The saying, “When one door closes, another one opens” is generally accepted as an uplifting message to inspire those going through rough times, but what happens if that door doesn’t belong… and should have remained closed?
It would have been an exciting weekend, especially for an introverted techie such as me, filled with pizza, beer, and video games. My wife was on her way to the other side of the country to visit her sister, and this was our first weekend apart since we married over two years ago. It’s not that I was in any hurry to get rid of her or anything—in fact, a part of me wanted to ask her to stay. I had just found out from my employer that I was being terminated effective immediately and was given a two-month severance package, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her and ruin her trip. Alas, the introvert in me was relieved to have a weekend to sit in silence, process what the future held, and perhaps jump into some video games for the first time in a while.
As the evening grew into night, I found myself reclined in my chair, browsing Indeed on my phone in silence. In the fifteen years I worked for this company, I had become rather complacent and comfortable with my career progression there. I was on my way to upper management, and it seemed like a smooth ride to an eventual senior management position from which I would retire in the coming decades. However, I hadn’t anticipated that the owners would ever consider putting us up for sale, which meant downsizing to make overhead costs much more attractive to potential buyers. While my performance was consistently top tier, so was the compensation I had battled for throughout my 20 years with the company which made me an easy target for reducing costs. Dread began to sink in as I scrolled through job posting after job posting—nothing even close to my current salary was available, and we just settled into our dream home three weeks ago… Said dream home was admittedly at the limits of our budget before I had lost my job. Ah well, as they say, “When one door closes, another one opens.”
At that moment I heard a door slam. It was rather late at night, and I certainly wasn’t expecting any company. Part of me selfishly hoped my wife’s flight was canceled, and she had decided to come home without telling me. Yet, as I walked through the kitchen to the front door there was nothing but silence and an empty house. Peering outside, I could see there were no cars, no movement, just a few streetlights fighting against the darkness. Something caught my eye as I turned around, walking back to my char. I found myself staring at a door.
I know it sounds strange, and maybe I should have gone up to bed, but there were a few things wrong with this door. I had no recollection of this door existing before tonight, but there it stood in the center of the wall between the kitchen and living room, centered behind the dining room table. I immediately took a picture and sent it to my wife, asking her if she had any memory of it being there. Looking at the time, 11:30 PM Eastern, she probably wouldn’t be able to respond for another few hours when she landed in Portland.
I decided to ignore it and just go back to my chair for some YouTube before bed. As I sat down and reached for the remote it dawned on me, I was looking at the other side of the interior kitchen wall where the mysterious door resides. Except there was no sign of it on the living room side of the wall. Clearly, my day was getting to me, and it was time to head up to bed and try to sleep it all off. I couldn’t help but glance back at that wall as I walked back through the kitchen. I felt the need to prove to myself that there was nothing but a blank wall. In a pang of fear, however, I realized the door was very much still there. What would be the purpose of a door on an interior wall that goes nowhere? I couldn’t remember if the door had always been there or not, but why would we put the dining room table in front of it?
There was no way I could sleep without investigating this further. I felt an insatiable need to open it and see the back of the drywall that faced the living room. Curiosity and a touch of fear washed over me, and I pulled out the dining room chairs and pushed the table out of the way. As I stretched my hand out towards the door handle, my phone began to vibrate wildly in my pocket. It felt like the kind of vibration you usually feel when an emergency alert comes through, but looking at the screen showed that my wife was calling me—odd, given that she isn’t supposed to land for a few more hours, but obviously, I answered.
Upon swiping my finger to the right to answer my wife’s call I smiled as I anticipated her sweet voice. Instead, I nearly threw my phone in horror as static followed by the sound of a thousand simultaneous screams filled my ears. My thumb raced for the hang-up button as the call cut to silence. Then, in seemingly the same voices that were screaming a moment ago said clearly, “When one door closes, another one opens. You should have told me.” Before I could react, the distinct ringing of a disconnected phone call hit my ears, followed by the pounding of my own pulse.
Did that just happen?! Am I losing my mind?! Not knowing what to do, the thought of immediately dialing 911 popped into my mind. Either I was dreaming, having a mental breakdown, or my wife was in serious trouble. Before I could come to a conclusion, I looked up from my phone, and the call immediately vacated my mind. The door on the kitchen wall was open… It was opened inward. A full-size door opened inward into a wall that was, at most, a foot thick.
