VIDEO AVAILABLE: A HALLOWEEN STORY | THE DOORBELL, Part 2: Answer Every Knock - Come and See the Bees

0:10 Hello and welcome to Ghost Scary Stories. This series is The Doorbell. Episode 2, Answer Every Knock. You came back. On Halloween night, with your own door right there and the knocking already started, you came back to hear the end. Good. That's good. Because you need the rest of it now, tonight, more than you needed the first part. You've been practicing all evening, haven't you? Every knock, you've answered. You're ready.

0:51 Let me tell you what opened the door. I opened the door. A year ago tonight, That's the thing I left you with, my hand on the door, and I have had a whole year to decide whether to tell you the rest. And here it is. Because that's the rule, and I keep the rules. I have kept them my whole life. So at midnight, on a dead street with that weight and that patience on the other side of the wood, I turned the latch and I opened my front door and I looked at what was standing on my porch. It was Mr Averill. I knew him. That's the first thing I have to make you understand, the thing that took the floor out from under me. I knew the face on my porch. Mr Averill lived four doors down when I was a girl. He kept bees.

1:41 He gave the whole street honey at Christmas. He died, or I always thought he died, when I was about twelve. There was a quiet funeral, and his house was sold, and that was that. And here he was on my porch at midnight, Forty years later, not a day older than the last time I saw him, over his garden fence, in his cardigan, with his kind, tired face, standing very still in my porch light. And he looked at me, and he did not ask for candy. He said, Come and see the bees, love. They're all out tonight. Come and see. And his voice was exactly right. That's what I need you to understand. That's the part no costume can fake, and his was not a costume. Forty years and I had not heard that voice, and the moment

2:34 he spoke I was eight years old again at his garden fence with honey on my fingers, because it was him, every grain of it, the warmth and the little rasp and the way he said love at the end of things. Nothing on this earth could have reproduced that except the man himself, and the man was dead, and he was standing on my porch asking me to come and see the bees. and he was smiling, and behind him, down the dark path, down the dead silent street, I could see others now, I had not seen them before, standing out there in the road in the dark. A woman in morning black, a shape in a long coat, a small boy in pyjamas, all of them turned toward my lit doorway, all of them waiting, patient, for me to take the step. And I understood, all at once, the

3:25 thing the rules had been hiding from me my whole life. I had always thought the danger was letting them in. That's what my mother drummed into me. Never let them over the threshold. Guard the inside of your house. And so I had spent 40 years thinking of my front door as a wall, as the thing that kept them out there and me in here. But Mr Averill didn't want to come in. He had never wanted to come in.

3:51 None of them had. The silent woman in morning black, The man with no face. The little boy in his pyjamas. Not one of them had ever tried to step inside. Had they? I realised. Standing there. Not one in forty years had pushed at the door. Because they were never trying to get in. They were trying to get me to come out. That is the real rule. The one under all the others. The one nobody on my street says because most of them don't know it yet. They still think their locked doors are protecting them. The door was never a wall. The door was the danger. Every time you open it, every single time, you are standing in the gap, half in your warm house and half out in the dark, and the whole point of answering

4:37 every knock, over and over, all your life, from the time you're a child holding your mother's hand, is that it trains you. It trains you to open the door. It trains the reflex so deep that you stop thinking of an open door as a risk at all. And they are patient. They are so patient. They will come to your door as children and neighbors and grandmothers for 40 years, taking their small toll each time. A little of your warmth, a little of your year, a little of the part of you that knows the difference between inside and outside. Until one Halloween night, You open the door to someone you love, someone kind, someone asking you to come and see the bees, and you are so trained, so worn, so used to giving them what they ask,

5:31 that you take one step out, and that's all it takes. One step over your own threshold, onto your own porch, in the dark, and you're theirs. You join them. You walk off down the street with Mr Averill to see the bees. And next year, it's your face on someone's porch, not a day older, asking some tired woman in a lit doorway to come and see something lovely. Come out.

5:57 Just for a moment. Come out. That's where they come from. The late ones. The good costumes. The silent, patient, old-fashioned ones who come after midnight. They were all us. Once. Everyone who ever lived on my street and kept the rules so faithfully and answered every knock for a lifetime, and then, one year, worn all the way through, took the step. My mother's rules don't save you. They buy you time. They make sure it takes a whole long life instead of a single night. And then they collect you anyway, gently, in a voice you trust, at a door you've been trained since childhood to open. And I have to tell you what it cost me, the keeping of the rules, because the rules are not free. No one tells you that part either. I never left this street.

6:51 How could I? The rules only work at your own door. The door you've answered at since you were a child. The door that knows you. And so I could never move away. Never go to college in another town. Never take the job in the city. Never follow the man I loved when he asked me to come with him. Because leaving meant giving up the one door that would keep me safe and standing in strange doorways that didn't know me. So I stayed. I stayed in my mother's house and I answered my mother's door, and I watched my own life go past the window like other people's trick-or-treaters.

