────────────────────────────
Kelsey didn't notice the fur until Mr. Pickles tried to eat it.
She had just stepped onto the porch, keys halfway out of her hoodie pocket, when the cat darted between her ankles with that low, predatory trill he saved for moths and unlucky lizards. Something pale lay on the welcome mat. Mr. Pickles pounced, batted, and then started to chew.
"Hey! No." She nudged him with her foot. "We talked about this. Presents are for birthdays."
He backed away with offended dignity, tail flicking. The porch light hummed above them, casting a sickly yellow cone across the wood. Kelsey reached down, pinched the tuft, and rubbed it between finger and thumb.
It wasn't like the soft hair that came off Mr. Pickles in gauzy clouds. This felt coarser, thicker. Some strands were almost translucent, and some were bristly, like they'd been cut instead of shed. She made a face and flicked it into the flower bed, then wiped her fingers on her jeans.
"Gross," she muttered, unlocking the door. "You're getting weirder, Mr. P."
Inside, the house exhaled its empty-night smell: dish soap and carpet and a faint metallic tang that she always imagined was the old furnace breathing through the vents. Her parents would roll in late, still laughing from their friends' Halloween party. Her older brother, Dalton, had texted fifteen minutes ago: Be home when I'm home. Could be midnight, could be never. Don't wait up.
Typical.
She tossed her keys in the bowl by the door and set the sack of chips and soda on the kitchen counter. Outside, high, thin voices shrieked with sugar—the last trick-or-treaters sweeping the street before curfew. It had been one of those weird warm Octobers, the air heavy and soft, the kind that made the neighborhood feel like a movie set that hadn't cooled down after the lights were turned off.
Mr. Pickles leaped onto a chair and stared at her with the expectant patience of a tiny king.
"Fine." She cracked a can. "But we're sharing."
She fed him a single chip and he tried to inhale the rest of the bag. They negotiated. He won. It helped to have company, even if it was manipulative and covered in fur.
Her phone buzzed. Group chat. A mess of selfies from people crowded around bonfires, red cups raised, fangs and face paint and the same witch hat she'd seen three times this week. Someone had tagged her in a story about the Bunnyman Bridge, one of those grainy YouTube videos with a breathless title: HE CAME TO MY DOOR. She thumbed the volume down before the narrator could whisper in all caps. The kids at school had been telling versions of the story all week—Clifton, Virginia, a man in a rabbit suit with a hatchet, a bridge, a warning, fur left behind when he marked you.
It was stupid. It was also the kind of stupid that made you check the locks twice.
She swiped over to the camera, framed a shot with Mr. Pickles hunching over his chip like a dragon, and typed: Guess the Bunnyman's leaving snacks now. Then she erased it. It felt like poking something you couldn't see. She put the phone face down on the table and told herself to grow up.
────────────────────────────
The doorbell rang.
She jumped so hard the soda slopped over her hand. Mr. Pickles flattened himself against the chair back and hissed at the door as if the bell were a living thing that had insulted his mother.
"Last-minute trick-or-treaters," she said, wiping her fingers on a paper towel that immediately stuck to her skin. "Be nice."
She grabbed the candy bowl and opened the door.
The porch was empty. The street beyond looked smeared and smeary, a row of jack-o'-lantern smiles bobbing between shadows. The leftover heat held its breath. Kelsey stood there for a full fifteen seconds waiting for the jump scare, for a kid to leap out from behind the hydrangea, for Dalton to film her flinch from the sidewalk. Nothing. Just the buzz of the light and the faraway screech of someone dragging a plastic skeleton down the sidewalk.
Her eyes dropped to the mat.
Another tuft of white fur sat exactly where the first one had been.
She glanced toward the flower bed where she'd flicked the earlier clump. It wasn't there. A sliver of moon caught on the wet leaves, and everything else was darkness.
Kelsey swallowed and stepped back inside, closing the door carefully, as if the house could have feelings about it. She turned the deadbolt. Then she turned it again, just to hear the click.
