The Violet Gate

In the autumn of 2014, I was dozing off in my cramped attic apartment on the third floor of an old Victorian house, the floorboards moaning with every gust of wind. I was five months pregnant, and the weight of the day’s work at the cannery had settled deep into my bones. The room felt wrong, heavy with a silence that was too still, like the air itself was holding its breath. I dismissed it, chalking it up to the building’s creaks and groans, but my cat, Mister Whiskers, had refused to enter the room for a week, staring at the corner by the wardrobe with wide, unblinking eyes.

Just as I was slipping into that hazy space between waking and dreaming, a primal dread seized me. I knew, with absolute certainty, that something was in the room with me, something that meant to harm the life growing inside me. I tried to sit up, to scream, but my body was a stone statue. My limbs were useless, my voice a silent knot in my throat. A cold sweat broke out on my forehead as I felt a presence coalesce near the wardrobe.

From the shadowed gap between the wardrobe and the wall, a figure emerged. It was impossibly tall, its edges blurred like a heat mirage, and it moved with an eerie grace, sliding across the floor without a sound. It stopped beside my bed, and I knew it was looking at me, though its face was a void of blackness. I couldn’t see eyes, but I felt its gaze like a physical weight. It reached out with a hand that had too many joints, its fingers long and skeletal, and touched my bare arm. The touch was cold, colder than anything I’d ever felt, and a jolt of electric panic shot through me. I felt a strange pulling sensation, as if my very essence was being siphoned out through that point of contact. My vision blurred, and for a moment, I saw flashes of a purple light that flickered across the wardrobe door, just like the one I’d seen a few days prior, when I’d been folding laundry and a shimmering violet speck had danced along the wood grain before vanishing.

Then, just as suddenly as it had come, the pressure lifted. The figure drew back its hand, and the darkness around it seemed to seep back into the corners of the room. My body was released from the invisible paralysis, and I gasped, my hand flying to my belly. The baby was still, and I panicked, but after a moment, I felt a faint kick, weak but there. I lay there, trembling, staring at the wardrobe, but the room was empty. The silence returned, but it was different now—laden with a secret I couldn’t grasp.

I didn’t sleep that night. I called my midwife the next morning, and she said the baby was fine, but she noted that my blood pressure was elevated. Over the following weeks, I noticed strange things. The apartment seemed colder, and my reflection in the mirror would sometimes lag behind my movements by a fraction of a second. I started having vivid dreams of a room filled with violet light, where I heard whispering voices that spoke in a language I didn’t understand. In the dreams, I was standing at a door that pulsed with a purple glow, and behind it, something was waiting.

One evening, a month later, I was standing in the kitchen when the wardrobe door in the bedroom creaked open on its own. I walked in to see a faint purple light emanating from the back panel, where there had never been a light source. As I approached, the light grew brighter, and I saw symbols carved into the wood—symbols I knew I had never made. I reached out to touch them, and the moment my fingers made contact, the light flared, and I felt a wrenching sensation, like being pulled through water.

When I blinked, I was standing in a vast, dark hall, the floor slick with something that glistened. In the distance, I saw the outline of the tall figure, its back to me, standing before a massive gate that pulsed with violet light. It turned its head, and though it had no face, I felt its attention fix on me. I heard a voice in my mind, not words but a sensation of hunger and recognition. It said, without sound, ‘You brought the key.’ I looked down, and in my hand, I clutched a small, antique key that I had never seen before, warm with a violet glow.

Terror flooded me, and I woke up on the floor of my bedroom, the key clutched in my fist. The wardrobe was closed, and the room was dark. But the key was real. I shoved it into a drawer and tried to forget, but over the months, my pregnancy progressed strangely. The baby moved at odd hours, and I sometimes felt cold, thin fingers pressing against my belly from inside.

In month eight, I went into premature labor. The delivery was traumatic, and I nearly died. When I held my daughter for the first time, she had eyes that were a startling shade of violet, and she stared at me with an ancient knowing that made my blood run cold. As she grew, she would sometimes talk to ‘the visitor,’ and I would see the wardrobe door slightly ajar, a faint purple glow emanating from within. I knew that the figure’s touch had marked me, and that I had unwittingly opened a doorway for it to enter our world through my child. But I also knew that my daughter was not entirely mine, and that one day, the gate would open fully, and the tall, dark figure would step through.

I live with that terror every day. I keep the key buried in the backyard, but I see it in my dreams, calling me. And when my daughter sleeps, she smiles at something behind my shoulder, and I know that the violet gate is never truly closed.