Whitney Writes…

The metal of the doorknob was cold against her skin. It wailed in protest as she turned it, pushing the heavy door open. The room was dark, the air thick with fog that obscured her vision and left her skin feeling cold and clammy. An antique wooden table stood in the center of the room. There were two place settings resting upon old-fashioned off-white-with-age lace doilies. A small, simple chandelier descended from the cob-web veiled ceiling down towards it. The light did nothing to illuminate the rest of the room, simply caused the table to glow. A candelabra held three tall, slim, lit candles that illuminated little else.

In one of the chairs sat a man. A man whom she had not seen in some seven years. It was not possible.

He was dead.

“Hello, Adelaide,” he said. His voice sounded just as she had remembered it.

She had laid awake many a nights since his death, wondering what it would be like to see him again. To hear his voice again. Adelaide had never imagined it would make her skin crawl.

“How are you here, Alistair?” she finally asked.

“I thought you would have been happy to see me,” he said, his voice tinged with a hint of disappointment. But there was something about it that was not right. Adelaide couldn’t put her finger on it.

“There was a time I would have given anything to see you again, it is true,” she said. “But this wasn’t how…” her voice trailed off. She studied him under the dim light. There was something different, something off about him. And more than just the fact that he was dead. She wondered if she reached out to touch him, if he would be solid beneath her fingertips. But… when had she moved that close, to be within arms-reach? She had been on the opposite side of the room just moments ago.

When Adelaide looked back up at Alistair, it was no longer Alistair’s face she was looking into. In his place was a winged-demon with pale, sickly green skin, black eyes, needle-sharp fangs, and black horns curling upwards from his forehead. When the thing pretending to be Alistair realized Adelaide was looking at it, Alistair suddenly reappeared again.

The pit in her stomach grew wider.

“Come, dine with me,” said the thing pretending to be Alistair.

“No…” Adelaide whispered, “I don’t think I will.” She backed toward the door. Backing, and backing. Where had the door gone? The room had not been this large when she had entered.

Panic gripped her and the thing at the table smiled at her. It was still Alistair, but it had the teeth of the thing she had glimpsed before. “I’m afraid what you’re looking for isn’t there,” he said, the voice now all wrong. There was a hint of Alistair’s voice, but there was an underlying wrongness to it. “Come sit,” it said again, the room moving around Adelaide so she was back before this… thing.

She spun away, sprinting across the room and flinging open the door. She ran and ran, through what felt like a pitch-black corridor, before finally emerging on the corner outside her office building, in her picturesque little town she lived in. Warm sunlight washing over her, erasing the clamminess of the strange fog. A wind blew, clearing her senses of the strange smell of that room.

A sigh of relief washed over her. Adelaide couldn’t help but feel as though she had dodged something incredibly sinister. She did not notice the fog creeping in at the end of the street.

Inktober 2023, Prompt #4: DODGE