Behind Sealed Doors

To say that the pandemic lock down had shook her would be an understatement. Of course, it had shaken everyone up; loosening ties to reality day-by-day, replacing the physical with the virtual bit-by-bit, and transforming mindset in a slippery and unknowable way. In those early days of the lockdown, the uncertainty of the damage the virus might inflict was equal to the uncertainty of the mental toll wrought by living life in the same few rooms and repeating the same few patterns.

This isn’t to say that she spent her time running amidst the old house in a state of slobbering insanity. In fact, if anything, she was too calm. Too poised. Too quiet. The madness roiled inside her deep beneath the surface, but she had no way to call upon it because she had no name for it. She was one of the fortunate ones; she had work, a home, and her health. She had nothing to blame for that rumbling discomfort that too often set in her chest and threatened to erupt in perhaps violent ways, but for the good graces of Irish whiskey.

Nevertheless, she had developed a ponderous obsession with the door at the end of the hallway. There was nothing behind the door, or at least that is what she had been told. “Sealed up to accommodate a staircase on the other side” said the robust builder she had hired to assist with some of the house’s more complex issues. He’d pointed to it on the blueprints and she had the education to absorb these facts and take them for truth, but still she felt curiously drawn to that useless door.

She had bought the house not long before the whispers of a virus had started penetrating her newsfeed; a virus with a name so ready for Internet memeification that she had almost thought it all a joke until she was told to stop coming to work. It was a large, old house, the kind of house she had always dreamed of owning. The kind of house that made people say, “sure it has good bones, but what a big project for such a little thing as yourself!”. Needless to say, she resented such sentiments and had used that resentment to fuel the peeling of wallpaper, spackling of walls, and arduous sanding and staining of hardwood floors. She was highly proficient with computer code, but she was happiest with a hammer or a power drill in hand.

The loneliness of living in the massive house was certainly a factor to the unshakable discomfort she carried around with her each day. Zoom calls with friends and off-centered, too loud Facetime sessions with her mother had confirmed the fact that people were concerned about her being alone in such a large old house. She had been invited to bear out the lock down days with a number of folks, and had given it serious contemplation. But there was so much work to be done on the house, and with Home Depot curbside back in action she could get much of it done during these new quiet hours. Also, there was the door to consider.

The door was placed at the end of a long hallway on the third and topmost floor of the house, a floor she had not even gotten around to touching yet. Once she had finished some precursory cleaning tasks up there, she had no real reason to spend time on the third floor until she finished the main living floors below. Yet she often found herself drifting up the central staircase, one hand on the thick, lacquered banister, and the other clutching a clinking glass of whiskey on the rocks. Up she would float like a ghost, passing the flickering hanging light, and into the shadowy hallway, where she would sit on a strip of faded and worn Oriental carpet and stare at the door.

It was unremarkable by all accounts; just a standard sized door of the same style and stain as every other door in the house. Yet sometimes, if she stood still enough for long enough, she swore she could see a flicker of light emanate from behind the keyhole. And sometimes, if she was quiet enough, she felt certain she heard the whisper of voices.

As time progressed, society began to shift into a “new normal” and she was invited on hikes with friends and even a takeout picnic with an ex, but she had declined each time on the pretense of her work or house projects. In truth, she felt nervous to leave the door unwatched, or perhaps the better word was “unguarded”. She wasn’t sure what she felt lay on the other side of that dull and ordinary door, but her interest in it had grown into a full blown obsession, and now she stayed up watching it from just a foot away each night, a heavy blanket around her back and a bottle of whiskey by her side. Several times she had even fallen asleep with her back pressed against the door, the flickering light down the hall having lulled her into something like a hypnotic trance.

On a lunch break from work one day she had taken her lukewarm cup of soup up the third floor and had been so entranced in watching the unmoving door that when her phone rang she jumped with such intensity that she spilled the soup onto the floor. She glanced at the phone to see that her mother was calling and she ignored the spilled liquid to answer a series of hurried and worried questions about her health.

She said, “yes of course I will visit soon”, and then she lost track of the rest of the conversation as she noticed that the soup was trickling from the frayed fringe of the carpet strip onto the scuffed hardwood, and the slowly forming stream had begun to slip under the door.

She made some sort of farewell on the phone and hurriedly moved as close as she could to the door, her eyeball mere centimeters from the gap beneath. She was as close as she could be without poking her eye, her cheek pressed flush to the floor. She wondered where the soup could possibly be going. If the door had been sealed, wouldn’t it just pool there at the foot of the door? But perhaps not; it wasn’t as though there had been any reason to close up that gap, perhaps the liquid was simply pooling behind the gap. She grabbed her cellphone and used the little built-in flashlight to cast a light and she peered under the door but saw only darkness. Endless darkness.

She pulled away and lying on her back and staring at the ceiling she realized her heart wasn’t just racing; it was positively pounding in her chest. She stood up on suddenly weary legs and despite the surge of fatigue and dizziness that had set upon her, she raced downstairs to retrieve a crowbar and a Sawzall from the scattered site of her most recent project. She made short work of cutting straight through the old hinges and then used the crowbar to wedge down between the frame and the door and began to pry.

For a long while, the door did not budge from this, its seemingly final resting place. Then, with no notice at all, it came free so suddenly that she went flying backwards, landing hard on that ugly stretch of carpet just before the heavy oak door came crashing down onto her. For a brief moment she pondered the hilarity of being killed by the same door she had become infatuated with, but she was quite alright. Though the air had been knocked from her lungs, she heaved it aside and sat up to consider what lay beyond that dark entryway.

