Nothing Beyond It

The door opened by itself. A heavy, grinding thud swept up the stairway and through the floorboards beneath my chair. Until then, I had heard nothing. I was enjoying the quiet. That was what I told myself, anyway. No traffic on a Sunday night. No sounds from other apartments. I had chosen this penthouse in this location for its silence. I had dismissed the observation of a colleague that Sentosa has the highest concentration of ghosts in Singapore. Now I sat listening to that silence, waiting for the usual components of it to reassert themselves.

My gaze snapped away from the glass of red I’d been contemplating to the dark opening now revealing itself halfway up the staircase. It was that door – the one jammed shut since the day I moved in. The one the real estate agent had joked concealed the previous owner’s victims. Yesterday, suddenly overwhelmed with curiosity, I had braced my foot against the frame, straining to open the door until my knees buckled, and it hadn’t budged an inch. Now, it glided backwards of its own accord. The wood shrieked as the groan shifted pitch into a high, taut whine.

I glanced back towards the deck doors and remembered my first night here: champagne in the spa pool, folded towels beside us, the sunset beyond. My guest knew me well enough not to ask whether I could afford the place. “Worth it just for this,” she said, and I nodded. Below us, windows caught the last orange sunlight before turning grey. There was nothing between us and the sky. Then the sun slipped away, as it does in the tropics, and something moved beneath the nearest towel. I mistook it for a shadow until a glossy, improbably large cockroach emerged. Another followed. Then the boards seemed to move. Insects streamed up through the decking like guests arriving at a party and circled the pool in a dry, rustling procession. My friend stopped halfway through her sentence. The towels were an arm’s length away. Neither of us reached for them. The insects crossed our sandals and the place beside the steps where I would have to put my feet. We clambered out together, left the towels and champagne, and scrambled across the boards. Inside, I slammed the sliding door and pressed my palm against the glass. They kept circling. Not one followed us to the threshold. “An infestation,” I had said. I would ring someone in the morning. My friend stood beside me and said nothing. I knew the night was over. Now the glass reflected only my chair and the open door behind it.

I kept looking obstinately out of the window, but the stairway door beckoned in the reflection: a dark seam where there should have been a jammed door. I turned to stare at it directly, then back at the glass. Both images were consistent. That should have reassured me. Instead, I recalled the apartment viewing: the agent opening cupboards, pointing out storage, leaving that one door until last. Obviously concerned at my reaction to his joke about dead bodies, he had said there was nothing beyond it worth worrying about. Pipes, I had assumed, or perhaps a storage area. When I couldn’t prise the door open, I had stood on the balcony and traced the apartment’s outline. The stairway ran against an exterior wall. There was no extension beyond it, no window, no recess deep enough for a room. Whatever the door concealed must fit inside the thickness of the wall. I looked down at my wine. Its surface was still trembling. I took a sip to compose myself.

A wave of air swept over me. Warm, fetid and wet. The hairs on my arms stood erect. The door had swung to a stop with a popping click. The silence that now followed demanded that I move. I took another fortifying swig, wishing it was something stronger, as I rose unsteadily, my heart hammering. A silent invitation settled over the landing, thick and demanding, as I stepped towards the beckoning black threshold.

I stopped short of the landing. There had to be a draught, a change in the weather, some logical reason for wood to swell one day and release the next. I waited for the door to swing back as I approached. It stayed open. I said, “Hello?” My question went into the opening without an echo. Then, from somewhere beyond it, came the barely perceptible, but unmistakable, click of a glass being set down on a table.

I took my phone from my pocket and switched on the torch. The beam picked out the chipped paint on the frame and a pale sprinkling of dust at its foot. Beyond that, nothing. I moved the phone from side to side, looking for a shelf or a back wall. The light did not fade into distance. It stopped. I put my free hand through the opening. My fingertips remained visible until they passed the frame; then I could see only my wrist. I snatched the hand back and flexed it in the light. Five fingers. The relief I felt counting them embarrassed me. There must be something wrong with the angle. I lowered the phone towards the threshold. For a moment the light caught a strip of flooring on the other side, smooth and polished, running away from me. I could not see where it ended. At least there was something to stand on. I held the phone out ahead of me.

As I drew back, the words came from beyond the doorway: “Worth it just for this.” I felt them rather than heard them. My friend had said that on the deck. The agent had used the same words at the viewing, his voice dropping into a low cadence as he quoted the previous owner about the view. I had laughed then. Now I waited for more. Nothing followed. I leaned towards the opening, trying to attach a voice to the words. I needed to get a grip. I put one hand on the door frame.

