The Door

My hike took an unexpected turn when I found the door. There are some types of doors I might expect to find in the middle of the forest; the kind that lead into cabins, or the kind that might lead into a sealed-off mine, for instance; but this door had no building or mountain connected to it. It just stood bare, a dark red door alone in a small clearing. There wasn’t even a frame around it.

My first inclination was that some rebellious teenagers must have dragged it out here after their parents took theirs away for sneaking out. Then I thought perhaps it was an art installment. Then I had to start wondering how it managed to stand up at all without a frame and I forgot all about my wondering of who might have put it here.

I walked around it at least twice looking for brackets propping it up, but I found them neither on the front, nor on the back. The only thing I did find attached to the door were two hinges–or hinge halves I suppose, since the side that would attach to the frame was not present–and an ornate crystal knob. It reminded me of the very old house my great aunt lived in that I would go visit in the summers as a child.

I rolled my head to either side, staring up toward the leaf canopy above me, hoping to see wires anchoring the thing to the nearby trees. I could not see any, so I did the next logical thing and found a long stick just to make sure. I waved it above my head, but alas there were no wires.

I had hesitated at first to touch the door in any way for fear that I might knock it over. This was a fear that I soon found out was misplaced when I found it in me to give it a solid push. I pushed hard and the door pushed back just as hard. It didn’t even so much as wiggle. It felt like solid wood when I put my hand on it, but I did not knock to try and find out–despite how irrational the thought of something answering was.

There was still one logical explanation for the rigidity of the door standing strong in the middle of the woods without a frame. So I reached down and I began to dig out the dirt at its base, expecting either wood or metal poles or literally anything to extend deep into the earth. After just a minute I was able to run my hand all the way across the underside of the door. My hand felt a door on one side and cool dirt on the other. It found absolutely nothing that could be holding the door up.

I felt a little dizzy as I backed away from the door and stared at it. I am quite certain the dizzy spell was not caused by the small amount of digging I had done. I just stared for a while, though I’m not sure how long, until I wasn’t dizzy any longer. I walked back up to the door and rapped on it hard twice. If something was going to answer then I wanted to meet them.

knock, knock

I waited, but there was no answer. I’m not sure what I expected, honestly. The fact that there was no answer was somewhat reassuring. That left only one course of action for this situation of the impossible, floating door. In hindsight perhaps I should have simply turned around and never looked, but that option didn’t occur to me at all in the moment.

So I turned the handle, and I opened the door. It swung in on hinges that didn’t exist. The wet, lush, green pacific northwest forest behind me was not the forest that I found on the other side of the impossible threshold. The forest that lay before me was instead filled with the wrong trees wearing colors for the wrong season; trees that I had never seen even in pictures, wearing colors I had never seen on any living plant before.

I walked through the door.

This short story was written in 30-minutes as a response to the prompt: “You notice something that is out of place either because it shouldn’t be there, or because it couldn’t be there”. It is presented here with minimal editing.