Chapter Text
Transcript:
Statement of Billie Frost regarding an Irregular house guest.
Billie: Can I start? Okay. It started a few years ago. I had just come out of what I think you would probably best describe as a bad breakup. Well, the breakup wasn’t bad so much as the relationship. For years everything was great, and I thought I had the perfect partner, and then one day it all came crashing down and I realised I had never really known them at all, and looking back at the relationship, I was never happy. Looking back, it was really bad. So the September before last, I was suddenly living alone, with a dog I never wanted but had ended up doing all the work for, in a house full of half finished DIY projects, and I was depressed.
I’ve always been prone to depression, it’s just one of those things I accepted about myself a long time ago, but back when Jack was still living with me, he had persuaded me I didn’t need the drugs. Didn’t need the chemicals, making me numb. He would get so annoyed when I didn’t react enough to him whenveer he was having one of his emergencies, ask me why I didn’t care, and I’d have to explain that it was difficult to have any big feelings at all on the meds, and he’d cry and have a meltdown and eventually I’d cry and then I was of course making it all about me… I’m sure you get the picture. He was a manipulative narcissist. Looking back it’s obvious, at the time, in the thick of it, I believed him when he told me he was the one supporting me. Believed that I was the problem. Believed that I’d be better off without the meds.
When we finally split, I went straight back to the GP as soon as I could, and went right back onto the meds that I’d had the best results with - Mirtazipine, although thinking about it now, every problem there was with every other type was a problem Jack said was there so… I don’t know. But I was happy to go back onto something that I knew would probably work. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken SSRIs before, it takes a while for them to settle in, to build up in your system, and in the mean time it can be a bit tricky. The last time I’d gone on them, the main thing I noticed was nausea, lack of appetite, sleep being a bit… I don’t remember, either bad or good, too much or too little, nothing too hard to deal with. This time, I don’t know if it’s because I was already grieving, coming to terms with so much of my life being a lie, not sleeping, I don’t know what it was, but they hit me like a ton of bricks. For the first two weeks, I was spaced out the whole time. That’s when it started.
I was just barely functioning on automatic, taking the dog on the same short walks and falling back into bed, only getting up to make instant noodles and sit on the toilet. The routes in my house that I was walking were all the same, back and forth, I’m almost surprised I didn’t wear a tread in the floor. I think that’s why I didn’t notice the extra door at first. There’s a lot of doors in my hall, it’s a typical council house with a layout that hasn’t made sense for twenty years, I think usually there’s six, three that lead to rooms and three that lead to cupboards? That sounds about right. I wasn’t even looking at the hall when I walked through it in those weeks, and there’s so many bloody doors that honestly one more wouldn’t really make any difference even if I’d been fully conscious. The dog noticed I think. He kept barking at anything that moved outside, and sometimes I had no idea what he was barking at, I’d just lie in bed and wait for him to finish. I think those times it might have been the door.
The first time I really noticed it, I just wrote it off as me not knowing how to count temporarily. That sounds mad, but I spent two hours looking for my clean bedsheets that week too. They were on top of the tumble drier. To suddenly realise there’s an extra door in the part of the house you’re actively avoiding because that’s where your abusive ex slept for a week, that’s nothing. As I got used to the meds, settled into them, it did start to play on my mind. I didn’t want to look at whatever memories might be behind the door, but I was a little curious as to what I could have forgotten I’d hidden in whatever cupboard it must be. I think part of me wondered if that’s where the dehydrator was. By the third week of meds, I was really evening out, and decided that I was finally going to start clearing things out, and start with the cupboard that I couldn’t even remember, I was going to make a day of it. The thing is, when I made my cup of tea and walked into the hall to start poking about, the door wasn’t there.
I was a bit confused, but again, I hadn’t really been able to believe much for a long while, what with Jack’s lies and then the meds, so I drank my tea and ended up in two minds about it. Either I had imagined a door, or gotten confused, basically it was in my head, or it was some spooky nonsense, and I didn’t have the energy for it. Either way, I was going back to work soon, and had other things to deal with. That was that as far as I was concerned, and I would just monitor the situation. I should probably clarify about the spooky nonsense. I was raised on horror movies by cool parents. My whole childhood was Stephen King and Clive Barker, I think one of my first crushes was Pinhead. Well, that’s a lie. I know he was. Second to the guy in Devilman which I accidentally saw at like, age 6 by accident when staying at my dad’s house. But yeah, I was raised on spooky shit, and graveyard walks as a shortcut, and skulls for decoration at christmas. I’m not spiritual, but I’m open to things that are beyond my understanding, and apparently I used to see ghosts when I was a kid. Jack always said it was stupid, not logical. So sometimes, I write things off as “Spooky Shit” and move on. I’ve seen the movies, you don’t open the door, don’t answer the phone, don’t poke the strange thing, it’s just asking for trouble. So usually I don’t ask for trouble, and on this occasion, I could not be doing with Spooky Shit and a divorce.
