Excerpt from "Addition"

"They were in the hallway, between the second and third bedrooms, when he saw the door.

It was on the left side, set into the wall between the linen closet and the bathroom. A six-panel door, same as every other door in the house - same paint, same hardware, same brass knob. It was not remarkable. It was a door in a hallway in a house, and the only reason Philip stopped was that the floorplan in the listing had shown a linen closet here, and the linen closet was here, and this door was also here, next to it, in a space where the wall should have continued for another four feet before the bathroom.

He put his hand on the knob. The knob was warm.

The door opened inward. The room was roughly ten by twelve - he knew this the way he knew room dimensions, by standing in the doorway and letting his body measure. The floor was hardwood. Not the carpet that covered every other surface in the house - hardwood, a warm honey oak, the boards fitted so closely the seams were barely visible. The walls were white, the kind of white that is the result of someone caring about white. A single window faced east, and the light of two-thirty came through it filtered through nothing - no curtain, no blind, no film of dust. The light entered the room as though the room had been expecting it.

The room was empty. The room smelled like lavender. Not lavender the way a candle smells like lavender - lavender the way a field smells, the plant, alive, blooming, the oil still in the stem. And underneath the lavender, a density. The air in the room was heavier than the air in the hallway, and the weight was warm, and the warmth sat in his chest the way altitude sits in the chest.

He stepped inside. The floor was lower than the hallway by an inch, maybe less. His knees registered the drop before his eyes did - the small correction of weight meeting a surface that was not where the body expected it. He stood in the room and the room held him. The light crossed the hardwood in a slow arc, and it was the most beautiful room in the house."

The "Familiar" Series:

https://www.abctales.com/collection/familiar