At this point, I was convinced this was all a horrible nightmare and figured I might as well proceed forward in hopes of soon scaring myself awake. It certainly didn’t feel like a dream, but what else could it be? I just received a chilling call from my traveling wife who shouldn’t even have cell service, and I was currently staring through a doorway that opened into a wall in my kitchen that should be revealing the living room. Screw it, I turned on my cell phone flashlight, took a deep breath, and marched through the door.
Those who know me know I love the cold, but nothing could have prepared me for the chilling cold I felt the moment I walked through that door. It was as if the chill in the air was hitting me from the inside. Ten feet down the impossible hallway I heard the door slam shut behind me, and up ahead I heard what sounded like a door creaking open. For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to look back towards the door that had just slammed shut. At this point I had really expected, hoped, to wake up in my chair, but there was no such relief as I marched forward towards the sound of the opening door with my phone light barely showing me the way.
After walking for what felt like a mile, I finally began to see a source of light that wasn’t coming from my phone. It appeared to be an open door on the right side of the hallway about a hundred feet ahead. Just a few feet away from the door, when I could start to make out some shapes on the other side of the door, my phone began to buzz rapidly as I received the following text messages:
Unknown
“When one door closes, another one opens.”
Unknown
“When one door closes, another one opens.”
Unknown
“When one door closes, another one opens.”
Unknown
“You should have told me.”
I was standing in front of the open door at the end of the impossible hallway now, but as my eyes came into focus, I was hit with a bright flash of light and the most intense heat I’d ever felt. In the next moment, I gasped awake in bed and sat straight up. Heart pounding, breathing heavy, and drenched in a cold sweat my eyes came into focus to see my wife in bed next to me giving a rather concerned look. “Are you alright?” she said in a concerned voice matching the look on her face.
“Yeah, sorry—just a bad dream. Weren’t you supposed to leave last night to visit your sister?” I said to her a little dazed and confused.
Her face went immediately blank, and she responded, “Just like you should have told me you lost your job yesterday?”
My heart sank as I said, “I know I should have told you, and I was going to, but I didn’t want to ruin your trip. You haven’t seen your sister in forever, and I figured there wasn’t much we could do about it over the weekend anyway.”
She shrugged and rolled back over, saying, “Oh well. I suppose when one door closes, another door opens.”
Chills ran down my spine as I heard those words, but I suppose such is the way of fresh nightmares. I decided to make my way down to the kitchen for a glass of water to clear my head. To my relief, there was nothing but a blank wall in the kitchen behind the dining room table. With nothing better to do as I sipped a glass of ice water, I began looking at my phone. Somehow during my terrifyingly realistic slumber, I had missed no less than a few dozen texts and calls from various friends and family. There were no voicemails, so I turned my attention to the text messages.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Please call me when you get this.”
I began to rapidly think of who the most likely family member to have passed away was, and then I read:
“I just saw the news about your wife’s plane… I can’t imagine what you must be going through right now. Please don’t hesitate to reach out if you need anything.”
I immediately began to Google “Portland plane crashes” to see if I could find out what happened. Obviously, no one knew that she decided to stay home, but what a wild stroke of luck that would be if—sure enough there it was: “American Airlines 747 crashes 5 miles from Portland Airport, no known survivors at this time.” A weird feeling came over me upon reading that. I had to tell my wife about the plane crash, but how would it make her feel to know she’d be dead if she didn’t decide to cancel her trip with her sister? What bothered me even more was the fact that I still couldn’t remember going to bed last night, and I could swear she left for the airport around sundown.
“Hey, honey! You should probably call your sister and tell her you’re alright! Turns out the plane you were supposed to take crashed a few hours ago, and it doesn’t look like they’re expecting any survivors!” I called up the hallway, immediately feeling a bit insensitive for not addressing the matter face-to-face. I certainly wasn’t prepared for the response she gave…
“Oh well. When one door closes, another door opens,” she said as I heard the bedroom door slam shut.
Those words still have me shaking downstairs in our kitchen. It was certainly my wife’s voice that responded, but my mind is racing as I process what I heard… I’m confident that last night’s lucid nightmare has ended. My senses are much more heightened than they would be if I were truly still asleep. But is that really my wife upstairs? Was that just a dream? And most importantly, do I dare go back upstairs and open the bedroom door?