30 May The Third Floor Door

Part I

Edsel Kline hadn’t seen the inside of a factory in nearly twenty years. The last one he worked for—Metzger Sheet Metal—shut down in 2003, and the pension it paid out had been devoured over time by a sick wife, a gambling phase he didn’t like to dwell on, and the slow decay of old cars and broken appliances that always seemed to cost just a little more than they should. The Holter Foods Canning Plant, as far as he could tell, had been around even longer than Metzger, though it was holding together just as poorly, if not worse.

The exterior was comprised of corrugated siding and moss-veiled brick, the red faded to a liverish brown under decades of sun and mildew. Ed parked his Buick near the loading dock and waited with the engine off and his gloved hands resting on the wheel. He didn’t move until the green security light above the rear entrance blinked twice, then held steady.

That was the sign to enter.

The hallway inside smelled of vinegar and lubricant. Everything was wet with something: condensation, or runoff, or rusty leakage that had taken up residence in the floor seams. His boots squeaked no matter how softly he stepped. No one greeted him. That had been the first night, when the man with the clipboard—Delancey—shook his hand in the locker room, gave him a badge that didn’t open any doors, and led him past the packing line without saying a word about the others working there.

“You’re not here for any of that,” Delancey had said, gesturing at the mechanized belt that clattered endlessly under gloved hands and rubber aprons. “We’ve got something special for you.”

At the time, Ed had figured they saw his age and wanted to keep him off the floor. Maybe they needed a night watch. That was fine. He didn’t have much to prove anymore. As long as he stayed on payroll and cleared his credit cards before the interest boiled him alive, he could stand a bit of odd work.

But now, as he climbed the narrow service stairs for the third night in a row, he wasn’t so sure.

The stairwell was steel scaffolding, bolted to the back of the building like an afterthought. It had no handrail on one side, just a waist-high mesh of chain-link fencing already split in places, as if something heavy had been dragged against it. A yellow security bulb hung above each landing, casting sickly pools of light across the steps and the alley far below. No one used the stairs except him. That was clear from the dust and bird droppings caked near the base, and from the way Delancey had said “You’ll need good shoes” with a little grin.

By the time he reached the top landing—third floor, exterior access only—Ed’s breath was coming hard. He paused and reached for the small folding stool propped just beside the door, taking a moment to settle in and ease the ache in his knees. Before him loomed the Third Floor Door.

It didn’t match the building. The doorframe had been cut crudely into the side of the old structure, as if someone had knocked out part of a wall and patched it back up with thick slate-gray metal. There was no visible handle, no keycard access, and no window. It didn’t even sit flush with the building. A faint seam ringed the frame, a hairline gap that Ed noticed only when the wind blew and whistled faintly through it.

In front of him sat a folding TV tray, the top of which held two items: a wide leather-bound book, its edges frayed and curling from age or moisture, and a long machete with a wrapped hilt and a thumb-worn grip.

“You’ll sit right here,” Delancey had said that first night, “and you’ll read from that book every fifteen minutes. One page, front to back. Doesn’t matter if you understand it.”

Ed had opened the book with trembling fingers. The text was comprised of English letters, but they didn’t form any words he could recognize. It read like an alphabet gone mad, phonetics strung together in what looked like gibberish but carried a certain rhythm when spoken aloud—unpleasant, but metered.

“And the blade?” Ed had asked.

Delancey’s smile had thinned. “Insurance.”

No other explanation was given. When Ed tried to ask what the door was, or why it needed guarding, or why the book had to be read on a strict fifteen-minute cycle, Delancey’s tone had hardened. “You want the pay, you do the task. Don’t ask questions you aren’t ready to hear the answers to. Trust me, Ed. Curiosity’s gotten a few better men than you scraped off that landing.”

So Ed had done the job.

Tonight was no different. He checked his watch—11:58 PM—and sat upright on the stool. The book lay open to the correct page. He hadn’t dared close it since that first night, when Delancey warned him the book sometimes turned to the wrong page on its own.

