Knock Knock, Open Wide

by Neil Sharpson

Genres: Dystopian; Political Thrillers

Synopsis

Knock Knock, Open Wide weaves horror and Celtic myth into a terrifying, heartbreaking supernatural tale of fractured family bonds, the secrets we carry, and the veiled forces that guide Irish life.

Driving home late one night, Etain Larkin finds a corpse on a pitch-black country road deep in the Irish countryside. She takes the corpse to a remote farmhouse. So begins a night of unspeakable horror that will take her to the very brink of sanity.

She will never speak of it again.

Two decades later, Betty Fitzpatrick, newly arrived at college in Dublin, has already fallen in love with the drama society, and the beautiful but troubled Ashling Mallen. As their relationship blossoms, Ashling goes to great lengths to keep Betty away from her family, especially her alcoholic mother, Etain.

As their relationship blossoms, Betty learns her lover's terrifying family history, and Ashling's secret obsession. Ashling has become convinced that the horrors inflicted on her family are connected to a seemingly innocent children's TV show. Everyone in Ireland watched this show in their youth, but Ash soon discovers that no one remembers it quite the same way. And only Ashling seems to remember its star: a small black goat puppet who lives in a box and only comes out if you don’t behave. They say he’s never come out.

Almost never.

When the door between the known and unknown opens, it can never close again.

 

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Release date: September 26, 2023

Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

Print pages: 336

Sample

OCTOBER 1979


The clock that hung on the wall of Mrs. Maude Pygott’s shop was of the same make that could be found in schools and offices across the world: a large metallic ring with a curious mechanical quirk that caused it to run efficiently throughout the day until it reached half an hour before quitting time. At which point the entire mechanism seemed to wind down, and the arms would move like an ant crawling through thick honey.

One of the reasons that Mrs. Pygott approved of the new girl was that, unlike every other college student who had taken part-time work here, Maude never found her staring at the clock when she should have been sweeping the floor or taking inventory.

Right now the girl, a short, pale, brown-haired twenty-something named Etain, was trying to wrestle the sweeping brush back into the cupboard without upsetting the Rice Krispies.

Mrs. Pygott had gotten the impression that the reason Etain was never to be found staring at the clock and cursing its dreamy languor was that she didn’t like to be reminded that she would soon be returning home. Etain did not seem to have a happy home life.

Trouble with the mother, Maude guessed.

* * *

The shop was not a place to work if you were claustrophobic.

In terms of the goods it sold, it was a decent-sized grocer’s, offering canned goods, tobacco, fruit, vegetables, cleaning products, newspapers, and toiletries. However, the size of the shop was better suited to a small newsagent’s and this meant that the shelves were crowded together and laden down with goods from the floor to the ceiling, which gave the place the close, stuffy atmosphere of a library.

The girl placed the broom back in the cupboard and turned to where Maude was leaning against the counter leafing through an issue of Ireland’s Own.

“You can leave now if you like, love,” Maude told her, gesturing to the clock. “Not much in it.”

Etain simply nodded. Not much of a talker; another point in her favor in Maude’s opinion.

“Oh, and would you mind telling him his tea is ready?”

Etain nodded again and headed through the back entrance into the Pygott home that abutted the shop.

* * *

In the living room, Maude’s youngest son, Tom, was watching television, cross-legged on the carpet and still wearing his school uniform.

Etain gave a rare smile. She liked the Pygott boys. They were both quiet, and often painfully shy (Tom in particular), but they were sweethearts. Good kids.

“Hiya,” she said gently.

There was no reaction.

Glued to the box, she thought to herself. She looked at the screen.

Bloody hell, she thought. Puckeen? Is that still on?

Memories returned, unbidden, of long, purgatorial afternoons after school with the rain washing the world outside. She and her sister, Kate, had watched Puckeen religiously; that is, as a joyless ritual that neither of them fully understood. It was one of very few television programs that Mairéad Larkin had allowed her daughters to watch. It was not, certainly, the biggest grievance she had against her mother. And yet, Etain mused, it was a lot higher up the list than it should be.

On the screen, a young, bland-faced man in a white Pierrot costume was explaining different shapes to the audience in English and Irish:

“And this is a square. Cearnóg. Four sides. Ceithre thaobh.”

