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Sasha comes home from work on Thursday evening, way too late, like every weekday evening. It's not even that Jon makes her stay late, she just got wrapped up in the North case, and she doesn't exactly have anything more interesting planned for the night. (Any night.) Her flat is empty, dark because it's already 9pm, cold because she saves up on heating in the summer but the season never actually gets warm. She doesn't need to check that her fridge is depressingly empty. She'll dig a pizza out of the freezer at some point, but she isn't hungry yet.
Her feet ache, though, from standing in the Tube, and her back from her bad sitting posture at her desk, and her eyes from peering at her laptop screen and at faded chicken scratch on old paper. More than dinner, she yearns for a hot shower.
She peels out of her ankle booties and peacoat at the door, lets them drop onto the floor, half-heartedly promising herself to retrieve them and put them away neatly later (the same promise she makes herself every night). In her exhausted impatience, she starts pulling off her cardigan, shirt, bra on her way to the bathroom, down the dark hallway. She's struggling with the tricky back zipper of her skirt when she passes the door. It's only when she's sitting on her toilet seat, tugging off her tights, that she realises she doesn't know where that door leads. There's never been an extra door in her hallway between the kitchen and the bathroom.
"Hmm," she says, echoing in the tiny tiled room.
Well. Shower first. Potential monster door later.
When she comes out of the bathroom, the door is nowhere to be seen. The wall where she thinks she saw it is pristine — that is, all the familiar cracks in the floral wallpaper and the couple of nail punches from the previous tenant's picture frames are where they've always been, but the plaster is solid, and there is no sign that there is or has ever been any secret passage there.
Sasha chooses to do the classic beginning-of-a-statement move of chalking it off to her fatigue and imagination. She eats her pizza while dispassionately watching crappy late night telly, and falls asleep on the couch.
Sasha is not a morning person. Certainly not before she's had her walk to work and coffee. When cold sunlight on her face bothers her awake a few hours later, she spends a few minutes staring groggily, unmoving, unthinking, at the door on the opposite wall, behind her television set. In the muted grey cloudy morning light, the door is a pale, uneasy yellow that melds in with the dirty off-white paint of the living room walls.
Sasha shifts — each of the tired thirty-year-old vertebrae of her spine stinging in protest — and reaches an arm out to the ground, searching it for her glasses that must have fallen off overnight. She finds them, puts them on. The door is still there. She can't help but think it looks, somehow, a little smug.
"Nope," she eventually croaks out, her tongue sluggish and her mouth dry from sleep. "Too early for that, thank you."
The door doesn't respond.
It's gone when she checks the living room before leaving for work. That's a little relief, Sasha finds, even though it is most likely capable of popping up again in her absence anyway. Still. At least she doesn't feel like she is leaving a new pet alone in her flat for the day.
Door status that Friday night is unknown; she comes home too tired for the thought of the door to even occur to her, and just goes straight from her entryway to collapse onto her bed and falls asleep instantly.
On Saturday morning, she drags herself to the kitchen, puts the kettle on for tea, sits down with a bowl of cereal, and eats them slowly as the fog gradually recedes from her brain and lets the world come into focus. By the time the kettle clicks off, she has actually registered the presence of the obnoxiously bright yellow door in the wall she has been numbly staring at.
She takes another mouthful of cereal. Chews it thoughtfully. Sets her spoon down on the table with a tiny click. Painstakingly unfolds her legs from her curled up gremlin sitting position, and stands up. She is wearing her cozy houserobe, an ugly tartan flannel shapeless thing worn soft and threadbare by a decade of use, with nothing under it but her button-down from yesterday's workday and her underwear, and the fluzzy slippers that are the only pink possession she allows herself. That's no horror story outfit. It's Saturday morning and the weather outside is even exceptionally summery, bright sunlight and the sky an actual shade of blue. Not a horror movie setting. Even in the files of the Institute, no one ever gets attacked by a monster while wearing pink fuzzy slippers.
She steps around her messy kitchen table, raises her fist, and knocks on the door. She goes for the standard three knocks, trying for as normal as possible.
The door falls open into her kitchen wall, slowly, with a long, ear-drilling, teeth-grinding creak. Beyond it is a pitch dark, flickering neon-lit, endless straight spiralling tilting corridor maze, walls and carpet and doors in monochrome cheerful bright sickly colours, mirrors hung on the walls reflecting nothing at each other into infinity. Sasha catches only a glimpse of it all, and stumbles one step back, lilting off her sense of verticality. Her head is spinning, her feet and hands feel inverted as she blindly reaches for the table behind (?) her.
A shape slides into the open doorframe, obscuring her view of the impossible other side, and Sasha's world rights itself again.
"Hello," says 'Michael'.
It looks like the human form Sasha has seen when looking at it directly, in the absence of a deformed reflection — mostly. It seems taller and larger than that, or at least it should be; the shape she sat in a café with would not have been able to fill that doorframe. Its long curly hair floats all around its head, strands changing direction mid-twist, some reaching upwards, and its colour is closer to the artificial garish yellow of the door than to a natural blond. Its smile is asymmetrical, teeth (too many of them, too sharp) showing on one side, a perfectly polite and agreeable upturn of the lip on the other. It's better to look at than what sprawls behind it, by miles, but still unsettling.
Sasha's right hand finally finds the edge of the kitchen table, and her brain adjusts the Cartesian planes of her perception back into something that makes her stomach less queasy.
"Hello," she says. Her eyes prickle. Her throat is dry. Her head is empty, and she can't think of what to say, so she goes with: "I'm having a cuppa. Would you like one?"
It tilts its head to the side, just a little further than looks natural. Its facial expression doesn't shift, its pale eyes fixed on her without blinking. "That would be very nice," it replies, after a just-too-long second. Its voice is breezy, echoey, moreso than it sounded the previous two times she met it. Perhaps the echoes come from the corridor behind the door.
On autopilot, Sasha picks up two mugs from the dish drying rack, two bags from the paper box of Lipton English Breakfast tea. "Sugar?" she asks, out of reflex, before remembering the café, the untouched cup of dark coffee, cold and undrunk. "Are you even going to drink it?"
It laughs, all of a sudden, immediately full and loud laughter with no build-up, echoing, echoing. It tilts its head to the other side, but by gyrating the wrong way round its neck, the unholy child of an owl and the Cheshire cat, corkscrew curls bouncing along with no acknowledgement of the rule of gravity.
"No," it says, pleasantly, between two wheezing giggles. "Five sugars, please."
Sasha sighs. Her head is starting to pound, and she has no illusion that this might be unrelated to her visitor.
But the tea helps, a little.
She drinks it leaning on the kitchen counter, holding the mug with both hands, her eyes closed, breathing in the bitter aroma, finding serenity in the cheap but comforting warmth. Across from her, 'Michael' arranges all its long limbs on her wobbly extra chair and wraps its too-many knuckles around the mug, and it doesn't take a single sip, but its countenance seems a portraiture of happiness.
Making friends, huh.