He read the lines aloud. The syllables clung to his tongue like syrup, but he managed. The moment he finished, he scratched the time down in a tiny spiral notebook he kept tucked in his coat.

12:00 AM — Recited. No incidents.

His handwriting had become shakier over the past few days. The first night had passed uneventfully, save for the quiet. During that shift, he heard no voices and saw no movement. That night, the silence was interrupted only by the moan of the wind and the occasional clank of the factory’s internal operations below.

The second night, he thought he heard scratching.

Tonight, he was sure.

It came at 12:13, a few minutes before the next scheduled recitation. A soft tapping, like fingers drumming lightly on wood—except the door was metal, and the taps weren’t rhythmic. They were testing, searching.

He froze, the machete in his lap. The sound stopped the moment he picked it up.

He stared at the door for a long while. When the minute hand clicked over to 12:15, he read again. The same page, the same meaningless text. His voice cracked at the third line, but he pushed through it. When he finished, he thought he heard a whisper, just barely perceptible over the breeze that threaded through the scaffold bars. A word, maybe two.

“Help us…”

He stood too quickly, nearly upsetting the tray. There was no one else there. He looked down the stairs, checked the alley and the rooftop line of the building beside Holter Foods. Everywhere he looked was empty. There were no pranksters, no co-workers hiding behind the compressors, only darkness and faint light from the loading dock and the lurching shadow of his own body against the far wall.

He sat again and reached for the machete. Just to hold it, for comfort.

12:16 AM — Heard voice. “Help us.” Could be wind. Uncertain.

He paused before writing the last three words. He felt the pressure to document it honestly, but something about it felt traitorous. As if the act of acknowledging the whisper lent it weight.

The wind picked up again.

And behind the door, something shifted.

Part II

By the seventh night, the factory seemed to sweat.

The upper floors had always been warmer than the rest of the building—something to do with steam lines running through the walls, Ed assumed—but now the air had taken on a wetness that clung to the skin like animal breath. Every surface felt just shy of damp. The folding chair hissed softly when he sat down, and the spine of the book creaked as though it resented being opened.

He had begun to notice the smell. It wasn’t any single odor, but a composite—old rain trapped in sealed metal, spoiled syrup left too long in a hot cupboard, something faintly coppery that dried out the roof of his mouth the longer he sat with it. He kept a tin of mints in his coat pocket and found himself reaching for them more often, even though they didn’t help much.

He’d taken to humming to himself between readings, low and tuneless, not to comfort himself exactly but to drown out the sounds he pretended he hadn’t heard. They were clearer now—less like wind and more like language, though still garbled, like radio signals warped by thunderclouds. Sometimes they came in waves: moaning, choking, the guttural tremble of someone stifling a sob. Other times, they were frighteningly precise. One voice, every so often, threaded its way through the rest, pressing against the door with familiarity.

“Daddy… please.”

That one nearly broke him.

He didn’t remember standing up. He found himself halfway across the landing, machete raised without realizing he’d drawn it, his free hand hovering near the seam in the door like he meant to trace it.

He sat down again and waited for the next mark on his watch.

1:30 AM — Recited. No new activity. Mild sound. Stayed seated.

The lie tasted bitter as he wrote it.

Ed hadn’t heard from his daughter in over a year. She lived in New York now, or maybe outside it, and the last time they spoke she’d been sharp with him over money—something to do with his handling of the estate after her mother passed. That voice behind the door wasn’t hers. Couldn’t be. But it had her inflection, the lilt at the end of certain phrases, and the same uneven rhythm when she was frightened.

The book, still open in his lap, looked wrong. It was turned to the same page he’d been reading from all week, but the shape of the text had changed. The letters were the same as before—angular, jagged—but now they leaned slightly to the left, as if tugged by gravity from a direction Ed didn’t understand. The lines had grown narrower, packed tighter. He touched one of the margins and found his fingertip tingled faintly, like a struck tuning fork.

He didn’t write that down.

At 1:45, he stood to begin the next reading. He lifted the book from his lap and brought it to eye level, but as he did, a sharp jolt cracked through the bridge of his nose. He staggered and caught himself on the tray. Blood welled in both nostrils, hot and sudden. It coursed down over his lip and into his mouth before he could fumble a handkerchief free from his coat. His vision blurred. He tried to focus on the letters but found them swimming.