The costume notwithstanding, he looked and sounded like a man announcing the profits for quarter three, which were broadly in line with the profits for quarter two.

Behind him was Puckeen’s box.

They really haven’t changed a thing, she thought to herself. She wondered if this was a repeat, and they were simply airing an episode from her childhood. But no, the presenter was different. Very similar, certainly. Same affect, same costume (in fact, quite possibly literally the same costume) but nevertheless a different person. Growing up there had usually been a male and a female presenter. And of course, Puckeen himself. At least in theory.

Puckeen lived in the box that dominated the center of the set. The box was plain and black, and rectangular. It was always in sight, always visible. Sometimes, one of the presenters would be “bold.” Loud. Disobedient. Argumentative. Overly inquisitive.

And the other presenter would remind them, sometimes severely, sometimes nervously, sometimes more in sorrow than in anger, that if they didn’t behave, Puckeen would be cross and come out of his box.

For children watching the program for the first time, it became a game. Waiting for the episode where Puckeen would finally emerge from the box. Where they would finally see what he looked like. Episode after episode, they awaited a revelation.

But it never came. The offending presenter would inevitably repent, apologize to the other presenter, and be forgiven.

She realized with a jolt of dark amusement that the nation’s taxpayers had been funding a decades-long practical joke on their own children, who spent hours watching a program whose main character had never appeared, and would never appear.

Beckett could have learned something from the RTÉ children’s programming department, she thought. Even he never tried to make Waiting for Godot last fifteen years.

Only fifteen? It was already running when I was a child. How long has it been on …

Suddenly, her train of thought was broken and she remembered why she was here. She laid a hand on Tom’s shoulder and the boy jolted like he’d just been woken.

He looked up at her, blearily, as if not quite sure who she was or where he was.

“Your tea’s ready,” she told him, and left through the back door to the yard where her bike was stashed.

* * *

The call came at twenty minutes to seven, which was enough to tell Etain that it was from Kate.

It was the perfect time for Kate to be sure that Etain was home (which, technically she was, as she wearily wrestled her rain-slick bike through the narrow front door while trying not to send a family of porcelain cats on the hall table to an early grave).

But it was also the perfect time to ensure that Mairéad was not there, as she would be at evening Mass regardless of the torrential rain outside. Or indeed, anything else up to and including a full-scale war. Since Kate had graduated and moved out of the house she had not said two words to Mairéad, either in person, by phone, or by post. Kate refused to acknowledge her, speak of her to friends, or even admit that she had been born to anyone. Kate had, to all intents and purposes, killed her mother. Etain looked forward hopefully to the day when she could do the same.

She picked up the phone and answered, her voice still husky and wheezing from cycling across town in the rain.

“Hi, sis,” said Kate on the other end.

Her sister had a plummy, almost aristocratic South Dublin accent and she seemed to come by it effortlessly. Etain had spent a lifetime trying to force her own voice into that kind of shape, but had only ever managed a neutral tone lodged somewhere in the riverbed of the Liffey. When she was upset, or stressed, she lapsed into a nasally northsider twang that she hated.

“How is the cave, and where is the dragon?” Kate asked.

“She’s at Mass,” said Etain, trying her best to juggle handset and handlebars. But you knew that, she thought, or you wouldn’t have risked calling.

“How is she?” Kate asked. Not a query as to her mother’s well-being. A request for an update on an ongoing crisis. A casualty report.

“Same as usual,” Etain wheezed, stripping off her soaking mac one-handed and dancing as the sleeve gripped her left wrist like a hungry beast and refused to let go.

“You poor thing,” said Kate.

“Thanks,” said Etain.

“You should come down,” Kate said. “No, you have to come down. That’s an order.”

Etain sat down on a chair in the hall, too tired to stand, and tried to remember where “down” was. Since leaving the family home, Kate had led an almost gypsy existence, house-sharing with one set of friends for a few weeks or months and then moving on somewhere else. In the last half year she had been living in Clontarf, Rathmines, even a brief spell in London. Then, Etain remembered. Her sister was house-sitting for their aunt, who was away doing missionary work in Uganda. For the last three weeks Kate had been living alone in a tiny cottage in the wilds of Wexford and, by her own admission, being “driven mad by all the fucking peace and tranquility.”

