The Door Ajar

“The scariest part isn’t what waits outside—it’s realising it’s already crossed your threshold.” — Violet Dallow

Leaning hard against the door, Violet squeezed her eyes shut, pressing her palms flat against the cool wood as though sheer will might hold the world at bay. Her pulse thudded in her ears, ragged and uneven, refusing to slow. The night replayed itself in jagged fragments—the roar of the engine, the screech of tyres, the blinding flare of headlights pinning her like prey.

And then she heard it.

The car hadn’t gone. Its engine still idled outside, low and steady, the sound vibrating faintly through the walls. It prowled there in the dark like some great beast, waiting, testing the edges of her courage. Violet held her breath, her body rigid, listening to the menacing purr bleeding through the silence of her home.

Seconds stretched unbearably long. She could picture it in her mind’s eye: the bonnet angled towards her house, the faceless driver staring at the very door she pressed herself against. The thought curdled her stomach.

Finally, with a slow, deliberate growl, the engine shifted. Tyres rolled over gravel. The sound receded, cautious, almost taunting, until it melted back into the distance.

Only then did Violet release the breath she hadn’t realised she was holding. She let her forehead rest against the door, her skin clammy with sweat, her whole body trembling.

“It’s okay,” she whispered to herself, voice thin and shaky. “You’re safe now. It was probably just… someone lost, or—”

But the words collapsed even as she spoke them, brittle things that crumbled in her throat. She knew the truth. The car hadn’t been lost, nor idle chance. Its pace, its pursuit—it had been deliberate. Someone had followed her, shadowed her, toyed with her.

The realisation slithered through her veins, cold and unrelenting, and she felt the fear surge anew, impossible to shake.

However fleeting her relief, it dissolved the moment Violet pushed herself away from the front door. The house was dark and hushed, the kind of silence that should have offered comfort—but instead it pressed too thick, too deliberate, as though it were listening.

She forced her legs to carry her down the narrow hallway, each step loud against the boards despite her efforts to move quietly. With every pace, the lingering scent of eucalyptus and dust from outside seemed to thin, replaced by the familiar smell of home: detergent, floor polish, the faint ghost of her mother’s cooking. Yet even these domestic traces did nothing to ease her nerves. If anything, they made the dissonance worse.

Halfway along the corridor, it hit her. A shift in the air. A wrongness.

Her breath caught. Slowly, her eyes travelled forward to her room—the one place she considered inviolable, her sanctum. She always kept the door shut. Always. But now…

It stood ajar.

Just a finger’s breadth, no more, but enough. The sight of that sliver of black space, that crooked angle, turned her stomach to ice. She knew, with absolute certainty, that she had closed it before leaving tonight.

Her skin prickled, fine hairs rising along her arms as though an unseen hand had brushed past. The door seemed to stare at her, silent and watchful, like a sentinel marking her trespass back into her own home. The narrow gap bled darkness into the hall, a void where there should have been safety.

Violet froze, heart thundering, every nerve screaming with the knowledge of some quiet violation.

Someone had been here.

Violet forced herself a step closer, her shoes whispering against the boards. The gap of the door seemed to widen as she neared, drawing her forward with a magnetic pull she wished desperately to resist.

Then the thought struck her with paralysing clarity.

What if someone is still in there?

Her breath stilled, caught sharp in her throat. The possibility sent a cold flood of terror through her veins, rooting her to the spot. Her eyes darted to the narrow strip of blackness, half-expecting it to shift, for some shape to move within. The silence pressed so heavily that she could hear her own pulse in her ears, drumming an uneven rhythm.

Every instinct screamed at her to turn back, to wake her parents, to retreat to the safety of another room. Yet some darker compulsion drove her onward—the same stubborn streak that had led her to Ethan, to the abandoned office of the Silver Queen, to Sally Harlow’s hidden words.

With trembling hands, she inched forward, each step heavier than the last. The boards beneath her betrayed her with faint creaks, each one a gunshot in the silence. At last she stood before the half-open door, staring into the strip of darkness that bled into the hall.

Her throat was dry, her pulse hammering so violently she thought she might faint.

“Jaz?” Violet whispered, her voice barely audible. “Jasmine, are you in there?”

For a moment, there was nothing. Only the suffocating silence pressing out from the black.

Then, soft as a breath, came the reply.

“Jazzie isn’t here.”

Violet’s stomach lurched, terror flooding every vein.

And then, after a heartbeat’s pause that seemed to stretch to eternity, the voice came again—lower, closer, curling into her ear like smoke.

“But I am.”