The book slipped from his grip. It struck the metal deck with a heavy thwap, pages flaring outward, and came to rest face down.

His watch read 1:47.

“Shit,” he muttered, dabbing his nose with shaking fingers. Blood smeared across his upper lip and down his chin. The pressure behind his eyes was immediate, and when he knelt to retrieve the book, his vision went dark at the edges. He nearly dropped the machete trying to steady himself.

He flipped the book open and found the correct page, though the letters seemed even more distorted now. The vertical slashes bled into curves, and the spacing between syllables had collapsed entirely. His voice cracked as he began to read. He lost the cadence halfway through the first line and had to restart. His tongue felt too thick, his throat swollen. He pushed on, tripping over syllables, until the final consonant left his mouth in a hoarse rasp that scraped the back of his teeth.

When he looked up, he saw them.

Hairline fractures.

They spidered out from the center of the door—no more than six or seven—but they were real, and they hadn’t been there before. He was sure of it. Ed ran his palm over the surface and felt them catch against his skin, as shallow and sharp as paper cuts. A faint hiss, barely audible, issued from the seams.

He backed away, pressing the book flat against his chest.

The wind picked up, and a metallic clatter echoed from the alley below. As a result, Ed almost missed the sound of the outer stairwell door opening.

Delancey emerged into the yellow spill of light, his coat flapping behind him. He looked displeased, but not surprised. His eyes scanned Ed’s face, the tray, the book in his arms, and finally the cracks in the door.

“You skipped one,” he said quietly.

“No,” Ed lied. “I— I just dropped the book, is all. Kept the time.”

“You didn’t.”

“I—”

Delancey stepped forward, lowering his voice as if afraid something might hear. “Don’t lie to me. You skipped. Maybe by a minute. Maybe two. You think it doesn’t matter, but that seal isn’t symbolic, Ed. It’s temporal. You break the rhythm, and it starts looking for another pattern. Another way through.”

Ed felt the blood cooling on his face. “It talked to me.”

Delancey didn’t blink. “Of course it did. That’s the only tool it’s got.”

“What is it?”

“You already know I’m not supposed to tell you.”

“It sounded like my daughter.”

“That’s exactly the point.” Delancey turned back toward the stairs, pausing only long enough to glance over his shoulder. “You’ve got four more hours on the schedule. Do not drop the book again. And for Christ’s sake, stop listening.”

The manager descended the steps without another word.

Ed remained frozen for several minutes, watching the hairline cracks on the door’s surface. He imagined they had grown slightly. One of them curved now, bending in a way he didn’t remember from before, and he thought he saw a shimmer within the seam—as if light passed through from the other side, though the gap should have been sealed.

He sat down and checked his watch.

2:00 AM — Late. Book dropped. Crack appeared. Spoke to Delancey. Recovered.

He capped the pen and stared at the last word for a long time. Recovered. It didn’t feel true.

That morning, after clocking out and shuffling to his car beneath a drizzle that hadn’t been in the forecast, Ed dreamed a dream he had never dreamed before.

He was standing in an expansive, grassy field. A black sun hung above the horizon, burning downward like a sinkhole in the sky. The door stood upright at the center of the field, unconnected to any wall. Its edges glowed faintly, and the cracks had grown wide enough to reveal slivers of what lay beyond.

Through them, he saw stars—writhing, spinning, collapsing and reforming.

The door was open.

Something had gone through.

He awoke with his coat still on, seated upright in the Buick, his timecard unpunched and the faint taste of iron on his tongue.

Part III

The following nights blurred together. Ed began marking the dates on the inside cover of the book, not because he believed he would forget them, but as if recording them might anchor reality in place.

The voices, however, didn’t fade. They deepened.

