A gothic horror story which reimagines the parole system through a supernatural lens — a house that literally manifests bureaucratic denials as locked doors, each containing the dying hope of a rejected second chance…
by: Raymond Brunell
I am 47 Sycamore Street, and I have become something monstrous.
Once, I was modest — three bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen where morning coffee steamed in cheerful cups. My walls knew laughter, my floors bore the gentle weight of children’s feet, my windows framed ordinary sunsets. That was before Cassius Thorne moved in, before his briefcase of denials began to reshape my very bones.
The first door appeared on a Tuesday.
Cassius had spent the evening reviewing files, his pen scratching harsh rejections across parole applications. Marcus Valdez — denied. Insufficient rehabilitation evidence. The words hung in the air like incense, acrid and ceremonial. As midnight struck, I felt a peculiar tension in my eastern wall, a stretching sensation like skin pulled taut. By morning, where once hung a watercolor of sailing boats, there stood a door, oak-paneled, brass-handled, bearing a small placard: “M. VALDEZ.”
Cassius paused before it, the coffee mug trembling in his hand. He reached for the handle once, twice, then hurried away. I felt his pulse through the floorboards — rapid, guilty, alive.
The scratching began that night. Not desperate clawing, but something far worse: the methodical, patient sound of fingernails dragging across wood in slow, measured strokes. The rhythm was hypnotic, maddening, like a metronome counting down to some inevitable conclusion. Behind the Valdez door, hope was performing its death dance.
By the end of the week, I had sprouted three more doors.
Elena Cortez — denied. Associates with known criminals. Her door materialized in the hallway, pine-scented and ordinary, except for the way shadows seemed to pool beneath its frame.
David Kessler — denied. Anger management concerns. His door claimed space in the living room, its presence transforming family photos into accusatory stares.
Sabrina Mills — denied. Unstable housing situation. Her door bloomed in the kitchen, where Cassius now ate his meals standing, unable to sit while phantom fingers scraped against the wood mere feet away.
I felt each rejection like a physical blow, my foundation settling deeper into the earth with the weight of accumulated denials. My original doors — the ones leading to bedrooms, bathrooms, closets — began to stick, as if reluctant to open onto spaces that were no longer quite what they seemed.
Cassius developed habits. He mapped routes through my rooms that avoided the new doors, pressing himself against walls as he navigated growing narrow passages. He stopped inviting his sister for dinner. He canceled the book club that had met in my living room for fifteen years. I watched him shrink, becoming as trapped as the hope dying behind my multiplying barriers.
The scratching evolved. What began as random scraping became patterns — Morse code messages of desperation, then musical phrases that played in minor keys. Sometimes I caught fragments of words, syllables spelled out in desperate nail taps: please, second, chance. The cacophony was beautiful and terrible, a symphony of abandoned possibilities.
More doors: Thomas Brennan — denied. Lack of family support. Angela Rodriguez — denied. Insufficient employment prospects. Vincent Chang — denied. Medical concerns.
My walls bulged outward to accommodate them all. My windows shifted, my roof buckled and reformed. The neighbors began to whisper. Children crossed the street rather than walk past my fence.
Cassius installed soundproofing in his bedroom, but I carried the scratching through my bones now. It resonated in my pipes, hummed through my electrical wiring, and thrummed in the space between my walls. He couldn’t escape what I had become any more than hope could escape his denials.
A breakthrough came on a rain-soaked Thursday.
Jerome Washington — denied. Institutional dependency concerns.
As the Washington door materialized in what had once been the front closet, Cassius finally snapped. He threw his files across the room, papers scattering like white leaves. He screamed, “What do you want from me?”
The scratching stopped. Every door, every trapped hope, every dying second chance, fell silent.
In that crystalline moment, I felt something shift in my foundation — not settling this time, but lifting. Through my walls, I sensed the weight of forty-three denied applications, forty-three lives reduced to risk assessments and bureaucratic caution. Each door represented not a person, but a possibility Cassius had murdered with his pen.
That night, I dreamed — as houses do indeed dream — of rehabilitation centers that actually rehabilitated. Of second chances that blossomed into third and fourth chances. Of men and women walking free under stars they thought they’d never see again. I dreamed of myself as I could be: a home where forgiveness lived alongside justice, where mercy tempered judgment.
When morning came, Cassius stood before the bathroom mirror and saw what he had become. His reflection showed a man hollowed out by his own judgments, aged beyond his years by the weight of hope he’d killed. His eyes had taken on the flat opacity of courthouse marble.
It was then that he noticed it. Behind him in the mirror, at the end of the hallway, a new door had appeared. This one was different — mahogany instead of oak, with brass fittings that gleamed despite the dim light. The placard read: “C. THORNE.”
The scratching resumed, but only from this final door. Not the desperate scrabbling of dying hope, but something else — the sound of someone trying to unlock something from the inside.
Cassius approached in a creeping manner, his reflection fragmenting in my windows as he passed. His hand shook as he grasped the handle. For a moment he hesitated, and in that hesitation I felt the weight of every denied parole, every crushed dream, and every life deemed too risky for redemption.
“The key,” he whispered to no one, to everyone, to the scratching hope behind the door that bore his name. “I need to find the key.”
But I knew what he was only beginning to understand. The key wasn’t lost. They had never lost it. It lived in the space between mercy and justice, in the breath between judgment and grace. It existed in the recognition that people didn’t earn second chances as privileges. Instead, they were seeds of redemption waiting for someone to water them.
As his fingers closed around the handle, I felt my walls begin to shift again. This time, we are not growing but opening. Doors that we had sealed, preparing to swing wide, releasing not the scratching hope we had trapped within, but the possibility of a different kind of justice.
The door opened.
And I became, at last, what I was always meant to be. Not a fortress against failure, but a foundation for forgiveness.
The scratching stopped forever, replaced by something infinitely more beautiful. The sound of doors opening, one after another, in an endless symphony of second chances finding their way home.
