And then she thought about her father, and the picture went flipping away from her, getting smaller and smaller until she couldn’t see it at all. She didn’t know if it went to him or not.

The room was getting colder. She knew it was darker outside, partially because the window did not let in as much light now and partially because she just knew.

Just like she knew that the man was coming. He was frightened of her, and that seemed strange; why he should be frightened when she was the one locked up in a dark scary room, she wasn’t quite sure. It seemed to have something to do with the funny way his mind worked. She had to be approached cautiously. She was one of THEM.

She stood up and faced the door, curling her hands up into tiny fists, waiting for him. He would come soon. The strange foreign thing continued working on her mind, tuning it to a different frequency. It felt like tiny fingers pushing at her skull, working their way deeper the way worms move through the soil. It came at her through the wood floor, through the walls, through the very air. She felt sick to her stomach and a little light- headed.

As she stared at the door, the wall around it began to evaporate, the wood becoming lighter and lighter until she could see through it like a sheet of water. It began from the farthest corners, the ceiling and floor, and worked its way inward until the wall melted away to the edges of the door. She saw all this from the corners of her eyes, never looking away from the door handle. The door itself remained solid wood, and now it stood strangely alone in the middle of the storm, standing without support, its hinges swung wide and dangling naked screws like fingers of bone. She stood in a three-walled, open room, but the wind did not enter it, and the snow swirled about and around the door as if against a gigantic pane of glass.

She knew that what she saw wasn’t real, but in a way that didn’t matter. To her it was very real. It existed within this different part of her mind where the fingers squirmed and dug like worms; it came from her dreams.

The doorknob was turning. She knew that she didn’t want to see what was behind that door, that whatever it was could be more terrifying than anything she had ever experienced, and then the door was swinging open, and though the snow swirled all around it, that rectangular section was a deep black shadow, a strange chunk of coexisting space that did not fit with the rest.