Falling Through the Keyhole

I opened my eyes and the door was at the foot of my bed. Not my bedroom door, but “the door”. The door out of time and place that would better fit an old Victorian mansion of two hundred years ago. Massive, wooden and paneled with weathered flaking paint, covered in nicks and scratches along with a variety of other damage apparently from many years of use as well as disuse and neglect. The door should not have been there, yet, there it was. The door floated just past the end of my bed and I knew it wasn’t going away until its function was served.

The door itself wasn’t the most disconcerting object of my young mind’s interest. It was the ornate brass doorknob fixture with its impressive keyhole. The keyhole looked as if it needed a very large and special key to fit it but I knew that no key was necessary for what would happen tonight. The keyhole’s presence and part it would play was the whole purpose of the door appearing in the air in the darkness of my bedroom. It always had been.

Of course, I was already paralyzed and thus had no option but to await for the inevitable. Inevitable only because the series of events that I knew were going to transpire had never changed in all the years the door had appeared at the foot of my bed. Paralyzed in the position I had been sleeping in before the events were set into motion. My hands crossed over my chest in the pose of a mummy. My brothers always teased me that I looked like I was dead when I was sleeping on my back like that. Hands crossed over my chest and laid flat out on my back like the child pharaoh waiting his embalming.

I was physically paralyzed and incapable of movement or uttering even a whispered sound, but at the same time I was quite alert mentally and anticipating what I knew would happen next. I was paralyzed but I was not afraid. At least I was not afraid for the moment. Anxious, maybe, and most likely perturbed and very frustrated that I had to experience the keyhole and what was beyond it again.

It was definitely what was on the other side of the keyhole that caused me fright.

I focused my entire being upon the keyhole. My concentration began to block out all peripheral vision and only the keyhole existed. Only the keyhole mattered. Then a faint soft glow of cerulean light spilled from the keyhole and I knew the journey was about to begin. Sweat coated my nakedness under the thin blanket and though unable to move I could still feel every sensation coursing through my body and over my skin. I felt a trickle of sweat stream down the side of my head and once more tried to move, to struggle against my invisible bonds, but in vain.

The soft blue light began to intensify and swirl and form an expanding cone shape that took on a life of its own as it slowly moved toward me and became a kaleidoscope of spinning colors. And sound? Was that music I heard? A tunnel of music and colorful lights that baffled my senses to a point so I could not distinguish which were lights and which were musical notes. Sight and sound overload.

I knew the bottom of that senses burning whirlpool was the depths of the keyhole and it wanted to draw me into it like a black hole sucking the life and light from its surrounding universe. That was when the intense blue-white light shot out from the center of the vortex and struck me square in the middle of my sweat beaded forehead.

There was physical impact to the light beam striking me. I jolted stiff with involuntary muscle contractions that made me feel as if my body had turned to steel and I began to float up off the bed. Float and what felt like shrink in size. Was I shrinking or was the light expanding to engulf me? I felt my blankets slide off my body as I rose higher and shrank smaller and began moving toward the center of the vortex of light and sound.

Time faltered and with excruciating slowness each second dragged as I continued to shrink and float toward the keyhole at the bottom of the tornado of multi-colored lights and musical sounds. The keyhole became a cavernous portal that I was about to enter feet first still in the very same position I had started from in bed. The cone of lights narrowed to a pinpoint within the very center of the keyhole and it was about to swallow me like a behemoth blue whale scooping up a single krill.

Then, everything stopped.

I was in suspended animation and no bigger than a dust spec just before my feet touched the singular point of convergence at the dead center of the monstrous keyhole. Frozen in time and space the terror of realization and remembrance of what was waiting for me on the other side overpowered me. The scream started in the deepest core of my being and expanded and forced its way upward to explode past my lips as only a whimper.

With a loud WOOSH I was sucked into the infinitesimal pinpoint heart of the key black hole into the infinity of blackness and then

Nothingness

Technorati: Bonez, Cerulean Dreams, Cerulean, keyhole, dreams, nightmares, visions