Harmony at the door

1.

Harmony—once my best friend, before she vanished into the quarry dam a decade ago—woke Cameron and, with him, half the cul-de-sac with his unnatural, high-pitched barking and the clamouring of my front door at exactly three minutes to midnight.

Some things never change.

I sat up so fast my vision went white at the edges. For a second I thought it was the dream again—the Well, the hands climbing out of stone—but the sound didn’t stop. Bark. Claw. Slam. Wood shuddering in its frame.

Cameron stood in the bedroom doorway, hackles raised, barking with a force that didn’t belong to a twelve-year-old dog with arthritis and a loyalty to the couch. His bark had always been low and steady. Tonight it was sharp, broken, panicked.

The pounding at the front door rattled the picture frames down the hall.

“Dylan!” a woman’s voice shrieked. “Dylan, open the door!”

That voice reached straight through the house and wrapped something icy around my spine.

I checked the clock.

11:57 p.m.

Three minutes to midnight.

My fingers fumbled the lamp switch. Light flooded the room. Cameron bolted for the hall, barking himself hoarse.

The front door shook again.

“Dylan! Please! It’s me. Harmony!”

The name punched the air out of my lungs.

2.

The last time I saw Harmony, she was laughing in the quarry dam. Fifteen years old. Cut-off shorts. Braid slipping loose. Everyone knew you weren’t meant to swim there. Everyone did it anyway.

“Come on, coward!” she’d yelled.

I told myself I’d jump in after her in a second.

She vanished without another sound.

They dragged that dam for weeks. Shopping trolleys. Tyres. Silt. No Harmony.

They fenced it off after that. Yellow signs. Unstable ground. Locals called it cursed. Kids called it the Well.

I never went back.

3.

I stepped into the hallway. The pounding had turned furious now. Cameron hurled himself at the door, claws grinding shallow trenches into the wood.

“I’m calling the police!” Mr Carter yelled from across the street.

“I know you’ve got it!” the woman screamed. “I need the box!”

The word froze me in place.

Eight years of deliberate forgetting collapsed in a single breath.

“Who are you?” I shouted.

“Open the door,” she said. “You already know.”

I slid the deadbolt halfway, then slammed it back. My palm left a wet mark on the brass.

“Go away,” I said. “I’m calling the cops.”

“Like last time?” she snapped.

That cadence—flat, amused—cut deeper than volume ever could.

“Lisbeth?” I whispered.

The pounding stopped.

A breath.

“Some people called her that,” the woman said. “You called me Harmony.”

My stomach turned over.

I had never told Lisbeth about the dam. Never told her that name.

I cracked the door two inches.

She stood under the security light, rain-dark coat clinging to her frame. Lisbeth’s cheekbones. Harmony’s crooked mouth. Water dripped from her hem onto my welcome mat.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she said.

“Have I?”

“That depends on what you believe about the dead.”

Cameron pressed against my legs, trembling.

Behind her, the street looked normal. Neighbours in pyjamas. Phones glowing. No one seemed to see her.

“Let me in,” she said. “They’ll be here soon.”

I opened the door.

4.

The box lived at the top of my wardrobe. Rough timber. No lock. No markings.

I hadn’t opened it in eight years.

Lisbeth had given it to me in second-year law. Drunk. Serious-eyed. “Promise me you’ll never open it, Dylan,” she said.

I promised.

A week later she vanished without a note.

Then came Cherie. Pink hair. Laugh like soda. Four months of almost living again—until I came home and found her standing in front of my open wardrobe with the box in her hands.

“It’s just a photo,” she said.

She glanced down again.

Her face drained white.

Three days later a jogger saw a woman dragged toward the Well by a taller figure in a long coat.

No body was ever recovered.

I slid the photo back without looking.

And sealed it away.

5.

In my kitchen, Harmony held a mug she didn’t drink from. Her clothes dried in uneven patches. The smell of pond water and something metallic hung off her skin.

“You kept it,” she said.

“Yes.”

“You never opened it.”

“No.”

“I need it back.”

“Why now?”

Her eyes darkened. “Because she’s found a way through again.”

“My mother,” she said. “Rose.”

The headlines came back to me in fragments. Murder. Madness. Surgeon lover. Daughter institutionalised.

“She gave me to a man who wanted my heart,” Harmony said. “Edwin Solly. Promised her a transplant if I matched.”

“Your own mother,” I whispered.

“She came to finish it after she died,” Harmony said. “Three minutes to midnight. Flowers in her hands. Scalpel in her pocket.”

The Polaroid, she explained, had trapped Rose’s final shape. Not her body—but her intent. Her hunger.

“The box pins her,” Harmony said. “But when someone really looks, she slips a hand out. Enough to drag them through.”

“Cherie,” I said.

Harmony nodded.

“The Well is a door now,” she said. “She built it with me.”

6.

Three polite knocks interrupted us.

One.

Two.

Three.

Cameron exploded into barking, scrambling across tiles—then slid backward as if yanked by an invisible leash.

Harmony’s face drained.

“She’s early.”

The microwave read 11:59.

“Dylan,” she whispered. “Get the box.”

I ran.

The box was warm when my fingers closed around it. Too warm.

The knocking returned. Closer now. As if each sound was happening inside the walls.

Back in the kitchen, Harmony stared down the hall.

“Open it,” she said.

“You said—”

“I said everyone else died,” she snapped. “You’re tethered to me. To the Well. You survived once. You might survive again.”

“Might,” I echoed.

The front door creaked.

Three more knocks, heavier now.

I slid the lid.

Inside lay the Polaroid, face-down.

“Turn it,” Harmony said.

7.

The kitchen vanished.

I stood in a barred hospital room. The air stank of bleach and rot.

Rose stood in the doorway holding lilies. Edwin waited behind her with empty eyes.

She stepped forward.

The lilies blackened.

Her face warped.

And she looked straight at me.

“Oh,” she whispered. “There you are.”

The photograph tore open.

Rose stepped into my kitchen.

Her hand slid into my chest without breaking skin.

Cold. Searching.

Satisfied.

8.

They said my heart stopped for forty-three seconds.

Police questioned me. Doctors whispered cardiac event and stress psychosis. Harmony was gone. The box was gone. So was the photo.

Only three deep gouges remained on the inside of my front door.

And a vase of lilies that bloomed overnight and rotted black by morning.

9.

I don’t dream about the Well anymore.

Now I dream of a barred room that never quite seals.

Cameron still wakes me some nights at 11:57 p.m., growling at the front door.

Sometimes I hear it inside the walls.

Three soft knocks.

And a voice sweet with lilies and rot whispers behind my ear:

“Open up, Dylan. Some things never change.”

END.