Behind a small door in Jacob’s house, there’s four filing cabinets—one for each member of his family.
Chapter 1:
I don’t know how, but I’d never noticed the small doorway before. It was opposite the bathroom, and so you’d expect to notice it every time you exit the smallest room in the house, but I’d never consciously spotted it there before.
At the time I was in a rush, so I just mentally noted it, thought “How strange,” and ran to meet my friends.
It was later that night, when I couldn’t sleep…that’s when I decided to explore it.
My name’s Jacob. I live with my mother, my father, and my sister. Well, Mom and Dad aren’t around much, so it’s just me and Ashley most of the time. We’re referred to as the “Wonder Twins” sometimes…not because we’re twins, but because we lucked out genetically. I’m tall, broad-shouldered, and I work out…and my sister?
To put it simply, my sister is the most attractive creature on the planet.
Long, blonde hair, a tiny waist, and tits that are perfectly proportioned to her frame. They say I’m a looker, but I honestly can’t compete with Ash…I know that it’s wrong, but many time I’ve lain awake at night thinking about her perfectly plump lips wrapping around my cock, wondering if her body is as perfect as it looks…
I’d feel guilty about it, but honestly…a lot of things keep me up at night. I’m an insomniac, and if I’m going to be staring at the ceiling, I figure I might as well be thinking about something pleasant. Sometimes I’ll make a game of it, and see how many times I can jerk off in a row…I don’t always think about my sister, but she’s started wearing less and less clothes around the house, so…yeah, it’s rare for any other females to enter my fantasies.
Unless they’re joining my sister and me, if you know what I mean.
On this night, however, I wasn’t jerking off. I was laying there, as usual, staring at the ceiling, when suddenly I remembered the little door. Now you might be thinking that the middle of the night isn’t the best time to be exploring strange rooms, but let me tell you…when you can’t sleep, the middle of the night is the best time for doing anything.
I got up, found a flashlight, and decided to see what was in there.
I wasn’t really expecting anything exciting. It’s a door in my house that I’ve never noticed before…it wasn’t like it was going to contain hidden pirate treasure, or a secret aunt that Mom and Dad never told us about. But one of my methods of dealing with the insomnia is to just follow my whims…an unanswered question can bounce around my head all night, but I knew that once I saw that nothing was in there, it would be one more thing that wasn’t be distracting me.
The door was stiff, like it hadn’t been opened in a long time—the doorknob turned fine, it was just the door itself that seemed to be stuck. I gave it a good shove, but nothing happened.
A part of me considered just going back to bed, but I wanted to know what was in there. Even if it was just old Christmas decorations, I wanted to know. So I put the flashlight down on the floor, put my shoulder to the door, and gave it a good shove.
It didn’t open, but I definitely felt it shift. I decided to give it one more shot—with a proper run-up—and if that failed, give up, go to bed, and spend the rest of the night wondering why the sky was blue or something like that.
(That’s a joke—I know exactly why the sky is blue. It kept me up all night when I was nine, and so I’d found my parents’ old encyclopaedias, and read everything relating to “atmosphere” and “light frequencies” and yada yada yada. If I’d known how to connect the dialup, I probably would’ve been able to find out in less than two minutes.)
In the end, I had to do a run-up while half bent over (which was strange to say the least. If my parents or sister had come out at that point, they would have been met with quite an odd sight).
Determined to find out what was inside the tiny door—perhaps Harry Potter, locked away so his letters couldn’t find him—I half-ran, half-scampered towards the door, and when my shoulder made contact, it flew open with a loud “BANG”, as I went tumbling into the tiny room.
Not unexpectedly, it was full of dust, and I spent a few minutes coughing and wheezing, hoping that it wasn’t asbestos that I was breathing in. When I caught my breath again, I listened carefully to see if my door-opening skills had roused anyone from their sleep, but it seemed that I was free to explore the room alone.
