The Hinge That Didn't Creak

"I've walked that hallway a thousand times in the dark. Never once been afraid of what was at the end of it."

I don't know how long I sat there after Mum left. Long enough for the kitchen to go cold. Long enough for the lamp above the table to start buzzing — that faint, electrical whine it made when the bulb was on its last legs. Long enough for the moth to finally give up and settle on the rim of Jeremiah's mug, wings folded, like even it had run out of fight.

Eventually I stood. Not because I'd resolved anything — the argument still sat in my chest like a knot pulled too tight — but because the kitchen had nothing left to give me. The clock said quarter to midnight. Five o'clock would come regardless.

I rinsed the mugs. Watched the brown dregs swirl down the drain. Dried my hands on the tea towel Mum had folded into its neat square on the bench. My fingers were trembling — just a fine tremor, barely visible, but I noticed it because there was nothing else to look at.

I turned off the lamp. The kitchen dropped into darkness and I stood for a moment, letting my eyes adjust. Moonlight came through the window above the sink, picking out the edges of things — the bench, the stove, the fridge with its constellation of drawings and magnets. Tania's latest effort — a purple horse with six legs — glowed faintly like something from a dream.

I moved through the hallway, past the photos I couldn't see, past the side table where Mum's lamp had already been switched off. The living room door was closed. No light underneath. The fire had gone out — I could smell the last of the ash, grey and spent.

I climbed the stairs slowly. First step, second step. I skipped the third — the one that always creaked, the one that gave you away — out of habit, the way I'd done since I was fourteen and sneaking back in after a night at Ben's. The landing was dark. Mum and Dad's door was closed. Anne's, closed. Catherine and Janice's, closed. The bathroom door ajar, as always.

Kenneth's door was closed. No light. No sound.

I stood there for a moment, looking at it. Just a door. Same as every other door in this house. Same brass handle, same scratched paint. Behind it, a man I'd known for five hours, sleeping in my brother's bed.

A first name and a hobby.

I turned away and went to my room.

The boots came off first. I sat on the edge of the bed and worked them free, left then right, and set them by the door where they always went. Dust clung to the soles, a smear of dried mud crusted along one heel. They looked the way I felt — worn out, but still in one piece.

I didn't undress. Didn't get under the covers. Just sat there on the edge of the mattress in my jeans and work shirt, elbows on my knees, staring at the floorboards. The room was small and dark and mine — the same single bed I'd slept in since I was twelve, the same wardrobe with the door that wouldn't close properly, the same window that looked out over the back paddock toward the windmill. I could see the blades turning slowly against the sky, silver in the moonlight.

The house settled. I listened to it happening — the way you can feel a building exhale when the last person stops moving. Mum and Dad's murmured conversation, barely audible through the wall, faded and stopped. A toilet flushed — Anne, probably, her room was nearest the bathroom. Then a door clicked shut. Then nothing.

Quiet. Real quiet. The kind where the only sounds left are the ones the house makes on its own — the slow groan of timber, the tick of cooling pipes, the occasional crack from the roof. Outside, the wind moved through the wheat in long, slow waves, and somewhere near the shed, a nightjar called once, then again, then went silent.

I sat there and let it wash over me. The tiredness was deep now, settling into my bones like sand into cracks. My eyes burned. My shoulders ached from the day's fencing. I should have lain down, closed my eyes, let sleep take me the way it usually did — fast and heavy, like a door slamming.

But something kept me upright. Some feeling I couldn't name. Not the argument — that had settled into a dull, familiar ache, the kind you learn to carry. Something else. Something in the house itself.

I noticed it first in my teeth. A faint buzz, barely there, like I'd been clenching my jaw and the tension was resonating through the bone. I opened my mouth, worked my jaw side to side. It didn't help. The buzz was still there — not in my teeth at all, I realised, but somewhere deeper. In my chest, maybe. In the air.

I held my breath and listened.

The house was quiet. But it wasn't still. There was a vibration running through it — so faint, so far below the threshold of normal hearing, that I wasn't even sure I was feeling it at first. Like the memory of a sound rather than the sound itself. Like standing near a power line and feeling the hum in your sternum without ever actually hearing it.

