Lockdown

A statewide lockdown was in effect. Nobody was to be allowed in or out of state lines. Nobody could leave their homes without official permissions to visit grocery stores or gas stations. Dystopia had come to life in California.

Like anyone else, Ana had once pondered what she might do when the end of the world hit. Her preparedness plan mainly involved obtaining a gun to protect her property. The cardboard signs extolling the need to end gun violence occupying most of the space in her coat closet would not factor into her decision making in an end of the world scenario; those only applied to a society that hadn’t gone insane, and what she saw on the news reports she dared to watch indicated they were no longer functioning in a sane society. Besides, her disaster preparedness was supposed to be hypothetical. It was never supposed to be something she had to implement. Therefore, it could be as unrealistic and opposite to her civilized morals as she pleased. Thus, a gun factored heavily into her apocalyptic fantasies, in which she magically obtained a deadly weapon and its threatened usage persuaded everyone around her to hand over the resources she demanded. It was a simple plan that led to an exciting reality in which she could still enjoy the comforts she currently possessed.

The COVID-19 mandated lockdown effectively murdered every part of Ana’s fantasy as a dystopian heroine, though. Instead of running lawless around town and accumulating possessions like an avatar in a role-playing game, Ana had been confined to her 850 square foot townhouse for a week and a half. Her roommate had been out of state when the governor announced the lockdown and decided to weather the pandemic frenzy with her parents in Oklahoma instead. The only company left for Ana was her fat, lazy tabby named Julio.

Julio was a rescue who had spent the last three years overcoming the strange, skittish behavior most shelter cats exhibited in their early days. When Ana first brought him home, she’d lived in a different apartment that she’d been forced to move out of because of Julio’s behavior. He didn’t claw anything up or pee all over the place, but he had stared at random walls and corners a little too intensely sometimes. Then Ana had scrolled through Instagram one day and found a meme about how cats could see the supernatural and detect any evil presence in homes. She’d moved out of the apartment a month early as a result, and Julio hadn’t had the same trouble in any of their dwellings since.

He’d never stared at unseen forces in the townhouse, either. At least, not until Ana started working from home. She noticed it first on the same day she’d lost her favorite comfy sweatshirt in the laundry. She had been settled on the couch for a solid hour when he trotted over to the built-in bookcase along the opposite wall and sat in front of it. His striped tail flicked back and forth as he sat. For a few minutes, Ana glanced over every so often to make sure he wasn’t trying to knock her glass globe bookends down. They tended to reflect the afternoon sun and cast lights that drove him crazy, so she thought little of it until she noticed he wasn’t looking at the lights. He was staring at the bottom of the bookcase.

“Okay. What is your deal, cat?” she inquired as she set her laptop aside and walked over to join him at the bookcase.

“Rrreooow,” Julio answered with a hunter’s enthusiasm, sinking to his haunches to flick his front paw against the seam between bookcase and floor.

“Hey, get away from there,” she chided and knelt. “Did you lose something under there?” she inquired, but she couldn’t possibly see how. The distance between the wall and the floor was nonexistent. 

She ran a hand along the seam from end to end and back. She expected a splinter at worst and maybe to find the tag of a toy Julio had somehow lost sticking out of the wall. Instead, the entire bookcase shifted when her fingers slid around the corner and gave a solid tug.

Ana wrenched herself back, scooting a few feet away on her butt in such haste that Julio bolted. She could hear the thudding of his paws as he hefted his weight up the stairs to her bedroom, while she stared up at the contents of the bookshelves. Her heart pounded an irregular cadence through her chest. She heard it pulse through her ears like the rhythm of a drummer on his first day with the instrument. When the glass globes wobbled but didn’t tilt or slide toward the edge of the shelves, she released a breath from her aching lungs and pushed herself off the faux wood floor.

“What the hell?” she breathed as she surveyed the damage to her living room wall.

The bookcase had shifted, leaving a massive gap between the edge of it and the beige paint. Cobwebs filled that gap, but the silvery threads snapped and floated apart to their opposite anchors as Ana pulled the bookcase even further away from the wall. It swung as if on a hinge she’d never noticed and revealed a deep, descending darkness. She could see the top few stairs, wooden and cracking. Then, nothing but darkness as the chasm below swallowed the natural lighting streaming in between her sheer, floral window treatments.

Ana took a cautious first step onto the stairs and hesitated, one foot still on the landing in the house she thought she’d known like the back of her hand. Her stomach knotted as the damp scent of mildew on the walls leading down the stairs mingled with the warm, clean scent of fresh laundry behind her. She knew what she was about to leave behind, exchanging the cozy security behind her for the frigid unknown of the secret passageway.