I picked up my flashlight, and swung it around. The room was tiny—no longer than an average bed, and about as wide as a king-size. Like I said, it was so full of dust that I was practically choking with every breath—I put my sleeve over my mouth just to make sure that I didn’t start coughing again, and had a look at the room’s contents.
In each corner of the room was a filing cabinet…other than that, the room was completely bare. Weirdly, each filing cabinet had a name—“Spencer Maslow”, “Ruth Maslow”, “Ashley Maslow” and my name, “”Jacob Maslow”. Ruth and Spencer are my parents…my first thought was that this was where they kept all of our paperwork. Birth certificates, tax returns, all that kind of thing…but then I remembered that Mom had a drawer in her study upstairs for all that junk. And plus it didn’t look like this room had been opened in a long, long time.
I went straight for my own filing cabinet, of course—who wouldn’t? Inside there were a bunch of files—I picked one at random from the middle.
“Organization,” it said, and here’s where things got really weird.
Inside the file was a diagram of my room, and then another, more detailed diagram of my desk. And it was completely up to date…like, it had the new monitor I’d just inherited from a friend (when he got a better one…he didn’t die or anything) two days ago.
It was obvious that no one had been in this room for years…how did it have such current information? The paper looked brand-new, it wasn’t even slightly yellowed…
I continued to flip through, and got more and more freaked out as I did. There was a complete hierarchy of my computers’ contents…somehow, whoever had put these files together knew the system that I organized my porn system with.
Figuring I was sleep hallucinating or something like that, I returned the folder to the front of the drawer I’d pulled it from, and staggered out of there. I shut the door carefully, and went back into my bedroom, where I spent four more hours staring at my ceiling before eventually drifting off to sleep.
* * *
The next morning, when I woke up, I pretty easily convinced myself that it had all been a dream. I’d hallucinated before—only a few times, but it always felt like that. My hallucinations seemed so plausible, but at the same time just didn’t make sense…once I’d imagined that I was a horse. My life was exactly the same—parents, hot sister, bed…but I had four legs instead of two, and no arms. My parents found me trying to open the fridge with my mouth.
It was a Saturday, so my plans included “lounging around the house”, and “doing nothing.” A quick glance at the clock told me two things: firstly, that it was askew, something which I quickly corrected, and secondly, that I’d slept in well past twelve.
On the way to the kitchen, I was unable to resist checking out the door, seeing if I’d imagined that it existed, or just what it contained…
Sure enough, there it was…a door that you had to hunch over to use, right across the hall from the bathroom. I must have seen it, and incorporated it into my weird dreams. I turned the handle and it opened easily, but I restrained myself from going in…I wasn’t quite prepared to face whatever lay behind those doors, whether it was four inexplicably-labelled filing cabinets or a haunted ventriloquists’s dummy that was going to fuck my shit up for the next few days (and several sequels as well).
I began to make myself a sandwich, but when I went to get the ingredients, got distracted by the disarray that met me in the fridge and pantry. I never ended up making the sandwich, deciding to help my parents out by reorganizing the kitchen instead. My sister was sitting on the couch when I emerged an hour or two later—when I saw her, I barely managed to refrain from cursing out loud.
Ashley plays tennis on Saturdays, and hadn’t changed after the game. She should have been sweaty and disgusting, but of course she just looked sexy-messy…her tennis outfit didn’t cover her toned midriff, or her long legs, and she had this terrible habit of taking her bra off as soon as she got home…
I didn’t want to be attracted to my sister, I swear, but she left me no choice…
Declining her offer of checking out the latest Adventure Time with her, I made my way straight to my room to jerk it—I finished myself in record time, and immediately felt much more relaxed, especially after I threw out the tissues I used for clean-up, and emptied my bin. Maybe I’d be able to hang out with her like a normal brother now, without my damned hormones controlling my every action.
I’d just started to sort out my MTG cards—something I’d been meaning to do for literally months now—when I heard a knock on the door. It was Ashley—she was clearly bored, and apparently I was better company than the TV. I know what you’re reading this for, but I didn’t throw her over my desk and take her or anything like that—it would make a mess, for one, but more importantly…we just didn’t have that kind of relationship.
