Story / It's Just a Room - Part 4
To read from the beginning, click here.
4:44
Olly olly oxen free.
I should be dead by now, I’ve been in this room for so long, I also took the liberty of checking the cracks in the door, and there’s no airflow. I decided it must be almost five in the morning, since I’m still so tired, but I’m afraid to sleep because I’m afraid I might not wake up.
If I die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take. My soul to take. My soul to take. Lemme keep my damn soul, I pray the lord go fuck himself.
5:32
I can hear this faint buzzing sound, it started about five minutes ago, and it hasn’t changed. It’s a constant high pitched hum, but it’s too quiet to pinpoint, and it’s freaking me out. I need to sleep soon. I don’t have an alarm to wake me up, but maybe when I do wake up I’ll be out of this mess. Maybe. Hopefully.
We can all hope, can’t we? Even if we’re locked in a box.
10:43
Good morning, I think. I didn’t sleep too well, I’m just glad I didn’t oversleep. The door is still locked, and I still can’t hear anything on the other side, but I can still hear that buzzing. I keep picturing some dark figure hunched over with its ear craned to the door, just listening to me typing. I haven’t said a word in eight hours. I can see it when I close my eyes, it’s thick black robes sprawled over its boney body, a dark mist surrounding it, glowing, steaming black eyes, impossible horns that twist and turn and branch off like antlers. And I just kept feeling that this thing was listening to me. Could it tell what letters I’m typing by the sound each key makes? Certainly not… Of course, I would never want to underestimate something I don’t fully understand. And trust me, I don’t understand this place at all.
This painting really sticks out like a sore thumb in this drab room. It’s colors are so stark, so contrasted, it’s kind of beautiful; but yet something about it is deeply disturbing.
They said my mother was beautiful too, and her death was… deeply disturbing to me; to my brother. Deeply disturbing, such an interesting phrase, something so awful that it chills you to your core, it is, at it’s very essence, horrifying. Brenda killed herself when I was three years old, like I’ve said. I found out why many years later, after I had graduated college, after I had stopped talking to most of my family. But Chester had found out from someone (I think he said it was one of our cousins or something) that she killed herself because she believed she was going crazy. She said she was hearing voices, and that she was “haunted.” Nobody talked much about the specifics, but it was pretty disturbing if you ask me. Ever since Ches told me, it’s kind of been on my mind, or at least in the back of my mind. Why would she have killed herself? What got to her? I remember the nights she would pace around the house, checking and rechecking the windows.
The buzzing is still here, it gets louder every once in a while, and sometimes it gets really really quiet. But it’s always there, still buzzing.
I remember, ha this must have been so long ago… I remember these days when I was young, too young to know good from bad, and I was left alone in my room, in my crib; nap time I suppose. It’s funny, you don’t even have a concept of what nap time is when you’re that young. I would be sitting there, or laying there, and everything was just so quiet, so calming. The sunlight was spilling in through the cracks in the shades; sometimes it was a cloudy day, and that ambient light had a beautiful blue-grey glow to it. But it was so quiet, and there was always this faint buzzing in the background, breaking the silence. It’s like when you can’t hear anything else your head starts to make up sounds. I prefer the subtle ambience of birds chirping, wind blowing, cars cruising down the freeway, dogs barking, neighbors having a good time, and any number of other suburban soundtracks.
I guess that explains why I like to keep the windows open year round.
11:12
Once upon a time, when Chester and I were in elementary school, we were walking through the woods. Truth be told, we did this every once in a while, so that wasn’t all that uncommon. But, on this particular day we had walked over some hills, crossed a river by fallen tree bridge, and then stumbled across a tree with a door in it.
I didn’t realize what it was at first, but Ches pointed it out to me, it initially looked like a weird knot of some kind, but it was definitely a door when I looked closer. It was about two and a half feet tall, and almost 2 feet wide, rectangular, and bordered by a strange vine with little purple flowers growing out of it.
“This is a fairy door,” Ches told me in some reach for an explanation, “It’s gotta be! I’ve heard about these.”
I threw my hands to my hips, “No way! What the heck’s a fairy door?” I asked, disbelieving.
Chester described some stories he heard about people who’d wander off into the woods and get taken by fairies, and he heard about fairy rings—circles of mushrooms or flowers that were portals into some other world. He was pretty sure what we’d found was a fairy door, but he couldn’t remember where he’d heard about them. I think he must have confused a fairy ring and just made it up, but whatever the case we were standing directly in front of it.
“Listen, maybe we can open it,” he said, then he reached for the knob and turned it. Open sesame.
