Booktok Doorframe Lean Novels & Stories

The visual break managed to hide the fact that the bottom two shelves of the left bookcase were shallower than the others. I knelt down in front of the bookcase and started to pull books out of the way. Once they were clear, I ran my hands along the surface of the wood paneling. I didn’t find any latches or buttons. I thought I could have been wrong until I felt a panel give slightly beneath my touch. I applied more pressure. There was a click and the panel popped outward. I tried to pull it open further but it ended up sliding back into the other panels. Revealing the compartment behind the case.

Run down was the wrong term, not as perfect as the other homes. Giant vines ran all over the building, snaking their way around the windows. Weeds stood tall in front of the house and the path that led to the door was full of cracks. Alpha Dane raps on the door and pushes it open before someone even answers. He tugs me into the dimly lit house, giving my hand a little reassuring squeeze. “Ah Dane.” A man a similar age to Alpha Dane, steps out from a room, knocking over a stack of books and sends them crashing to the floor.

It possessed a geometry that was too perfect for the rough, organic interior of the hut. It was a Door. The frame shimmered with a faint, violet luminescence, pulsing gently like a slow heartbeat. The center of the door was a swirling vortex of black, but deep within that blackness, Ressi could see faint glimmers, like distant galaxies spinning in a void. It looked deep—impossibly deep. The fire in the hearth seemed to shrink away from it. The temperature in the hut plummeted. Fear, cold and primal, washed over him. He scrambled backward until his back hit the reed door he had been about to open. "Mungu wangu," he whispered.

This time, when I checked, there were strange signs. I turned the door. It didn't close. The top-right corner of the cabinet frame was split open. The crack had eaten deep into the wood, twisting the entire frame. The door brushed against one side and then popped out, leaving a clear gap. The hinges were still intact, but nothing held them in alignment anymore. "Shit!" I stopped immediately and called out, "David. I need you." David, who was checking something on his computer, stood up immediately. He walked straight over to me.

Dust motes, disturbed by our violent entry, danced in the few slivers of gray light that cut through the grimy, high-set windows, illuminating a vast, shadowy expanse of towering bookshelves that receded into an abyssal darkness. The door, splintered around the lock, wouldn’t latch. Jake immediately threw his weight against it, his boots skidding on the polished marble floor. “It won’t hold! I need to brace it!” he grunted, the strain evident in his voice as the door shuddered under an impact from the other side. A pale, grasping hand shot through the gap, fingers clawing at the air.

The door itself was solid but the frame around it had the slightly soft give of something that had been damp at some point in the past decade and never fully recovered. I looked around the corridor. There was a bench against the far wall. Decorative, heavy, the kind of thing that had been sitting in the same spot so long it had left marks in the stone floor. “Help me with that,” I said. Titan looked at the bench. Then he just hit the door with his shoulder instead. It took three attempts. Not elegant. Not quiet. But the frame gave on the third hit with a crack that I felt in my back teeth, and the door swung inward hard.

No camera visible; the glass in the door’s square was too thick to break without noise. She went still, listening. Far off, boots on concrete. Closer, the faint hiss of air through the vent. The building breathed with them. The chair, then. She tipped it, levered her weight on the loose bar, and felt it give with a metallic gasp. She worked slowly, carefully, mindful of echoes, until the crossbar slid out—two and a half feet of hollow steel with sharp corners where weld had failed. She tested it against the cot frame. Solid. Against the door seam. Useless. Against the window bars… too short to reach from the floor. The high slit stared down at her like a thin, indifferent eye.

Because the door told the rest of the story. The iron-banded wood sagged on its hinges, hairline fractures spidering out from each gouge where claws had raked at the barrier’s skin. Splinters sprouted along the grain like a field of pale weeds. A new crack had appeared through the center panel, thin as a thread but deep, and when the light slid across it I could see it widen, the way a wound opens when the muscles beneath it flex. Thalia lifted the latch with two fingers. Even that light touch made the whole frame creak.

We navigated the winding corridors of the first floor until we finally reached the massive double doors of the private library. Kade pushed the doors open and walked directly to the back wall of the room, stopping in front of a tall wooden bookshelf filled with heavy encyclopedias. He reached behind a thick leather-bound volume and pulled a hidden metal lever. The entire bookshelf clicked loudly and swung outward on heavy steel hinges, revealing a thick reinforced steel door equipped with a digital keypad. Kade typed a rapid sequence of numbers into the glowing panel, and the heavy door hissed open to expose a brightly lit concrete room.

He toggled to the next picture, instead. why aren’t you looking at these outside?! The room in the next image was more easily identifiable, if only because of the bookshelves— warped, crooked, several shelves broken—and an old rocking chair in the far left corner, also mostly out of frame. A sitting room of sorts. There were probably more bookshelves out of frame, maybe a table and a few recliners.