There was only one rule: don’t open the door

Author: Dream Books Sanjeevi

Every night the door shook at midnight. A lever was turned an inch at a time, then one that was slammed shut, as if there was a creature on the other side begging for entrance. What I can tell is I’ve been living in this house for a week now and every night it has been like this. The landlord’s warning echoed in my mind: “However much you are told or whatever is said to you do not open the door.”

Tonight the tapping was turned into a nasal, animal growl. My name.

The door shook violently. Intrigue set in and ignoring common sense I started to turn the knob.

It was silent.

Then on my rear, a cold breath blew through my ear.

The cold breath hung around my neck making the hair on the back of my head stand on end, this made me freeze. Slowly, I turned around.

Nothing.

The house was silent, the darkness of the walls did not stir. Still, I had the impression that something looked at me from behind a veil of dirty curtain. The stillness made me want to scream; my heart was pounding so loud it filled my head, and my ears.

I stretched my hand toward the door and had intended to shut it and act as if nothing happened. Before my hand could get the door knob, it shut on its own with a loud noise that echoed in the house like a shot.

Then the whisper came back louder, louder, and closer. My name, again and again, moving and turning through space as a serpent wraps its body around something it seeks to strangle.

I tried to step back; my legs were like jelly, but strong fingers dug into my arm.

I looked down. Fingers. Skinny, skinny, skinny, bony, and a very pasty English pallor grabbed me by my throat through the crack in the door.

A voice, raspy and broken, spoke from the dark: “You broke the rule. Now you belong to us.”

The ground below me opened, and I disappeared into the deep abyss of what seemed like my house.

I fell into black darkness and lost myself in it; the darkness was vast, very cold, and stifling. This is a reflection of my screams; no noise escaped my mouth in that dark abyss as I sank deeper still. Uncomfortable pressure in my stomach ceased and gradually translated into contact with a cold stone floor beneath my palm and fingers once tender skin pressed into an unkind surface.

I got up as far as gasping for air, and then I saw something that made my stomach clench. I was no longer in the house. I was not in this house at all; I was in a great, gaunt chamber, obscurely illuminated by the feeble light of some dulled torches on the decaying, medieval stonework. It was the scent of sodden mold and rot mingled with the thick aroma of the air, heavy as water.

Standing in front of me people moved in the darkness. His and she too had drawn, pallid faces and icy, red-rimmed eyes that shone far too malevolently. They shuffled forward they were exhausted obviously and heavy breathing accompanied them. Sitting in the middle of the room there should have been a tall man wrapped in a black shroud that covered his face too. It eyed me in a manner that only creeped me out.

” Welcome to our territory,” the figure added, he was speaking very softly and yet his voice was deep and strongly accented throughout the entire chamber. Therefore, when he started becoming a rebel the rule was that, ‘It is simple, but you disobey.’

I went to the side but the sickly skin quickly surrounded me, the man, walking with the aimless, monotonous gait. Panic surged through me.

‘They say well…well, what do you want from me?’ When presenting my viewpoint I stuttered, what came out of my mouth was just a whisper.

The figure in the hood raised a skeletal hand slowly. What was behind the door the Lord had given us; ours. And now, you are too."

Head down I shook my head… and my heart began to pound. "No, I didn't know!"

The figure stood up smoothly and a little jerkily, turning to face me and causing the hood to fall back momentarily to reveal it was neither man nor woman before it raised its head and looked at me as if it was momentarily considering what I had said. Then it continues, after a menacing pause ”I can think of no logical reason to live in the dark and still you contain no refuge for me anymore.”

It was not individualities that danced there but sculptures; a statue comes alive; there are dead hands grabbing, trying to pull me straight to the middle of the circle. I tried to kick my legs and shout but the hands remained clinging tightly to my waist.

To my surprise, as I was being dragged towards the darkness somebody muttered in my ear, “You shouldn’t have opened the door.”

And then, just like that, there was only darkness.

I awoke to silence. The coldness of the stone beneath me was the only thing I was aware of which told me that what I had just witnessed was not a dream. I opened my eyes and I immediately felt a great pain in my head, my heart was still pounding. They had extinguished the torches almost to the point of darkness but I was aware of human forms looming in the shadows. These emaciated creatures, the hooded entity – they were still there in the shadows.

I struggle to find my wits about me slowly getting up on my feet and moving to the edges of the room. However, the room was raised to an unlimited height with no front or back, left-right corner or right-left corner, and curved like a maze. As I moved closer to each wall it bounced as if the stone had some sort of life within it, a heartbeat.

I was trapped.

But then I saw it—far in the distance, faint but unmistakable: a door.

I felt the wind being knocked out of me. The door looked like the ones to my house, but around the edges faint blue lines were beginning to spread across its surface emanating some sort of ethereal power. I hesitated. Do not open the door, the landlord had said. But that rule has already been broken. Perhaps this door was the exit. Maybe it was my only chance.

Slowly stepped closer, with every ounce of noise vacuum seeming to bear down on me and suffocate me. Again there were faint whispers, the voices of those faceless people pursued me, getting louder as I retreated cognitively.

“You cannot move away,” they whispered.

I ran.

A door was slowly moving away from me, no matter how fast I walked, it would always be closed just a little further. The people behind me started to yell louder, losing any form of coherence more and more, their cries and screams were desperation and fury. I could sense that my legs were becoming sore, I still had to catch my breath but I had to get out of there.

Finally, I reached it. Before you know it I outstretched my arm and opened the door using the handle vigorously.

Suddenly and without any warning, light so bright it pained my eyes engulfed me from head to toe. For a moment I was flying neither here nor there, a space of being out of this world. The whispers stopped and I was ushered forward, out of the cold, away from the stone cell.

But as I crossed the doorstep, it felt that there was something amiss.

The life awaiting me outside the door of the house was not my life. It wasn’t freedom.

I was standing in the same room. The same torches. The same stone walls. This same smothering blackest black. The door closed and was gone and behind me, the rough heavy walls of the prison rose up.

Then the figure of a man with a hood appeared again with red eyes of mockery.

For instance, “You cannot run away from it,” it murmured it. "There is no way out. You will go through this again and again.”

I collapsed on the ground, with the force of hopelessness collapsing on my pitiful body. The door, the aimless chase… It was insane and at the same time, therefore it was just a tease and everything was a trap.

With the pale figures coming in closely, again I was forced to realize the-/as horrible a thing, as is possible. It was a control as there had never been an escape. This was my punishment. The journey of optimizing one door, only to be slammed shut on the other and end up with me back here.

The last thing I heard before they took me again was the sound of a distant voice—my own—whispering: The only strict regulation was that the child should not open the door.