I pressed my palms flat against the mattress. The vibration was there — in the bed frame, in the floorboards, in the walls. It wasn't strong. It was barely anything at all. But it was real, and it was coming from somewhere, and it didn't belong.

I stood up. My socks were silent on the floorboards as I crossed to the door and pressed my ear against it. The hallway beyond was dark and quiet. Dad's breathing — that low, heavy rumble Mum had been complaining about for years — came faintly from the far end. One of the girls shifted in her sleep — a creak, a sigh, then nothing.

From Kenneth's room: silence. Not the silence of someone sleeping. The silence of something sealed. A room cut off from the rest of the house and placed inside something soundproof.

My pulse picked up. I could feel it in my throat, in my wrists, in the soft spot behind my ears. Not fear — not yet — but that deep, animal alertness that comes when your body knows something your brain hasn't caught up with. The same feeling I'd get in the paddock when the cattle started moving for no reason, or when Blue's hackles went up and his eyes locked on something in the tree line that I couldn't see.

I eased my door open — slowly, carefully, holding my breath. The hallway stretched ahead of me, narrow and dark, the family photos on the walls reduced to pale rectangles in the moonlight filtering through the bathroom window at the far end.

Kenneth's door was closed. Same as before. Same brass handle, same scratched paint, same water stain near the bottom hinge where the roof had leaked three winters ago and Dad had patched it with a strip of tin and a few choice words.

But the air was different.

Standing six feet from that door, the vibration I'd felt in my room was unmistakeable. Stronger here. Warmer. Like the static you feel when you run your hand across a wool jumper in the dark and the sparks follow your fingers. It pressed against my skin, against my eardrums, against the backs of my eyes.

And at the bottom of the door — in the gap where the wood didn't quite meet the floorboards — something moved.

Light.

Not lamplight. Not torchlight. Not moonlight reflected off something it shouldn't have reached. Something else entirely. A colour I didn't have a word for — somewhere between green and blue and purple and none of those things at all. It seeped through the gap like liquid, pooling on the hallway floor in a thin, shifting line that seemed to breathe. It pulsed — once, twice — in time with the vibration, and the two sensations merged into one, light and pressure and frequency all locking together into something that felt less like a phenomenon and more like a heartbeat.

Every hair on my arms stood up. My mouth went dry.

I should have turned around. I should have walked to my parents' door, knocked, told them something was wrong. That's what a sensible person would do. That's what Dad would have done — assessed the situation, controlled the variables, dealt with it methodically.

But I wasn't Dad. And the thought of waking him — of standing there in the hallway trying to explain a light that shouldn't exist and a feeling in my teeth and a door that hummed — after what had happened in the kitchen, after the way he'd looked at me, after a first name and a hobby — I couldn't. I couldn't give him one more reason to think I'd lost my mind.

And underneath the fear — underneath the cold, creeping wrongness of it all — there was something else. Something I'd felt all night, all evening, maybe all my life. That pull. That itch. That restless, nameless thing that had driven me to the pub, to Jeremiah, to this hallway.

It was here. Whatever I'd been looking for — whatever had been tugging at me since before I could remember — it was behind this door.

I reached out. My hand was trembling. I could see it in the faint, impossible light — my fingers shaking, the raw patch on my palm from the gate hinge catching the glow and turning it into something that looked like it was already part of another world.

My fingers found the handle. The brass was warm — not hot, but warm in a way that metal shouldn't be at midnight in an unheated hallway. And beneath the warmth, that pulse. That steady, rhythmic thrumming that travelled up through my hand, into my wrist, into my arm, into my chest, until I could feel it syncing with my own heartbeat like two clocks finding the same time.

The thought came — clear, sharp, unwanted: Dad's right. You don't know this man. You don't know what's behind this door. And you're going to open it anyway.

I turned the handle.

The door opened without a sound. Not the usual groan from the bottom hinge — the one that complained every time, the one that Dad had been meaning to oil for the past year and never had. Nothing. Just silence. Perfect, impossible, wrong silence.

And what I saw on the other side of it stopped every thought in my head.