I don't have many fond memories of my younger years, but one of the few that have stuck in my mind was of something that happened when I was only five years old.

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It started with a knock on the door.

 

I was playing with some toys in my bedroom at the time, and I recall hearing the door being opened by my mother. I don't remember what was said, but I recall her being irritated and slamming the door again. When I asked her about the incident a few months ago, she told me there had been nobody on the other side of the door.

 

The same thing kept happening.

 

Every day from that day onwards, there was a knock on the door.

 

The next day.

 

And the next day.

 

And the next.

 

It eventually reached a point where my mother stopped answering the door.

 

The knock always came at the same time of the day. At around 3:33 in the afternoon, according to my mother. On several occasions, my mother would try to catch the person knocking on the door, opening the door seconds before she predicted the knock would happen, but the knock would simply come a few seconds after she went back inside and closed the door again.

 

On one occasion, my mother tried to catch the culprit on camera, but the camera would always be turned by an insane hand away from the door. No matter where it was or how impossible it would be to turn it without being in the frame, the camera would always slowly be turned away, seconds before the knocking could be heard in the footage.

 

None of the neighbours ever saw anyone knocking on the door, nor could my mother see anyone through the window. The second my mother took her eyes off the windows overlooking the front door, the knocking would start. If she ever looked back, she would see nothing more than a fleeting shadow, retreating down the road.

 

Weeks passed. Then months. Then years. Until I was six, then seven, then eight, nine, ten.

And every day, the same knocking.

 

Eventually, it was just something we learned to live with.

 

And then one day, after the usual knocking, a parcel was dropped off on our doorstep.

 

I was fifteen now. It had been a decade since the knocking had first began, and not once had there ever been a deviation in the pattern, but here we were, sitting around the kitchen table with the parcel in front of my mother.

 

I'm still not entirely sure why she opened it. The parcel was a blank box, no tape with the sender's information, no patterns, no writing, no drawings. Just a bland cardboard box. My mother would have had every right to call the police immediately and not open the box, but she did anyway.

 

I wish she had called the police.

 

Inside the box were hundreds of photos of her.

 

The pictures were all Polaroids, taken from impossible angles and impossible positions where my mother would have surely seen the culprit taking the photo, and every Polaroid depicted her in the front doorway, door wide open, and her peering out into the street for any sign of our phantom knocker. On the bottom of each photo, scribbled in thick black pen, was the date the photo had been taken.

 

The oldest we could find was from the same day that the knocking had first began.

 

My mother, of course, immediately contacted the police. The box was confiscated as evidence, and police officers were positioned in and outside our house 24/7 until my mother and I finally moved out, as we should have years ago.

 

The parcel incident happened four years ago. Since then, my mother and I have now moved into a new home on the other side of the town, and we haven't heard any phantom knocking in the afternoons. Understandably, my mother doesn't like talking about it, but I still get chills when I remember the expression on her face as she opened the box and saw the photos.

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The police never found the culprit.