“You want me to come down to Duncannon?” said Etain.

“I do.”

“Why?”

“Because I am throwing a party and it is going to be the best party of our miserable lives.”

“When?” Etain asked.

“Tomorrow night.”

Oh, fuck right off, Etain thought.

“I can’t,” she said.

“You can,” said Kate. “You will. You shall.”

“I can’t, I won’t, I shan’t,” said Etain irritably. “How am I supposed to get down?”

“Borrow the car,” said Kate.

“She won’t let me,” Etain replied.

“I didn’t say ‘Ask if you can borrow it,’ I just said ‘borrow it.’”

“I have work the next day.”

“So don’t stay too late. Leave around eight and you’ll be back home in plenty of time.”

Etain did not share her sister’s optimism. Her aunt’s house lay at the center of a labyrinth of winding, brambly, unlit country roads and Etain was not a confident driver. She had never even driven outside of the city.

“Kate, I can’t,” she said.

“Etain—”

“Sorry, I—”

“Etain. Barry’s going to be there. He is traveling a lot further than you are. And I promised him you’d be here. And, one way or the other, I think you owe him a face-to-face.”

Etain very nearly slammed the receiver down right there and then.

Bitch, she thought, fucking interfering bitch how dare you …

But she was too tired even for that. And after the first flush of anger had passed she realized that she was more angry with herself than anyone else.

* * *

Barry Mallen had been her … no, technically still was her boyfriend legally and in the eyes of God. Ever since he had completed his degree in agriculture he had gone back home to the family farm outside of Bantry and they had tried to make a few phone calls every week take the place of seeing each other every day, kissing at house parties, walking arm in arm around the lake in Belfield. He was a big lad. Good for sheltering from the wind. Strong arms to get lost in. Sweet as chocolate. She had thought him a joke when she had first met him, with his wild, unkempt ginger hair and thick Cork brogue that reminded her of a barking sheepdog. As an arts student, she’d instinctively thought herself better than him until the night she had gotten blackout drunk at a party only to wake up on Barry’s couch the next morning, having been safely escorted through the midnight campus past foxes and worse. He had made her a cup of strong sweet tea, and spent the morning patiently listening to her tell him why she hated her mother. A few weeks later he had invited her and a few of his Dublin friends down to the family homestead and they had kissed in his father’s barn while the rest of their friends sat drinking and singing softly in the darkness and chased the bats with their flashlights.

* * *

She loved him, she realized with a start. Which was why she hadn’t done the honorable thing and cut him loose.

She had to break up with Barry. If she didn’t show up to this party, that would be as clear a signal to him as anything. But he deserved better than that. Kate was right, the absolute unutterable hoor.

“Fine,” she said wearily, and hung up the phone, because if she had to listen to Kate celebrating her victory she would have screamed.

* * *

It was a bright, cloudless October day, cold as a razor’s edge, and as she drove Mairéad’s ancient baby-blue Ford Cortina down the coast to Duncannon, she reflected on how much more she would be enjoying the journey if there wasn’t heartbreak waiting for her at the other end. The Irish coast spread out before her in all its wild, rough-faced beauty and she had a mad desire to stop by the side of the road, strip naked, and leap into the sea until she was too cold to think or worry. The sea air made her senses sharpen and she could almost feel layers of Dublin grime and funk lifting off her skin and lungs and eyes. It felt like she was being scoured, cleaned and made brighter.

* * *

The road to her aunt’s house was little more than a dirt track running through a near-impenetrable forest of blackberry bushes that seemed to wind and twist like an intestine for half a mile. The road was so narrow that Etain could hear the thorns of the bushes clawing hungrily at the doors of the Cortina as the tiny car bravely pushed deeper into the brush. Etain winced, not wanting to even imagine what this was doing to the paint. Mairéad would kill her. Ah well. That had been inevitable since she had left the note on the kitchen table breezily informing her mother that she was borrowing her car, as if that was something that one simply did.

Even more worrying was the thought that she might meet another car coming toward her. There was no room for two cars to pass, there was barely enough room for one car to move. The thought of having to reverse all the way back through the blackberry jungle filled her with dread. But, at last, the road widened and there was her aunt’s house, a small, cozy-looking two-story that would have been quite pretty had it not been painted in an absolutely despicable shade of orange. There were five or six other cars parked haphazardly in the weed-speckled driveway, and she tentatively squeezed in between two before turning off the engine, gripping the steering wheel, leaning her forehead against it, and whispering, “Okay, okay, okay.”

