by Tamika Thompson
(1000 words)
I noticed the door in the attic on the second night in the home, and it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. Mesmerized, I dropped the box of sweaters I’d brought up for storage and stepped forward. The wood seemed to breathe. The knob pulsed in my hand.
As I eased open the red portal, the hinges moaned, the sound pleasing to my ears. I squeezed through the frame, relishing the sigh of warm, moist air, the snugness of the room pressing against my skin. I could almost hear the darkness whisper “welcome.”
Yearning to see, I caressed the wall, but, before my fingertips reached a light switch, the room satisfied my desire. Overhead bulbs glowed orange, revealing an empty room and another crimson door.
“Honey. Come. See this.”
I imagined my husband one floor below, mounting his television to our bedroom wall, hearing me, yet silently carrying on. He rarely answered me.
Tickled about what I’d find, I thrust forward and through the second door.
“Sweetie. Come. A second!”
I wasn’t alarmed by the color’s blood-like brightness. Silent as the bottom of a lake, the room was wider than the previous one and smelled of something so new it lacked odor, like a newborn’s flesh.
In my defense, I did question it all, if only briefly. How could this much space extend from the top level of the house? Wouldn’t the floor beneath me hover above the neighbor’s driveway? But a third door enthralled me; approaching it was ecstasy.
“Honey, can you hear me?”
And another door.
“Sweetie, it’s exhilarating!”
And yet a fifth, where paper and pencil rested against the wall. I knelt to enter.
“Honey, come. See for yourself!”
Dimly lit and dank as a cavern, the fifth room’s ceiling was only four feet high. I hunched to walk. When I extended my arms, my fingers met the walls. I only noticed the change later. After.
My husband, whose company relocation had necessitated the new home, still didn’t answer. Not surprising. My record for missed calls in a row to his phone was fourteen, and whenever I told him things, he didn’t believe unless someone else concurred. I figured he only listened to other men.
I’ve considered this question since that day—why was the sixth door green? At the time, I felt I was being let in on a funny mystery, with that olive-colored wood the final clue. But when I tried the knob, nothing happened.
“Well, this was silly.”
It occurred to me only then to turn around, to go back through all those red doors, back into the attic with the boxes of winter sweaters, back down the carpeted stairs with a funny story for my husband. But a look behind me revealed there was no longer a door.
I blinked a few times, ensuring I’d seen correctly. There was only the wall. My hands shook as they reached for the writing tools. The pencil bore teeth marks. The water-stained note contained a message from the room’s previous occupant.
It began: If you are reading this, you made the same mistake I did.
Each line was a fist to my stomach, a curse upon me.
She told of how she’d become enchanted by the red as well, had called to her husband, also with no reply. The pale specks on the paper were her tears.
Look behind you, she wrote. The green one is gone too.
My lungs heaved as I obeyed, my chest sensing the finality before my mind did. There were no doors. No windows. Just white walls, a gnawed-on pencil, and tear-flecked paper.
The air thickened around me. I struggled to breathe, to understand.
One room. Zero ways out.
Maybe the doors were actually mirrors; I’d thought I’d entered, and instead was hunching in place in the first room.
But I stroked every surface and only turned up drywall and a cement floor.
Cement. Dear God.
I stopped considering earthly answers.
Were the doors an entryway to another dimension? To infinity?
If not inside my new home, where was I? An alternate house? With a mirror husband? Did he ignore his wife as well?
What if the previous occupant had been another version of me? Did my panicked mind merely imagine that the handwriting was similar to my own? Was my own?
The first day, I screamed my husband’s name until I grew hoarse. No more “sweetie” or “honey.” He was “James! Help me!” He still never answered.
The second day, I scratched at the drywall until my fingernails broke and the nubs bled.
The third day, I tried unscrewing the bulbs; perhaps I could get a finger through. But the dim orbs wouldn’t give. The glass wouldn’t break. They merely reflected my disheveled image back to me—white tears streaking down brown skin, tangled curls, blood-crusted lips.
The fourth day, I kicked the walls until I sprained an ankle, pounded with my fists until my bruises ached.
The fifth day, my fitness watch died, my tongue was so dry it burned, and my stomach rumbled every time I moved. So, I started this note while still in my right mind. If you are reading this, you are trapped here, somewhere, as well.
I’ve concluded the room swallowed my voice. That my husband couldn’t hear me in here because he never did out there. I blame myself. Why did I go along with being ignored?
I don’t know where the previous occupant’s bones are, as the only remnant was her note. Any remains you find are mine—denim skirt, white tank top, a platinum wedding band. I’m sorry this has happened to you. I pray a miracle occurs, and you find a way out. Or maybe you’ll get lucky and someone will hear you. Will drill through time and space until they can embrace you. That would be a mercy, wouldn’t it? To finally be sought out. To actually be heard.
END
Tamika Thompson is author of Unshod, Cackling, and Naked (Unnerving Books, 2023) and Salamander Justice (Madness Heart Press). She is co-creator of the artist collective POC United and fiction editor for the group’s award-winning anthology, Graffiti. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in several speculative fiction anthologies as well as in Interzone, Prairie Schooner, The New York Times, and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Columbia University and a Master of Arts in Journalism from the University of Southern California. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.