‘Men of today are losers unworthy of my daughter.’

The old man didn’t care that his youngest child might hold a different opinion.

In the house there was only the father and daughter, the daughter’s cats and a maid who went home for the afternoon. It was a magnificent house for a small town, inherited from his grandfather, the father of the previous ruler. Ah, he too wielded power; a regent who spent his youth drinking wine with colonial officials. His legacy was a Dutch-era house with a faded terrazzo floor. It had a large storehouse and a deep well. There were many doors. Closed, of course. A symbol of the ancestral kingdom.

One door among them was special to Dahlia, a red door near the storehouse in the darkest corner. Above the door hung cobwebs.

There was a deep secret between Dahlia and the door that she hadn’t divulged to her father or any of her siblings.

One day, she had opened the red door and stepped into a forest. Yes, truly. A forest. She clung tightly to this enormous secret. In the scorching heat of the afternoon – when she couldn’t stomach another TV show or munching her slothful way through yet another bag of potato crisps; when she wearied of her lonely home, far from the gleam of myriad neon lights; or when she was simply sick and tired of every damn thing – Dahlia would sneak into the woods. When she felt a tightness in her chest, the forest offered her plenty of air. Several times, she returned from an excursion on the other side of the door, barely suppressing an urge to scream. Out of fear, out of happiness, out of anger – maybe all three. Anything at all, just not boredom.

Behind the red door, a new world revealed itself to her. Not far from it stood an old, moss-covered well. She peered into it and felt something like an electric shock jolting her out of a century-long slumber. The water in the well was clear and calm but a shadow had appeared on it. The shadow of a face. No. She shuddered. Not a face. There was only a head and eye sockets, holes that led down to the darkest depths. The face had no features; all was emptiness and two holes, ending who knows where.

Dahlia tried to tear her eyes away, her heart racing.

She experienced a feeling more unsettling than horror. A sense of wanting to reach out to the emptiness, to lose herself within it. As she tried to look away, the shadow grew more distinct. Dahlia could make out the creature, from the waist up to the neck. The figure was naked with long, dishevelled hair and breasts. A woman.

But who? Who was this faceless woman, whose eyes dropped away to nothingness?