The Door
#shortstory A short story set in the fantasy world. Maybe it can also be seen as the beginning of a further adventure. Who knows. Enjoy. Thank you in advance for your appreciation. It was not the specific properties of “the door” that attracted me in an unusual way. Every day I walked through dozens of doors and, like everyone else, I opened and mattered. That's what they serve for. For some time now I also closed my bedroom door in the evening. In the morning I took them off the lock to go down the stairs, open the front door and get my daily newspaper. Ever since the neighbors had broken into, this had become more than a routine for me. It was a checklist that I meticulously ticked off every night. The latches on the front door and closing my bedroom door. It was also not the oak door frame or the gilded latch that attracted my attention as a strangely twisted question mark today more than usual. It was a beam of diffused light, drilled silently through the keyhole of my bedroom door in the middle of the night. The light formed a long, fluttering cone of floating, swirling dust particles that splash open in a circle at my waist. How I got out of bed and ended up in the middle of the room, I barely wondered. I dabbled with my index finger the outline of the projected light on my body and felt nothing. Oddly, because at that time I expected the opposite. Logical thinking at three o'clock in the morning is not really the easiest task, but I was pertinent sure it was night. I even remembered that today it was new moon, which was the advantage of owning a tear calendar that daily mentioned all sorts of useful and less useful things. Spicy of me! For a moment I doubted whether the light on the landing had been cut out. Let me summarize: I'll look around the landing... light out in the hallway, light on in my bedroom, turn on the door and... close. Check, I didn't forget anything. At that moment, my brain unanimously took the ambiguous decision that I was the next victim of the burglar... or that I was dreaming. I hesitantly took a few steps forward. There are those who claim that dreams are deceit, others claim the opposite and read the future in it or declare them as signs we get from the afterlife. I, on the other hand, was a doubter, always been. I was somewhere in the midst of these two opposing opinions, just as I was in the middle of my bedroom, in front of the door where light shone from the keyhole, light that normally shouldn't be there! A desperate person who had to choose between the burglar and the dream. It occurred to me that the time, between the moment when the neurons in my brain were playing the “step to the door “command at my feet, that time to bridge those next meters that were still moving me away from the door, was stretched as I approached that strange light source.. Yet my hand suddenly felt the coolness of the latch in its grip. In dreams, that should be perfectly possible, I thought. A dream? So I stood there, still, still wailing, still in front of the door, motionless with a question mark in my hand. The latch felt less cool than just now or was it longer than a moment ago. An hour could also have expired. My sense of time was lost somewhere between the four walls of the bedroom. Slowly, as if on the other side of the door someone was exerting resistance - maybe the burglar - my hand was moving. Awfully slow, my fist, the knuckles white with tension, made a movement moving with the numbers of the clock. Only then did I see that the key wasn't on the door! Had I put it on my bedside table earlier this evening? Not that I had that habit. No, I always left him on the lock, but in a dream everything is possible, or not sometimes? I was sweating. Was it from fear or effort, I did not know. But it ran me like pee from my forehead, a few drops in my eyes clouded my vision of things, especially on'D I E D E U R'. I now heard my fear falling into drops to the ground: drip... drip... drip... drip... drip...! At that moment, I knew for sure. This was not a dream. Surely not such an ordinary week-pleasure-but-good-by dream. It was a downright nightmare! A strange word whose etymology I should look up again, perhaps at a more appropriate time, when I had more time... or was awake. I saw in my imagination already a horse in the night, heard the sound of his roaring trot pounding in my ears ominously. Or was it just my blood flowing faster. Perhaps the pressure that increased in my veins ominously and my heart fluttering down my throat like a rumbling drum. I saw in front of my mind's eye a black prancing mare with eyes like carbuncles and hooves slapping those gensters somewhere on the landing behind the bedroom door. The next moment, it was as if a white cloth was thrown over me in a flash.. Blinded I waved my arms around me and felt the support of 'something' in my back. Deeply inhale and exhale, above all 'keep' breathing! My first idea drilled into my mind like an ice-cold awl: I got ambushed and someone pushes me a knife or revolver in the back. With fear I froze in the middle of a movement, standing there with arms spread out like a crazy, sweaty statue trying to do nothing above all. Eventually I perceive shapes, not neatly delineated, but blurry images, as if I was peering through the lid of an inlay jar or through a window of smoke glass. Careful, torturingly slow, I turned half around and looked amazed at what I saw over my shoulder. The door was behind me now but there was no light left through the keyhole. Should that disturb me even more? I was on the other side of the door? That could or should be the only obvious explanation of this bizarre hocus pocus. Light dispels ghosts one claims. Is that true?? I felt shapes along me. Cool unknown creatures whispering strange words and sounds, soft as velvet, which I just didn't understand, but still caused the goose bumps on my arms. Half-blind, with the courage of despair and the poor stabbed, almost panicked, I felt the light. My hands found hard whimsical shapes at body height, protrusions that vibrated inside when I hesitantly touched them. At that moment, I thought for a moment to squeeze myself in the arm. You read it in every ghost story as a proven means of knowing if you are actually dreaming or if you are awake because of the pain. But I didn't dare. My heart was still beating faster than usual and my blood was still vaguely ringing in my ears. The fear wasn't gone, but... Then I got a little bit curious! You have these lizards that have a third eyelid. It's called a nip on these critters. Such an additional eyelid serves as a protection for those long-tailed reptiles. My third eyelid, whether I owned it or not, opened. Maybe it was just the things around me that opened up,! But who would tell me at that moment what was reality and what was not. My vision gradually came back to normal, and what I saw was not possible, couldn't. Not at all! No, I couldn't be awake. In my room there was no rock mass, with here and there in between a pointed stalagmite or a small river that meandered a little further between two opposite walls and slowly disappeared up into the ceiling without leaving any trace.. Let alone fish flying back and forth over furniture and chairs like fur-colored butterflies in a butterfly garden and then just dissolved again, poof... as if they had never been there. Suddenly, a red-brown dragon stepped out of the left corner and looked at me in the waddling past suspicious, conceited his giant head and blew some shrub on fire in the other corner of the room before he disappeared into the opposite corner.. Where was that going now? Was this the limit of my fantasy in my dream? Would I continue on this road until I bathed in my own sweat, woke up relieved in my bed? Then I saw, half hidden behind a species of palm tree unknown to me, whose purple leaves grew up and bore pitch-black fruits, the next door! The realization in me grew steadily as I slowly took the following steps: this was not a dream or a nightmare, this was not the end, but perhaps the beginning of a new story. ©Rudi J.P. Lejaeghere