The warmth tugged at my skin, an unnerving force drawing me across the doorstep. Beyond lay that absolute pitch-black void. Impossibly, the door led outside – but with no clues as to where. I stepped through, not knowing what to expect. A faint dry rustling several steps ahead reminded me of those cockroaches. I blinked against the suffocating blackness that surrounded me, unable to find a wall, a floor, any sort of horizon. One, two, three, four. I counted my steps as I moved forward into the sultry murk. The air smelled of damp earth and something stale, like breathing through wet wool. What sounded like a dried bug wing crushed loudly under my foot on the fifth step.

At step six, something brushed my knuckles. I stopped and felt along a curved wooden edge: the back of a chair. Beneath my fingers, its polished surface gave way to three deep notches. I knew those marks. I had noticed them on the chair upstairs when I moved in. It was one of the things the previous owner had left behind. I tossed it in the skip bin when I moved my furniture in. How did it get here? I reached for the seat. The polished wood was warm – not sunlight warm, but the heavy, clammy heat of someone who had only just stood up from it.

I lifted my hand and held it against my cheek. The warmth lingered in my palm. I wanted the chair to be merely old furniture, something I had mistaken in the dark, but my thumb found the lowest notch again. There had been a pale splinter inside it. I had caught my sleeve on it while carrying the chair downstairs. I felt for the splinter now. It pricked my wrist. Behind the chair, my outstretched fingers met the straight edge of a table. I stopped before exploring its surface. Furniture meant a room. A room meant walls. I could follow the table round until I found one, keep my hand on that wall and work back to the door. I edged sideways. The chair scraped against the floor. I had not pushed it. I let go. The sound stopped. For several breaths I stood with my hand suspended where the chair had been, unwilling to find out whether it was still there.

Whatever had been drawing me on began to feel more deliberate and I shivered. A sudden panic gripped me as I reached step twelve. Nothing had changed. I was walking blind and getting nowhere. I wheeled around, hoping to see the door shimmering behind me. Nothing but darkness. I stood still, trying to remember whether I had turned while feeling for the chair. My twelve steps were no longer consistent with a straight line. I took one pace back. Somewhere ahead, a board answered with a dry click. I waited. It waited. I moved again, more carefully, and heard the same small sound after my foot settled. I tried telling myself it was an echo, though my voice had found none. On the third step I stopped halfway through shifting my weight. The answering click came anyway. My raised foot hovered above the floor until my leg began trembling. There was no second sound. I kept my foot suspended, muscles shaking against the dark. The silence stretched until my lungs burned for air. Then, directly in front of my face – directly on the end of my nose – came a waft of warm, wet air as if exhaled simultaneously by someone else. I recoiled blindly, desperate to retrace my steps, reaching tentatively into the void to find the door frame. My fingertips brushed reassuring timber. I felt further along before trusting it, found the paint chipped where I had braced my foot yesterday, and scrambled back inside. I slammed the door shut and locked it with a confidence I had to reach for.

I kept my palm against the door until my breathing slowed. On this side, the wood was cold. I checked the lock, then checked it again. From behind it came a soft scrape, followed by another, as though someone were pulling a chair across a floor. I leaned closer before I could stop myself. The sound ceased. Above me, in the room I had just left, a floorboard creaked. Chest heaving, I clambered back upstairs to grab my wine, desperate for a drink. The glass was gone. The wooden tabletop was entirely bare. The quiet in the room seemed to curl and gather around my shoulders, chuckling under its breath, moist like the air behind the door.

I switched on the lamp beside my chair. Its shade threw the familiar oval of light across the wall. In the balcony doors I saw my books, the cushion I had pushed aside, the dark square of the television. I checked beneath the table, then between the chair and the wall. No glass. I must have carried it somewhere. People put drinks down without noticing, especially when they’re tired, especially after wine. I tried to reconstruct the last few minutes: I had got up, gone down the stairs to the open door, come back. There had to be a missing movement. I wanted very badly to remember it. Outside, a car passed on the road six floors below. I listened until its engine faded. The ordinary world was still there, on the other side of the balcony door. Outside felt safe and I nearly opened it. Instead, I turned towards the downstairs kitchen.

As I approached, I remembered the agent taking an inventory of the things left in the house. He had counted the chairs twice. One at the table, one beside the window. “He always kept space for a visitor,” he had said, and then moved briskly on to show me the deck.

The kitchen light was off as usual. I seldom turn on many lights at night. I kept focused on the doorway and walked slowly enough to hear the boards beneath me. At the entrance I stopped and sniffed. Red wine: I could recognise it beneath the damp wool smell that had followed me. A spill, perhaps. I waited for the refrigerator to start. It clicked, and its familiar vibration travelled through the floor. I took another step. Nothing stood between me and the switch. Nothing moved in the dark. Yet turning on the light felt like an intrusion, like stumbling into my own surprise party. I put my fingers against the wall and flicked the switch.

As I peered inside, my red wine sat defiantly on the counter. Beside it sat a second glass. Poured just how I like. Waiting.