The door to my pantry has a hard time staying closed. Ever since I moved in it's never stayed shut for long. My boyfriend thinks it's because the floor is on a slant and the weight of the door is swinging it open, but I know next to nothing about how houses work so that's my best guess too.

Well it was starting to bug me. We recently got a puppy and she has been getting into EVERYTHING, including everything on the lower shelves of the pantry.

We got fed up with cleaning everything up, so my boyfriend suggested we go out and get a new doorknob and latch so that the door is held in place more firmly. We installed it and it worked perfectly, holding the door in place and latching it shut so that there were no more puppy messes.

The other day I came home to find cereal and flour strewn all over the kitchen and dining room floor, with tiny pawprints tracked through it. I instantly knew my puppy had somehow gotten into the pantry again. My boyfriend must have left the door open. I was furious.

I yelled his name up the stairs to his home office, rearing to hand him the mop and tell him it was his mess to clean up. No answer. Then I remembered that he was at the actual office today.

I went into the kitchen, stepping over the piles of flour and cheerios and torn up bits of cardboard, and saw the pantry door wide open. I was upset that we had spent money on the new knob and it didn't even work the way we needed it to.

I got closer, and upon further inspection, a chill went down my spine. There were scratch marks all down the inside of the pantry door. Long, deep scratch marks that looked as if they were done by some sort of sinister claw. I thought it might have been the puppy, but the marks reached all the way to the top of the door, far higher than the puppy could have gotten to.

The scratches were all in sets of three, and the wood around them was splintered and torn, as if something inside was desperately trying to free itself.

But that was not the only thing wrong with the door. I looked down and saw the latch on the side of the wall that held the door in place on the floor, and the part of the wall that used to surround it was splintered outward, looking as if someone had kicked the door out from the inside.

The doorknob, which was the sturdiest and heaviest one we could find, was dangling out of its socket in the door by one screw, barely holding on. The round metal knob looked as if it had been crushed by a monstrous hand.

I backed away from the pantry at that point and called my boyfriend and told him to come home immediately. I'm sure I sounded completely hysterical to him but I couldn't comprehend what I was seeing. I realize at this point I should have called the cops, too, but I was too scared to think.

I sat down in the dining room and just waited for him to get home. It was then that I noticed the trail of red droplets that lead from underneath the dining table out into the living room.

Dreading the worst, I followed them. They lead behind the couch. There, in a mangled heap of blood and fur and bone, I found my puppy.