IFFY FICTION

The door is locked.

Why, you ask? That’s the wrong question. The right question is: why have I thrown out the key?

Though you didn’t ask, I’ll answer. The door is locked because closed wasn’t enough, and the key has been thrown out because locked wasn’t enough.

What lies on the other side could turn the handle, would turn the handle, push Its way in.

Or, in a moment of gullibility, I’d succumb to Its siren song, enticing through the thick wood, and I’d open it myself. So, you see, the lock was necessary. But a lock doesn’t work when someone so weak holds the key.

On particularly lonely nights, I would find myself holding the heavy iron key in my hand, feeling the weight of its possibilities. And lo, before long the same old song would begin. Always when I was at my weakest.

I admit, on three occasions I succumbed to temptation. Ignoring the screaming voice of warning in my mind, I opened the door. I kept trying, in my lunacy, expecting something different to happen. But the result was always the same: the horrors of the Otherside flooded through the narrowest slit between door and frame.

Without the door, I was defenseless.

The herculean effort to put things back as they should be left me weak and flimsy each time. Just to return to safety. Me, in this little room. It, everywhere else.

I remember learning once that liquids and gasses want to equalize pressure; high pressure will always move to low, until all is equal. It’s how weather is made. Maybe that’s why It pushes and pushes, perpetually. The door moaning, creaking, threatening to give in. It wants to be in the only place It cannot. I am the last defense.

Me and the door.

That’s why the key had to go. One night, not long ago, I clutched it in my trembling hand. I felt its heft, its reassuring grit of ancient rust, as my hand hovered in front of the lock, ready to push it in. At that moment, the voice of reason shrieked its plea with such force, I overcame the temptation and cast the key away. I watched in horror as it fell, scrabbling and scratching to take it back, gouging the floor, nails breaking back. And then it disappeared, slipping through a gap in the floorboards. Down into the crawl space.

To get it back, I’d have to go to the Otherside. Into It.

But now the door is locked. There is no way in.

And there is no way out.