The Painted Door

My earliest memories are not of lullabies or picture books, but of the woman who sat on the porch swing of the old farmhouse. I was five, maybe six. She wore a white dress that seemed to shimmer like heat off asphalt, and her hair was a cascade of pale, almost silver threads. She never spoke, but she would point at the shed behind the house, her finger long and thin, her nails impossibly clean. I thought she was a neighbor, maybe the farmer’s wife from down the road, though our house stood alone in a sea of cornfields. My mother called the shed ‘the root cellar’ and never let me go near it, saying the floor was rotten and I might fall through. But the woman’s insistence was silent and patient, and I began to dream of the door, a heavy oak slab with a rusted iron handle.

When I was eight, I finally disobeyed. The lock was a simple latch, and the door swung open with a groan that sounded almost like a sigh. The stairs were stone, slick with moisture, and the air was cold and thick with the smell of earth and apples. I remember a row of glass jars on shelves, their contents dark and shadowy, but what drew me was a painting at the far end, propped against the wall. It was a portrait of a woman who looked exactly like the one on the porch swing, but younger, and in the background was a door that seemed to be the same shed, but slightly different. The door in the painting was painted a deep, glossy red, and the handle was a brass eagle’s head. I reached out to touch it, and the moment my finger brushed the canvas, I heard a scream from upstairs. It was my father’s voice, raw and terrified. I ran up, and he was standing in the kitchen, staring at the wall. He said he saw a hand emerge from the sink drain, long and white, and it waved at him. I didn’t tell him about the painting. I didn’t tell anyone.

Years passed. The woman on the porch never aged, but I did. I moved away for college, and the memory faded like a photograph left in the sun. I am now 36, living in a cramped apartment in a city of glass and steel. I thought I had escaped whatever haunted that place. My sister, the younger one, was the only one I ever spoke to about it, and even then only in hushed tones, years after we both admitted to feeling watched. She told me about the red door that appeared in our grandmother’s hallway, though Grandmother never had a red door. And about the whisper of leaves in winter, even though there were no trees nearby.

So I was not entirely surprised when, last week, I saw a for-sale sign that made my heart lurch. The photo on the listing showed a house I had never seen, but the door was painted red, the same glossy red from the painting, and the handle was an eagle’s head. It was in a suburb outside the city, a modest two-story with a porch swing. I don’t know why I went to see it, but I did. The realtor, a perky young woman named Dana, unlocked the front door with a cheerful smile.

‘The owner passed away,’ she said, ‘He was a reclusive painter, died of a stroke in the studio. The house has been on the market for a year.’

I walked in, and the air was stale, but underneath I caught a whiff of apples. The porch swing creaked even though no one sat on it. I went through the living room, the kitchen, and then stopped at a doorway in the hallway. There was a door where the closet should be, a door I knew. It was oak, heavy, with a rusted iron handle. I turned the handle, and it opened onto stairs going down. Dana said, ‘Oh, that’s just the old storm cellar.’ But I knew it was the shed, somehow transplanted.

I descended, my heart pounding. The walls were stone, and the shelves were lined with jars. At the far end, a canvas stood, covered with a white sheet. I pulled it off. It was a newer painting, but the same subject: the woman with pale hair, now older, her face lined, and in the background, the red door, slightly ajar. A single word was scrawled in the bottom corner, in a hand that could have been my own: GO BACK.

I should have listened. I didn’t. I pushed the door in the painting, and it swung open on silent hinges. Beyond was a long hallway lined with doors, each one painted a different color, but all with eagle-head handles. I heard my sister’s voice, calling my name, but it came from inside my own head. I walked down the hallway, passing doors of blue and yellow and green, and I felt a chill as I remembered the woman’s silent pointing. I came to a door painted a flat black, and I knew with a certainty that made me sick that behind it was the woman herself, waiting for me.

I opened it. The room was small, and there was a bed, and on the bed sat the woman. She looked at me with eyes that were not white but the color of old paper, and she smiled. Her mouth stretched too wide, showing teeth that were like seeds. She raised her hand, and in it was a photograph. It was a picture of a family—a mother, father, and two little girls. The girls were my sister and I, but I didn’t recognize the parents. In the photograph, the red door was behind them, and a hand was emerging from the darkness, a hand that looked like the one my father saw. The woman said, ‘You’ve been looking for me, but I’ve been with you all along. You brought me here.’

I woke up in my apartment, covered in sweat, but the red door was now my bedroom door. I haven’t slept since. I’ve called my sister, and she says she sees it too, a red door at the end of her hallway on the inside of her closet. We are both terrified, but we don’t know what to do. We are considering moving again, but I have a feeling this door will follow us wherever we go. It’s not a ghost, not a demon. It’s a doorway, and I think it’s always been leading somewhere else. Somewhere that is not exactly our world. I just hope we never have to walk through it.