Story / It's Just a Room - Part 12
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14:00
Behind the desk was a tiny little door, like out of Alice in Wonderland or something. Just a little fairy door in the middle of the wall, and it had one of those French style handles, so I could get some leverage on it.
Turned out I didn’t need much leverage because that sucker gave right away. The door opened. Much to my chagrin there was not another room--well I guess you could call it a room, but it wasn’t like mine. This room was all thick black darkness, like I feared this place might be made of. I reached my hand in, and it was cold, it felt like the chill reached inside my skin and ripped into my hand. I yanked my hand away as fast as I could and stepped back. This was no joke, nothing would cut through that darkness.
17:02
Getting close to the end of the night, and I still haven’t figured out how to get out of here, but I think I’ve got a solution. I have two doors to deal with now, and one of them is actually open. Maybe…
I might have to crawl through the little door behind the desk if I’m going to get anywhere. Every time I look at it (now shut, by the way) I get the heebie-jeebies, and I can’t help but think of those drawings and… and what I saw behind that door in the woods. It wasn’t the same inky darkness that this petite door in my locked room contains. No it was worse. Much worse.
19:46
I’ll try to explain it, what I saw behind that fairy door in the tree, if I’m even able to explain it. We were standing there between a few trees, probably oak or something. Chester grabbed the knob so fast I didn’t have time to protest, and the next thing I knew we were both standing there looking at that… that thing.
It was green, and purple, and made of some kind of sludge that kept shifting between different forms. It looked like mushrooms in one instant, then it changed and became the face of a bear, then it was an entire city, and then it seemed to melt and become a pool of boiling lava, devouring screaming beasts that didn’t look like any person or animal I’ve ever seen in my life.
This substance seemed to ooze out of the doorway, penetrating our world. It was some kind of evil, and I don’t think there’s supposed to be evil fairies, are there?
Chester was seduced by whatever it was that he was seeing, but I gotta think he wasn’t getting the same view I was. What bothers me the most is that he just didn’t remember what happened once I had slammed the door shut. Like I said, he wasn’t the same after that.
After high school, he told me that he was planning to figure out what that door was doing in the middle of the woods. I told him it was his deal, and I didn’t care about it. By that point it had been almost a decade since we saw the door. I think he kept going back to that spot. I didn’t see him much after high school, since we both went off to different Universities. When I did see him, he was different, more distant. I think that door messed him up somehow, I think it made him become something different. There was a look in his eye like he wasn’t quite there, you know? He stopped coming around to family stuff, he didn’t write, and I would mostly just bump into him at the weirdest times.
This change didn’t feel right, and now that I’m staring another one of these doors in the face, I think it has something to do with it. Maybe I fell into one of those doors after I left the airport. Could it be that simple? And that complex at the same time? What the hell is a fairy? I never saw a fairy, not in that door in the woods, and certainly not in this shadow infested door right here. That’s it, I’m going in.
05:12
I don’t quite know how to put this…
06:01
I’m still in the room. I mean, I’m back in the room, I guess. I don’t fucking know anymore.
I crawled through that tiny doorway. It was cold at first, like a frostbite setting in deep, I could feel it blackening my flesh, turning me into ice. Yet here I am, still breathing.
I got down and army crawled in, head first, throwing caution to the wind. I figured that was my only way out of this room, and I think I was right.
06:32
The blackness engulfed me, and I felt lost in whatever was surrounding me, like it was no longer a hardwood floor but the throat of some beast swallowing me whole. I crawled further, and the passage got tighter. My eyes were closed most of the time, but when I did open them it was too dark to see, just like without the light in this room: I couldn’t even see myself blink. I think the door might have shut behind me at that point, but I’m not sure.
I kept on crawling, and crawling, until finally there seemed to be light in the distance. Honestly, I wasn’t sure if it was the light at the end of the tunnel or just the headlights of a train, but I got closer—or it got closer—and I was able to reach out.
It was warm, but it was the same as the shadowy tunnel, all organic like a living ichor. So I crawled some more, and the warmth turned into heat. I started to sweat like a pig, and before I knew it, I was crawling through what felt like a blacktop on a hot summer day in Texas, only it was moving.
I didn’t stop, because I’d already gone too far, and there was no way in hell I could turn back, I’d fuckin’ die if I did. Onward and onward still, through this giant throat of a tunnel, until finally it seemed to part, I could breath free again, and this air wasn’t so hot. I tumbled out on the other side.
07:30
I was in what looked like a basement, pretty similar to this room actually. But it had a couple small windows up near the ground level, and it had a staircase. The room was old looking, real dusty, and the floor was stained a dark red. Looking around I saw that there was hooks hanging from the ceiling and immediately I knew where I was.
Then I heard a noise, as if every single leaf fell at the same time on the first day of autumn. It was a rushing, skidding noise, proceeded by a scraping against some kind of rock, and the sound of my twin brother’s voice shrieking in pain. Must have wrecked his bike, I assumed.
So I hid, because I knew what would happen next. And right on queue, I heard his rustling footsteps approaching the cellar door. He pried it open and climbed inside. I watched him from the corner, just staring in awe. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. He wasn’t a kid though, he was thirty, like he looked at the airport.
08:10
“Chester?” I asked him from the shadows.
“What the hell are you doing in a dark corner of some meat cellar?” He replied. Yup, that’s my brother.
“Do you not remember this place?” I said, a bit puzzled since he’d told me the story.
He looked around, then turned back to look at the cellar door. “Oh!” He exclaimed, taking his hands out of his pockets, “This is where I met Lizzy.”