Where before there had been murmur and pleading, now there were accusations delivered with unsettling familiarity. The voice that had once mimicked his daughter’s sobs now used her speaking voice, her pet names, her phrasings—the quiet phrases only a father would remember. Others joined her. His ex-wife’s reprimanding tone emerged one evening near 2:30, reminding him of unpaid bills and passive betrayals. There was a man he hadn’t spoken to in forty years, a friend from the welding crew who had overdosed in Ed’s trailer during a summer blackout. They all spoke to him now, just inches behind the steel.

“You never called her back.”

“You knew about the pills. You flushed the rest, didn’t you?”

“You let us die, Ed. You let all of us die.”

It had taken everything in him not to shout back. He pressed the book to his chest and recited through clenched teeth, his voice steady but pale, thin as a reed in wind. The machete stayed closer now, its black blade resting across his knees. He had started sleeping with it propped beside his mattress back home; he no longer believed the Third Floor Door’s influence ended when he punched out.

The seal had worsened. On the eleventh night, Ed arrived to find the cracks had multiplied. Dozens now split the surface in feathered lines, branching like veins toward the edges of the frame, dull light emanating from within. He approached cautiously, stooping to examine a wide fracture near the bottom.

There, barely visible through the gap, he saw movement.

It lasted less than a second, a flicker of something inside, like a pale hand dragging down a shower curtain. The shape had fingers—too many fingers—and what might have been an eye, though its placement defied anatomy. The skin looked stretched and semi-transparent, as if whatever was pressing against the interior was made of meat and light fused together.

He fell backward onto the landing and nearly kicked the tray off its bolts.

No one was around to hear him curse, though he paused anyway, half-expecting Delancey to emerge again from the shadows like some factory wraith. But the stairs remained empty, and the alley below remained still. After one more look at the seam, Ed climbed back into his chair and opened the book.

This time, the page was different.

The heading, if it could be called that, now appeared as a long string of letters with no spacing, each one jagged and low-slung, their tails dragging into the margins. The text beneath had changed subtly in its shape. Where once it had been uniform in size and spacing, the lines, under strain, now warped near the edges.

He blinked, closed the book, reopened it, and found the same page. It was not a misprint. The words themselves were shifting.

That night, Ed wrote nothing in his log. He feared seeing it all again in ink. Instead, he turned to the machete, examining its edge as he waited for the next quarter-hour mark. The blade should have dulled by now. It had been sitting in cold air, exposed to moisture and salt from his skin. But it looked newly honed—almost sharpened in its sleep. The edge shimmered faintly. And there, near the hilt, was something else.

A black residue clung to the curve just above the guard, sticky and half-dried, like coagulated tar. He touched it with a gloved finger and felt it resist him, as if it didn’t want to be removed. It smelled like burned bone and sour ammonia, and left a faint sheen on the steel even after he wiped it clean with a cloth.

He hadn’t used the blade, he was sure of that—but something had.

By the twelfth night, fewer employees lingered on shift when he arrived. The breakroom lights remained dim past the usual hour, and the fork trucks no longer moved through the corridors by the time Ed made his way to the stairwell. When he asked the floor runner if shift times had changed, the man shrugged and told him they were “adjusting staff for efficiency.” No further details were offered.

That night, Arturo Salazar failed to clock in.

Ed had grown used to seeing Art near the shipping bay, sipping vending machine coffee and watching old YouTube clips on his cracked phone. They weren’t friends, but they had spoken more than once. Art had mentioned a grandson once—some kid learning trombone—and had even given Ed a spare pair of gloves when his tore.

When Ed asked about Art’s absence, Delancey offered no real explanation.

“He quit,” Delancey said. “Didn’t want the overtime. Simple as that.”

That might’ve been enough, if Ed hadn’t found Art’s lunchbox. It sat just inside the alley near the foot of the scaffold stairs, half-hidden beneath a pile of broken-down shipping cartons. Its thermos was missing, but the cloth napkin and apple still sat inside, along with a crusted sandwich and a picture of a boy holding a music case, bent slightly at the corners.

Ed carried it back up with him and left it on the tray beside the book. When he finished his next reading, he placed the gloves Art had given him beside it.

“Don’t believe them,” he whispered into the cracks.

