Chapter 1

THE ROOM AT THE END OF THE HALL

A Novella

By Issac E.Grant

CHAPTER ONE: COMING HOME

You come home on a Tuesday.

You don't remember choosing Tuesday specifically. You don't remember packing your two bags or sending the email to your supervisor or sitting on the train for four hours watching the city unspool into farmland and then back into a smaller, quieter city. You remember the decision — the clean snap of it, like a bone giving way — and then you remember standing on the front step of your parents' house with the smell of cut grass in your nose and your mother opening the door before you even knock.

She always knew.

"Kaito," she says,

And her voice is so warm and so familiar that something in your chest contracts. She pulls you into a hug that smells like the laundry detergent she has always used, the same brand since before you could read. You let yourself be held. You are twenty-two years old, and you let yourself be held on the front step of the house you grew up in, and you do not feel ashamed of this.

You feel, for the first time in eight months, almost safe.

The house is exactly as you left it.

This is the thing about coming home that nobody warns you about: how complete it is. Your bedroom still has the poster of that band you stopped listening to at seventeen. The kitchen still has the same crack in the tile by the refrigerator, the same refrigerator magnets from places your family visited and then never talked about again. The smell of it — warm wood and your mother's cooking and something underneath, something soft and settled that you've never been able to name — wraps around you like a second skin.

Your father claps you on the shoulder at dinner and doesn't ask about the university. You love him enormously for this.

"It's good to have you back," he says,

Spoons of more rice onto your plate, and that is the entirety of the conversation about why you came home.

After dinner you wash dishes while your mother dries them, and you talk about the neighbours and the garden and a television program she's been watching. Normal things. Ordinary Things. You are grateful for normal things.

You go upstairs at nine thirty.

You brush your teeth. You change into the clothes you left in your old dresser — soft from age, slightly too small across the shoulders now. You turn off the light.

You lie in your childhood bed, and you look at the ceiling, and you think: I can breathe here. I forgot that I can breathe here.

And then, in the dark, in the quiet, your eyes travel to the end of the hall.

The door is there.

It has always been there.

You don't think about the door that night. This is important to understand. You see it — the thin line of its frame in the dim light from the window at the end of the hall, the old brass knob that has always been slightly tarnished — and then you look away, and you sleep.

You dream of nothing.

In the morning there is breakfast.

Everything is fine.

✦   ✦   ✦

The first week home passes in a pleasant haze.

You sleep long and wake slowly. You eat your mother's cooking. You help your father with small tasks around the house — a gutter that needs clearing, a fence post that has gone soft with rot. You take long walks through the neighbourhood, which has changed slightly and not at all. A new café where the dry cleaner used to be. The park with the same equipment it has had since you were seven, slightly rustier, the paint more faded.

You start a journal. This is your therapist's suggestion — your former therapist, from the university, who you saw four times before you stopped going. You remember her saying: write things down. You remember thinking it was trite. You try it anyway because you have nothing else to do.

The first entry reads:

Back home. Feel strange. Good strange, mostly. Like being wrapped in something. Like being held still.

The second entry, two days later:

The door at the end of the hall. I've never thought about it before. Why haven't I thought about it before?

You look at that entry for a long time after you write it.

You don't know what made you write it.

You go downstairs, and your mother is making tea and the afternoon light is coming through the kitchen windows in that golden way it has always come through, and you almost say something. You can feel the question right there, on the roof of your mouth. Heavy and round, like a stone.

"Mom," you say.

"Hmm?"

And then the question dissolves. You don't know where it goes. You watch it go, dimly aware that something just happened. Your mother places a mug of tea in front of you and asks if you'd like milk, and you say yes and the afternoon continues.

That night, you write in the journal:

I tried to ask Mom about the door. I don't know why I couldn't. It was like trying to say a word in a language you half-remember. You know, you know it. You just can't quite get there.

You cap the pen.

You go to sleep.

Down the hall, in the dark, nothing moves.

Nothing breathes.

You almost believe this.