"Dalton?" her voice asked the kitchen as she set the candy bowl on the counter. It sounded too loud. She grabbed her phone and opened the thread.
Where r u?
Typing bubble. Then: Chill. On my way. Tell mom I'm her favorite.
She rolled her eyes and typed: Doorbell ditchers. Also Mr. Pickles is high on chips.
He sent a skull emoji and a photo of his own face in a pirate hat, somebody's shoulder pressed into his side. Kelsey didn't zoom in. She didn't need to know which somebody.
Mr. Pickles abandoned his snack to stare at the back door. His ears were forward. His tail didn't move. After a second he made a low sound Kelsey had never heard from him before, a kind of question that knew the answer was bad.
"Don't you start." She moved to the window over the sink. The backyard was a wash of shadow and fence. The motion light near the garage clicked on and painted the grass a dull, bony color. In the reflected window she caught her own face, smudged hoodie, bad ponytail, an expression that could almost pass for calm. She lifted the edge of the curtain and looked down.
Something pale clung to the outside of the glass—caught in that little rift where the frame didn't quite sit flush. A few wiry strands fluttered in the slight breeze.
Kelsey let the curtain fall and pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes until colors sparked. It was just fur. It was probably from one of those lawn rabbits. It was probably some kid who'd taken the legend too seriously. It would be something to tell her friends tomorrow, and they would laugh and say, Oh my God, you should have saved it for evidence, and she would show them how funny she'd been about it in the moment.
"Right." She laughed once, to prove it. "Evidence."
She found a sandwich bag, went out the back door, and used two fingers to pluck the tuft free. It gave with a soft sound she didn't like. Back inside, she sealed it in the bag and squinted at it through the plastic. Some of the hairs had tiny ridges. Some were so thin they looked like scratches on the air. She took a photo anyway and captioned it: Okay this is actually gross. Then she put her phone down and washed her hands longer than she needed to.
The house settled around her, a series of small clicks and sighs. She turned the TV on for company and turned it right back off when the laugh track sounded too much like a recording of people who were no longer alive. Mr. Pickles made another low sound and slunk toward the hallway, belly low to the ground, like something was stalking him that only he could see.
"Hey," she said softly. "Don't go getting yourself possessed."
He didn't look back. He stopped at the end of the hall, two paws set over the threshold, staring toward the darkest part of the house. Kelsey followed him because the alternative was staying in the kitchen and listening to herself breathe.
────────────────────────────
The hallway narrowed the sound. Every footstep felt too loud. Night pooled on the photographs that marched along the wall: vacations and Christmas mornings and Dalton in a Little League uniform, his mouth full of missing teeth. The air here was cooler. It smelled like dust and the sweet, stale breath of cardboard. At the very end, left of the pantry, a door waited, painted the same off-white as the trim.
The basement.
Kelsey didn't go down there. Nobody did, not really. Her dad had meant to finish it one summer and never did, and the basement had taken the slight personally, growing damp and mildewed and mean about it. When she was little, Dalton used to hide on the stairs and grab her ankles when she passed. He had whispered in a voice like the furnace, There's a thing down there that doesn't blink, and she had believed him. Even now, the sight of that door with its old brass knob made the skin between her shoulder blades itch.
The door was open.
Not much—two inches, maybe three—but enough that the darkness found a way into the hall. A thin line of it lay across the floor like something had leaked.
Kelsey stopped. For a heartbeat, the world went completely flat, like a photograph. She could feel the two inches between the door and its frame like a space in her own chest. She knew, absolutely and in a way that made her stomach dip, that she hadn't opened it. She never opened it. She avoided it the way she avoided spiders and early morning alarms.
For a shaky second she reached for the words she always used to steady herself: Dalton. He did this to be an ass. He'd found some white fur somewhere and he'd leave it in places he knew would get to her and then he'd film her freak out and send it to his friends with skull emojis.
Then she saw the fur caught on the doorframe.
