I could’ve sworn this door had never existed before. I bought a new house a few weeks ago and have explored everywhere seemingly hundreds of times. It’s one of those old antebellum plantation houses, huge and winding, but something just doesn't sit right. This hallway always had three doors. From when I was first viewing the house to when I walked to the bathroom this morning. Now there is one more.
The inside of it is something I am still trying to unravel. A cobwebbed wooden chair with a seat you would have to almost climb to reach, a rug beneath that may have been blue, though the colour has faded with time. Dust covers everything. Everything but one circle on the floor as if something had recently been moved. The walls seemed to stretch when in my peripheral. Corners drifted, lines that ought to run straight began to bend inward, spaces narrowed until I would blink and the room opened again, wider than the house could hold.
My breath shortens there. Not from the cold - the air is still, almost warm - but each inhale catches halfway as if there isn't enough air to fill my lungs.
I didn’t go back there for days. I didn't even use the bathroom in that hallway. The outhouse worked fine and gave me peace of mind instead. When my family came over, I told myself I would keep quiet about it. The door was still there, of course. My mother walked past it twice before stopping and placing her hand on the frame.
“Was this always here?” I asked.
She frowned, as if confused. “Of course it was”
She opened it and stepped in before I could say anything else.
The room looked the same - the same chair in the centre, the dull rug, the dust undisturbed. Mostly. My brother walked in behind her, fiddling with his car keys as he spoke. He stopped near the chair, mid-sentence, and set them down without looking. Not on the chair. In the circle. No one reacted and the conversation carried on, filling the space in a way that felt wrong as if the sound didn’t belong. I kept my eyes on the keys, but at some point, I wasn't anymore. Later, when they’d all moved back into the hallway, I looked back. They were gone.
“Where’d you put them?” I asked.
My brother looked puzzled. “Put what?”
“Your keys.”
“Keys? I didn’t bring keys.”
I didn’t argue. The circle looked cleaner than before.
I half expected the door to be gone in the morning. It wasn’t. I had made a habit of counting how many steps across the room the first day I found it. It was fifteen. Now it was seventeen. I had darted out before I could measure it again.
At breakfast, no one mentioned it. I had gone over to make a tea before I heard the others start heading up the stairs. They started towards the door before I could protest, all walking to different points and carrying on their conversation. And then, without acknowledgement from the others, my aunt squatted down and set her phone down in the circle. I tried to keep my eyes on them, but too many bodies were in the way. Once they had moved, nothing remained in the circle. The conversation carried on, seemingly unaware of anything that had occurred, and after ten minutes they returned to the kitchen.
I waited until I could catch my aunt alone. “Why did you leave your phone in that room?”
She raised an eyebrow. “Phone? I don’t use one, you know that.”
I stared at her for a moment. She blinked. “Anything else dear?”
I shook my head and apologised.
I stepped out to the hallway after my conversation with her. My phone was already in my hand, scrolling through my contact list slower than I needed to. As if that would change anything. There was no trace of her name at all.
I went through my call history, I had rung her the day I first saw the door, but nothing was there. I stood there for a while before heading back upstairs.
The door was still there.
Inside, the chair had shifted. Not by much, but it was no longer centred by the wall, leaned slightly toward the circle. It wasn’t just clean anymore - the edges looked darker as if pressing into the wood. I stepped closer and the floor felt uneven beneath me.
Behind me, footsteps.
“I was looking for you.” My aunt said.
I turned. “What for?”
She paused and looked at me a second, as if trying to remember something.
“Oh, nothing important,” she said, and smiled.
She lingered in the hallway longer than expected. “I’ve come up here a lot haven’t I?” She asked, almost to herself.
I hesitated. “No, I don’t think so.”
She nodded slowly as if that made sense, then turned away. “Strange.”
When I looked back in the room the chair had shifted again, facing the circle more.
I went back to my room and grabbed my graduation photo. Everyone was smiling and huddled together trying to get into frame. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time. I carried it out without rushing. The house felt quieter than it should have considering the number of people in there. When I arrived at the room, it appeared unchanged at first. The circle waited as always.
I placed the photo in the circle. For a moment, nothing happened. Then I blinked. The floor was empty. I didn’t move for a few seconds, staring at the ground, and then left to head downstairs.
My father glanced over. “What are you doing here? I thought you were with your aunt upstairs?”
“I was just showing you something”
He frowned slightly. “Showing me what?”
Then I said, “remember my graduation photo?”
He tilted his head. “Graduation? You haven’t had one of those.”
As quick as he finished the sentence he turned back to the television. I stared at him for a moment almost hoping for him to say something else. Nothing came.
On the wall behind him there was a photograph I’d noticed a hundred times before of my colleagues and I. Only now it was only my colleagues. The space where I should have been had closed in on itself, shoulders touching where they never had before.
I didn’t say anything.
I went back upstairs. The hallway felt shorter this time. The door was closer. Inside, the chair sat directly in front of the circle now.
The circle was no longer empty.
Something dark sat at its centre. Not something I could name. Just a shape that didn’t seem to belong. I stepped closer to get a look, the floor dipping more harshly as if drawing my weight in. For a moment I had the feeling I was interrupting something. That the circle was being filled.
Behind me, a voice.
“Sorry - are you looking for anyone?”
I turned around. My father stood in the doorway. Not confused, not concerned. Just polite as if I was a stranger who had wandered too far.
I opened my mouth to answer, but what I was going to say had already escaped me.