I have the same dream every night, and it ends the same way: a long hallway, a door at the far end, and the absolute certainty that I must not open it. Last Monday, I woke up and the door was in my apartment.
Not a metaphor. Not a lingering image that fades with the morning. A door. In my hallway, between the bathroom and the bedroom, where no door had ever been.
My name is Joel Reyes. I am twenty-nine years old, I work in graphic design, and I sleep badly — have slept badly since I was a child, which is when the dream started. I have had it so many times that it has become less frightening and more familiar, the way a recurring film becomes comfortable even when the content is dark. I know its geography. The hallway is long, with a low ceiling and pale yellow walls the colour of old paper. The floor is bare boards. The light comes from nowhere in particular, sourceless and flat, the way light behaves in places that don’t follow the rules of real rooms. And at the end of it, always, the door.
It is a plain door. Dark wood, a round brass handle, no markings. It is never open and it is never quite closed — there is always the thinnest line of darkness at the frame, as though something on the other side has just shifted away from it. I stand at the far end of the hallway and I look at it and I know, with the total unambiguous certainty that only dreams provide, that I must not go through it.
I never have. In twenty years of the same dream, I have never once touched the handle.
The door in my apartment was identical. Same dark wood, same brass handle, same thin line of darkness at the frame. I stood in my hallway at six forty-five in the morning in my socks and my sleep-creased clothes and looked at it for a long time. I reached out and pressed my knuckles against the wood. Solid. Real. The same faint cold that came through all my interior walls in winter.
I told myself I was not fully awake. I made coffee. I stood at the kitchen counter and drank it and watched the hallway from a distance. The door remained.
I called my landlord. He came by that afternoon, a slow and methodical man who I had never seen surprised by anything. He looked at the door for a while. He checked his records. He measured the wall on both sides. He knocked on it, then listened in a way I couldn’t quite interpret.
“There’s no room behind this,” he said. “The measurements don’t leave space for one.”
“Then what’s behind the door?” I asked.
He looked at the handle as though considering whether to use it. Then he looked at me.
“I’d leave it alone,” he said. He didn’t explain why, and I didn’t press him, and he left, and I sat on the sofa and looked down the hallway at the door until the light outside went dark.
I did not sleep that night. I sat in the chair by the window with a lamp on and watched the hallway, and the door was there, and the thin line of darkness at the frame was there, and nothing happened except that by three in the morning I was exhausted and cold and frightened in a way that had moved past acute fear into something more like dread, which is quieter and harder to shake.
I called my friend Dara at seven in the morning and she came over without asking too many questions, which is one of the things I value most about her. She stood in the hallway and looked at the door and did not say anything for a long time.
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