A few coarse threads had snagged on the lip of the wood, pale and almost shining in the dim. Another little tuft lay on the floor just inside, as if something brushing past had left a piece of itself behind. Mr. Pickles had gone very still. His ears flattened. He made that sound again, the one she didn't have a word for, and then he backed up until his tail touched her shin.
Kelsey's mouth felt dry and useless. She lifted her phone and opened the camera. The picture was nothing but a vertical stripe of black and the white little snags on either side. She looked at the screen and then the door and then the screen again, as if one might tell her something the other wouldn't. The house stayed quiet.
She reached out and touched the edge of the door with two fingertips. The wood was cool. It moved a fraction under her hand, and that was enough to make her snatch her fingers back.
Her phone buzzed. Dalton: Be there in 10. Want anything?
She typed, fingers stiff: Did you open the basement?
Typing bubble. Then: Lol no. You okay?
She started to write yes and erased it. Another message arrived before she could answer: If you're messing with me I'm not falling for it.
Kelsey swallowed. Her tongue tasted metallic, like she'd bitten the same place on the inside of her cheek all night.
A sound rose from the dark.
It wasn't loud at first. It was a soft shift, a weight changing its mind. Something brushed against something else—wood against concrete, a box sliding across a floor. Then a thud, not heavy enough to be a person falling but heavy enough to be deliberate. The hair on her arms wrenched itself upright.
The old light switch was inside the door, at the top of the stairs. She could see the outline of its plate, faintly grayer than the darkness around it. She leaned forward and groped for it, hating the way the black swallowed her hand. Her fingers found metal. She flicked it up.
The bulb flickered somewhere below, sputtered with tired electricity, and went out with a little pop and the smell of something burnt. The darkness seemed to jump in that moment and settle closer.
"Okay," she said too loudly, to the door, to herself, to the idea of the house. "Nope."
She stepped back and meant to shut the door and thought of the hinge squealing and thought of whatever was down there deciding it didn't like being shut away and froze. The quiet throbbed. She could hear, distantly, a group of kids laughing as they made their way down the sidewalk, a car door slamming, someone calling good-night. Close by, she heard only the tiny scrape of Mr. Pickles' claws as he shifted his weight.
A scratch answered from below.
Not the polite sound of branches against a window. Not the scamper of a mouse in a wall. This was a deep, slow pull of something hard against wood. It climbed. It measured the distance between treads.
Mr. Pickles hissed so hard he coughed. He shot down the hall, back puffed like a threat, then seemed to think better of whatever bravery had seized him and vanished into the coat closet with a thump of hangers.
Kelsey realized she was breathing through her mouth. She put a hand against the wall and felt the paint cool and tacky under her palm. Her own heartbeat made the hall pulse. She took one step back. Another.
Something pressed against the other side of the door.
Not much. Just enough to rock it open another inch. Metal flexed. The old latch had never been much, just a hook put there by someone who liked the idea of barriers. It squealed now, a creature voice made of iron. One of the screws that held it in place popped free and bounced, a tiny lightless bead on the floor.
Kelsey ran.
Her body decided for her. She turned so fast her sock slid on the wood. She hit the corner of the hall with her shoulder, stumbled, caught herself, and kept going. The house seemed suddenly enormous, every room a mouth. She did not look back at the door. She did not need to. The sound behind her—a heavier thud, a stretch of old wood—told her enough.
────────────────────────────
She made it to her room and nearly shut Mr. Pickles in the closet by mistake. He shot across the carpet and launched himself under her bed in a streak of outraged shadow. Kelsey shoved her dresser an inch with her hip, dragged her desk chair in front of the door, and clicked the lock with hands that didn't feel like they belonged to her. The lock sounded like a toy.
"Call," she told her phone. "Call." But when she looked at the screen, her reflection stared back at her with too-wide eyes. She couldn't seem to remember any numbers. She opened Dalton's thread and hit call. It rang. It rang again.
