Mid-Week Flash Challenge - Week 110

This week's photo prompt was taken by Alan Chaput, a Cozy Mystery author who lives in Savannah Georgia. I really love this image.

Took me a while to find something original, I had a couple of false starts, but I like what I finally came up with. Hope you do too.

The General Guidelines can be found here.

How to create a clickable link in Blogger comments can be found on lasts week's post here.

There is also a Facebook group for Mid-Week Flash, if you fancy getting the prompt there.

Bricked

She passed it every day on her way to school, and every day she was sure something had changed about it, but she couldn’t define what. Was it the tone of the blue? Was it the pattern of bricks in the blocked up panel? Was it just the panel that was bricked up or the entire door? No matter what, it caught Amy’s attention.

When she turned twelve her dad gave her an old Smartphone of his and she started taking pictures of the door. She’d review them at the end of each day, but couldn’t see any differences between them. Maybe the shade was darker or lighter, but she put that down to the time of day.

Then one day one of the bricks had shifted. She brought up two pictures next door to each other. One was definitely further over than the other, but was it just the angle? She took more pictures, but they all looked the same.

Then one day the sticker on the right hand side of the door had gone. It didn’t mean much, but the door looked different, bigger somehow as though it was taller and wider. She pulled up some older pictures and did some calculations. There was a difference in centimetres: it was 3 wider and 2 taller. But how could a door grow? It was insane – or was she?

Then the bricks in the panel started moving. They rotated clockwise, taking two weeks to make a full rotation. It had to be an illusion. Amy planned to mark one of the stones to find out.

She took a purple marker with her, but when faced with the door she hesitated to approach it. She didn’t know why, it was a door for goodness sake, not a living thing. But a part of her didn’t quite believe that.

When she moved towards it she held her breath and quickly drew a doodle on one of the prominent bricks. She hurried away, half expecting the door to reach out and grab her. She chuckled at her childish fear as she took out her camera and held it up to capture the new marking.

But it was gone.

She looked from the phone screen to the brick. There was no sign of it. She scowled, how could that happen? Maybe it had been too small.

She got the pen again and returned to the door, without hesitation this time, bending slightly to draw another doodle. She covered half the brick to be sure. The sound of the pen against the brick was reassuring.

She stepped back and reached for her phone, keeping her eyes on the design the whole time. She flicked her eyes back and forth while she opened the camera app. She brought the phone up slowly, keeping her eyes on the brickwork until the last minute. But as soon as she looked at the screen it was gone, both from the phone image and the actual door. This was mad!

Her annoyance overrode her fear. She stepped back to the door immediately. She put her hand on the bricks as she drew too, as though this would somehow keep the doodle from disappearing. The marker was drying out a little against the stonework as she scribbled furiously, her concentration focused on its tip.

It went dark and she looked up. She was on the other side of the door, inside the derelict house. She closed her eyes and opened them again. Nope, she was definitely inside.

She glanced round; the windows were boarded up, strips of light cutting through the cracks of them to illuminate the barren hallway. She looked at the door. The panel was indeed the only part of it bricked up. She pulled on the handle, but it didn’t budge. She called out, but her voice sounded strangely muffled, the dead air not transporting it.

Then in the corner by the door leading into the back of the house she spotted a skeleton in ragged clothes, and another under the staircase. They weren’t full size, they weren’t adults, they were children like herself.

When she took a closer look one of them had a camera next to them, an old 35mm one like her dad used to have. It seemed she wasn’t the first to have become fascinated by the door. She turned back to look at it. Is that what it did, drew children in? She looked back at the bodies on the floor. And was this her destiny?