The next time the dog was barking at nothing, I had just finished my first week back at work. It was brutal, they’d had some cover in from another office but, all the processes for admin on my team were built by me, and they screwed everything up, so I was just sort of done. I’d come back and walked the dog, and was making a tea for settling down for the night, when the dog started barking in the hall. I was honestly not okay, completely overstimulated, over tired, and I was ready to scream at the dog, which I’m not proud of. I poured the kettle and left the cup to brew, and headed into the hall to get the dog. At first I thought he was shouting at the front door, but then a realised it was the OTHER door. It was back. I won’t lie I faltered for a moment, but I had spent all day fixing other peoples mistakes, and I just could not be fucked. My default setting for spooky shit that I don‘t want to deal with is to act like it’s normal and keep going, so I called the dog back into the living room, closed the normal door, and finished making my tea. I sat on the couch and pretended that the new bloody door wasn’t there with an old episode of Doctor Who before calming down enough to go to bed. I don’t know if the door was still there when I went back through the hall to get to the bedroom. I wasn’t giving it any attention, if it wanted that, it could be there when I wasn’t so goddamn tired. I took the dog straight to bed with me as well. He was only two, they’re still stupid at that age, I didn’t want him screaming at strange doors. I had a bit of trouble sleeping, but in the morning, the door was gone.
At this point, I spent a little time considering how to deal with it, if it would come back, that sort of thing. I still wasn’t convinced that it wasn’t all in my head, but just because something’s in your head, doesn’t mean it isn’t real, and doesn’t need dealing with. Usually, when I’m a bit fixated on a spooky thing, I draw it, get it out of my head and onto paper, and it feels like it traps it there, puts it in my control, and then I can move on. I couldn’t do that with a door. I’m not particularly good at drawing doors for a start. I decided to just keep ignoring it for now and see what it did. It had been over a month, and it hadn’t hurt me yet, so I reasoned it was either playing a long game, or was harmless. If not friend, why friend shaped, you know? Sorry. I use humour to try and … I don’t know. Anyway, I was set on ignoring it, so I did. Eventually, even the dog stopped caring that it showed up. They’re like that, if you act like something’s normal they believe you. It just became an irregular fixture in my life.
I think it probably wasn’t used to being ignored. I guess most people would freak out at a brand new door just popping in and out of existence, and maybe I would have too, a decade ago. But it started to up the game when it realised it wasn’t getting a rise out of me. It would rattle as I passed, just a little, and I would talk to myself, or the dog, and say something dumb like “I really must do something about that draft”, or “Oh another little shake, hope the coal search on the house wasn’t wrong, really should get that checked”. Then it started rattling more insistantly, honestly it was silly. This was about two months in, and I think a part of me had decided that it operated by some sort of vampire rules, like I would have to invite it in for it to have any effect? I just got more and more used to it sometimes being there. It didn’t really help that I didn’t have people round often, although somehow I doubt it would have shown up when they were there. I wasn’t lonely, there’s always someone on the other side of the phone, but I was isolated. I’d moved away from family to live with Jack. So a part of me quite liked having something silly, and spooky because he would hate it, of my very own happening. I couldn’t tell you when I started talking to the door instead of the dog, but at some point, the handle rattled and I just told it I was too tired to deal with it, and from then on, I would tell it it was being silly, or a little attention whore. It was like a fun little back and forth. I’d sit in the living room with my dinner or tea, and the door would rattle for attention in the hall, and I’d tell it to try harder. Eventually it did, and started showing up in my living room. Then it was like having a buddy in the room with me, distracting me from the TV. I know what you’re thinking, why didn’t I tell anyone? Well, I did. Kind of. I made jokes about “my new friend” to Hannah, but she’s used to me being… erratic and I think she thought it was just another of my silly little coping mechanisms.
I stuck to my “vampire rules” theory as the door followed me around the house for a good few more weeks, careful with all the responses I gave it to never give it an invitation to open, to never touch it by accident, I got far too comfortable though. I convinced myself entirely that the door WAS the strange thing, and that there wasn’t anything behind it that could come in without me explicitly leting it. That was stupid of me I’ll admit.
