The Front Door
A short story by Tobias Malm
Since I rarely left my home because of social anxiety, I can’t say exactly when my front door—well, let’s say—lost its connection. I don’t know how else to describe it. It must have happened sometime earlier in July, perhaps a few weeks before I noticed anything. Those days were painfully hot; it was the warmest July in Stockholm on record. I was sweating profusely even in nothing but my underwear. My windows were open day and night, though it did little good, and the noise from the city poured into the apartment. I felt perpetually heavy-headed and drained of energy, unable to do much of anything, not even gaming. Simply put, the heat was unbearable and unusually so. Other than that, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Maybe I was too tired to notice, but I don’t think there were any warning signs. One day, without my realizing it, it must have just happened.
It wasn’t until the end of the month, right as I sat down to order everything I needed to stay alive for another month, that I discovered my horrible predicament. The delivery never came. I waited two full days before calling the grocery store to ask where my food was. To my surprise, they said they had already been by and that no one had opened the door when they rang the bell. I didn’t believe them at first; there was no way I could have missed my loud doorbell. But when it happened again—and then once more after that—I began to doubt myself more than them.
I waited several days before I decided to leave my home—for the first time in I don’t know how long—to buy my own food. A mild breeze met me as I carefully opened the front door. Given the weather outside, it didn’t quite make sense, but I was too busy being afraid of encountering a neighbor to think about it. The next thing I noticed was the smell of moist wood mixed with the faint scent of an old fireplace. For all I knew, I might have smelled like that for a long time; still, it caught me off guard.
A sunbeam slipped through a broken window and drew a pale line across the dusty floor. Pieces of mortar lay scattered about, fallen from the walls. I didn’t know what to make of it. This wasn’t normal for this part of Stockholm… no, for any part of it. But I hadn’t been outside for months, so it was at least conceivable that all this had happened while I was shut away. Perhaps, I thought as I walked toward the elevator, they were renovating the building. Yet that didn’t explain why the damage looked so old.
The elevator was out of order, which annoyed me since I lived on the sixth floor. By the time I finally reached the lobby, out of breath, I noticed something odd: the walls were painted the same color they’d been when I was a child, back when my uncle was still around to look after me. That seemed to confirm my theory that the building had been renovated and restored to its old look.
But just as I settled on that explanation, something else caught my eye. A large piece of graffiti, sprayed across the wall in dark red: “CLOSE THE FUCKING DOORS!”
Outside, the air was mild. The heatwave had finally broken, yet that was the first thing that unsettled me. The shift felt too sudden, unnatural, as if something fundamental had gone wrong. What scared me next was the silence. No cars on the road. No distant rumble of the city.
I stepped onto the sidewalk and scanned the street, usually crowded at this hour, now completely empty. Weeds sprouted from every crack in the pavement. Vines clung to the buildings. It looked as though the city had been abandoned overnight, a thought that made no sense. Just minutes earlier, I’d listened to the traffic streaming past my windows.
I kept walking along Odengatan—another street that should’ve been bustling—and found the same unsettling emptiness. A bus stood abandoned in the middle of the road, not crashed, just… forgotten. Its windows were cloudy, its paint bleached by time. On the side hung a faded advertisement, partly peeled away. Only one line of text remained legible:
“We open doors.”
I stepped into a grocery store, still half-expecting, for some reason, to find food inside. The place was dark, silent, and just as empty as the streets outside. Every shelf looked as though it had been looted long ago. The only thing left was a single package of cheese, hard as a rock. The expiration date read 08/10/1993. My skin crawled when I saw it. What was I looking at? What could it possibly mean?
I took the cheese and stepped outside. My heartbeat was racing so fast it made me lightheaded. I’d never had a panic attack before, but this felt like one. My breath came short and uneven. I looked around, my eyes unfocused, searching for something to hold onto. Then I looked down at the cheese again, just to make sure I hadn’t imagined it. That’s when I heard it, a sound unlike anything I’d ever heard. It was both metallic and alive, screaming through the air so violently that I clamped my hands over my ears. The sound filled everything, yet beneath it, I could sense its origin somewhere in the direction of the city center.
It went on for perhaps five minutes before it finally stopped, and the silence that followed chilled me to the core. I ran home, clutching the fossilized cheese as tightly as I could. Whatever had made that sound, I wasn’t ready to face it.
The first thing I did when I got home was look out the window, and to my relief, everything appeared normal. The merciless heat, the endless traffic, the crowds of people were all there. It was, strangely enough, the first time I’d been glad to see anyone outside. I went into the kitchen and set the cheese on the table. For several minutes, I just stared at it, waiting for it to make sense. Then I turned it over and checked the expiration date again, thinking I might have misread it in a moment of panic. But no, the date was still the same—August 10th, 1993. Had I somehow traveled back in time? My mind jumped from one wild theory to another. It couldn’t have been time travel, I told myself. The cheese was simply too old.
