Don't Open the Door

. . .

The week before camp opened, the forest was empty.

No counselors. No kids. No schedules pinned to the mess hall wall. Just the cabins arranged in a half-circle along the creek, their doors latched, their windows dark, pine needles piled on the steps like the trees had been trying to bury them.

Cabin 6 was at the far end of the arc. Older than the others. The wood was darker, the porch sagged on one side, and the door had a grain pattern that looked, in certain light, like a face someone had started to carve and then thought better of.

At 3:07 AM on a Tuesday in June, something knocked on that door.

Three times. Slow. Evenly spaced. The way a person knocks when they know someone is inside and they’re willing to wait.

Nobody was inside. The cabin had been empty since September.

The knocking stopped. The forest listened. A raccoon on the mess hall roof turned its head toward Cabin 6 and went still. The creek kept moving, but the trees along its banks didn’t. No wind, no rustle, no sway. Just silence, and the faint smell of warm wood, as if the door had been heated from the other side.

In the morning, Walt Dietrich walked his usual loop past the cabins. He paused at Cabin 6. Looked at the door. Looked at the three shallow impressions in the wood. New ones, fresh, each the width of a knuckle.

He didn’t touch them. He’d learned not to, years ago.

He wrote nothing in his logbook. He walked back to his truck. And the forest went on breathing the way it had been breathing for longer than the camp, longer than the road, longer than the name anyone had given it.

It would be patient. The buses were coming in twelve days.