I can’t tell you what was inside, because to this day I don’t believe what I saw. It was just ridiculous and impossible. Chester stared mouth gaping, and I slammed the door in front of him. I think I saw him trying to reach inside. It was… It was a scene unlike anything I’d seen in the real world. It must have taken him, spiritually for a moment, but when I shut the door, he snapped out of it.
“What the heck happened?!” Ches shouted, “I thought we were going to open the fairy door.”
“Did you see what was in there?” I asked him, almost shouting.
He shook his head, “You slammed it before I could open it,” he said. He looked confused, and he sat down on the grassy forest floor.
“No, man, you opened the door and you stood there staring into it for almost a minute. I shut the door because you tried to go in!” I was hurt that he didn’t remember, but it wasn’t his fault. I should have realized, but I didn’t—and still don’t—believe that it was fairies.
We kept on walking through the forest, grabbing sticks to use as make-shift walking canes and dual purpose swords, jousting and playing for a few more hours before the sun began its descent behind the canopy.
It was summer, so it was already nearing nine o’clock when we finally headed back home. The trail wasn’t too far from the house, so we had plenty of time before we’d be stuck in the dark. Well, okay, we thought we had plenty of time. I don’t know what happened exactly, but we must have gotten lost or something, because it took us longer than normal to get back home, and by the time we saw the porch lights, the sun was gone. Dad was pissed, but ultimately glad that we were home safe. It was after midnight.
For the next couple days, Chester would bring up that door in the tree whenever we were alone together. “What do you think it was?” He asked the first time. I remembered what was behind that door, but it seemed that it had been wiped from his mind altogether.
“I don’t think,” I said, “I know what that door was.” I was certainly confident, but looking back on it, I don’t think I really understood what I saw. I would ask him to drop it, and he would until dad was out of the room again, or until we were outside playing. He wanted to know what he missed, because for some reason he wasn’t all there when he turned that knob. He just blanked out, it almost felt like he was taken over by something else: something from that other place.
A few days after the incident, I woke up in the middle of the night from a nightmare about giant spiders crawling up the slide in the playground toward me. My eyes shot open and I was sweating, but I looked around to find Ches. He wasn’t there. Wasn’t asleep, wasn’t in the room, wasn’t even in the bathroom.
On a hunch I figured maybe he went back to find that door in the woods, so I grabbed a flashlight and my hoody and threw on a pair of jeans. I had to sneak out the back door, and shut it slowly so my dad wouldn’t hear me leaving. I took the trail out into the woods, lit by the moon and my torch.
“Ches?” I half-whisper, half-shouted. “You out here?” I knew it was a good twenty or twenty-five minute walk from the house to where we found that tree, so he probably had already gotten pretty far. I kept walking through the woods, up the hills and through the trees and brush until I got to the river. It was pretty deep, and the water flows downhill pretty fast in the mountains. The impromptu bridge was still there, so I took my chances and climbed on carefully. It was rickety, and I felt a lot better about it during the day, or with my brother, or both I guess. But I made it across, and it wasn’t too long until I found the tree from a few days earlier.
1:16
This wooden chair is beginning to hurt my ass, so I’ve been taking time to walk around a bit… Gotta get that exercise in somehow in this god damn lockbox.
Anyway, Chester was standing there, staring at the spot on the tree where the door had been. I say had been because it was gone, probably vanished as miraculously as it came.
“Ches,” I pleaded, “Come on, it’s late. We gotta get back in bed.”
Chester’s eyes were totally transfixed on the spot where that door was. “Maybe it’ll show up again,” he argued, but I could tell he didn’t quite believe it. I tugged on his arm, and he shook me off.
“Let’s go!” I shouted at him. This seemed to knock him loose and he turned to look at me. He was frowning a bit, disappointed that the wondrous door was now just a memory. That fairy door that had no reason being where it was. That door that had no reason concealing what it did. Finally, he came along and we walked back home together.
Chester wasn’t really the same after that, something really disturbed him and he started becoming obsessed with figuring it out. I denied him every question on the subject, telling him to forget about it, god only knows I wish I could forget about it. I think he went back to that spot every once in a while, hoping it would show itself again, but he stopped talking to me about it after a few weeks.
Stopped talking, but started drawing pictures of it the way he remembered it. One sketch in particular hung on the wall above his bed: The tree was in the center of the foreground, and there were a few thinner trees making up the background, he even spent time shading in the grass and some twigs on the ground. The door was in the middle of the tree, about two feet off the ground, just like it had been when we saw it. Every time I looked at that picture it made me a bit uneasy. I asked him to take it down after a month or two, and he did.
He didn’t stop drawing it though. One night I was looking for a drawing he’d done for me to turn in to Mrs. Brinks, and I stumbled on a whole treasure trove of sketches and watercolors of that tree and that damned door.
I didn’t bring it up to him.