Short Story – The Door

When I woke up in the morning, I was pretty certain that meant I was no longer asleep. That was what ‘waking up’ usually amounted to. But the events of the day led me to believe such a thing was not always so.

To begin with, nothing had been out of order. Everything had been as it always is. Wake up, get dressed, grab a cereal bar and dash out the door to get to work. The bus had been running late, but that wasn’t entirely out of the ordinary. Work was boring as usual, answering emails to the sound of phones being left to ring and the clack of fake nails on keyboards. 

It was when I left work at lunch to go to my favourite cafe to get a sandwich that things started to go weirdly. I have never been the kind of person to investigate things that go wrong, I usually leave things to other people. Not that I generally like to admit it, but I often turn a blind eye to things. For example, if I see someone throw an empty plastic bottle onto the street? I’ll pretend I didn’t see, safe in the knowledge that someone else will see it eventually and they will pick it up. But what was so strange about this, was that no one else did seem to see it.

It’s not like it was hard to see. A seven foot high shimmering doorway, in the middle of a busy pavement. People were walking on either side of it, some even walking straight through it, but not once did someone look up from their phone, or spare a second glance at the brilliance of the light it was emitting. Curiously, I walked up to it, a low buzzing getting louder in my ears as I grew closer. When I stood in front of it, I slowly reached a hand out, feeling a gentle heat radiating from it. A woman walked past me, looking at me strangely as she did so. Could she not see anything? Could anyone? Was I the only person here seeing this doorway, and everyone else was just seeing a strange lady stood still in the middle of the street, holding her hand out to something that wasn’t there?

I’m not sure whether it was curiosity or a deeper urge that made me step forwards, putting one foot through the doorway, my body following behind. The shimmering passed over me, both warming me and leaving me with a chill as I stepped through. I turned and looked at the doorway from the other side, frowning at it. Nothing had happened. Was I simply imagining it? Hallucinating?

I turned away from the door, my eyebrows furrowed in confusion as I stared down at the ground, trying to rationalise what was happening. Maybe I had hit my head at some point, and couldn’t remember it because of a head injury I had sustained. Almost subconsciously, my hand reached up to the back of my head, and gently patted my hair. I couldn’t feel any tenderness, or any bumps. The sandwich I promised myself this morning would make everything better, I concluded, and looked up.

The sight I saw made me gasp. There were no cars or buses on the road, but instead, there were horses pulling carriages and people on bicycles trying to avoid them. The buildings were the same, and yet, they were different. The superstore was a hotel, and a fancy one by the look of it. My beloved cafe was what looked like a watch repair shop. The people walking around me were dressed like they were all part of a reenactment ground, and yet, they carried mobile phones. A woman in a full skirt, with countless layers of petticoats, carrying a parasol over her shoulder, and talking on the phone? It’s a strange sight.

I turned to face the door that still shone, that these people also seemed unable to see. I stepped back through, and looked around at the town I knew, the sound of car horns filling my ears. I stepped through again, and watched a bicycle swerve around a pile of horse manure. I stepped back through, keeping my eyes on one woman, a lady with blonde hair piled on top of her head, a small pink hat precariously placed on top, and a phone to her ear. On the other side, my side, she was still there, walking past me, but her hair was in a ponytail and she was wearing a tracksuit, rather than a flouncy dress.

I had to be dreaming. Or dead. Or close to dying. Something other than awake, perfectly lucid, and in my right mind. But, then again, if I was dreaming, dying, or dead, surely nothing I do matters? Couldn’t people who dreamt lucidly control what happened? Did that not mean I could fly, or something? 

I tried it on the side I knew, jumping and imagining the ground falling away beneath me as I soared into the sky, but nothing happened other than a few people giving me some strange looks. I stepped through the door, to the strange side, and tried again, jumping. It took me a moment to realise my feet hadn’t come back into contact with the floor. I looked down. My heels, the only shoes I owned that were any kind of appropriate for work, were floating a few inches away from the ground. I kicked my feet, and moved higher, like I was swimming to the surface from the bottom of a pool. 

