THE DOOR OF NO RETURN. EPISODE 6: THE FIRST CROSSING

KEHINDE AKPORIEN
@akporienkehinde866986
6 days ago

She stepped through.
The door closed behind her.
Dele was still on the other side.
And then she heard his voice, from in front of her.
Ada told herself she would only look. That was the lie she carried through the doorway, the way people carry small lies into rooms they know they should never enter.
The moment her foot crossed the threshold, the cold of the archive room vanished. What replaced it was a warmth so complete it felt like being forgiven for something. Sun warmth. The kind that used to settle on her skin on Sunday afternoons in her grandmother's compound, before the compound became a place people stopped visiting, before silence became the only thing that lived there.
She turned. The door was gone. Not closed. Gone, as if it had never once been cut into that wall.
"Dele?" Her voice did not echo the way a voice should in open space. It simply stopped, swallowed whole, the way a scream is swallowed by deep snow.
She was standing in Ile Aye. Not the Ile Aye of cracked tarmac and coughing generators and the sour sweetness of fermenting cassava behind Mama Bisi's stall. This was Ile Aye remembered too perfectly, too gold, too still, the red laterite roads swept clean of every pothole she had ever cursed under her breath. The iroko tree at the town's center stood taller than memory allowed, its canopy wide enough to hold up the entire sky, and something about that wrongness made her chest ache with a fear she had no name for yet.
Then she heard him.
"Ada."
Dele's voice. Close. Warm. Coming from a man standing beneath the iroko who was not Dele at all, though he wore Dele's face laid over an older one, the way a photograph is laid over the negative that made it.
"I am not him," the man said gently, before terror could fully close her throat. "But I understand why you would want me to be. My name was Bayo. I was his father."
The ground seemed to tilt beneath her. Dele's father had vanished eleven years ago, one of Ile Aye's quiet disappearances, filed away as a man who had simply left his family the way men sometimes do. No one had ever searched properly. No one had ever really wanted to know.
"You are not real," she whispered, though her body refused to carry her closer or farther away.
"Real is a complicated word in this place." Bayo smiled, and it was Dele's smile exactly, which was the cruelest thing about him, crueler than any monster could have been. "You do not have long. Listen to me. I need you to carry something back."
"I am carrying nothing for you."
"It is not a curse, Ada. It is a warning." He crouched the way a father crouches to speak to a frightened child, though she was a grown woman and he had never spoken a single word to her in his life. "Tell my son not to follow. Whatever door he finds, whatever voice calls his name in the night, tell him not to follow it. I followed something once. It wore my wife's voice so perfectly I wept with relief. I am still here."
Behind him, at the edge of the golden light, shapes stood among the trees, too many of them, too patient, too still, watching her the way hunters watch something that has not yet noticed the trap.
"Go home, Ada." His smile widened, one terrible inch past where a human smile should ever stop. "Before something else learns to answer to his name instead of me."
The world folded shut around her like a fist. She hit her knees on the archive floor, gasping, alone. The door was ordinary again, closed, painted institutional green. Dele was nowhere. And yet seconds ago, she would have sworn on everything sacred that he had been standing right beside her, close enough to touch.



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