The Locked Door

To me, the door was always locked. Ever since I can remember. What use is a locked door? It could have just been a wall this whole time. By the time I was eight years old, I would walk by the door without even realizing it was still there. Your mind gets used to things that never change, or mine does at least. 

One night, it must have been summer, because I woke up in a blanket fort. I was only able to sleep in a blanket fort when there was no school the next day, and this particular fort was masterful, a semi-permanent structure. It had been there some time. I laid there with an eerie feeling in my stomach, like something was wrong. I was too scared to get up, but also too scared to sleep, so I became a statue lying in a sleeping bag, with a silence so profound that I thought for a moment I had lost the ability to hear.

Click. It sounded like a door latch, but from the wrong end of the hallway. My dad’s room was far down the other direction and Leah’s (my sister) room was in between mine and his. I kept thinking that there wasn’t even a door in that other direction until you reached the front of the house, and this sounded much closer. I squeezed my eyes shut and laid there until morning.

I must’ve at least fallen asleep at some point, because the sun had brightened my whole room in a flash. I could hear my dad making breakfast in the kitchen, the smell of bacon yanked me from the sleeping bag and I rushed out the door. On the way down the hall, I froze. The locked door… I had forgotten all about it. That must’ve been the noise I heard. I turned and stared at it like I had never seen it before. The locked door was somehow different, but I couldn’t figure out how. I was certain of one thing though, it had changed.

“Dad?” I said, walking into the kitchen. Sometimes when I walked into the kitchen, my dad would have this overjoyed smile on his face like he was meeting me for the first time. This was one of those times.

“Hey bud,” he said back. My name wasn’t bud; it still isn’t, but that’s just what he calls me. I guess that’s fair, his name wasn’t really dad. “Ready for some bacon?”

I tilted my head and smirked up at him, like he really needed to ask. As he put a few strips on a plate for me at the counter, I blurted out the only thing on my mind, “Were you in the locked room last night?”

His back was toward me, but I swear that all his movements ceased, if only for a fraction of a second. It reminded me of when a movie would skip in the DVD player and all the actors would freeze for a second. I used to pretend it was meant to happen, like some wizard had stopped time real quick, just as a joke. The people had no idea they were just play-things for this wizard. 

Maybe he didn’t freeze though, maybe I just thought he did. He answered the questions with a tone that I now know is patronizing, but growing up I thought was fatherly, “How would I get in there bud? The door’s locked.” He was right. Locked doors don’t open. 

“Oh” I said, the way children do when they try to process another thought. Sometimes it takes a minute. I eat bacon in the meantime. Well, did you know that silence is a great negotiating tactic? Like you say something, and the other person expects you to say more, but you just sit there unrelenting in your silence until they feel so uncomfortable that they have to answer. That’s not what I was doing, I was just a slow thinker, but it worked.

“Why, uh, why did you ask me that?” He said. That was the first time I had ever heard my dad sound nervous. I knew from cartoons though, that when people sound like that it means they're hiding something. 

Now I needed to surprise him with a loud sentence to catch him off guard, just like in the shows. “I heard the locked door shut last night!” his eyes widened. That’s not enough, he might be able to explain that, I need more. “And I saw someone walk away from it too!” Oddly, he relaxed at this last statement. 

He smiled and nodded, “Oh, I see. You had a dream, kiddo. I can honestly say that no one has ever come out of the locked door.” I believed him, but that didn’t make me any less scared. If it wasn’t my dad coming out of the room, then someone was going in…? But how did the door lock again once it was closed?

For many nights after that, I stayed up as late as I could with my ear to the wall. The house was quiet except for the intermittent hum of the air conditioning. Each morning my dad seemed more relaxed than the last, I think he was slowly forgetting about the door, but I know I hadn’t. He was keeping a secret from me and I was going to find out what it was. 

One day when he went off to work, I was going to break the only rule in the house, “Don’t go in dad’s room.” My sister and I had that rule so ingrained in our little minds that we never even thought of it as part of the house. It might as well have been locked… but it wasn’t. I waited for my Leah to settle into her favorite cartoon, something about ponies in high school I think. Pony High? Anyway, it was plenty of distraction.

I went into dad’s room and had no idea where to begin. I started with the nightstand, hoping maybe I’d find a key. No luck, just a bunch of handwritten notes about Leah and me. What we liked, what we didn’t. How we were doing in school, our friends' names. Our… Ages? Geez, dad, can’t you remember anything? I stuffed the papers back in the drawer and looked under the mattress. In all the TV shows people hide stuff under there. Nothing.

The dresser came up next. As I went to open the first drawer, I caught a glimpse of myself in the dresser-top mirror and jumped. My heart raced and I soon felt really guilty, but not guilty enough to not do it. Just guilty enough to take the fun out of it. The first drawer was full of underwear, which took even more fun out of it. The next was socks, and so on through the various pieces of clothing. The final drawer, however, was something different.