Only now did I grasp the true meaning of the date, the 10th of August. That was the same week my uncle disappeared. I went into the room where I kept his old belongings and spent hours searching for anything that might explain it. The only thing that stood out was a business card. “Yellow Neutral Corp.,” it said, followed by my uncle’s name and phone number. I’d never known what company he worked for—no one had ever told me. I tried searching for the name online, but nothing came up. That didn’t surprise me much; the company had probably vanished years ago.
Just as I was about to look into another box, I realized something that made my blood freeze. I had been so focused on understanding what was happening that I hadn’t thought about how much trouble I was actually in. How was I supposed to get out if my front door opened into whatever horrible place I had just seen? Jumping from the windows wasn’t an option; it would have killed me. The fire department might have been able to help, but the idea of calling them filled me with so much anxiety that I dismissed it right away.
Filled with dread, I walked to one of the windows. There it was: civilization. I could see it, yet I was cut off from it, not just in spirit as usual but in body too. I considered tying some sheets together like in the movies, but I only had two. In the end, I chose to do something I hadn’t done for months; I called my brother.
I didn’t know what to say when he picked up the phone. For a moment, I just froze. He would never have believed me if I’d told him the truth. I needed to come up with an excuse for him to visit, but I must have sounded like an idiot, stammering without knowing what to say. He asked if everything was alright, his voice careful and concerned, as if he feared something had gone wrong with me mentally. In the end, I told him I’d found some information about our uncle that I wanted to show him as soon as possible. That was, at least, partly true. He suggested that I come to his place instead and mentioned that his wife would cook dinner.
“N-no,” I said. “I mean, that would be nice, but you really need to come here and see this yourself. There’s… something. David, please, just come over.”
He paused for a few seconds before answering. “Are you sure everything’s okay? You’ve been spending way too much time in that apartment, you kn—”
“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” I cut him off. “But you have to see this. I’m serious. Can you come now?” My patience was slipping.
“Alright, calm down. I’ll come by in a few hours.”
“Thanks,” I said quickly. “And when you get here, call me first. The door’s acting weird, so I’ll need to throw the keys down from the window.”
“What the hell, man? Did you manage to lock yourself inside again?” He let out a long sigh. “Fine. I’ll call when I’m there. Just don’t do anything stupid before that.”
I didn’t leave the apartment during the long hours I had to wait. The only thing I dared to do was glance through the peephole every now and then. All I could see was the decaying stairwell, lifeless and still. After standing there for nearly ten minutes, trying to collect my thoughts, I faintly heard the same noise I’d heard outside. It lasted just as long as before, and it sent a chill through me. Goosebumps spread across my arms as I backed away from the door.
I went into the living room and stayed there, fighting the urge to panic, until my brother finally called. When I looked out the window, I saw him standing on the sidewalk below, waving. I threw the keys down to him and shouted for him to come up and unlock the door.
I figured that if someone opened the door from the outside, I’d finally be able to get out. But after about five minutes, worry started to creep in. He should’ve reached my floor by then. Then my phone rang. It was him.
“Hey, where the hell are you?” he asked.
“Where the hell are you?” I shot back.
“I’m standing in your apartment!”
“Y-you are?” My heart skipped a beat.
“What have you done to the place?”
“No, no, no,” I stammered. “You must be mistaken.”
“It smells like someone died in here. Didn’t you get this place renovated last year? This is bad. My God, you really need help, man.”
“Listen to me,” I said. “I know this sounds completely insane, but please, just hear me out! Earlier today, when I tried to leave the apartment, I ended up somewhere else. Everything there was dead. And there was this package of cheese, okay? Its expiration date—”
“What are you talking about? What cheese?”
“Just listen!” I shouted. “It said it expired in 1993!”
“This isn’t funny. Where are you hiding?”
“I’m not hiding, damn it! You don’t get it! You must have entered the apartment in—”
“Wait. Did you find our old Nintendo?”
“Our what? No! You need to get out of there right now.”
“I can hear you.”
“H-hear me?”
“You think this is funny? I can hear you talking in the bathroom!”
“No! I’m not in the bathroom! Get out! David, get out of there right now!”
I heard my brother walk toward the bathroom, and only a few seconds later his screams burst through the line. The phone hit the floor, clattering against the tiles, yet I could still hear him nearby. He shouted, “No! Please, God!” Then everything went silent.
“Hello?” I said. “What’s happening? Get out of there!” I shouted. “David, I’m sorry, I—”
Then I heard something on the other end of the line. “David!” I called, my heart lifting with sudden hope. But it wasn’t him. It was something else. The sound was faint, like children whispering meaningless words in the dark. A minute later, the call ended.
I went back to the front door and looked through the peephole. Nothing had changed, yet the whispers were still there, soft and chilling, just beyond the door. Panic set in. I dragged furniture across the floor to block the entrance, tears streaming down my face.
I’ve been hiding in the bathroom ever since. My brother’s wife keeps calling, again and again, but I’m too ashamed to answer. She texted recently to say she’d been at my apartment but that no one had opened the door.
I’m relieved that my brother locked it from the inside. I can’t bear to think what might happen if whatever killed him found its way here. Still, sooner or later, someone will come. And they’ll force the door open.