Chapter 1: The Whiskey Door

Chapter 1: The Whiskey Door

The cheap whiskey burned a familiar path down Elio’s throat, a controlled demolition of his senses. It was both the poison and the key. He slumped deeper into the sagging armchair, the one facing its twin across the room. The other chair was empty, a void at the heart of his desperate ritual.

His apartment was a shrine to failure. Wires snaked across the floor, connecting three cheap webcams to a wheezing laptop. Each camera was aimed at the empty chair, a silent, hopeful audience. Mirrors, scavenged from thrift stores and back alleys, leaned against every wall, their surfaces reflecting a hundred fractured versions of the scene: a hundred tired men in a hundred cluttered rooms, all staring at a hundred empty chairs.

Three weeks. Three weeks since Sarah had vanished. The police had offered sympathetic shrugs and a case number. Friends had offered casseroles and platitudes. Elio offered himself this: self-immolation by degrees, hoping the ashes would reveal a path.

He gripped the tumbler, the condensation cold against his skin. “Come on, Sarah,” he mumbled, his voice a raw scrape. “Just a sign. Anything.”

This wasn't magic, not really. It was a glitch in his own wiring, a fault line in his soul that cracked open under pressure. Grief had done it the first time, after his father’s funeral. He’d woken up on the ceiling, looking down at his own sleeping form, the world a silent, grey diorama. But it was alcohol that made it predictable. Alcohol was the solvent that dissolved the barrier between here and… somewhere else. It was the whiskey that opened the door.

He closed his eyes, focusing on the memory of his sister’s laughter, trying to use it as a beacon. The room began to tilt. The low hum of the refrigerator faded, replaced by a high-pitched whine that seemed to vibrate directly in his skull. It was starting. The nauseating, gut-wrenching lurch of detachment. His limbs felt heavy, then weightless.

He was rising. Not physically, but something inside him was pulling free, stretching like old elastic. He pushed, trying to cross the room to the empty chair, to project himself into that space where Sarah should be.

But the connection was weak, staticky. He didn't see Sarah. Instead, another image bled through the darkness, one he knew with a sickening familiarity. An image that had haunted his sleep for a decade.

Milky, hollow eyes.

They stared from a face he couldn't see, devoid of pupil or iris, glowing with a soft, dead light. They weren't angry or sad; they were simply empty, an all-consuming vacancy. The vision was a psychic scar, left over from the day he’d found his father, slumped in his own armchair, gone. These were the eyes he imagined had watched him go.

The vision was a harbinger of the other side, but it was the wrong one. A dead end.

“No,” Elio gasped, the connection snapping. He was violently shoved back into his body, the return so jarring that whiskey sloshed over the rim of his glass, cold and sticky on his hand. The room swam back into focus, the hum of the fridge a mocking comfort. Failure, again. He slammed the glass down on the end table, the sound cracking the silence. He was no closer to finding Sarah, just another step closer to the bottom of the bottle.

That’s when the knock came.

It wasn’t the hesitant rap of a neighbor or the rhythmic thud of a delivery driver. It was three sharp, deliberate knocks that resonated with absolute confidence. They cut through his drunken haze like a shard of ice. It was nearly midnight. No one came here. He hadn’t had an intentional visitor in months.

He froze, listening. After a beat of silence, the knock came again, just as sharp, just as patient. Whoever was out there knew he was in. They weren't going away.

With a groan, Elio heaved himself out of the chair, his joints protesting. He navigated the maze of wires and junk, his heart thudding with a paranoid rhythm. He peered through the peephole and felt the blood drain from his face.

He knew her instantly, though it had been years. Time had done nothing to her, which was somehow the most terrifying thing of all.

Liora.

He pulled the door open. She stood there, a specter of impossible elegance on his grimy welcome mat. Her silver hair was pulled back in a severe, intricate braid, and her dark coat was tailored with a precision that made his own frayed sweater feel like a shroud. She appeared to be in her fifties, but her eyes, dark and sharp, held an ancient, predatory intelligence that defied age. A faint, knowing smile played on her lips.

“Hello, Elio,” she said, her voice smooth as velvet, cool as a tombstone. “Still trying to open doors with cheap whiskey? I’d have thought you’d have learned by now.”

He could only stare, his mind struggling to bridge the chasm of years. Liora had been a “family friend,” a peripheral figure who had a knack for appearing just before the worst moments of his life. Before his mother’s final decline. Before the affair that had torched his last real relationship. Now, here she was again. An omen in a designer coat.

She didn't wait for an invitation. She swept past him into the apartment, her gaze sweeping over his pathetic setup—the cameras, the mirrors, the empty chair. There was no shock on her face, only a kind of pitying amusement.

“How…” Elio started, his throat dry. “What are you doing here?”

“An interesting arrangement,” Liora mused, ignoring his question as she ran a gloved finger over the dusty surface of a mirror. “Crude. Like using a sledgehammer for brain surgery. You’re lucky you haven’t invited something truly awful in.”

“Get out,” he said, the words lacking any real force.

Her head snapped toward him, and for a second, her smile vanished. The look in her eyes was one of pure, chilling ownership. “You’re looking for Sarah,” she stated. It wasn’t a question.

The floor seemed to drop out from under him. “How do you know that?”

“I know about the glitch in your code, Elio. The talent you treat like a party trick.” She took a step closer, her perfume, something like night-blooming jasmine and cold stone, filling the stale air. “You feel it, don't you? A part of you can slip the leash of your flesh. You think it’s a curse. It’s a gift. And you are wasting it, drowning it in ethanol and self-pity.”

Every word was a perfectly aimed dart, striking at the heart of his deepest insecurities. She saw him. Not just the mess of his apartment, but the mess of his soul.

“Sarah has the same gift,” Liora continued, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “Latent, untrained. Like a light shining in a very dark forest. It attracts attention. It attracts hunger.”

A cold dread, far more potent than the whiskey, coiled in his stomach. The milky, hollow eyes flashed in his mind.

“She’s still there, Elio. I can feel her. Her little light is fading, but it hasn’t been extinguished. Not yet.” She stopped directly in front of him, so close he could see the complex, star-like patterns in her dark irises. “But you won’t reach her like this. Pounding on the walls of reality will only get your hands bloody. You will never find the door.”

He was trapped, cornered by his own desperation. This woman, this ghost from his past, was speaking the language of his secret madness, and she was the only one.

“What do you want?” he finally managed to ask.

Her smile returned, slow and predatory. “I want to offer you a choice. You can stay here in your nest of wires and mirrors, drinking yourself into an early grave while your sister is consumed. Or you can come with me. Now.”

She held out a hand, her leather glove immaculate against the grime of his world.

“I can show you how to walk through the door, Elio. I can lead you right to her.” She paused, letting the offer hang in the air, a lifeline woven from poison. “But be warned. The path to Sarah goes through the heart of the dark. And on that path, you will no longer belong to yourself. You will belong to me.”

Elio looked from her outstretched hand to the empty chair where he’d failed, then back to her ancient, waiting eyes. Hope, terror, and the bitter taste of whiskey churned within him. He had no other path. No other choice.

Slowly, deliberately, he nodded.

Liora’s smile widened. It did not reach her eyes. “Good boy,” she said softly. “The first lesson begins now.”