Still, she lifted her foot off the landing and proceeded down the creaking wooden stairs. Now that she knew this place existed, she couldn’t return to the presumed safety of her home without finding out who else she’d been living with. Her illusions had been shattered by the discovery of the stairs behind the bookcase. Determined to reclaim the illusion and drive out the intruder, Ana continued down.

At the bottom of the stairs, she realized why there was nothing but darkness here: a closed door blocked her path. Her smooth hand slid along its rough middle in search of a doorknob. A sharp flare of pain radiated through her knuckles and down to her wrist as her fingers knocked against a different circular slope. She held back a hiss of pain and pressed her fingertips along the foreign object for a few seconds to feel the rough outline of a keyhole slit. A lock. That meant…

Yes! Ana’s aching fingers flitted further down to wrap around a doorknob. When she twisted it, the door popped open as if someone on the other side had pulled it. The sudden lack of resistance threw off her balance, and she stumbled into the hidden room. Her eyes strained to adjust not to the presence of further darkness but now to the soft lighting from a reading lamp in the furthest corner. It sat on a small nightstand she recognized with a growing knot in her gut. With the chips off the faux wood top on the front two corners, there was no mistaking it: she’d placed the same nightstand on the curb for trash pickup a month ago. What was it doing here?

Everything in the room looked to be items she’d thrown away or realized had gone missing over the past couple of weeks: her old twin mattress with a spring poking out from under the cozy but pilling flannel sheets she’d stowed away after the winter two months ago, old tennis shoes she’d thrown in a bag to donate, and clothes missing from her laundry basket tossed over an ugly pink paisley wingback chair she’d salvaged and never got around to reupholstering. Everything hidden here belonged to her, including the mirror directly to her left.

Ana straightened up and turned, realizing she’d fallen four feet deep into the space that must have only been twelve feet deep. Her hand fell away from the door as she looked around again. A jolt of fear stabbed through her heart and shot into the nerve endings in her toes and cheeks like a thousand needles pricking into her as a horrible realization swept through her. 

Her reflection hadn’t moved. Ana glanced over at it to test her theory. Still, no movement. In fact, there was no mirror. No frame surrounded the figure she’d assumed to be her reflection.

Ana stared in a frozen stupor at the other woman, because the most logical explanation was that her reflection somehow wasn’t moving. There was no other way to process the fact that she was seeing a mirror image of herself that wasn’t staring back at her from a mirror. 

Despite all the times she’d yelled at women in horror movies for asking the same thing, all Ana could stutter was, “Wh-who are you?”

Her doppelganger grinned, an eerie replica of the same smile Ana practiced in the bathroom mirror before dates or social gatherings.

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of Julio for you.”

Ana’s mind reeled as her voice trilled from the stranger’s throat. It was like watching a video of herself, only this was happening in real life, in real time, and coming from someone she’d never met before. She knew nothing about the woman who seemed to know everything about her.

An alarm tripped in the back of her mind to snap her out of her stupor, the same whining blaring of a battleship calling its soldiers to their stations. Ana watched the doppelganger moving to the door and tried to dive toward it as the dam of her subconscious mind overflowed, pouring a flood of images into her conscious mind.

Empty black hangers in the closet. A box of rainbow Goldfish in the pantry turned the wrong direction. The coat closet door half open. The yoga mat with the blue lotus design lying on its side in the corner instead of propped against the wall. The teal razor in the shower turned the wrong direction. The red toothbrush flipped upside down in its holder. Julio staring at the bookcase disguising the hidden stairway, pawing at whatever horrors lay behind it.

The warning signs had been there for weeks. This stranger had been living under and sneaking into Ana’s home for so long, she appeared to believe she was Ana. Now that the real Ana had found the secret passageway and unwittingly stumbled into her new prison, the impersonator strode with purpose to the door. After living in the shadows, the stranger was going to claim what she thought was her rightful life. Ana’s life.

The mental alarm drove a throbbing through her fingers. Ana remembered the keyhole on the outside of the door. Her stomach plummeted to her feet.

“NO!” Ana shouted as she lunged at the door, but it slammed shut before she could catch it.

The lock clicked from the outside, sealing Ana in. She slammed her fists against the door, pounding until her hands ached. When she could no longer manage that, she slapped with flat palms. Once even the lightest hit began to send jolts of pain through her arms, she screamed.

The world wasn’t supposed to end like this. She was supposed to be on the front lines, taking whatever she wanted when she wanted it. Now, it was her doppelganger who did the taking. The real Ana was doomed to live out the exact opposite of her apocalyptic fantasy, stuck in a never-ending lockdown.