do that. Couldn't bear to see the looks on their faces—the concern, the disbelief, the slow realization that their friend had lost his mind.
So I did the shot. And then another.
At 11:00, Sam noticed I was swaying and suggested I should probably slow down. I waved him off, insisted I was fine, poured another drink with unsteady hands.
The room spun pleasantly. The music was too loud. Everything was funny, even things that weren't supposed to be funny. I felt free for the first time in months, unchained from responsibility and fear and the constant vigilance that had become my life.
I had completely forgotten about the salt.
At 11:30, Jason started yawning, mentioning that he had work in the morning. Sam and Dick began gathering their things, making noises about heading out. I walked them to the door, stumbling slightly, making them promise to do this again soon.
"You okay to be alone tonight?" Jason asked, genuine concern in his voice. "You're pretty drunk, man."
"I'm fine," I slurred, leaning against the doorframe for support. "Perfectly fine. Best night I've had in forever."
"Alright." He didn't look convinced, but he let Sam and Dick pull him toward Dick's car. "Text us tomorrow, okay? Let us know you survived."
"I'll survive," I said, the words feeling prophetic in a way my drunk mind couldn't quite process. "Always do."
I watched them drive away, their taillights disappearing down the dark street. Then I closed the door, locked it, and stumbled back into the living room. The house was a mess—empty beer cans everywhere, plates of half-eaten snacks, the whiskey bottle nearly empty on the coffee table.
I should clean up, I thought vaguely. Should do... something. There was something I was supposed to do. Something important.
But I couldn't remember what it was.
I collapsed onto the couch, the room spinning around me, and closed my eyes. Just for a minute. Just to make the spinning stop.
The last thing I remembered thinking before I passed out was how good it felt to laugh again.
I don't know what woke me.
Maybe it was instinct. Maybe it was some deep, primal part of my brain that remembered danger even when the conscious parts were drowned in alcohol. Maybe it was Grandma, somehow, reaching across death to warn me.
Whatever it was, my eyes snapped open at 3:33 a.m.
The house was dark. The music had stopped. And in that darkness, I heard it.
Breathing.
Not from outside this time. Not muffled by walls or separated by glass.
Inside. Close. In the room with me.
My blood turned to ice. My head was still foggy from the alcohol, thoughts moving like they were wading through mud, but some part of me understood immediately what had happened.
I'd forgotten the salt.
The doorways were unsealed.
And they were inside.
I tried to move, to sit up, but my body was sluggish, uncooperative. The alcohol that had felt so pleasant hours ago now felt like poison in my veins, dulling my reflexes, slowing my thoughts when I needed them to be sharp.
The breathing moved closer. I could feel it now, cold air washing over my face with each exhale. That same wet, rattling quality I'd heard through the front door so many months ago.
Slowly, terrified of what I'd see, I turned my head toward the sound.
It was right there. Inches from my face. That impossible smile splitting its gray, translucent skin. Those too-large eyes reflecting what little light filtered through the windows.
Behind it, I could see more shapes. Three. Five. Seven. Maybe more. They filled the living room, crowding around the couch where I lay paralyzed by fear and alcohol.
The closest one reached out one of its too-long hands, spider fingers extending toward my face. I tried to move, tried to roll off the couch, but my body wouldn't respond. The alcohol had stolen my coordination, left me helpless.
This is it, I thought with strange clarity. This is how I die. Drunk and stupid and careless, just like Grandma warned me not to be.
The thing's fingers touched my forehead, and I felt that same cold that Grandma had described in her journal. It seeped into my skull, spreading through my thoughts like frost across a window. I could feel it reaching for something inside me, searching for that moment of transition it needed to feed.
And in that touch, I saw things. Felt things. Understood things I wish I never had.
I saw the threshold dwellers' world—that space between spaces where they existed, hungry and eternal and wrong. I saw the other victims, the ones who'd lived in this house before Grandma, frozen in doorways that didn't exist in any physical sense, trapped in that moment between one state and another forever. I saw Margaret Holloway, the schoolteacher, her face still locked in that expression of terror, unable to die, unable to live, unable to do anything but exist in that horrific in-between space for eternity.
And I saw what they wanted from me. Not just to feed on my transition from waking to sleeping, or living to dying. They wanted to take me back with them. Wanted to trap me in their threshold space as punishment for resisting them for so long. Wanted to make an example of me, to warn whatever poor soul inherited this house next that you couldn't fight them. That eventually, they always won.
The cold spread from my forehead down through my neck, my chest, my limbs. I could feel myself starting to freeze, not physically but conceptually, my state of being becoming locked, transitional, neither fully drunk nor fully sober, neither fully awake nor fully asleep.
This was what it felt like to become one of them. To be taken.
Through the growing cold and the spreading paralysis, I heard that voice again, that wind-through-empty-spaces sound speaking directly into my mind:
"We told you that you would forget again. They always do. Welcome home, Jack. Welcome to the threshold."
And somewhere in the house, I could hear my phone alarm going off—a reminder I'd set weeks ago, one that I'd never disabled.
A reminder to do the salt ritual.
Hours too late.