Clint stared at the wall, trying to understand what he wasn’t seeing. The door had been there. Now it wasn’t. How could it just disappear?
“What in the—” Alex dropped his flashlight.
It hit the floor and spun around and around, casting shadows off the wall.
The sound of small wings fluttering tickled the air. As the light slowed its spinning, Clint thought he saw shadows of deformed little birds dancing along the walls. Another turn and he decided they were bats. After another spin he was sure there was nothing there at all. Never had been. Yet he couldn’t shake the feeling something had been there, watching them.
“Where’s the door?” Danny whimpered.
“What’s happening? Guys…” Clint ran his fingers across the wall where the door had been. “Nothing.” Just a stark wooden wall.
He couldn’t keep his cool. The anxiety welled up inside him. He started taking shorter breaths, feeling like something was squeezing his lungs. The muscles in his neck and shoulders tightened as he fought to keep from hyperventilating. He pulled his glasses off and dropped his head, closing his eyes, and counted to ten. His mom had taught him that. When the world begins to close down on you, shut the world out. Start small. Breathe. And then return to the world.
At ten, he lifted his head. The world looked fuzzy. His peripheral vision was limited, like those blinders they put on horses. He put his glasses back on, but that still didn’t seem to help. Not ready to see.
Clint knew the panic was irrational, but in the moment it was more real than anything else. He felt closed down, trapped. A scream welled up inside his throat, but he fought to swallow it back down.
What came out instead was, “Let us out!” Clint flung himself forward and banged on the wall. He blinked hard, trying to focus. “If this is some kind of joke, good one.” He found his way over to the window and ran his light across it. A few more deeps breaths and his vision began to clear. “This isn’t right.” Rubbing his hands over the glass, he tried to remove the dark smudges. When that didn’t work, he spit on it and tried again. “The window isn’t even a window, I don’t think.” He rapped against it a few times with his knuckle. “It’s not even glass.”
Heather moved to the wall where the door had previously been. She tilted her head as if studying it. Clint stared at the back of her head, concentrating on her dark curls. Focus on something small.
The sound of Heather’s hands on the wall pulled his attention. She slowly ran them over each wood panel.
“What are you doing?” he asked. His voice came out breathy.
“Looking for a hidden latch or something. Some proof of the door.” Methodically, she moved inch by inch over every part of the wall.
How can she be so calm? How can she stay so rational?
Fighting to not break down into full panic mode, he sucked in a deep breath. What he couldn’t afford right now was to ball up in the corner, wrapping his arms around his legs and rocking back and forth. Do not shut down. Do not panic.
Clint’s short breaths grew longer, deeper, and he pulled himself out of the anxiety attack.
He cringed and felt his heart jump when Alex screamed too close to his ear.
“There’s no goddamned door!”
Clint turned to watch Alex’s face morph into a terror-stricken expression. Alex took one deliberate step back at a time, away from Clint, away from the wall, away from a door that was no longer there. He backed right into Reid, who was facing the other way.
“Guys, look,” Reid said, feebly. “Here.”
Clint looked past Reid to where he was staring—the old fireplace.
Though he knew the answer, Clint asked anyway, “Wh-who lit the fire? Hey.”
Inside the fireplace, a flame flickered, swaying back and forth. The cobwebs in the corners swayed, too, as if dancing to the beat of the same song or a breeze that didn’t exist. A whistle of wind crept through the room, yet came from nowhere. No breeze, no door, no window.
Clint turned back to Reid.
“Nobody,” Reid said. “It lit all by itself.” His eyes were unblinking, seemingly hypnotized by the flames.
Danny started shaking his head, whining, “It can’t be, it can’t be. No, no, no, no, no. We’re all trapped. It’s haunted. I knew it. I knew it. We’re screwed!”
Heather slapped Danny across his cheek. “Knock it off, you big baby. Can’t you see? It’s a prank. Reid got us here to scare us, and you’re falling right into his plan.” She turned to Reid. “Nicely done. Don’t know how you got the fire to start or make the door disappear, but you’ve outdone yourself. Totally awesome.” She curtsied and bowed her head. “You win, Reid.”