"Pick up," she whispered.
"Yo." His voice was cheerful, crackling, as if it had to fight through a crowd to get to her. "Traffic. Five minutes."
"Don't hang up." She pressed the phone to her ear and backed away from the door until the backs of her legs found the bed. She sank down without meaning to. "Dalton, don't hang up."
A pause. The shape of his voice changed. "Kels?"
"Somebody's in the house." The words came out small and square, like blocks stacked carefully on top of each other. "I think somebody's—downstairs. In the basement. I didn't open it. I didn't."
"Kels, listen to me. Get out. Go out the window. I'm two blocks away."
The window. She turned her head like it belonged to someone else and looked at the black pane. Her own face floated there, then resolved into the night beyond. The neighbor's maple leaned a shoulder toward her side yard. She could probably make it to the little overhang above the kitchen and then the fence. She could probably do it without breaking both ankles.
On the other side of the door, something scraped at the paint near the knob. Slow. Testing. She pictured a box cutter. She pictured claws. She pictured someone with a tool bag and a mask. A ridiculous, filthy rabbit mask with eyeholes cut too wide.
"Dalton." Her mouth didn't feel like it was saying his name correctly. "If this is you—"
"Jesus, Kels, it's not me. Stay on the phone."
Her hand found Mr. Pickles under the bed and closed in the warm fur of his back. He didn't flinch. He didn't purr. He vibrated with a silent growl. His whole body was taut as a live wire.
The scrape stopped. The quiet swelled again, the kind that had weight and temperature. Kelsey counted inside her head and lost track of numbers. She realized she was crying only when a tear fell off her chin and landed on the screen, a bright oval that distorted Dalton's name.
The chair moved.
Just a fraction, forward an inch, then back as if something on the other side had tested the pressure and readjusted. The lock creaked. The door nudged in its frame, so gentle she might have imagined it if the hair on her arms hadn't lurched in agreement.
"Kelsey," Dalton said, and his voice was close and tinny and very far away, "I'm on the street. Two more houses."
She couldn't find any words to give him back.
A sound came from the crack between the door and the floor. A breath. Not quite a voice, not speech, but the suggestion of it, as if the door itself were trying to talk. Her own name threaded through the idea like floss through a needle.
Kelsey.
She didn't know if the sound was real until Mr. Pickles answered it with a hiss that sounded ripped out of him. He pressed himself against her shin like he meant to crawl into her leg and live there.
"Kels? Answer me. I'm out front."
Something touched the doorknob. The metal turned a quarter inch and stopped against the lock. It turned back. It turned again, patient. A fingernail—or something that scraped like one—ran down the wood from the knob to the chair seat, slow as a clock.
Her phone vibrated. Text message from her brother: I'm here. Lights on.
She opened her mouth to answer and couldn't make anything useful come out. She stared at the knob. The chair ticked forward another half inch. The door eased toward the room, careful, a carefulness worse than violence. Paint flakes fell in a little drift onto the carpet.
On the other side, a whisper threaded through the crack, almost a laugh, almost a child's voice and almost not human at all.
I brought you a gift.
The chair slid farther, inch by inch, the legs making tracks in the carpet pile. Mr. Pickles' claws dug into her skin through her jeans. Footsteps pounded on the porch—real ones now, loud and graceless and blessedly familiar. Dalton banged on the front door, shouted her name, swore.
The doorknob inside her room made one last, patient turn.
Kelsey tightened her grip on the cat and stared at the strip of dark widening, at the pale, wiry threads caught in the edge of the wood, and knew, with a bright, cold certainty that carved the air around her, that whatever was on the other side had not come to knock.
It had let itself in.
© 2025 Karen Cody. All rights reserved.
This original story was written exclusively for the Urban Legends, Mystery, and Myth blog.
Do not copy, repost, or reproduce without permission.
This tale may appear in a future special collection.
Want to know the legend that inspired this tale?
Read about the real Bunnyman Urban Legend here
Post a Comment