The Vestibule

Close your eyes. You know this place.

A hallway. The carpet is thick, a little worn down the middle, where everyone walks. It swallows your steps, so all you can hear is your own breathing. At the far end, a night-light buzzes in its socket. It gives just enough light to show you where the dark is.

You ran up this hallway. A thousand times. At night, after the lights went off downstairs, you had to reach your room before the dark at the bottom of the stairs caught up with you. You never knew what was behind you. You only knew you couldn't let it win.

On the right, your bedroom. The bed is against the wall, the comforter a little too short. Your hand must never hang off the bed. You don't remember why. No one ever told you. You just kept the habit, and even now, in a grown-up bed, your hand slips back under the covers on its own.

Across from it, the closet. Its door never quite closes. You pushed it with everything you had, you wedged a shoe against it, you tried not to look. There's always a finger of dark left. A gap just wide enough for something to look out.

· · ·

Except this isn't a house.

Look again. The hallway is longer than you remember. There are doors you never noticed, all closed, all the same. Every door here is a fear you put away.

Behind one, the sound in the wall, the one that always scratched in the same spot. Behind another, the phone ringing at three in the morning, and no one on the line. Further down, the shape at the window, the one you saw only once and spent your whole life not seeing again.

You closed them all. You grew up. You forgot.

The palace didn't.

· · ·

This palace isn't ours. It's yours. It came with you, it grew up with you, and it kept every room exactly the way you left it.

Every night, we reopen one.

And tonight, at the end of the hallway, one door is already ajar. A cold light slips out from under it.

You think you just closed your eyes.

You didn't… you just walked in.