The Dark Doorway

The Dark Doorway

The girl was sullenly stomping her way through the carnival’s maze of mirrors when the doorway appeared before her.

It materialised out of nowhere, creeping into existence like the brightening glow of approaching headlights, twisting and growing until suddenly it was just there, right in front of her, as though it had been there all along.

There was nothing particularly remarkable about the doorway. It was simply three pieces of wood hastily hammered together, so rickety it looked as though the slightest breeze would knock it over, its image echoed a thousand times over in the never-ending web of reflections that surrounded it. But the girl sensed the wrongness in it immediately. Something invisible leaked from the opening: a thick, undulating gloom that pulsated outwards, a black fog of despair and desperation and disquieting dread that would send even the stoutest of hearts running.

But the girl didn’t run. She studied the doorway with wide, unblinking eyes, the flashing pink LEDs of her new light-up shoes illuminating her open face. The feeling of wrongness crept up her neck, a spider tapdancing up her spine. An unseen wisp of shadow reached out for her: a cold, slimy tentacle that wrapped around her waist and drew her towards the doorway.

She couldn’t have resisted it even if she’d wanted to.

The darkness hit her the instant she crossed the threshold. She had known darkness before, of course, but never like this. This darkness was pure and all-consuming – the kind that made you forget light had ever existed, that made you realise how terrifying the unknown truly was, that stripped you of all senses until you were nothing but a unanchored soul floating in complete emptiness.

Finally, the darkness that engulfed her gathered itself together, shifting into something tangible, and retreated backwards, slithering languidly into a silver cage that had not been there a few seconds before. It hovered behind the bars for a moment, watching her through phantom eyes, then materialised into solid form.

Where the darkness had lurked, now stood a monster. A mountainous shape that shifted and flowed, its form in constant fluctuation, its edges blurring like thick, choking smoke. Dripping fangs shifted into poisonous tusks, protruding bones became long, curling horns, grotesque boils evolved into rotting flesh, which in turn melted off the creature until nothing but charred bones held together by stringy muscle remained. The monster snarled within its cage, its ever-shifting eyes burning into the girl’s like a black hole devouring a dying star.

She couldn’t tear her gaze away. Before her was a creature made of nightmares, a gruesome shapeshifter of Satanic proportions, a monstrosity that belonged in the deepest, darkest pits of Hell. But instead, it was here. Buried deep within a run-down carnival funhouse, trapped and forgotten, alone and homesick. Yearning for a hero to come along and save it.

So the girl did what any four-year-old in front of a caged monster would do.

She let it out.