I was waiting on the kettle finishing boiling, again, after work getting settled, when a familiar rattling behind me told me that the door was there, next to the fridge just behind me. I ignored it, I wasn’t really in the mood for the game, and the rattling stopped. What replaced it made me freeze for a moment. The slow sound of the handle not rattling, but turning, the soft click of the latch coming away, and the gentle, high creak of the door opening. I was still, eyes glued to the kettle as it boiled, and hand hovering over the mug with a teabag clasped ready to drop. I knew better than to turn around, but clearly vampire rules did not apply. Clearly the thing behind the door had ALWAYS been able to come in, and there WAS a thing behind the door. I had to make a decision in the moment, and only one thing made sense. It’s a bit funny really. It felt very British. I offered it a cup of tea. I didn’t turn round, I just said “Kettel’s boiled, do you want a cup?” and waitied. The door closed pretty quickly after that. I still didn’t turn round for a while, just made my tea, as calmly as I could.
I spent the whole of that night wide awake, trying to think of what to do. I couldn’t leave the house, like I said, I didn’t really have anyone nearby, and even if I did, the dog’s a reactive nightmare so it’s not like I could just pack him up and cart him round my mam or Hannah’s house - they’ve both got cats for a start. I couldnt go to a hotel, even if there was a dog friendly one nearby, I couldn’t afford it. I was completely stuck in the house, so I would just have to deal with the door somehow. I called in sick to work the next day, said I’d been up all night with the flu, I figured it could get me a couple of days off to figure things out, but of course that just meant that I was stuck in the house. I started by opening all the “real” doors. The new door always seemed to appear closed, and seemed to want to open for dramatic effect, so I thought if I had the others open, I’d spot it easily amongst them. It was as much a sanity test as anything. Once that was done I realised there wasn’t a lot else that I could do to counteract a strange door opening in my house, so I just sort of sat on the couch to think about it. If there was nothing I could physically do about hte door, then my reaction to it was what was important. I did try to draw it a few times then, but I couldn’t get the lines
Right, you can see what I mean in the sketches I brought. You can keep them. I thought a lot about what it could possibly want from me, and to be honest, it was a bit of a puzzle at first. Obviously if it had wanted to cause me physical harm, it could have done that at any point. And it was being so… obvious. Eventually I did decide that it probably wanted to scare me, that was all that made sense to me. That’s how I decided what to do about it.
I went back to work the next day - I had realised that the door was appearing to scare me, so it probably wasn’t doing anything when I wasn’t in the house, and the dog had long since stopped reacting to it. I was careful not to put all my energy into work, just played it off as me still being under the weather so that I would be a bit more okay when I got home. I couldn’t be sure if it would show up that day, but I got the feeling that since it hadn’t got the response it wanted, it would probably come back soon to try again. I was right of course. I was sat on the couch, god you must think that’s all I do, I was sat with a tea on the couch, tv in the background, and the door was suddenly in the corner of my eye. I did my best to pretend it wasn’t there for a while, kept my eyes on the screen as if nothing was wrong. It didn't take long for the door to open, I could see the handle turn down and heard the creak as it slowly opened a crack and something moved. Were those fingers creeping around the edge of the door? They were very… long. I tried not to think too hard about it. This was when I sprang into action, sort of. I did the knee slap. You know what I mean don’t you? That thing that everyone does when they’re desperately trying to leave or break the silence in a room? I lifted my hands, and slapped them down on my knees, and declared to the door “Right then, I think it’s time for another cuppa.” and I stood up and turned straight towards the kitchen, trying not to glance at the door as I passed it. The door stopped opening, and yes, those were… strange fingers that had creeped around it, they stayed there as I passed, clearly it wasn’t running away this time. It didn’t open anymore though either, the door stayed exactly as it was when I stood, even when I turned my back to get two mugs and teabags from the cupboard. I made an assumption, and made them both with milk and sugar. Who doesn’t like a builders tea?
