Brute Force

The door closes on its own. 

Uma thinks nothing of it. Sometimes with the way the air flows in her house, the doors and curtains have a tendency to move about. It takes her a moment to jiggle with the doorknob- to get it to properly open again- but it’s a small annoyance. She probably just needs to check the lock, maybe the hinges.

It’s a new house- well, a new house for her. She’s barely been moved in for just over a month now, and it was sold to her at an insanely cheap price. She figured there would be some issues (and had honestly been worried there’d been big matters she wasn’t told about), but so far, all she had found were slight irritations. The stairs creaking a little too much for her liking, the way the kitchen drawers all seemed on the verge of breaking- it was all just so… quiet. A small hinderance in a rotting structure.

If a house could be dead, this might as well be it. The silence of it was almost deafening- a still skeleton that managed to function as its own grave. 

Nothing however, was quite as tiresome as that door.

Uma liked to relax before bed; she’d make herself a small cup of tea, and watch an episode of some show she didn’t care for on her laptop, already curled up under her covers, halfway drifting off….

…but then the door SLAMS and she’s startled upwards in an instant, spilling hot tea not only over herself, but her bed. 

“Fuck!” The word leaves her mouth before she’s really even aware of what’s happened. She looks around, trying to see what fell, what could’ve caused the noise- and when she comes up with nothing, she decides to look in the hallway.

Except, her door is closed.

A sigh. Irritant. Hinderance. Frustration.

She jiggles the doorknob a couple of times, becoming increasingly upset when it wouldn’t open. She’s really got to get that lock checked. 

She’s about to take her mug to it (although she knows brute force and a broken mug won’t help), when she hears a soft click. The door slowly swings open, like someone had pulled it back with a string.

How… unsettling. 

Uma slowly lowered her arm, but kept her grip on the mug firm- walking out of her room into the hallway. She looked around, seeing nothing. She figured that was the case. In fact, she knew by now, it was the door. The stairs creaked as she worked her way down them quickly, grabbing her old dining room chair. It was falling apart, just like the rest of the house- but for its new and temporary purpose, it’d do.

She carries it back up with surprisingly minimal struggle, dragging the splintered wooden chair down the hall until she reached her bedroom again, wedging it under the doorknob. That didn’t stop Uma from collecting her things, though; she’d decided on spending the night on the couch as soon as she figured the door was a fire hazard. She grabbed a change of clothes, her pillow, her laptop, and a throw blanket that had narrowly avoided the tea spill.

She’d clean it up in the morning.

Uma was not a particularly religious or spiritual person. She wasn’t even one to be scared by small things easily- but the one incident had scared her off enough from sleeping in her own room- or really even entering it- until someone came to look at the lock of her door.

“It’s fine,” The handyman had commented, “You said it was locking randomly?”

“For minutes. I couldn’t get it to open,” Uma confirmed. She leaned against the hallway wall, opposite of the man crouching down in the middle of the doorway. 

She imagines the door closing on him. What would that look like? Would he sprain a finger? Can you sprain a finger? Would he get knocked on his ass?

“That’s weird. Maybe it’s a hinge issue?” The man didn’t seem to believe himself, stupefied by the case of Uma’s irritating door. He turns in place, still crouching as he tests the door’s movement, swinging it back-and-forth slowly, watching. Listening- but there was nothing to hear. No squeaky hinge, no creak of the weight of the wood. It was a perfectly fine door. He’s about to tell her nothing’s wrong again, but before he can speak, Uma beats him to it;

“Can you replace them all anyway?” She asks, “I’ll pay extra.”

He looks up at her with an unreadable expression, but then shrugs, “Your money, man.”

So the lock gets replaced. And the hinges. And the doorknob.

One could say the door’s undergone a kind of makeover. It’s the nicest looking thing in the house. 

Uma’s been meaning to actually furnish the house, to make it feel lived in- but it just feels wrong, she can’t explain it. It would be like watering a carcass.

The door closes again when she’s about to enter her bedroom coming home from work.

She sleeps on the couch that night, still in her office clothes.

At some point, Uma tries to move out of the room, but the door won’t let her. It closes every time she tries to move a big piece of furniture out, at one point closing so forcefully on her mattress that the mattress itself had torn. 

So, unfortunately, Uma is stuck in the stupid room, with the stupid, sentient door. 

She calls the handyman again. Asks him to take it down. He comes again and asks her why she won’t just do it herself- and Uma doesn’t want to tell him she’s using him as a human guinea pig. If it could tear a mattress, she wants to know what it can do to a man.

The answer?

Slam itself on his hand so badly that it breaks, and bone pokes through flabby flesh and thin viscera. 

The nearest hospital is twenty miles away, so Uma drives him there. 

No one believes her when she tells them a door slammed on his hand. Even when he tells them the same thing.

If the door believes she’s moving too many things out, it’ll close on her. She speaks out-loud to it, like it’s a living thing, something one can talk to. Uma wonders briefly if she’s going insane.

“I need to do laundry,” She tells the door, it having slammed closed way too close to Uma for her personal liking, “Are you going to stop me from cleaning my clothes? Is that what you’re doing now?”

She’s arguing with a door, how nonsensical can this get?