7:26 And I told myself it was safety, and it was. It was safety, and it was also a cage. And the terrible thing, the thing I can't get around, is that those were the same thing. The rules kept me alive, and the rules kept me here. and there was never a version where I got one without the other. I gave my whole life, at the door, a little every year, and the toll was the life. That was always the toll.

7:58 It was never candy. It was the years I spent inside, safe, alone, answering, while everyone I might have been walked off down the street to see the bees. And I should tell you, because I promised I'd stop hiding it, that there is another way to see all of this, and I have seen it, on the grey mornings after, and I cannot prove to you which way is true. Here it is.

8:43 a woman is alone in her dead mother's house. Her mother is gone, her street has emptied, the neighbours she remembers are decades dead, and every Halloween she sits up alone and opens her door over and over to the cold and the dark. Admiring costumes no one is wearing, handing candy out into an empty porch, talking to the night in her mother's voice, saying her mother's rules, because it is the only night the house feels full, because answering the door is the only thing that still feels like having people, because a woman who gave her whole life to a doorway cannot stop standing in it even when there is no longer anyone on the other side.

9:26 On that reading, there is no Mr Averill, there are no bees, there is only a lonely woman and an open door, and the dark and the thing she is so afraid of walking out to join is simply death, coming the way it comes for everyone, in the faces of the people we've lost, asking us, gently, to come out. I cannot tell you that reading is wrong. Some mornings, it is the only one that makes sense. And then the 31st comes around again, and the not comes, and I...

10:00 i know i know that there is something on the porch both of these are true to me i have stopped being able to hold only one but on either reading you understand the ending is the same a door and me unable to stop opening it and one year The step out. It doesn't matter whether it's a curse or just a lonely old woman's heart finally walking her out into the cold. The door takes you either way.

10:31 I know this because a year ago tonight, in that open doorway, I almost went. I stood there and Mr Averill smiled at me and said, come and see the bees. And I felt my foot begin to lift. I felt it. After a lifetime of answering, a lifetime of giving them what they ask, the step out felt like the most natural thing in the world, felt like politeness, felt like the next line in a song I've been singing since I was small. My whole life had been practice for lifting that foot, and some last part of me, some small untrained part, screamed, and I looked down and saw my own foot halfway over my own threshold, out into the cold, and I pulled it back, and I shut the door. and I slid down the inside of it

11:20 onto the floor. And I stayed there until the sun came up. I don't know how many more years I have. That's the truth I have to tell you. I've answered too many knocks. I'm worn too thin. I can feel how close the step is now. How easy, how good it would feel to stop keeping the rules and just open the door one last time and walk out to all of them waiting in the dark. Everyone I ever knew. Mr.

11:48 Averill and his bees and my mother. Oh, my mother is out there now. I've seen her. Three years running she's come to my door on Halloween, younger every time, and said, Carol, love, come out. And it is so hard, you have no idea how hard it is, to tell your own mother no, to shut the door in her kind face, to choose a cold, empty house over going to her. One year I won't be able to. One year I'll go, and then it'll be my turn to walk the street. Now, listen to me, because this is the part that matters. This is the part I came back to tell you, and our time is almost gone.

12:31 I taught you the rules so you'd be safe. Keep your light on, answer every knock, admire the costume, give them what they ask, never turn them away, and they are good rules. They will buy you a lifetime, the way they bought me one. But I did not tell you the last rule, the real one, until now, because you weren't ready, and because, if I'm honest, I needed you to practice first. So let me ask you, you've been answering your door all night, haven't you? While you listen to me, it's Halloween. The knocks have been coming the whole time, and you've been getting up, and opening your door, and admiring the little costumes, and giving them what they asked, and never once turning anyone away. Because

13:18 you're a good person. Because you were raised right. Because everyone is raised to open the door on this night. You've done it a dozen times tonight without thinking. You're so good at it. You don't even feel the door is a risk anymore, do you? You just open it. That's the training. That's all it is. That's all it ever was. And I have spent two nights, two whole episodes, with my voice inside your house, in your ear, teaching you to be even better at it, teaching you that the rule is, you answer, you always answer, you never turn anyone away. So here is the last rule, the one under all the others, and I need you to hear it before the next knock comes, because on this night, late, when the children are gone, a knock will come to

14:10 your door too. It comes to every door eventually, and it will be someone you know, someone kind, Someone you've missed. And they will ask you, so gently, to come out and see something lovely. Do not open the door. I know. I know what I taught you. I know I spent all this time training the reflex. Answer every knock. Never turn them away. And I know that by now your hand goes to the latch before your mind does. I made sure of that. I'm sorry. I had to. You had to practice so you'd understand. But that was the trick.

14:49 Do you see? That's the trick the whole street is under. The training is the trap, and the only way I could make you feel it was to do it to you. So tonight, when the last knock comes, the one after the children, the one from someone you love, in the dark, asking you to come out, keep your light on, and leave the door shut. There. That's the knock now, isn't it?

15:14 Right on time. Don't answer it, Oh, but you want to, don't you? I can feel how much you want to. After all that practice, your hand's already moving. So did mine.