When they were ready I went back to the couch and very carefully as I passed the door, set down the second cup by the cracked door. I did not look inside. I did not look as I sat down, and I did not look as I pretended to watch whatever was on the TV, and I did not watch as a strange, distorted hand came from the crack of the door and delicately retrieved the hot mug of tea. I continued to not watch when about twenty minutes later, the mug was returned to the same spot, empty, and the door disappeared. That started a new little ritual, every time I noticed the door, I made two cups of tea, and spent about twenty minutes pretending to be relaxed, before the cup was returned. This happened about once every couple of weeks, usually on days when I was stressed out by work. I noticed, after a while, that it preferred some of my mismatched cups to the others. The chunky, heavy mugs were dragged across the floor a little when they were being taken, and put back quickly and a little more heavily than others. The very light and thin ones were returned on their side, which I took to mean they weren’t well liked. It’s favourite was the one with a turned out lip. I noticed that it liked to pick that mug up by the rim rather than the handle, hooking it’s fingers carefully underneath and lifting it straight up, and returning it the same way, twisting it at the end to make sure that the mug was facing the same way that I had put it down. I decided that might mean it like that one best, and started keeping it clean and saving it for when the door showed up. I think it liked that? It started coming more like every week then. I’m sorry I didn’t keep closer track, I’m not very good at keeping track of things.
I know I probably should have been terrified, but I really do struggle to have big feelings when I'm on my meds properly, to be honest a lot of the time I struggle to identify them even when I'm not medicated. I treated the whole thing sort of like a study, like research. Once that first shock of the door opening was over, finding out more was all there really was for me. Plus there was the companionship. I hadn't lived alone before Jack moving out, and honestly, just drinking a cup of tea with someone else there and doing nothing was a comfort. I got back to thinking about the vampire rules after a while, that obviously weren't applicable. But it also got me thinking about fairies and hospitality. Obviously I didn't think that may of this actually applied to the door at this point but, it felt worth considering. The door was visiting, and I was the host. The next time the door showed up, and by now it was just appearing in the middle of the room, not even bothering to pretend to be attached to the wall, I decided to be a better host.
I'm not especially good at starting conversations, can we just say I'm awaiting my ASD assessment and leave it at that? But I am good at obsessively checking in with people that I'm doing things okay, often to the point of being annoying. I thought for ages about how best to approach the long fingered creature that reached around the door, and in the end decided that clearly introductions were pointless, we had been hanging out for months at this point. It's like when you see someone at work every day in the lift, but you've never asked their name and they work in a different office so you just nod at each other or comment on the weather but still press the right floor buttons for each other. You know them, but you don't KNOW them. Well I knew the door, but I didn't know the creature, and I kind of wanted to. So the door appeared in my living room, next to the couch, and I went to put the kettle on and get it's mug out of the cupboard. I heard the door creak open the usual way, and instead of waiting and ignoring it, I took a deep breath, and popped my head back into the living room, looked at the door and asked “By the way, do you actually like milk and sugar in your tea?”.
There was a long moment where nothing happened. I was afraid that I'd scared it off, broken the spell that seemed to have been woven over the months of visits, but I was wrong. I had finally invited it in.
Laughter erupted from behind the door. It was high, strange, without rhythm, and it reminded me a little uncomfortably of my own manic episodes, when things were bad, and suddenly the mortality of the world was deathly hilarious. It touched something in me, reached down and activated that part of me that never stopped spiralling out, and brought it up, and out, and suddenly I was laughing too. It's the kind of laughter that starts small, just barely more than a giggle, and catches in the back of your throat, it rolls up through you, rips through your stomach in waves and pushes up past your teeth, until you’re doubled over and breathless. So I laughed with the monster, at the absurdity of my question, and the sheer ridiculousness of the situation, and as we laughed, he practically fell out of the door. He looked like a man, tall, thin, with long curly hair. But everything about him was wrong.
He was too tall, even though he was bent double laughing, I could see that if he stood, he would at the very least fill the doorway he had fallen out of… maybe. It was… It’s hard to say. His legs were long, his arms too? But the way he was twisted round bent laughing, coiled like a spring almost… I was laughing too so I couldn’t really make sense of it… but when he unfurled himself he was a normal height… I think. His head didn’t touch the ceiling? His fingertips didn’t touch the floor? But they were also somehow dangling by his feet. So was his curly blonde hair, but it definitely only reached his lower back. He pushed it back with a hand that was definitely normal size, if a little spindly, but at the same time, it was long fingered and distorted, sharp fingertips brushing through the sea of golden strands away from a face that I can’t remember clearly. I mostly just remember the hands. I tend to pay attention to people’s hands more than their faces. He grinned. I remember that.
And then he answered me. Giggling, like he was answering the funniest question in the world. He told me that he didn’t really mind. Then he asked me, still giggling, why I had decided to make him tea. I had needed a minute. I hadn’t really expected to be having a conversation… I don’t know what I expected but it wasn’t for my silly creepy little door buddy to suddenly be some kind of eldritch … man thing in my living room. I don’t expect a lot of men in my living room.
