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Gerard Keay opened the door to his apartment and immediately sighed loudly.
On the opposite side of the apartment, in clear view of the entrance, was a tall mustard yellow door. Its glossy black handle gleamed as if the newly polished. It looked as if it had been there for as long as the apartment had stood, and anyone else may have been able to convince themselves of that, because what else was there to assume? It wasn’t like doors could just appear and disappear at will.
However, Gerard, who thought of himself as Gerry even if no one else did, was certain it had not been there before he had unlocked his front door.
Ignoring the door, he threw his bag and coat onto the table and moved to the couch, all but collapsing onto it. The day had been a long, gruelling one spent chasing leads that had gone nowhere. He certainly did not have the energy for the door’s nonsense.
It had began following him several weeks ago. The first time it had appeared in his apartment, he completely avoided the entire building for three days straight, opting to sleep on the cot in the archives instead. He had eventually been lured back by the need for a hot shower and to get away from Elias’s incessant nosiness — he had an uncanny knack for appearing when you least wanted him to. When he’d cautiously stepped back into the apartment, the door had been gone — only for it to reappear in the Institute bathroom the next day, as if to make a point.
By now, Gerry had established that it couldn’t do anything unless he knocked on or opened it, and obviously he wasn’t going to do that. He wasn’t entirely foolish, no matter what Gertrude might dryly remark.
The thing was — the door seemed to have realised he had no interest in opening it. But instead of giving up and finding some other poor soul to torment, it had only began appearing more frequently. But when before it had seemed hungry, now it seemed… playful, almost. Its intention seemed to have shifted to annoying him as much as possible.
It’s working, he thought dryly as he opened his eyes to see the door had moved to the wall right in front of him. It had replaced the poster he had tacked on there months ago in an attempt to make the apartment feel homely, and he was certain it wouldn’t do him the courtesy of putting it back.
Often, when Gerry made an indication that he wanted to use a door — the fridge door, for example — it would shift to replace it, making him wait anywhere between a few minutes to close to three hours before it moved somewhere else.
It was also fond of appearing right behind people he was talking to. Of course, it would disappear again immediately if they turned around, trying to see what he was glaring at.
He wasn’t afraid of it anymore, not really. It was possible that it was luring him into a false sense of security — highly likely, actually — but Gerry had grown up around monsters. He knew how to read and understand them better than he did humans, most of the time. Even the ones that were purposefully unexplainable and impossible to understand — like the door — he could learn to read. In a way, knowing something was unpredictable was its own kind of predictability.
The point was, as much as Gerry was sure the door would love to eat him given half the chance, he could say with relative confidence that its motives were more harmless — and more annoying, unfortunately.
That was probably why Gerry had let his guard down enough that, when that night the door had replaced his bathroom door for the third time in a row, Gerry snatched a marker from a nearby shelf and scribbled GO AWAY in messy letters on the very centre of it.
He froze, realising what he had done. Dropping the pen, he took a step back, ready for the door to open and who-knows what to step out and drag him to who-knows where.
Minutes passed, but nothing happened. Gerry took another cautious step backwards. When fifteen minutes had passed (he counted), he let out a slow breath and turned on his heel to grab his emergency duffel and his leather coat. The door had proved it could follow him wherever he went, but like hell was Gerry going back to sleep now.
He wandered the streets of London for hours, but no yellow doors appeared. He headed to the institute, but it was closed and Gerry didn’t want to go in badly enough to bother picking the locks. It was not like the institute had ever protected him from the door, anyway.
When the sun began rising with no sign of the door, Gerry finally admitted to himself what he had suspected the entire time: the door was probably waiting for him back at the apartment. It was waiting for him to return to it, and then…
Gerry had no idea.
He considered his options. He could probably avoid his apartment for a few weeks, maybe a couple months. It would be pretty easy to sell the lease and find a new one, and hope the door did not follow him there.
But the thing was — Gerry liked his current apartment. It didn’t quite feel like a home, not yet. But it was the closest thing he had had in a long, long time.
Besides, if the door was going to extract revenge, it would happen regardless of whether Gerry moved apartments or not. He refused to spend ages living in paranoia — more paranoia than usual, anyway. He might as well get it over with.