At first it just looked like miscellaneous rags, but then I realized that the drawer wasn’t as deep as the others. It had a false bottom. Another TV classic. I dropped to the ground and moved my hand all underneath the drawer until I found something. An envelope?

The front was blank. I flipped open the unsealed envelope and pulled out a scrap of paper. “Good luck, and Godspeed” it said in a woman’s writing. Then I turned the envelope upside-down and dropped a shiny new key into my hand (You can only imagine the disappointment I felt upon realizing that it wasn’t a strange ornate key with like a skull on it or something). I stared at it for a while. Too long, I guess, because I heard the door slam open.

“Caught you!” said Leah with a mixture of pride and surprise. She couldn’t help but to look around the room though at this new world she had suddenly stumbled upon. “What’re you doing in here anyway?”

“This!” I said, showing her the key. “It’s been here the whole time.”

“I’ve seen keys before. There’re keys on the counter right now.” She was unimpressed.

“No,” I said in a loud whisper. “This key opens the locked door.”

She furrowed her eyebrows for a moment while processing this sentence, and then her eyebrows raised and jaw dropped in rapid succession. “The door!” I nodded conspiratorially.

“If you promise to keep a secret, I’ll let you see what’s inside.” I said in a singsong way that is quite enticing for some reason. She nodded quickly and smirked.

We ran to the door and then I stood frozen for a minute, key in hand. I took a deep breath in and out and then unlocked the door. I began to push it open when Leah pulled it back closed and said quickly, “Do you think dad was serious when he said no one has even come out of there? What if we can’t come back?”

“He’s been lying, remember. He didn’t even say he had the key.” I said, trying to convince myself as much as her.

She replied in a small voice, “Dad never said he didn’t have the key either.” But my point was made. I reached for the door and found it was locked again. Must be automatic. My hand was shaking as I put the key back in the lock, so much so that I missed the keyhole twice before finally getting it. Then I opened it.

We found ourselves peering down into a poorly lit stairwell, with faded flickering blue light being emitted from the bottom. Then a car door slammed. “Wait!” I turned to my sister, “What were the keys you saw on the counter?”

“Um… dad’s office keys I think?” He forgot his office keys; he’s come back to get them! But it was now or never so I ran down the stairs as fast as I could. Leah stood at the top, frozen and unblinking with the door held open by her body.

The bottom of the stairs fed into a startling big room filled floor to ceiling with television screens the size of computer screens. In the center was a large black box with thousands of wires slithering from it down to the ground and underneath the walls of screens. On the top of the box was a small keypad with numbers and letters, like you see on the side of a vending machine. Each screen was following the movements of some man going through his daily life: pumping gas, eating dinner, driving a car, sleeping, fishing… you name it.

As I got closer to the screens, I realized that they all appeared to be following the same man at different points in time. My dad. Heavy footsteps echoed each time my dad’s dress shoes hit a descending cement stair. I was frightened. I didn’t know how he would react or what it all meant. I dropped to my knees on several crisscrossing wires and began to cry.

After what seemed like an eternity, I looked up to see a sympathetic face staring back at me. He had been standing within arm's reach, waiting for me to look up. “Why…? What is this?”

“This,” he gestured toward the box and screens. I saw the first signs of anger crawl across his face, “is why your mother isn’t here with us. Sit down son. It’s time you knew where your mother really is.”

He recounted an incredible tale from his and my mother’s youth. They were the brightest scientists in their field and had actually discovered definitive proof of parallel universes. No one but them, however, knew that they had actually discovered a way to reach those parallel universes. They never planned on doing so, of course. They began monitoring a handful of their infinite other lives on these hundreds of TV screens. They constantly were down here watching what lives they could lead, things they could do, ideas for how to live. They could sit down here for hours on end. 

When my mother finally got pregnant with me, they started spending less and less time down here, and started focusing more on getting a calm domestic life ready for the impending family. Three weeks after I was born, a terrible thunderstorm rolled into town and she went down to turn off the machine. God only knows what would happen if there was a power surge. Well, my mother found out. Lightning struck as she was operating the box and she was sent to one of the infinite parallel universes.

My grief-stricken father was left raising an infant and pining for the unexplainable disappearance of his wife. He had to tell everyone that she ran off and left him, including us. But each night for the past eight years, he has returned to this basement and traveled to another universe to try to find her. Sometimes for months, or even years. Although it seems instantaneous to anyone viewing his actions from just our dimension. It looks as though he keys in numbers on the box and is transported to a similar device in the closet of his bedroom.

That was the end of his story. By that my sister had joined us downstairs, and the parts she missed were recounted to her as well. I’m thirteen now, and live in this universe with you, but truth be told, this isn’t my real universe. For the past five years we have been traveling through space and time as a family to try to become whole again. I hope this universe works out better for you than it has us, “Good luck, and Godspeed.”