I bought the house for almost nothing.
It was nestled in a forgotten corner of Vermont, where the trees crowd too close to the road and the sky always seems overcast. The real estate agent a pale man with the eyes of someone who didn't sleep much seemed all too eager to close the deal. I didn't care. I just wanted quiet.
The house was old. The kind of old that creaks when the wind sighs. The basement was sealed off literally. There was no stairwell, only a square wooden hatch in the floor near the kitchen, bolted shut with ancient nails and painted over. That should've been a red flag, but I told myself it added character.
Three weeks passed. I settled into the isolation, wrapped myself in routine. Waking, working, sleeping. But then… the sound began.
It was faint at first, like a pressure behind my ears. A hum too low to hear, but impossible to ignore. It came only at night. Always from the same direction beneath the floor.
On the 23rd night, I found the hatch open.
The air above it was cold and still, and the wood around the opening looked… wrong. The paint had peeled away, but not like it had aged. More like it had recoiled. Like the wood had breathed. I stared down into the dark for a long time. There was a ladder descending into blackness that hadn't been there before.
Curiosity is a hell of a thing. I told myself I just wanted to look.
I climbed down with a flashlight in my mouth. The beam flickered before I hit the bottom, and when I finally stepped off the ladder, I understood why the basement had been sealed.
There, in the center of the concrete floor, stood a door.
Not one built into the wall a door standing on its own. Freestanding, like a prop. Its frame was ancient, dark wood carved with symbols I didn't recognize. No hinges, no sign of how it was constructed. It didn't rest on the floor, either. It hovered. Just slightly maybe an inch or two above the concrete.
It was perfect. Too perfect. It hummed in rhythm with the noise in my head.
I approached slowly. The handle was brass, and warm to the touch, almost as if it had been waiting for me. Against every instinct, I turned it.
The door opened without resistance.
On the other side was… not a room.
It was a horizon.
An endless plain of obsidian stone stretched in every direction. The sky was a shade of violet that made my teeth ache. There was no sun, but everything was lit by a dim, sourceless glow. In the distance, things moved tall, thin shapes that pulsed and slithered without legs or faces.
I should've shut the door and run. Instead, I stepped through.
The air was thick, like breathing through oil. I turned to look behind me, but the door was gone. Only the black stone beneath my feet and the sound of breathing that came from no source.
Then the sky bent.
Not in a visual trick, but physically folding in on itself like paper. Something vast and incomprehensible had noticed me. It did not arrive, it was already here, everywhere at once. It didn't move so much as become more present.
I tried to scream, but the sound was swallowed before it left my throat.
The thing that approached wasn't a being. It was a concept, an idea with mass. It was shaped like grief and geometry, like a cathedral collapsed in on itself. Where its face should've been were layers of mirrored surfaces, each reflecting something I couldn't bear to recognize.
It looked into me. Not at me, into.
I felt myself split.
It peeled me apart like pages in a book, revealing memories I'd forgotten, moments of shame and joy and pain, and laid them out across the stone like exhibits. It showed me things. Other worlds. Versions of Earth in which things like it had feasted and moved on. Civilizations reduced not to dust, but to ideas it had digested.
Then it spoke.
Not in words. Not even in sound. It impressed itself into my understanding.
And it shared a name. Not a word, a name that existed like a color you've never seen but instantly recognize.
I wept.
Not out of fear, but awe. For a moment, I felt joy. I was nothing, and yet it had chosen to notice me. To show me. To give me a glimpse.
And then it released me.
I awoke on the basement floor, gasping, choking on dust. The door was gone. Only the old concrete remained. My flashlight was dead. My body ached in ways I couldn't describe.
I climbed the ladder and bolted the hatch shut. Nailed it down again. Painted over it. I even moved the fridge on top of it.
But some nights, I hear the hum again.
And something else.
Knocking.
From beneath the floorboards.
Once, I looked in the mirror and noticed something just below my collarbone—a scar I don't remember acquiring. It's shaped like a spiral, and it pulses faintly when I touch it.
Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see that horizon again. And I feel the sky bend. I remember its name, even though I can't say it.
And I wonder…
Did I ever really come back?