Doorway

She stirred from slumber, summoned from sleep by the sense of some gentle presence of motion in the room. She rolled over and flopped her arm over the space where her husband’s chest should be, but found only an empty expanse of sheets. 

She hummed sleepily and flailed her hand around the bed until it struck something warm; her husband’s back. She opened her sleep-glued eyes and rubbed them with the backs of her hands. Bringing herself to one elbow, she noticed that he was sitting up, hunched forward in their bed and staring intently over his feet to the open door that led into the hallway from their bedroom. 

“Babe-” she began, but was cut off by her husband's sharp whisper. 

“Do you see it? The man in the doorway.” 

Her skin burst into gooseflesh and her breath caught in her throat. She slowly swung her gaze from him and across the dark room to let it fall into the shadowed entrance. Nothing was within except for the gloom of the unlit hallway.

Silence, but for their labored breathing. The refrigerator clicked on downstairs, and the woman flinched. Her husband whispered again, barely audible over the sound of her heart pounding in her ears.

“There’s a man there, his head is...wrong.” His voice trembled and he swallowed wetly before he could utter the last word. 

Her blood thundered in her veins, but still, she saw nothing. She summoned a weak croak. “Babe, there’s nothing there. I’m sure you just had a bad dream,” she said almost inaudibly. Mostly to herself. 

Surging adrenaline had sharpened her hearing to a keen edge. She heard the fridge downstairs, her bedmate’s hitching breaths, a dog barking miles away, and… dripping… She was sure she heard dripping. 

From the blackened doorway and into the room stepped an enormous man. Impossibly tall and wide. In the dim illumination of the shuttered windows, she saw his form. He was powerfully built and pitch-black as if chiseled from the void between the stars. His skin roiled with an oily, inhuman iridescence, like gasoline on the tarmac. It stood perfectly still in mid-stride, framed by the entrance.

She made a gasping squeak in her throat as a scream was silenced by paralyzing instinct. Now silence, but for dripping. 

The man wore what could have been a ceremonial skirt, woven out of what seemed to be the same indescribable liquescent element that his bare chest and arms seemed to crawl with. Where his head and neck should have been, instead erupted a jagged cluster of smooth, obsidian-black crystal columns. They glittered as though with some malicious sentience in the soft light. She could not tear her gaze away from it, enrapt as she was by the twinkling, alien geometry.

A tiny voice shouted something from within her reeling mind. It was faint, as though buried under miles of stone. Repeating the same indecipherable command over and over with a pleading, vital urgency. Her back and chest had begun to prick with points of hot sweat. 

The man in the doorway let out a low, resounding growl that seemed to shake the very room. Something like whalesong, but somehow deeper. She felt it in her teeth and groin, like the sensation of freefall when driving over a hump in the road. Her limbs felt nailed in place. She whimpered as her glassy eyes let slip fat tears which snaked down to her chin where they pooled and dripped ponderously onto the bed. 

It stepped forward once again with a booming squelch, and she heard herself screaming. 

She sat up in bed with a sheen of sweat covering her body, and the scream still pounded against the back of her teeth. Her fingers grasped frantically into the sheets and her knuckles went white. She felt the scream begin to deflate as she realized the man was gone. She gazed into the now-empty doorway to their bedroom. 

She whipped her head from side to side, checking every shadow the room contained for a glimpse of the hulking thing. She barked out a hysterical laugh through her panting breath. It had been a dream. She had been asleep.  

She darted her eyes over to where her husband had been sitting. Had he been sitting? she thought deliriously.

She whirled away and yanked the chain on the bedside lamp, flooding the room with an explosion of light. She jerked back to look into his face and found him lying next her. He was wide-eyed with lips parted in urgent confusion. His chest rose and fell with rapid, labored panting. He had tears on his cheeks. Her hand shot to her face and came away wet, her eyes bulged with widening shock as she looked down at her glistening fingertips.

She collapsed onto him and they held each other. They spoke not a word for many moments, communicating only through the occasional sob. 
After a time, they unlaced their arms, and swung their legs over the edge of their bed. They cautiously dismounted and circled towards each other. Their faces all the while piercing in every direction, on high alert.   

Together, they found four bare footprints that began in the once shadow-shrouded hallway beyond their bedroom door. Prints, that in unimaginably long-gaited strides, ended abruptly at the foot of the bed. They huddled around the inky footfalls and stared down in riveted dismay. Denial frothed in the back of their throats. The woman swallowed with some difficulty.

“Did you…” 

“Yeah.”

“What…” she trailed off. 

Silence devoured the exchange.

Each of the tracks was ringed in an outline of murky black sludge, and they caught the meager light with that same greasy iridescence. The couple stood mesmerized, and they tried to ignore the straining heaviness in their eyes and the yawns that were stirring in their jaws.