Every cell in her body told her that she would find something miraculous beyond the door, and yet, as sat panting, she saw only a boarded and shoddily plastered wall. She let out a strange sound that could only be described as the gut wrenching mixture of a laugh and a sob. The sound echoed through the empty house eerily, and it was all so absurd that she began to giggle. That meek giggle turned into a full laugh, and then she was laughing so hard that it hurt and she wished she could stop but it kept rolling out in waves that crept from somewhere in her chest; from that same place the building discomfort had made its home at the start of the pandemic. Tears streamed from her eyes, snot flew from her nose, and her abdomen cramped and contorted in painful ways, and yet the laughter did not stop.

Until, quite suddenly, it did. And when it stopped it was so abrupt that the ensuing silence felt thick as it filled the air around her. And between the cracks of the shoddily plastered, boarded wall, a light shone. It was just a brief flicker, but it was enough to compel her to take on the wall with the Sawzall first, and then the crowbar, maddeningly hacking away without a single thought passing through her mind.

Noise roared up on her ears and it took her some time to realize it was her own screams as that violent, pent up thing within her chest came exploding out amidst the blizzard of plaster flakes and wood splinters. And then, finally, she saw what truly lie on the other side of the door.

Before her stretched a long, dark hallway that she could only discern the size and shape of thanks to the occasional flickering of a dangling light. The light seemed to strobe as she tentatively let her foot pass the door’s threshold and cement itself in this newly discovered passage. With each step the light flickered. On then off. On then off. And as she grew closer to the shadows at the end of the hall, she realized with the deep rooted fear that all women know, when she realized that there was a man standing at the end of the hallway.

He was an impossibly dark silhouette against an inky black backdrop. She stopped moving immediately and pulled back half a step, but her legs felt stuck to the carpeted floor beneath them. She was captured by the strangeness of it all; had this hall been in her home all along? It seemed physically impossible given the sheer length of this passage in contrast to the shape and contours of the house. And even if it were some sealed off hallway that the blueprints had not accounted for, where had this stranger come from? Was he a squatter? Would he lash out in violence to protect this secret and mysterious enclosure that he had come to call home?

She realized in a distant and dreamlike way, that she still held the crowbar clutched in her hand, and as the light flickered on again she could now make out the man’s features; classically handsome yet warped into an expression of fear. The hair stood on the back of her neck as she realized that perhaps some fearsome creature was perched behind her. Something so terrifying that it had set this man onto the verge of a fight or flight response.

She steeled her nerves and whirled around to see what gruesome fate was creeping out from the darkness behind her, and all she saw was the empty passade, split in the middle by an empty door frame, and on the other side of that threshold, the hallway of her home. Both hallways were of the exact same width, and appeared to run the same length. She realized that the flickering light in this new hall was strobing in the same obnoxious cadence as the light from her side of the door. Slowly she looked down and realized that beneath her feet lie the same strip of Oriental carpet with the exact wear patterns that she had become so familiar with during her many long nights camped by the sealed door.

Somehow, this newly discovered hallway was the mirror image of the one from which she had just emerged. But this realization had taken her far too long, and when she spun back to the shadowy man he had already rushed towards her from the darkness. She raised the crowbar, closed her eyes and prepared to swing in self defense.

“STOP!” he shouted, his voice was hoarse and panicked, and yet somewhat familiar. It was that familiarity that led her to halt in bringing her weapon crashing down into his skull. She opened her eyes, weapon still poised. Despite being taller than her, he now cowered with his hands still in a defensive position around his head, a notable tremble in his palms. “What do you want?” he asked in just above a whisper.

His apparent fear caused her to falter. In these dark halls she would have expected to encounter a monster; some sort or wraith of a man, or perhaps the vengeful ghost that slasher films often favor. Instead she felt herself empathetically transcended into the shoes of the human standing before her, his head ducked and his figure trembling just as she now trembled. “I just want you out of my house” she said, her voice shaking with uncertainty.

“Your house?” he asked, and now he stood at full height, and in the flickering light she looked into his eyes, and knew him. As impossible as it seemed, millions of long forgotten memories assaulted her at once, and in each vision this man’s face was a central feature.

She saw him then in a whole other life, one that she had never lived. She saw him as a young man, his eyes a bit lighter and the wrinkles besides his eyes less deep. He was talking to her about Nietzsche with a 40 of Miller Light in one hand and a joint in the other. And she remembered falling in love with him in that moment, and that single memory seemed to be like the turning of a key as a cascade of memories followed. She could remember kissing him under a flickering neon light in an alley that smelt of stale beer; arguing about a Bob Marley poster in a tiny studio apartment, him on one knee while proposing atop a mountain, a wedding ceremony where she could somehow taste the smile upon his lips.

And then she remembered buying a giant house together; her house, and yet not her house; their house. She remembered all the projects they had planned for fixing the house up, of building a gigantic garden in the backyard, of creating a nursery across from their bedroom for when they would one day start a family.

All memories so vivid, and so real, and yet none of them her own. Had the memories come to her from a parallel universe, one where they had actually met? Perhaps in their mutual loneliness, in their two separate universes, they had each stood by a sealed door and felt a longing for someone on the other side of the abyss; someone in another universe entirely. Perhaps they had both wished for each other with such longing they had pulled each other like magnets moving through time and space.

It didn’t matter. Because now she could see that those same memories had flooded into him as he gazed upon her with the loving tenderness of a million shared moments. She took his hand, and together they walked back through the threshold.