I nodded.
He kicked a pile of dirt on the ground and it sent a plume of dust into the air about waist level. “So what are we doing here?” He asked.
“Fuck man, I don’t know, I crawled through some hell hole of a tunnel and just showed up here. I’ve been locked in a god damn room for over a week!”
“A room?” He ran his right hand through his hair. “Oh that’s right, you’re in the box.” He said knowingly.
“What box?” I pleaded.
“It’s a place where you go when you need to… I don’t know, think about things? I didn’t invent it, who knows who invented it,” Chester said.
I walked a bit closer to him, “So how do I get out of it? Bro, come on you’ve got to help me, I’m losing my god damn mind.”
He wasn’t looking at me, more preoccupied with the hooks, and all this dirt. “Listen, I’m your brother. I’m Chester, do you understand?”
I shook my head, confused, “Of course you are, what of it?”
He looked at me, “That thing that you think is me? That’s not me. You remember when we found that door in the woods?”
I nodded.
“Do you remember where it was?”
“No not really—“ I began, but Chester cut me off.
“Why don’t we take a look outside?”
09:21
Chester gave me a boost up out of the cellar, and I grabbed his hand, hoisting him up as well. I looked around at the woods, bright green leaves in the dawn of summer. There was our bike, mangled all to hell on the ground.
Chester pointed in the distance, “See that tree over there?”
I nodded again.
“Watch.”
So I watched. Nothing happened. I decided to sit down on a nearby boulder, and Chester walked around a bit looking at stuff, ever curious: this was definitely my brother.
I kept watching for a while longer, and the sun was now visibly on its way down, it must have been nearing six or so in the evening. Suddenly I heard footsteps, and I saw Chester—eighteen year old Chester—approach the tree. I could see him from the front, which meant I couldn’t see the side of the tree that door was on. My brother—the one who met me in the cellar—was now crouching behind me.
“See?” He whispered.
I nodded slowly.
“I made a mistake that night.” Then high school graduate Chester pulled a book out of his backpack. He flipped open to a page near the middle and began reading from it. But it wasn’t English. For all I know he was speaking gibberish.
My brother spoke from behind me, “Cover your ears.”
I covered my ears and I watched as a purple glow lit up the kid’s face. His eyes widened with joy and surprise, but his expression quickly turned to terror. There was a blinding flash, and what sounded like a million bees for a moment, and then the woods were silent.
Laying on the ground, naked, was Chester, next to his clothes. I shot my brother a weird face, hoping to convey “what the hell happened?” He just pointed my attention back to the sight at hand. The kid started clumsily putting on his clothes, but left the backpack and book behind as he got up and left the way he came, marching almost like a zombie.
When this apparition was out of ear shot, I whispered to Chester, “What the fuck was that?!”
“I don’t know, but whatever it was took my place that day, and I’ve been gone ever since. Well I haven’t really been gone, gone, but I haven’t been here. I’ve been in this other world, watching that thing live my life.” He paused, and I scouted over so he could sit down next to me on the boulder. “It did whatever it could to use me, to use my body, and it was horrible to see sometimes.”
“Is it still out there?” I asked. “Did we… like time travel or something?”
He laughed, “It’s not that easy, Chuck. Never was, never will be. But you can grab that journal, and it might save your ass.” He gestured over to the book laying next to the open backpack.
“I’m kind of scared to go over there, honestly,” I said. But I did anyway, and the door was gone just like that night when I found Ches in the woods, there was no door.
I reached out to hand Ches the book, but he didn’t take it. “I’m not here, remember? Can’t interact with things like that.”
“But you kicked up that dirt in the cellar, and you’ve been picking up leaves and shit for the last hour,” I argued.
“It ain’t that easy, brother.” He smiled.
10:30
So I’ve got that book with me now, back here in this room… It’s cold in here, colder than it was out in the summer air. Chester’s hair was blowing a bit in the wind, I imagined mine must have looked pretty damn similar.
“Listen,” He started, he always liked to tell me what to do, “That book is the key out of your cell, prisoner.”
I thought about that for a while, probably minutes, without saying anything. Then I asked, “Why am I a prisoner?”
“You know why,” He said.
And I do know why. I think. It’s because I’m afraid. I always have been, of pretty much everything. I didn’t talk to people because I was scared of other people, especially after our mom died. I’ve been scared of the unknown for as long as I can remember.
11:58
Calm, cool, collected, these are things I’ve never been, but Chester has always had that shit on lock down. He told me that the book would be my key, but I don’t know what that means. After that, I woke up on the floor in this room. My brother was gone. The door behind the desk is gone now too, but the book is here, sitting on this desk with you, Olly.
It’s a brown leather journal, looks handmade, and it looks like he carved some kind of geometric symbols into the leather, like stars and triangles, all that stuff. The latch was closed, but not locked, so I opened it up and took a peek inside.
Instructions, I think, is the only way to put it. The book is filled with instructions. But I don’t really understand them, and Ches isn’t here to help me figure it out. Some of the pages have diagrams, or more of those symbols, but it talks about things I’ve never heard of. Herbs and materials I don’t have access to. But I don’t think it’s all one thing, I’m guessing this is like a recipe book for… well I guess spells? A spell book. Jesus Christ, what did my brother get into?
I was right though, god damn it if I don’t want to be right, but I was. Something had taken Chester, and the thing that replaced him was a monster from inside that tree, inside the other world.
God, I must sound crazy. Here I am locked inside some stupid wood cell, probably hallucinating things, and ranting to nobody about how my brother was spirited away by fairies from a magical door. What have I become?