Therapy Bits

My thanks to Fandango! Join in here…

Fandango’s Story Starter #215 – Facts, Fictions & Fantasies

Image created with Chat gpt.

The door to the study had been locked for years, yet tonight it stood wide open.

Eleanor paused in the hallway, her candle flickering against the dark wood panels. No one had entered the room since her father’s death, not even the servants, who whispered that the study was cursed. She remembered how the heavy brass key had been sealed in her mother’s jewelry box, how dust had gathered on the doorknob, how she herself had walked past it a hundred times without daring to touch it.

And yet now, without sound or warning, it gaped like a mouth, swallowing the light.

She stepped closer, holding the candle higher. The air that drifted out was cold and dry, carrying with it the faintest scent of ink, leather, and something else—something sharp, metallic.

“Father?” she whispered, though she knew how foolish it sounded. He had been gone ten years, buried beneath the yews at St. Mary’s.

Inside, the study was unchanged, as if preserved. His desk still stood by the window, strewn with papers, quills resting in the inkwell, a ledger lying open as though he had risen just moments before. The shelves lining the walls bowed beneath the weight of books, their spines cracked and faded. Time seemed to have halted here, frozen on the night he died.

And yet, Eleanor noticed, not everything was the same. A single chair stood before the fire, pulled out at an odd angle, as though someone had sat in it recently. The hearth held fresh ash, faintly glowing.

Her candle quivered. She should leave, she thought. Shut the door, fetch her mother—or better yet, bolt it again, and never speak of what she had seen. But curiosity, that old enemy, whispered otherwise.

She set the candle on the desk and lowered herself into her father’s chair. The ledger before her bore his cramped script, columns of numbers, accounts she half-remembered from overheard conversations. But in the margin was something strange: a symbol, inked over and over, as though he had drawn it compulsively. A circle, inside it a jagged line, like a lightning bolt splitting the ring.

The sight of it stirred a memory. As a child she had once asked him about a similar mark scratched into the garden wall. He had grown pale and snapped at her never to touch it.

Now, staring at the ledger, Eleanor noticed something else: the ink was wet.

She reached out with trembling fingers. The symbol smeared beneath her touch.

A sound rose behind her—a low rustle, like the turning of a page though none of the books had moved. She turned. The chair by the fire was no longer empty.

A man sat there.

His face was hidden in shadow, but the outline of his shoulders, the slope of his head—they were unmistakable.

“Father?” she breathed again.

He did not answer, but the fire flared, throwing light across his features. She saw then that it was not truly her father. The face resembled his, but the eyes were wrong: black and depthless, reflecting no light. His lips moved without sound, as though he were speaking in a language she could not hear.

Eleanor stumbled back, knocking the candle onto the desk. The flame guttered but did not go out, casting wild shadows across the walls. On the shelves, the books began to tremble, rattling against one another, dust shaking loose in clouds.

Then she heard it—the whisper. Not from the figure, but from the room itself, seeping from the cracks in the floorboards, the spines of the books, the very stone of the hearth. A chorus of voices, urgent, pleading, overlapping so quickly she could not separate one from the other.

She clutched her head. “Stop! Please!”

The whispers ceased.

The figure rose. He was taller than she remembered her father, and the fire seemed to bend toward him as he moved. He reached out a hand, long-fingered, skin pale as bone. In his palm was the same symbol from the ledger, carved as though into flesh.

When he spoke, at last, it was in her father’s voice.

“You should not have opened the door.”

Eleanor’s breath caught. “I didn’t. It—it was open.”

At that, he smiled, and the smile was worse than the silence.

“You were always meant to find it,” he said. “And now you will finish what I began.”

The shadows lengthened. The fire roared. The door behind her slammed shut with a finality that shook the floorboards. Eleanor realized, too late, that the study had never been locked to keep anyone out.

It had been locked to keep something in.

And tonight, she had set it free.