People looked up as I floated above them. I had a brief moment of panic when I remembered I was wearing a skirt, and people would be able to see up it, but I shook off my concerns. I was in a dream, obviously. How else would I be flying? What did I care if some made up people inside my head see up my skirt?

I started thinking of things I might be able to do in this strange dreamscape I found myself in. I had never been able to control my dreams before, this was an entirely new situation for me. I stopped moving for a moment, flying high above the tallest building in the city, and found myself falling until I started kicking my legs again. The air itself seemed to react like water, and I like a swimmer. Water. The opposite of water was fire. I frowned slightly, thinking of a candle, and how I had always wished someone would invent a candle you could light by snapping your fingers. I lifted my fingers in front of me and snapped them, hoping for a small spark, or even a little flame, like a match, to hover over one of my fingers.

The air seemed to pull itself out of my lungs as the tops of the buildings below me all instantaneously caught ablaze, beginning like candles, and quickly becoming devoured by oranges and heat. People below me screamed, and I panicked. Even in a dream world, I couldn’t become a murderous super-person. I imagined water – rain, or a hose, to put out the flames. Nothing happened for a moment, and I felt dread in my stomach that I wouldn’t be able to stop what I started, when an icy coldness hit me, and I was drenched from head to toe. A sheet of water, getting bigger by the second, fell from the sky onto the city. The fires were put out, sure, but I watched helplessly as horses panicked, people lost their footing, and several heads went under and didn’t resurface.

A whooshing sound caught my attention, and I turned to watch the arrival of someone else floating in the sky, someone who seemed to be well versed with flying. He was looking directly at me, and at first, I thought he might be coming to help me, but then he got close enough for me to look at his face. He was mad. He was mad at me. 

A blast of light skimmed my body, the force pushing me backwards through the air. I gaped at the man, wondering why he would do such a thing as attack me, but with a glance at the destruction below me, I couldn’t really blame him. Another stream of light, and I started kicking my legs, angling my body down, towards the ground, running from the danger I had brought on myself.

I had one plan. No one seemed to be able to see the door but me, so if I went through it, maybe I would wake up, or at least, no one from this side of the door would be able to follow me through. Blasts sent my way from the flying man propelled me on, one of them singeing the hair on my arm as it brushed past me. I hit the water flooding the ground before I reached the door, but continued swimming. The motion was the same, I just could no longer breathe. Water burned my eyes as I opened them, looking around, and I saw the door immediately, it’s light showing me the way through my blurred, watery vision. 

I dove through the door like I was learning to swim underwater and had to swim through a hula hoop, held by an instructor. On the other side, I fell to the floor, spluttering and dripping water. People looked down at me, but walked on, as I would if I saw such a thing. Normal people. Wearing normal clothes, in my normal city, with my normal cafe across the street. I stood up, grimacing at my clothes clinging to my skin, and looked down at my arm. My hair, singed off from a burst of light, from a flying man in the sky. 

It had to have been a dream. And yet, I got a call later that afternoon from work, and I had to explain that I had felt unwell and had gone home instead. I woke up the next morning to find my still wet clothes in the bath, waiting for me to wring them out, or put them in the washing machine and let that wring them out for me. I walked down that same street the next day, and the door was still there, glimmering and beckoning me forward, begging me to step through, but I looked away, pretended I couldn’t see it. 

I had spent only a few minutes in a world I could control, and I had become the villain immediately. Whether or not it was a premonition, or it said something about me, or was simply a hallucination my mind was showing me, I would never go near that door again.

And done!

The idea for this story is based loosely on a dream I had, wherein I was normal me, but could step through these shimmering doors I would randomly see, and on the other side, I would have superpowers.

I'm not going to lie, my superpowers were specifically the fact that on the other side I was Spider-Man, but still.

That's all for now...

Bye!