The walk down the corridor to his apartment felt much longer than usual. Gerry pulled his door open cautiously, and peered inside. His eyes went straight to the bathroom door, but it had returned to its normal, plain white. He scanned the apartment, but could not see it anywhere.
Letting out the breath he had not realised he was holding, he stepped inside, unzipping his jacket as he did. Turning to hang it on the hook, Gerry let out an involuntary yelp.
The door had appeared right next to Gerry’s front door, in the place his coat hook normally was. That was gone, of course. Gerry looked the door up and down and realised the writing was, too.
He eyed the door for a long moment, and when it did not move, he turned to put his coat and duffel in his room and have a shower, and maybe a nap. A less-tired Gerry could deal with potentially revenge-fuelled doors later.
When he woke up — his phone informing him he had managed four hours of sleep — he was surprised to find both him and his bedroom intact and as he had left them. He wandered out of his room to make himself a cup of coffee, and spotted the door where the fridge usually was.
It seemed to have simply returned to being as inconvenient as possible. Gerry frowned at it as he slotted the pod into the coffee machine. It could clearly remove any graffiti inflicted to it. He wondered — what else it would tolerate being put on it?
It would be both incredibly dangerous and incredibly stupid to test it, but Gerry was not covered in eye tattoos for nothing. He had always been a curious person, and the urge to find out, to know, was probably only encouraged by the entity he relied on for protection.
Besides, it was the only way he might have to annoy it back.
He managed to hold off for a day, but when it continuously appeared in the floor right in front of him at the institute, trying to trip him up, he caved and drew a hand flipping the bird on it. Miraculously, it stopped trying to trip him up, and the next time it appeared next to him, the hand was gone.
It became a bit of a game, from then on. Whenever the door became too annoying, Gerry would grab the nearest writing utensil and draw a quick sketch — often, something rude. Sometimes, the door would then stop bothering him quite so incessantly, but sometimes the door only seemed encouraged.
“You shouldn’t be writing on the doors of the institute, you know,” a short, bookish man with sharp glasses and sharper eyes told Gerry one time as he painstakingly drew a cartoon of a door being set on fire.
“Then it should stop following me,” Gerry replied, barely glancing at him.
There was a scoff. “Who are you, exactly?” The man asked.
Gerry finished the drawing and turned to walk down the corridor, ignoring the man’s protests. “I work with the archivist,” he called over his shoulder. The door echoed faintly with strange laughter.
When he made it home, Gerry pulled out his paints and a small canvas he had bought ages ago. He had had an artwork in his head for a while, and his hands had been itching to paint the entire day. He settled down on the couch, not able to muster up the ability to care if he got it covered in paint.
This was his favourite place to be — paintbrush in hand, no expectations from anyone for him to perform or say the right thing or act the right way. Just a story he could tell himself, in the blending of colours and manipulation of lines.
At some point, Gerry was vaguely aware the door appeared next to him as he painted, but it made no attempts to interrupt him, so Gerry let it be, besides a teasing swipe of purple paint along the side. It was surprisingly companionable.
This, too, quickly became a tradition for them: whenever Gerry pulled out a canvas or sketchbook, the door would appear behind him. It was flattering, Gerry thought, that a door that could go anywhere it pleased seemed to enjoy watching him draw. It said a lot about Gerry’s social life that painting next to a door that could and would eat him was the highlight of his day.
It was probably inevitable, then, that Gerry’s two habits of drawing on the door and drawing with the door would culminate into Gerry painting swirl of vines and thorns around the door handle. It had started with a quick swipe of green paint in an attempt to annoy it, then squinting at the accidentally even and gently curved line. It was too aesthetically pleasing to leave alone.
The painting was completed quickly, with blue flowers peaking through the mess of thorns. Gerry rocked back on his heels to look at the painting in its entirety, then nodded to himself, satisfied. He got up to scrounge for food, and thought nothing more on the matter.
When the painting was still there the next day, however, Gerry paused. Nothing he had drawn on the door had lasted overnight before, and the feeling this realisation left in his stomach was one he was not brave enough to put into words.
Instead, he grabbed a marker and sat cross-legged in front of it, and began a quick sketch of an owl — Gerry had been consumed in figure studies of owls, recently.
The door was still and silent, making no attempt to creak or twist strangely or have footsteps echo from behind it. It reminded Gerry of a person holding still in an attempt to not interrupt him.
