It was late when I found the door.

It was a perfectly ordinary door, the same six-panel whitewashed woodgrain model that we’d been using throughout the house.  It was set in the middle of the hallway, plumb and perfect, the surrounding jamb pristine white against the drab grey wall.  When I tried the knob, it turned without issue and the latch released with the barest click.  I didn’t open the door, however.  I released the knob and let it latch again.

The door wasn’t supposed to be there.

There wasn’t a room on the other side of that wall.  Or rather, there was; there were two: the master bedroom and its en suite, but there wasn’t supposed to be a door here in the hall that led into either of them.

I circled around and checked from the bedroom and from the bath; there was no unplanned door there.

I consulted the plans.  If there was a door there, it would open onto the master bedroom.  There wasn’t any space for anything else.

Perhaps it opened onto a blank wall.  Perhaps I should test it.  Perhaps I should open it.

But even if it did open onto just a blank wall, my brain rebelled, it wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place, it wasn’t on the plans, I hadn’t seen any of the workers installing it, I certainly hadn’t had a hand in putting it there and I was the architect!  If I tried the door and it opened onto the unfinished interior of the wall that was absolutely supposed to be there, that really wouldn’t be much of a solace at all. The door itself was wrong.

I found one of the big bookshelves that sat like monoliths in the room that would eventually be the library.  Without any books in it, it was easy to move, and I placed it in front of the door, eclipsing it entirely.  A bookshelf in the middle of the hallway was decidedly odd, but it was, I reasoned, slightly less odd than a door that wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place.

Like I said: it was late.  Somehow I thought this was a solution.

The next morning I came down the hallway and was stunned to find, not an ill-placed bookshelf, but the door.  A passing worker commented that she’d found one of the library bookshelves had wandered into the hallway and wasn’t that odd?  She’d put it back where it was supposed to be.

Which left me standing there, facing a door that wasn’t supposed to be there.

Shaking my head, I forced myself back into the main hall where we kept the plans and from which I had been directing most of the work.  If none of the workers thought the door that wasn’t supposed to be there was remarkable, I could ignore it, too.  I dispensed orders, I received shipments, I tested paint against the walls in the main room.

I didn’t go into the hallway.

I didn’t want to look at the door that wasn’t supposed to be there.

At the end of the day, however, the workers went home and I did my rounds shutting and locking the exterior doors and making sure all the power tools were unplugged and stowed.  Exhausted from a hard day of work and frantically not thinking of the thing, I walked right into it.  Into the hallway and right into the door, which was inexplicably hanging open.  It shuddered, swinging towards closed, after its encounter with my forehead.

Suddenly desperate, I shoved the door closed, slammed it with a whoosh of surprised, swirling air.  I closed it quick, before I could see what could be found on the other side.  It wasn’t supposed to be there.

The plans were straightforward.  The house was exactly what every family needed.  I didn’t need to see what was on the other side; I didn’t want to see the other side.  I just wanted to finish the house.

I stomped down the rest of the hallway, trying and failing to ignore the soft, floral scent that swirled in the otherwise stale sawdust air.

I pulled the bookshelf back out of the library and then I went outside to the storage units and found two boxes of books.  I dragged them inside (why did we pack books in anything other than the smallest moving boxes?), ripped them open, and started shelving books willy-nilly into any open space.  An empty bookshelf was easy to “move back” to where it was supposed to be; confronted with a full bookshelf, my exhausted brain reasoned, no worker would bother to drag it back into the library.

The next morning the wife and kids were due to visit, and I was eager to show her the work we’d done, how close we were to moving in and finally living like a real family, white picket fence and everything.  The kids ran around screaming and shouting at each other, “testing” the stairs and arguing over which of them got the better bedroom.  The wife let herself be shown around, smiling and appreciative.  She declared the work some of my best.

And then she asked about the bookshelf in the middle of the hall.

“What bookshelf in the middle of the hall,” I answered insipidly, and she took me by the hand and led me to it, because it was obviously out of place.  I stammered an excuse about trying something a little different, still a respectable choice in housing, what about a hallway lined with bookshelves?  It might make the passage a little cramped, but—

She pressed her cheek against the wall and said she thought she saw something behind the bookshelf.

I laughed and told her she was imagining things and loudly declared it was time to go get ice cream.  The children shouted and dragged us out of the house.  The wife dropped the issue.

I couldn’t sleep that night.  I turned up at the work site long before the workers were due.

Grumbling at myself and my life choices, and unshelved all the books and repacked them into the too-heavy moving boxes.  I muscled the empty bookshelf out of the way, and both this and the boxes of books I lugged into the library.