My sister and I spent the rest of the day just shooting the shit like siblings do. Her and I had always gotten along, and when I wasn’t letting my dick do the thinking, we had a perfectly normal brother-sister relationship. We talked about Game of Thrones, and then spent even longer talking about how everyone on Facebook was talking about the latest episode. She kept me company as I put my laundry away, and even complimented me on my mad folding skillz.
I considered telling her about the door, but something held me back. I guess a small part of me still believed that it could have been real, impossible though it seemed. After she left, I jerked off again (we have a normal relationship, but I had just sat in a room with a short-skirt-wearing goddess all day…I’m only human) and decided to hit up reddit.
I’d been on reddit for less than half an hour when I glanced down, and noticed something…well, strange.
My desk was immaculate. I don’t just mean “it didn’t have half-eaten bowls of pasta on it”, I mean it was…perfect. There wasn’t a single item out of place…even my pencils, somehow, were arranged from smallest to largest, exactly how I imagined they’d be arranged in a perfect world.
My mind started whirring, and I opened my computer’s desktop. It was covered in the normal mish-mash of icons that I store there, and without even thinking, I started making folders, subfolders…I ensured that there was a place for everything, and everything had its place. I didn’t even look at the clock, just started sorting, and was physically incapable of stopping until I was done.
As I put the last image I’d downloaded into its correct sub-sub-folder (Porn > Pics > Solo topless > Redheads), I sat back, suddenly finding it hard to breathe. It…it was hard to describe. It wasn’t like I had no control over my body at all, it was just that…well, spending my evening sorting out folders was the only thing I wanted to do.
No, more than that…want is such a weak word. I needed to. I urgently, desperately needed to turn that chaotic pile of pixels into a system that made sense. Until everything was just right, the rest of the world was a blur—it was the ultimate tunnel vision. I couldn’t concentrate on anything else, I couldn’t think of anything else. It was like one of those niggling questions that come to me at night—I couldn’t sleep until it was solved. I just couldn’t.
It was like holding your breath—you can only do it for so long, before your need for oxygen takes over.
I wondered, briefly, if my insomnia had somehow triggered some kind of latent OCD tendencies, but a quick google search quickly dispelled that idea. My head spinning, I turned around and opened my drawer—all of my clothes were neatly folded and efficiently stacked next to each other, a stark contrast to my usual system of “throw them all in and root around when you want something.”
I closed the drawer—the idea of leaving it open almost made me physically ill—and tried to trace my steps that day. I suddenly realized that everything I’d done since waking up that morning had been neat, it had been organized…it hadn’t been like me at all.
It was getting close to midnight, so I lay on my bed (which, I noticed, I’d made that morning, for the first time…ever), shut my eyes, and tried to sleep.
Unsuccessfully, of course. If trying to remember the name of the bad guy from the Smurfs (Gargamel) had once kept me up for six hours, suddenly becoming an OCD neat freak ensured that there was no chance of slumber overtaking me.
It was an embarrassingly long time before my eyes snapped open in sudden realization:
The dream.
In my dream/hallucination/whatever you want to call it, I’d opened a filing cabinet with my name on it, and found a file labelled “Organization”. I’d moved that file…had that, somehow, rewired my brain?
The rational side of me tried to dismiss the thought, but it was no good. The thought had entered my head, and I knew that it was going to niggle away at me until I disproved it. With a sigh, I got up, found my flashlight, and went back down the hall.
Apparently there are tests you can do to see if you’re dreaming—look at your watch, look away, and then look at it again, stuff like that. I wish I’d known them at the time, because I can tell you—it sure as hell felt like a dream. The door silently opened inward, and as I stepped, hunched over, into the room, I was again faced with four filing cabinets, each clearly labelled with the name of one of my family members. The footsteps in the dust confirmed that either I’d been here the previous night, or at least that my dream had memory. I retraced my steps, stood in front of the drawers with my name on them, and opened it.