She took a few deep breaths, and got out of the car, not bothering to lock it.

She knocked on the door, which was opened by a tall vampire with a black plastic rubbish bag awkwardly tucked under his collar as a cape.

He threw his arms open joyfully at the sight of her and said something completely incomprehensible.

She stared at him.

“What are you wearing?” she asked him incredulously.

Keano Flynn sheepishly removed a set of plastic fangs from his mouth.

“It’s Halloween,” he said, a little hurt.

* * *

It was indeed Halloween, but thankfully no one else had bothered to dress up. Keano, the least threatening vampire in Europe, sat sullenly in the corner, nursing a beer. He had helped Kate to arrange the party, but whereas he had wanted a Halloween party, she had been adamant that it was simply to be a party that happened to take place on Halloween, and she had won.

Only a dozen or so people had made the journey down to Duncannon, but the house was small enough for that to feel like a crowd. Etain wandered, adrift in the mass as always. She knew all these people but she couldn’t work up the nerve to talk to them. She had an irrational fear that no one would remember who she was. Suddenly, she felt a hand on her shoulder and she spun around to see Barry smiling at her.

His face has changed, she thought to herself. It had been so long since she’d seen him that he looked noticeably different. He had moved back home, and his mother’s cooking had broadened his face slightly. His arms and torso were bulkier too, as he was working full-time on his father’s farm. And he’d gotten a haircut. The haystack had at last been tamed and he looked almost clean-cut. He leaned in to kiss her and she kissed him back, even as she thought that she really shouldn’t. You’re here to break his heart, remember? she told herself.

Just his. Sure.

“Heya, Tain,” he whispered.

“Hi” was all she could say.

He gestured for her to follow him and she did. They left the living room, through the hall, and Etain found herself in her aunt’s guest bedroom, which was crammed with books and boxes of clothes and a small wire settle bed. Barry closed the door behind them, muting the ruckus of the party to a low background hum.

She realized that he was sweating. What was going on?

“How are you?” he asked. His breath was strained, as if he was about to break bad news.

Just do it, she told herself. There’s no good time. Tell him it’s over. Just …

“I was in Youghal,” he said, apropos of nothing.

She decided to let him finish.

“I was in Youghal and I was passing Cotter’s and there was this … I saw this in the window, like.”

Etain would remember for the rest of her life how the sound of the party suddenly seemed to drop away and all she could hear was Barry’s voice and the sound of her own breathing. For at this very moment, Barry had reached into his pocket and taken out a small navy-blue box.

Oh. Oh Jesus.

He was stammering. He was so scared.

“And I thought … I just … I wanted more than anything to just go in there … and buy it … and give it to you … I could see it all, like. What it’d be like. You and me. And I wanted that more than anything, Tain. It just. I couldn’t help myself. So I…”

He looked at her and suddenly he lost his nerve. The look of shock and (he thought) horror on her face killed his courage stone dead.

He had been about to pass her the box but now he put it back in his pocket.

“Sorry,” he mumbled. “Sorry. It’s stupid. It was stupid. Tain, I’m sorry, I don’t know what I was thinking. It was stupid.”

And, realizing what was being taken away, something in her, greater than her fear of Mairéad, greater than her fear of anything, rebelled and she blurted out:

“Yeah!”

Barry looked like he’d been stabbed.

“Yeah,” he said softly. “Yeah. I know. Stupid.”

He reached for the door handle to escape and her hand shot out and grabbed his wrist. She gazed into his eyes.

“No, Barry. ‘Yeah.’”

Realization slowly dawned.

“You mean … yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You…” His voice was cracking. “You will?”

“Yeah.” And she was laughing and crying at the same time. “Yeah. I will. I will. I will, yeah.”

And then came a kiss. A kiss bigger and vaster than any kiss that had come before. A hurricane of a kiss. A typhoon. A kiss that could blow you off your feet and knock you to the floor. Or onto a nearby settle bed.


Copyright © 2023 by Neil Sharpson