He had expected a response—mockery, perhaps, or some new voice—but the door remained quiet, moreso than it had been all week. The usual rustle of whispers felt muted, as though the voices behind the door had momentarily withdrawn, turning their attention elsewhere. He didn’t know whether that was better or worse.

By 4:15, Ed was sweating through his coat despite the cold. He had read the same corrupted page a dozen times now, and with each repetition, the characters seemed to dig further into his mouth, carving grooves into his speech patterns, stealing the rhythm of how he thought. When he closed his eyes, he could see the script floating beneath his eyelids—swirling curves that pulled him inward.

The door’s cracks widened. One had split clean to the base of the frame, a jagged fault line that oozed faint light. The substance inside shimmered in slow, oscillating pulses, like a heartbeat without a body.

He reached toward it with the tip of the machete, unsure why, and watched the light lean toward the blade as if recognizing it.

The residue reappeared near the hilt. He pulled the weapon back and turned it over. The black smear had reformed in the exact same spot he’d cleaned earlier.

A moment later, the voices returned, but this time they no longer begged. Instead, they spoke with purpose.

“They don’t tell you the truth, Ed. They never did.”

“You’re just a lock. You were never the key.”

“There are people in here. Real ones. Forgotten. Trafficked. Bound by lies.”

“You think that door keeps them out? It keeps us in.”

The tray beneath him creaked as he leaned forward, the machete remaining still in his hands.

“You could help us. You could open it.”

He didn’t answer—but he wanted to.

Part IV

Ed did not remember climbing the stairs that evening. The transition from the parking lot to the third-floor landing had passed without imprint. He found himself seated before the door, the tray beside him bare save for the warped book and the blade now blackened fully from hilt to tip. The surface shimmered faintly even when he looked away from it, the way a dark shape lingers behind the eyes after staring into headlights.

He no longer bothered writing in the notebook. It had stopped being a record. Now it felt more like an invitation to scrutiny, something that would betray him if found and one day be read aloud.

He had not spoken to anyone in over thirty-six hours. He hadn’t left a message for his daughter. He had eaten nothing solid since a bowl of soup the day before. To make matters worse, he had not slept well. In the hours between shifts, his dreams had become less distinct from his waking thoughts, until both settled into a strange half-life of recurring images and whispered repetitions. Always the same door, always a widening crack, always the suggestion of fingers beckoning him through.

And now, the voices were kind.

They were no longer accusatory. They no longer wept. Instead, they consoled, with a gentleness that reminded him of the first days in hospice with his wife, when she had still been lucid enough to soothe him even as her body failed her.

“You’ve done enough, Ed. We know you tried.”

“It’s not your fault. You couldn’t have known.”

“You were lied to, just like we were. But you can still help us.”

“You can still make this right.”

“Will it hurt?” he asked.

“No more than it already has.”

He stood up slowly, feeling each joint grind in protest. The cold had settled into his spine and knees, and yet there was a heat coming from the door itself, radiating outward in low waves that made his eyelids flutter and his gums ache.

He approached the frame, the machete held loosely in one hand, the book left behind. He had no need for it now. The text had changed so many times that he had ceased to recognize it, and its cadence had become impossible to maintain.

The door stood before him, silent and waiting. The cracks along its surface had widened to deep fissures, each glowing faintly with the suggestion of a world beyond—though calling it a world felt dishonest. It was a movement, an undoing, a twisting of time and place.

He raised his free hand and placed it against the metal, and found it warm to the touch.

The voices sighed in relief.

“We forgive you.”

“We see you.”

“You were never the enemy. You were only the gate.”

He closed his eyes and reached for the seam with his fingertips.

And then he was yanked backward, hard enough to send the machete clattering to the deck.

The force came from behind—two hands gripping the back of his coat and hauling him away from the door with enough strength to spin him off-balance. He stumbled, hit the railing with his shoulder, and wheeled to face the figure now standing between him and the seal.

Delancey looked worse than Ed had ever seen him. His hair was wild and damp with sweat, his collar unbuttoned, and his eyes glassy with panic. He held the book open in both hands, his knuckles white, and he was already reading.

