The Seventh Door

Mara had never been afraid of storms, but the one that broke over Holloway that October night unsettled her. The wind shook the glass of her boarding house window, rattling the loose frame as though it wanted inside. She had been a tenant for only three weeks, and already she had grown used to the faint drafts, the creak of old beams, and the occasional knock of pipes.

But what she heard that night was different.

A key turning in a lock.

Her eyes snapped open. The lamp beside her bed was off, leaving only the trembling light of the storm to paint the ceiling. She held her breath, waiting to hear the sound again, but only thunder answered. Convinced she had imagined it, she turned onto her side, determined to will herself back to sleep.

Then the sound came once more—metal against metal. Deliberate. Slow.

Mara sat upright. Her own door didn’t even have a lock.

She slid her feet to the floor, wincing at the cold wood, and crossed the room. The hallway beyond yawned in darkness. The storm had killed the electricity again, something the landlady assured her “was common in old houses like these.” Mara stepped into the corridor, every board beneath her feet giving her away.

At the far end of the hallway was something she hadn’t noticed before. A door.

It wasn’t possible. She had walked this hall every morning, passing from her room to the kitchen at the back. There had never been a door there. But tonight, one waited. It was painted the same faded green as the rest of the house, though newer somehow, as if untouched by time.

And it stood ajar.

A gust of wind pushed it wider, revealing nothing but darkness beyond.

Mara’s pulse quickened. She thought of retreating, crawling back into bed, and convincing herself that her eyes were playing tricks. But curiosity was a chain that pulled her closer. She crossed the hall, touched the edge of the frame, and stepped inside.

The air changed. It smelled different—damp and metallic. The hallway’s creaks vanished, replaced by silence so heavy that even her breathing seemed wrong. A single chair waited in the center of the room. On it, a notebook. Its pages fluttered though the air was still.

She approached, drawn to it as though she were not in control of her own limbs.

Her name filled the first page. Perfect handwriting, deliberate and neat. Beneath it, a sentence chilled her:

“You will not leave this house.”

She snapped the book shut, heart hammering. The room felt colder now. Her hand trembled as she turned back toward the hallway—only to find the door gone. There was no exit. Just four blank walls closing her in.


---

Hours, or minutes—time blurred. Mara sat in the chair with the notebook in her lap, flipping through its pages in desperation. Each one contained fragments of her life. Her arrival in Holloway. The meals she had eaten in the boarding house kitchen. The raincoat she wore on Tuesdays. Details so mundane and exact that only she could have known them.

But the pages went further.

They wrote of things she had not yet done. Mara opened the notebook. Mara read the words inside. Mara tried to run.

She dropped the book as though it had burned her.

“Enough,” she whispered, though no one was there to hear.

Yet someone must have been. Because a new line formed on the open page, ink bleeding across the fibers before her eyes:

“Mara spoke to the room. She begged, but the room was listening.”

The walls groaned, shifting like something alive. Panic clawed at her throat. She lunged forward and slammed the notebook shut, refusing to read another word. But when she did, the sound of the lock returned—the one she had first heard from her bed.

A door appeared. This time, on the far side of the room.

She ran.


---

The hallway she entered wasn’t the one she knew. This was longer, lined with doors she had never seen before, each one identical and shut tight. The portraits that hung on the walls were unfamiliar too—faces of strangers staring out at her with eyes that gleamed in the flicker of unseen light.

“Mara,” a voice whispered.

She spun, but the hall was empty.

Her breathing turned ragged as she tried the first door. Locked. The second. Locked. The third gave way, swinging open to reveal—her own room. The bed she had left. The window still rattling from the storm. Relief surged through her, fragile and desperate.

She stumbled inside, closing the door behind her. But something was wrong. The bed was occupied.

A woman lay sleeping beneath the sheets. Mara’s breath caught as she drew closer. The profile was unmistakable. The curve of the jaw. The fall of dark hair against the pillow.

It was her.

The sleeping version of herself stirred, as if sensing she was being watched. Mara backed away, hand fumbling for the doorknob, but the notebook waited on the nightstand. Its pages turned on their own, stopping on a line written in the same perfect hand as before:

“Mara left the house. Mara never returned. Mara was replaced.”

The woman in the bed opened her eyes.

And Mara understood she was no longer welcome in her own life.