You might think this is ridiculous but having an unexpected conversation was the scariest thing about all of that to me. So I ducked back out of the kitchen doorway as soon as I heard the kettle boil, and focussed on pouring the steaming water into the mugs that I had ready and waiting. Thought about how I should respond, now that I had started the conversation. When I turned around he was stood behind me. I hadn't heard him move. The door was in the kitchen now too. He was leaning on it despite being about two feet in front of it, his shoulders resting against the yellow woodwork and his torso twisted in a way that SHOULD have been uncomfortable but that he made look perfectly natural. The door had replaced my fridge door, and I was certain that was on purpose. He was trying to get a rise out of me and so far all I'd given him was tea. Well, it's worth saying I have a slightly demand avoidant personality type. He was demanding a reaction and I wasn't going to give it to him. I told him to move. Well, I told him he'd have to move if he wanted milk in his tea. I'm demand avoidant, not confrontational.
He broke down giggling again and sort of slipped away from the door. The door still stayed there though, while he gripped his face and stomach in hysterics. I just sort of sighed at that point. I asked if the milk was actually going to be behind the door, and he nodded through the laughter, so I opened it. There was actually milk there. Nothing else. Just a carton of milk, my milk, the same brand, the same dents the carton had had, sitting, by itself, on the floor of a corridor. It was hilarious. I don't know what I expected, maybe to see the full contents of my fridge as if just the door had changed? But the milk, sitting, completely centrally behind the door, just waiting, with a couple of drops of condensation rolling down it. I don't know how to explain to you how funny that was in the moment. I tried to hold it in, but I just couldn't, I couldn't help laughing with him. When I stooped to pick it up, he sort of twitched for a moment, and his laughter fell back down to a chuckle as I closed the door softly and turned back to the tea. He asked me again then, why I was making him tea, so I told him the truth. Everyone who visits my house gets offered a tea, but if he’d prefer a coffee, I had some decaf in the fridge. He didn’t laugh that time, he just looked sort of confused.
He asked me, more quietly, why I was treating him like a person, and I just said why wouldn’t I? It clearly bothered him, because he stepped towards me and became… something. The less human features became easier to see. I couldn’t look away from his hands, long spindly twisted fingers reaching towards me slowly, so other and distorted. He asked me again, why I was treating him like a person. He said it quietly but there was some kind of anger in his voice, his voice that wasn’t really where it should be anymore. I still couldn’t look away from his hands. I wondered a little, what it would be like to… I just couldn’t take my eyes off them. His anger felt more like frustration, like sadness. I just told him that I try to treat everyone like a person, and pushed the steaming hot mug towards him, touching the turned out rim against the tip of those long, strange fingers. He took it, and seemed to settle back down to sort of human shape. I picked up my own tea and walked past him to sit down, I really needed a sit down.
[PAUSE]
Archivist: And then?
Billie: Then he sat down next to me and we drank tea and watched Doctor Who.
[PAUSE]
Archivist: You sat down, with a man who fell out of a door that appeared in your house, and drank tea?
Billie: Yes.
Archivist: And when you had finished… watching Doctor who… what happened then?
Bilie: He left, I walked the dog, and I went to bed.
Archivist: He just left. He didn’t do anything else?
Billie: He said the tea was nice.
Archivist: Right. Right…
Billie: Do you mind, I need to get going, my ride is here and it’s Doctor Who night. Let that nice guy who brought me in know the tea was good though? Like, really good.
Archivist: Yes, right, no problem. I’ll… I’ll tell him.
[PAUSE]
[DOOR CREAKS]
Archivist: Wait, this man, who appeared in your house… did he tell you his name?
Billie: [LAUGHS] He said you were funny Archivist! I kind of see what he means!
[DOOR CREAKS AGAIN AS IT CLOSES]
Archivist: Right um… In the past I would have marked this statement as the result of recent trauma and poorly dosed medication but… I think it’s clear that Mx Frost spent time with the entity that calls itself Michael. It seems obvious from their description that there was a moment where they were almost thrown into the corridors but for whatever reason weren’t… perhaps because they weren’t scared?
[DOOR OPENS. NO CREAK]
Martin: Oh, has Mx Frost left already? I didn’t see them coming out, I’ll just take the… what is it?
Archivist: The door. They said their ride was here and left by… a different…
[STATEMENT ENDS]
[SUPPLIMENTAL - IMAGES PROVIDED BY BILLIE FROST]
