Chapter 7: The Open Door

Chapter 7: The Open Door

Liam’s grip on Chloe’s arm was the only real thing in a world that had come completely undone. He was pulling her, dragging her stumbling feet away from the monstrous stage at the end of the court, back toward the dying fire where Elara stood swaying, a ghost in the headlights’ glare. The roar of his own blood was a storm in his ears, but it couldn't drown out the sound of Kian’s voice, clear and serene, as he began his final, terrifying recitation.

“A man asked the universe…” Kian’s voice carried, imbued with a strange, resonant power. He was no longer shouting; he was pronouncing a truth, delivering a verdict.

Liam didn’t want to look, but he couldn’t stop himself. He glanced back over his shoulder. Kian stood atop the impossible Ford Chimera, his arms slightly raised, his face tilted towards the dark, newly-formed fifteenth house. He looked like a priest making an offering to a hungry, silent god.

“…‘What is the greatest joke ever told?’”

The air grew thick, heavy with static. A faint, metallic taste, like ozone after a lightning strike, filled Liam’s mouth. The deep hum that had preceded the house’s arrival intensified, vibrating up through the soles of his boots. He could feel it in his bones, a frequency that felt fundamentally wrong, designed to unmake things.

Kian paused, a beat of perfect, theatrical timing. A slow, beatific smile spread across his face, the smile of a man who had finally solved the riddle of his own existence. He delivered the final line, not as a punchline, but as a quiet, terrible revelation.

“The universe replied, ‘You are.’”

The words did not echo. They were simply absorbed by the profound silence, swallowed whole. And then, the fifteenth house responded.

Click.

The tarnished brass light fixture above the front door blinked on. It did not flicker to life; it was simply off one moment and on the next. It cast a single, cone of putrid, sickly yellow light onto the porch below—the same jaundiced, unhealthy color as the mustard-yellow house beside it, the same decayed shade as the harvest gold paint on a house down the curve. It was the color of old bruises, of sickness, of decay.

Then, with a movement that was utterly silent and impossibly smooth, the dark wood door swung inward.

Chloe let out a sound that was less than a scream, a strangled, tearing noise deep in her throat. Liam froze, his desperate retreat forgotten, his feet rooted to the spot by sheer, paralyzing horror. Elara, her eyes wide and glassy, stared, her artist’s mind trying and failing to process the sight, the camera lying forgotten at her feet.

The doorway did not reveal a hall or a room. It opened into a void.

It was not the simple blackness of an unlit space. It was a churning, dimensional wrongness. Liam’s mind recoiled from it, unable to comprehend what his eyes were seeing. Shapes with too many angles and impossible curves folded in on themselves. Colors he had no name for squirmed and writhed like living things—deep, venous purples and livid greens, the very same shades of the bruises described in the second joke’s maddening text. It was a wound in the fabric of reality, a glimpse into the guts of the world, and it was hideously, sickeningly alive. It was a silent, geometric scream.

Kian’s smile widened. He had found his masterpiece. This was the "truth" he had been so desperate to capture.

In a state of silent, reverent trance, he lowered his arms. He stepped gracefully from the roof of the car onto the hood, his movements fluid and certain. He did not look back. His friends, his life, his world—they were all part of a lesser performance he had now transcended. He stepped off the hood onto the cracked asphalt of the driveway and began to walk, his pace steady and unhurried, towards the open door.

“Kian!” Chloe’s voice was a shattered whisper.

He did not falter. He walked across the dead, weed-choked lawn, his feet making no sound. He stepped onto the wide, dark porch and into the cone of sickly yellow light. For a moment, he was a perfect silhouette against the squirming, impossible chaos that waited within. He reached the threshold. He did not hesitate. He simply took one final step, crossing from the world they knew into… that.

He was not consumed or devoured. He was just… gone. One moment he was there, and the next he was part of the impossible geometry, his form lost in the churning, bruised colors.

For a single, eternal second, the doorway remained open, a gaping mouth of madness.

Then, with a sound like a giant’s snapping fingers, the door slammed shut. The yellow light blinked out. The world plunged back into the dim illumination of the truck’s headlights and the dying fire.

And the house was gone.

It didn’t crumble or fade. It simply ceased to be. Where the fifteenth house had stood, there was now only the impenetrable, ancient wall of the forest, the gnarled trees standing exactly as they had before, as if nothing had ever been there. The air, which had been humming with a terrible energy, was now utterly, deathly still.

The sight broke the spell of horror that had held them frozen. Liam’s mind, which had stalled in the face of the impossible, rebooted with a single, primal command: FLEE.

“TRUCK! NOW!” he bellowed, the sound tearing from his own throat. He half-dragged, half-carried a sobbing, stumbling Chloe. He shoved her bodily towards the passenger side door. “GET IN!”

He turned back for Elara. She was standing, her face a blank, white mask, her dark eyes fixed on the empty space where the house had been.

“Ela! Move!”

She didn’t respond. He grabbed her arm, his grip bruising. He felt the tremor that ran through her entire body. He pulled her along, her feet dragging on the ground. He threw open the rear door of the truck’s extended cab and pushed her inside. She crumpled onto the seat without a word.

Liam scrambled behind the wheel, his hands shaking so violently he could barely fit the key in the ignition. The engine roared to life, a beautiful, profane, mechanical sound that was the anthem of the real world. He didn’t check on their gear, didn’t think about the campfire still smoldering in the roundabout. He stomped on the gas.

The truck fishtailed on the loose gravel, tires screaming in protest. He wrenched the wheel, swinging the vehicle around in a wide, frantic arc, the headlights slashing across the silent, watching faces of the remaining—thirteen? fourteen?—houses. He didn’t dare to count again.

He aimed the truck down the overgrown track that had brought them here and floored it. Branches scraped and screeched against the metal, the sound like the claws of some great beast trying to drag them back. The truck bucked and jolted over the uneven ground, but Liam didn’t slow. He drove with a cold, focused fury, his knuckles white on the steering wheel.

After a hundred yards that felt like a hundred miles, the tires hit the packed dirt of the forest road. They were out.

He didn't stop. He pushed the truck faster, the engine whining, sending them careening down the dark, winding road. Beside him, Chloe was weeping, her face buried in her hands, her shoulders shaking with silent, racking sobs. In the rearview mirror, he could see the pale, still shape of Elara in the back seat, her vacant eyes staring at nothing.

They had left Kian. Or rather, they had left the place that had taken him. They were three now. Survivors of a performance they would never be able to explain, their minds forever scarred by the sight of an open door and the terrible, cosmic joke that lay behind it. They were fleeing into the night, but Liam knew, with a certainty that chilled him to his soul, that a part of them would be trapped in Beasts O’ Field Court forever.