The Open Door

WE had a strange sleeping arrangement when we were kids. My childhood bedroom was also bedroom for my brother and mom. Since dad worked night, it was just the three of us home. So we slept with mom even when there were rooms for us. Mom usually had her little son next to her in that big bed by the window, and I was put in the single bed which was across the room door. Basically, my bed was just, say, three meters away from the door, which was always kept open. 

The thing about open doors is that they are creepy. You switch off the room lights, the room goes pitch-dark at once but it eventually warms up when the street light or moonlight seeps through the window. Then you see familiar shadows on the wall. Perhaps of a gently swaying mango branch just before a midnight shower or of bats dashing across the porch like what I used to see on our wall. There's always activity and life even when you're safe and sleeping. But the open door will always be dark and mysterious. No shadows or signs of life but just a dark hole on the wall, and it's really creepy when you're jolted awake in the middle of darkness and you find this hole before you. 

So yeah. That door, which mom kept open for ventilation ...I loathed it. Actually, I feared it to some extend till one night when the sighting occurred. 

It was probably around 2 or 3 in the A.M. I was on my side when I woke up facing the door. I wouldn't usually fight to see beyond the door but that morning, I rubbed my eyes to focus on the figure just outside the room, at the beginning of our long hallway. Warm and familiar, my mom, dressed in her usual clothes, was smiling and calling for me. Yet it was strange and wrong to see her in such fine spirit at that juncture. So I turned around to peek over my bed headboard, and there was mom, fast asleep with my brother next to her! I could've screamed at this point but I remained calm.The next course of action was just to cover my head with the blanket and go to sleep.

I never told mom this story till years later when we had moved out of that place. My brother must've been a mess when he had spotted the same figure calling out at him during one of those nights. I mean the boy was right next to mom - our real mom! He had told her about it a few times but mom had brushed it off. 
"Probably just a dream." Or a fragment of his imagination but I knew it wasn't just an imagination. 

When we recall the story now, mom cringes. God knows what it was or what could've happened if one of us had adhered to the strange calling but I'd never forget that bedroom.

* This post is inspired by Mama Kat's prompt - What do you remember most about your childhood bedroom?