The door stays closed for another two hours, and for one of those hours, Uma stands firmly in front of it, tapping her finger against her laundry basket- like a mother would in front of a defiant child. She can’t send a door to bed, however, so she ultimately gave up the stand-off.

If anything, it felt like she had been the one sent to bed- like the door had somehow asserted some authority over her she’d previously resisted, and the extra hour had just been a waiting game; the old wood making sure Uma had learned her lesson. 

She hadn’t learned the lesson the door had intended (if there was a lesson for a door to intend), but she had learned.

Uma needed to be clever when it came to escaping her bedroom entrance.

Her plan spanned over weeks. She’d stuff an extra shirt into her bag when she left for work. An extra book. She’d keep up with her daily routine, visit her in-house office, set them carefully on the desk or shelf. This door never randomly opened, never randomly closed. The room, in its dead silence, was oddly comforting. Most people were terrified of the dark.

Uma had wondered if anyone had ever tried to escape their own house before?

Really she should think about moving out. She’s already taken out a loan, though, and more than that, she’s stubborn. She’d rather take down that damn door with an ax. 

(She had tried by the way. It’d left some gashes, but impossibly, never even went fully through the wood. Now there’s ugly scratches on the front of her bedroom door.)

Moving out or not, it doesn’t matter now…

…Because eventually, the door catches on.

Uma’s in the middle of leaving for work, a pair of pants and a shirt in her purse, nonchalantly passing through the doorway-

-then, she’s screaming, her arm lodged between the door and it’s corresponding frame. It had violently swung on her before she had time to react, capturing her arm in the process. It wasn’t hard enough to break her arm- not like the handyman, no- but enough to pierce skin with splintered wood, flesh twisting and turning uncomfortably as her body tried to accommodate the foreign object squeezing her limb from both sides.

“Fuck, FUCK!” Uma cried, breathing ragged as she tried to pull her arm out. It made it so much worse. The door only dug in deeper, the woman screeching even louder as she could feel the pressure against her bone now. How, she briefly wondered, was this even possible? Hinges don’t possess that much power.

It doesn’t matter, she has to stop pulling. She pushes instead, the door giving away all too easily as she falls forward on the very arm she was trying to avoid injuring further- Uma letting out a pained wail as she rolled over. Gasping as she tried to just catch her breath. 

The door slammed shut.

“Let me out.” Anxious, disbelieving.

“Let me out!” Anger.

Uma jiggled the doorknob like she had the first time the door closed on her. Of course it didn’t work. She pounded on the door with her good hand curled up in a fist, then tried to force her whole body weight against it. The damned thing had eventually retaliated, quickly slamming open, and then closing again- effectively ramming her into the wall. 

The woman stayed on the floor for what felt like hours. She didn’t dare move, not so close to the thing. That’s all it was now to her. A thing. That’s all it was supposed to be to her! Hell, what door is not just a thing! To even call it ‘damned’ gives it personality, and Uma refuses to give it anything more than an appliance’s description.

It’s a door. 

It should open when pulled open, and close when pushed closed.

It’s a goddamn door.

Uma will spend all day convincing herself of this if she has to.

Everything hurt. 

Her pain meds were downstairs.

She could hear her phone ring. It was probably her work calling, asking her why she wasn’t there yet.

“Answer it,” She told nothing, “You can move can’t you? Answer the goddamn phone.”

That phone was her only hope of getting help, and it had fallen on the other side of the thing with her purse. 

“Answer it!” Uma’s angry again, scratching at the door with her nails, screaming. Then she tries to pull the door open by resting her feet on either side of the door frame and pulling on the knob with all of her body weight. Her arm has effectively stained her blouse, pants, and now, the floor- but she doesn’t care anymore. 

Eventually the phone stops ringing. 

She resorts to screaming at the thing, throwing anything she could at it- scratching into it with shards of glass from her broken lamp when throwing it didn’t work. Nothing works.

Night finally falls, and Uma falls with it, having exhausted herself. She’s thrown every item, insult, and tactic she could think of at the door- the slab of wood now carved with her hatred and despise of it- but none of it mattered. It didn’t fucking matter. The door was as still as it had been when she first moved in.

Taunting.

Like she’d imagined it all. 

Uma’s not sure how many days she’s spent in her room. It’s not her room anymore- or at least, she doesn’t consider it so. The things in it may be hers, as broken and ripped apart as they may be, torn and scattered across the floor. 

She fashioned a bandage out of an old tank top. Busied herself with reading. Read all the books. Reread them. Thought about how hungry she was. Distracted herself from her hunger. 

It couldn’t have been longer than three days, she reasoned. A human can only go three days without water.

…but it had felt like so much longer.

Uma turns in for the night, shoes still on as she collapses into her bed, because there’s too much broken glass for her to safely move around her room barefoot anymore. She’s bundled up in layers, to warm up and prevent making her injuries worse. Her stomach growls, but she’s learned to force herself to ignore it. She manages to finally fall asleep, arms crossed, and hunched over on her side- like she could spring up at any moment, just in case.

While she’s sleeping, the house sleeps with her- although it’s never particularly been awake. Except of course, one of its components. 

A small, slow creaking can be heard- but Uma is too deep in sleep to hear it.

The door opens on its own.