Chapter 4
The scratchy, muffled notes of a jazz saxophone filtered through the dense wood, playing a melancholy melody that Mark had never heard before in his life.
"Dave, are you still there?" Mark whispered into the open air, keeping his eyes locked on the white door.
"I'm here," David's voice crackled faintly from the dangling kitchen receiver down the hall. "What is that noise? Is that a radio?"
"It sounds like a record player," Mark replied, his voice trembling as he slid his hand down the frame of the door. "An old one. The needle is stuck. It keeps repeating the same four notes over and over again."
"Mark, get out of the house," David said, his tone dropping into a panic-stricken command. "That's impossible. There are no electrical lines running through that partition. We capped them all off during the remodel. There's no outlet on that side of the wall."
Mark didn't answer. His gaze dropped to the floorboards right where Buster had been lying. He noticed something he had missed in the dim light of his initial panic: a faint layer of fine grey dust had drifted out from beneath the door gap, settling neatly over the pristine polyurethane finish of his wooden floor.
It was old dust. Dry, undisturbed for decades, yet it clearly lay on top of a floor that Mark had vacuumed and polished just yesterday afternoon.
"Dave," Mark said slowly, a cold dread pooling in his stomach. "The dust. It's fresh on the floor, but it smells like a tomb. It smells like a damp basement that hasn't seen the sun since the seventies."
"I'm calling the police," David announced decisively. "Step away from the door, Mark. Don't touch anything else. I'm getting in my car right now."
"No cops," Mark said sharply. "Not yet. What are we going to tell them? Officer, a locked door magically appeared in my hallway and it's playing vintage jazz? They'll put me in a psychiatric hold by sunrise."
"You're already sounding like you need one!" David yelled back.
Before Mark could reply, the scratchy jazz music abruptly stopped. A heavy, metallic thud echoed from inside the room, right against the middle of the door, as if a heavy piece of furniture had been dragged across the floorboards.
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Simultaneously, the brass doorknob began to turn on its own.
Mark gasped, throwing his weight backward and stumbling into the opposite wall as the latch clicked backward. The door slowly began to swing open inward, revealing a pitch-black void that seemed to swallow the beam of his smartphone flashlight entirely.