The syllables poured from his mouth too quickly, the rhythm off, the pauses broken. He skipped lines, slurred endings, and doubled back on phrases that had already lost their structure. His voice cracked on the third stanza, and by the fifth, he was stammering.

The door began to hum.

The sound was not mechanical. It was harmonic. Deep, long, rising in volume with each fractured repetition of the book’s cadence. Ed pressed himself to the railing and watched as the fissures across the door flared, white-blue at first, then dimming into a sickly, translucent amber that revealed more than he wanted to see.

Behind the cracks, something moved, flowing across a surface that should not have existed, crawling along the underside like ink dropped into water. The form had no bones, no organs, no discernible parts—but it moved with purpose, and it moved toward them.

Delancey dropped the book.

He stumbled backward and turned toward Ed, mouth open to shout something—perhaps an order, perhaps a prayer.

He did not finish the sentence.

The door did not open in any conventional sense. It did not swing or part. It peeled, the material of it unraveling with a sound like wet canvas being torn by gloved hands. The seams split, then split again, and something stepped—or poured—through.

Ed could not describe it except to say that it was not of this world. Its mass shimmered and shifted, never fully resolving into any single shape. It had limbs, but they retracted and reformed. It had faces, but each vanished the moment he tried to count them. It stood and flowed simultaneously. It was both taller than the door and somehow flat against it. It entered without bending space and yet folded the landing inward with its weight.

Delancey screamed.

The sound was short, sharp, and final. His body collapsed inward, not as if he’d been pierced or consumed, but as if his very structure had been withdrawn. Bones dissolved beneath skin, and then the skin itself inflated, bloated with something that moved wrong beneath the surface.

The corpse stood up.

It turned to Ed with Delancey’s face slackened and sagging, his lips torn at the corners, eyes sunken to black pits with faint blue filaments twitching across their surface. The thing holding him up—whatever had crawled inside—moved his arms in uneven, jerking motions, like a broken marionette.

It opened its mouth and spoke.

Not with Delancey’s voice, but with Ed’s.

“You kept your promise.”

“You held the line.”

“Thank you for your service.”

The imitation curled the lips into a grin that split the cheeks open slightly, revealing no teeth, only the raw inside of an empty mask.

Behind it, the door throbbed again, and something else followed.

Part V

It didn’t take long.

The moment the door peeled open and the thing—no, the things—entered, time lost its shape. The fluorescent lighting along the third-floor landing snapped in rapid succession, one after the other, until Ed was left in darkness fractured only by the pale ambient light still emanating from the rent in the frame.

The first figure—if it could even be called that—had only mocked Delancey’s form as a temporary mask. Once it reached the stairs, its limbs split apart. A second figure, limbless and fluid, slithered up from the threshold, dragging behind it something that looked almost like a spine but moved independently and flickered between visible and unseen like a film skipping frames.

They passed by Ed without touching him.

That fact alone sent a tremor through his legs. Not relief, not exactly. Something closer to resignation, tinged with the knowledge that he had been chosen—or spared—for a reason he didn’t want to know.

The first time the screaming began, it did not come from inside the factory. It came from the alley below.

Ed crept forward and leaned over the edge of the scaffolding. His joints burned from the cold, from the strain of resisting the impulse to run or leap or simply close his eyes and surrender to the inevitable. Far below, near the loading dock entrance, he saw what remained of Greg Hiller—the night supervisor who always parked by the gate and never smiled at anyone. The man’s body twitched in the sodium vapor light, each spasm more violent than the last. His limbs flailed independently, no longer controlled by any recognizable nervous system. His head lolled backward, mouth open in a gaping O, but no sound came out—only a dull, wet grinding, like teeth being drawn across brick.

The second scream, that of a woman, but irregularly high, came from inside. It was followed by shouts, the clatter of metal, and something akin to laughter, though Ed couldn’t tell whether it came from the invaders or the men and women being consumed.

He turned from the railing and descended the steps.

The stairs no longer felt entirely stable. The metal flexed beneath his boots, not from age or wear, but from interference—interference with what was. Space around the plant had softened, as though reality itself had been stretched taut and now trembled under the pressure of being violated.