Gerry finished the shading, and the door a quick pat — not a knock, never a knock — and asked, “Do you like it?”
The door did not respond, but when the owl painting also stayed, Gerry took it as a yes.
Things continued as normal. Gerry helped Gertrude interview a guy who had had an encounter with some clowns — another dead end, unsurprisingly. He continued to draw mocking cartoons whenever the door was annoying, and the door continued getting rid of them. It still watched him draw, however, and it never got rid of the vines or the owl.
Gerry added a skeleton with a robotic arm, and a stylised moon. He drew an eye, which turned out to be a mistake. It disappeared within a minute of being completed, and the door made no appearances for the rest of the week. When is finally came back, Gerry drew an apologetic dagger. He didn’t think too hard about the way his shoulders relaxed when the door had finally come back.
It was a week later that Gerry got the idea. He looked up a few designs on a library computer for inspiration, then beelined back to the apartment, feeling strangely excited.
He didn’t see the door upon entering the apartment, but when he exited his bedroom with an armful of paintbrushes and acrylics, the door had appeared by the couch, Gerry’s usual painting spot. He smiled, despite himself.
He wanted the painting to be higher up on the door, so he held a palate in the crook of him arm, balancing it awkwardly so it wouldn’t spill. He dipped into the dark blue he had mixed, and placed the first line just below eye level.
He worked for hours. By the end, his knees hurt from how many times he had crouched to fetch more paint, and his arm was loudly complaining.
Gerry carefully placed the palate down, then less carefully through himself onto the couch, gazing up at the newest addition to the door.
It was a spiral, deep ocean blue at the centre, then branching out into other colours in a pattern reminiscent of tie dye as it spiralled down the door thirty centimetres. But if you looked closer, the spiral was made up of interlocking geometric shapes, that shifted and warped into each other nonsensically. When looked at for too long, the spiral seemed to vanish — the shapes the only thing that could be seen.
If he was being honest, Gerry was pretty damn proud of it.
Suddenly, the silence felt too raw, charged with — something, so Gerry hastily pulled himself back to his feet. “I— uh. I hope you like it,” he said, and got the hell out of there.
He needed to do something stupidly dangerous to rid himself of the displaced feeling in his stomach.
Hours later, well past midnight, Gerry fumbled the keys of his apartment smelling of smoke and fingertips coated in ash. He hummed a song he had heard on a passing radio, trying to get it out of his head — it was annoyingly catchy, he should play one of his—
There was a man standing in his apartment. Gerry stilled, cataloguing him. Shoulder length, curly blond hair. Tattoos. An unassuming smile. Still, something about him made the hairs on the back of Gerry’s head raise, and there was no escaping that the man was very, very marked.
Then Gerry registered the tattoos on his arms properly; vines with blue flowers. A skeleton with with a robotic arm. A moon. A dagger.
A spiral that was really many different shapes, curling up the man’s neck and over the left side of his jaw.
“I thought you were a door,” Gerry said. He let the front door behind him close, and leaned back against it.
The man laughed, the sound echoing in a way that hurt Gerry’s ears. It was familiar, but Gerry had no idea where he had heard it before.
“How presumptuous of you, Gerard Keay,” said the man-that-was-not-a-man. “I no one but myself, and myself is no one.”
“And does no one have a name?” Gerry replied, raising an eyebrow playfully. He had to fight to keep from grinning.
“Of course not,” he said. Without Gerry noticing, he had come a few paces closer. He held out a hand in greeting his head tilted to the side a little further than it should have. “But you can call me Michael, if you like.”
Gerry pushed off the door and approached him. He was tall, taller than Gerry, even, which was an impressive feat. He reached out and clasped Michael’s hand. It felt far denser and heavier than it looked, his fingers sharp. The look Micheal gave him was undeniably familiar: that while he enjoyed Gerry’s company, he would and could consume him given the chance.
Gerry was not as put off by it as he probably should of been. Gertrude was always saying he was too foolish for his own good, after all.
He shook Micheal’s hand, finally letting his own grin slip out. Micheal’s own grew in response. He looked delighted. He looked, Gerry thought, like he would be interesting to paint.
“Only if you call me Gerry,” he said.