I returned with a sledgehammer.

Demolishing the door was short work.  It splintered and collapsed at almost the first strike.  The door reverbed with the impact, making a stupid, mournful sound that echoed through the house.  There was only a whiff of the soft floral scent for a moment; then it was smothered in dust and plaster.

I pulled down the door and knocked out the surrounding drywall to the studs, then I dragged a fresh section of drywall from the stack out front.  With the repeated, satisfying slam of the impact driver I nailed the wall into place.  Next came the slather of plaster and putty, a light coat of primer hastily dried with two misused ventilation fans, and finally the dull blue-grey that was supposed to be here in the hall.

The sun was rising when I staggered out of the hall and laid down on the trestle table, across the plans, and went unconscious.

The workers woke me no more than an hour later.  I said I’d drank more at the bar than I’d meant to and didn’t want to wake the missus, so slept there.  We shared a manly laugh about it.

And then I walked into the hallway and the door was there.  Still there.  There again.

As before, it was installed plumb and perfect, jamb and trim painted stark white against the dark blue hallway wall.  Its position was, I was frustrated to note, better-placed than the door that I’d put into the plans.  It just fit, aesthetically, and I could tell by looking at it that the flow of traffic through the house would be eased considerably.

But it wasn’t supposed to be there.

I didn’t put it there.

I didn’t want it there.

Fuck!

While the workers did their increasingly small tasks—we were quickly coming to the finish line of the project—I surreptitiously made internet searches on my phone about how to exorcize a demonic door.  Unsurprisingly, the internet did not deliver anything useful.

I did find a raft of builders posting online, claiming to have found surprise doors in their own home projects, but those assholes universally claimed that embracing the door and making good use of it was marvelous, revelatory, life-changing.

Well fuck them.

I didn’t need my life to be changed by marvelous revelations.  I needed my life to be changed by building the perfect house, the house that my family deserved, the house that I’d promised my wife that I’d give her.  I had drawn up plans!  Meticulous, endlessly checked and rechecked, perfect plans.  And those plans did not have a door in the middle of the hallway leading into my bedroom that was, I had to admit, exquisitely placed.

I wanted my bedroom door down the hall, marginally inaccessible and slightly frustrating to use, where it was supposed to be.

That night after the workers left, I did drink.  I called the wife and made excuses.  I had to finish something at the worksite.  It wasn’t anything that I could leave til the morning.  I had to do it now.

There were barrels of kerosene in the supply dump in the front yard, and bags and bags of used-up shop rags that I’d planned to take to the dump when the job was over.  And I always carried dad’s old zippo in my back pocket.  If tearing the door out of the hallway didn’t work, maybe I could just burn down the hallway.  Would it burn down the rest of the house?  Maybe.  Probably.  I was drunk.  This seemed like a reasonable risk.

I rolled the barrels into the hallway.  I stacked and scattered the soiled rags all over.  I pulled out dad’s zippo and locked eyes with the door.  Or at least I stared right at it.  This was it.  I was going to do it.  I was going to burn this fucking door out of my house.

I stood there, frozen, for a very long time.

If this worked—no, no.  When this worked.  When this worked, the door would be gone.  I wouldn’t ever see it again.  It would stop haunting me.  But that would mean I would never know what was on the other side.  I would never know!  Would I wonder?  Of course I would.  I’d always wonder where this damned door led, and once it was gone, I’d wonder forever.  Not knowing would plague me.  After I burned it down, the door would still be haunting me.  Worse than if I’d never burned it down in the first place.

Fuck!

Clearly, my drunken brain reasoned, this was a simple problem to fix.  All I had to do was open the door, glance at what was on the other side, and then burn it the fuck down.

I slipped the zippo back into my pocket, rolled one of the barrels out of the way, and put my hand on the doorknob.  In the interests of full disclosure, I must admit that I growled at the door.  I was so frustrated with the damn thing!  I wanted nothing to do with this door or wherever it led, but now I had to open it, had to see whatever stupid nonsense was on the other side, if I ever wanted to live in peace.

One look, and then I’d close it again and burn it all down.  That was sensible.

As before, the doorknob’s action slid with perfect mechanical grace.  The click of the latch releasing was just barely audible, and then the weight of the door nuzzled softly in the palm of my hand.  I gritted my teeth and pulled the door open.

The scent of flowers rolled out of the opening door, and along with it splayed brightening streaks of golden sunlight.  I could hear birds singing.  The buzz of the whiskey filling my head fizzled into nothing, and I looked, clear-eyed, through the door.

Huh.  So that’s what my bedroom is supposed to look like.