Inside, the corridors stank of vinegar, but now there was something else beneath it—ozone, sulfur, the distinct chemical bite of something decaying rapidly and unnaturally. When he passed the breakroom, the window had cracked outward, as though something had burst from within. A mop bucket lay on its side nearby, but the water was no longer clear. It shimmered with colorless movement, as if filled with insects too small to see.

Ed found the book again near the base of the stairwell. It had fallen from Delancey’s hand during the struggle, or perhaps it had been dropped on purpose—abandoned in the moment the cadence failed and the seal broke. Its cover was warped and steaming, as though recently removed from a fire. He knelt beside it, hands trembling, and opened it.

Every single page was blank.

What remained was the same dull beige as the fog now seeping through the corridors.

He flipped through them with increasing speed, as if the act of turning might re-summon the text. It did not.

Somewhere to his right, a door exploded outward. A man staggered through it, holding one arm against his chest, the other hand pressed to the side of his head. His mouth moved, lips fluttering, but nothing came out.

The man’s knees buckled, and he fell. As he hit the ground, Ed could see his mouth had sealed shut, grown over with new skin.

Jubilant, exultant voices emerged again from behind a nearby ventilation duct. These voices were not like the suggestive, coaxing ones from the door, but joyous. And Ed knew, as if via some buried, ancient instinct, that it was not joy for the victims, but of release.

He stepped over the man’s twitching body and pressed onward, drawn toward the north side of the plant by forces he didn’t understand, toward the windows that faced the field and the tree line.

The screams were fewer now, as though the process had advanced, and what was left required no further resistance.

When he reached the factory’s double doors, they stood open. The security latch had been sheared clean off—not broken or twisted, but entirely erased, as though the concept of the latch had been deleted from existence. Beyond the doorway, the gravel lot shimmered with the same unstable haze that had leaked from the book and the door before it. The vehicles parked in their crooked lines were half-melted. One of the trucks now bore two fronts, joined cab to cab, its tires bent inward in unnatural angles that defied any understanding of mechanics.

Ed stepped out onto the gravel and felt something give way beneath his boot. He looked down and found that he had crushed a length of long, narrow bone, sharpened to a point at one end. It resembled a rib, but not one belonging to anything that should walk upright.

He did not recoil, and kept walking.

The sun rose slowly, though rose was the wrong word. It emerged, bleeding into view not from the horizon but from above it, descending slowly at first, then halting midway through its motion as if confused about its own trajectory. Its light was red. Not a hazy, warm red, but raw—a hemorrhage of radiance that painted the sky in strokes of coagulated color. The clouds that drifted across it did not move with the wind. They curled instead, inverting upon themselves, spiraling inward toward a single point that had no fixed location.

Sirens wailed in the distance.

They were not the shriek of ambulances or fire trucks. These had a different pitch, less urgent and more ceremonial, with long tones that rose and fell. Ed recognized them in the same way one recognizes a melody once heard in a dream. It wasn’t an emergency signal—it was a summoning.

Something passed overhead, large and unseen, its winged shadow stretched across the lot. It lingered briefly, and in its presence, the world seemed to hesitate.

He looked back at the building, and discovered the door was gone.

The third floor still bore the landing. The scaffolding remained, rusted and crooked. But the wall had healed. The cut that had once housed the strange door was now seamless brick, as though it had never been opened, never even existed.

Ed said nothing.

He walked to his car.

The Buick had survived, though the passenger-side mirror now hung from its hinge like a broken finger. The radio buzzed when he turned the key, filling the cabin with the sound of static filtered through deep, underwater clicks. He let it play.

He drove until the factory disappeared in the mirror.

The road ahead was quiet, but something followed—not in the rearview, or on the highway, but in him. The words from the book, long forgotten by the world, had been transferred, and still resonated deeply within. Unfortunately for Ed, they did not vanish with the ink.

And as the horizon loomed, Ed understood the truth.

The opening of the door had never been a singular event, but a test.

And others, now, were waiting.