Clint didn’t buy it. No way could a kid make a door disappear. He fought back a wave of nausea as the anxiety tried to seize him again. The whole thing was unreasonable, impractical. Unnatural.
He moved around the others and got up in Reid’s face. When Reid didn’t acknowledge him, Clint poked a finger into his chest. Reid finally looked down the six inches he had over Clint. He seemed surprised to find Clint there, as if he hadn’t been with him all along.
“You got us here. Great. Well played, man. And now this.” Clint spread a hand out, palm up, gesturing across the room. “I don’t know how, but okay, you win. You faked us out. You got us all shitting our pants.” He looked to the others, who nodded, then back to Reid. “You don’t even need to tell us how you did it, just get us out of here, okay?”
Reid blinked in quick succession, like he was coming out of a trance. “When did you get here, Clint?”
Alex pushed Clint aside and looked at Reid. He waved a hand in front of Reid’s eyes.
“Yoo-hoo. Earth to Reid!” Inches from Reid’s face, he snapped his fingers.
Nothing.
The fireplace crackled and popped, and everyone jumped except for Reid. It simply broke him from his stupor.
“Why are you guys looking at me like that?”
“You’re kidding, right?” Clint said. “Your brain just took a vacation there.” He looked on, exasperated, eyes bulging.
Danny’s voice came out small like a child’s. “Guys, can we argue later? I really wanna go home. This isn’t fun and it’s not funny.”
“Okay, guys, let’s focus,” Heather commanded the room. “What do we do? The door we came in is, uh, gone. So what are our options? Think. There has to be a way out.”
“Right,” Alex said. “The wall sort of ate up the door. So that’s out. The window’s not really a window. Where can we go from here? We need a plan.”
There wasn’t much to the room, though. Clint thought the odds of finding an alternative weren’t good. And the fire was growing larger. The shadow of a mouse or rat scurrying away from the fire pulled his attention.
“Eep!” Danny squeaked. “Rat!”
“Never mind the rat,” Reid said. “Look at the fire!” He took a brazen step toward it, palms up as if to feel the heat coming off it.
As the flames grew, the glow spread farther across the room, illuminating all the cobwebs and years of layers of dust and dirt. Clint caught a glint of the flame reflected in Reid’s eyes—those wild eyes he knew well. When the glow was strong enough to hit the farthest corner, off to their right, Danny let out a high-pitched scream.
Clint recoiled. “Not another rat, is it?”
He was just starting to calm himself, to feel a less scared and anxious, when he looked to where Danny was pointing.
The light betrayed a dark figure forming, hunching in the corner. As the fireplace swelled, its shape became more and more clear. The figure seemed more like smoke than a solid mass, and it floated and swayed from side to side just like the flame, just like the webs. It sat on its haunches, hunching over, with abnormally long arms draping along the sides of its legs and spilling onto the floor. Palms faced up, with fingers that were too long and jagged to be fingers at all. The shadowy figure’s head leaned forward, toward the ground, if it was a head at all.
Clint grabbed Danny’s arm and yanked him back to where Alex and Heather and Reid were now standing.
“What…is that?” Alex whispered.
Heather grabbed Alex’s shoulders from behind and shook him. “It’s the ghost. The creature. I thought it was a joke, just a—”
“Guys, I didn’t do this,” Reid whispered, as if afraid the figure would hear him. “Gotta get outta here. But the door…what do we do?”
Clint looked back to where the door had been and gasped. Unthinking, he lunged for the door which now stood where the original one had been.
“Come on!”
No one hesitated.
Clint whipped the door open and charged through, the rest following tightly behind, fighting not to be the last out of that room, the last left alone with that thing. Grunts and groans issued from them all as they tried to force their bodies in front of their friends’. Every man for himself.
On the other side of the door, Clint had expected night and outdoors and escape. Instead, he ended up inside another room.