Leave The Little Door Be

There was only one rule: don’t open the door. It wasn’t a door she would need to open; had she not been told to leave it be, she might never have fiddled with the knob. But as it stood, there was something gnawing away at her about the little wooden door to the immaculately crafted dollhouse that she had been tasked to tending. It wasn’t just the dollhouse under her charge, it was the whole of the nearly forgotten manor, but extra care had been instructed to the dollhouse.

She’d been tasked to dust the shingles, wipe the floors, and clean the perfectly replicated furniture. But never, on any account, was she to turn the knob of the door to the kitchen of this dollhouse.

Kneeling before it now, she roamed her gaze over the miniature kitchen, noting that it was a perfect replicate to the one down the stairs; the whole dollhouse was a perfect replica of the manor she was standing alone in. Reaching her hand into the little house, her thumb brushed against the silver rounded knob. It shifted under her touch.

Curious, she turned the knob of the door. It opened on its tiny hinges. Where in the manor would be a set of stairs to the basement, this was merely opening to a black wall.

In the silence of the empty house, a door opened downstairs… the one in the kitchen.

Eager fingers gripped the oak frame. Putrid flesh sloshed onto the freshly mopped floor as the form pried itself through the opening. A mangled sheet of knotted hair hung around its ill formed face, and as it breathed through raspy gasps and tattered lungs, its bloated tongue licked once at the air. It tasted the sweat of the women sitting beside the dollhouse upstairs.