She edged her way along the narrow passage, her heart pounding in her ears.
The walls felt cold and damp beneath her sticky fingers.

The sweat poured in rivulets, prickling as it reached the fetid air. Her eyes were becoming used to the half-light as she reached the top of the rickety stairs. She pulled in large draughts of air, her blood making whooshing sounds in her tense and aching head. Eyes shut tightly she began to pray, tumbling senseless words, trying to block out the fact that she had no other choice. The staircase below her reached down into blackness as she took her first hesitant step.

She felt the panic rising, clamouring in her ringing ears, as she took one slow step down into the waiting darkness. It seemed like an eternity as she tried to control her laboured breathing. She had to gain some measure of control. Hysteria threatened to swamp her, a tidal wave of feeling swelling in her ample stomach.

Terrified, she gripped the old wooden handrail as she took one careful step after another, each one taking her closer to the nameless terror waiting below. She had been here before, many times. Her dreams were littered with moments such as these and now, as then, she felt the enormity of what would await her at the bottom of the seemingly never-ending stairs.

The air felt cooler and she could make out shifting shapes in the strange mist that seemed to rise from the depths below. She realised that this was the point in her dreams that she always awoke, clammy with sweat and whimpering with an ice-cold fear that stayed with her for days.

Under her feet the stair groaned. She shifted her weight quickly onto her other foot and steadied herself against the cold damp wall.

She was nearing the bottom. She could see nothing but vague shapes in the still and cloying darkness that seemed to wrap around her trembling legs like a hungry cat, but the shivers rising up her sodden spine told her that she was almost there, almost there….

She knew that the doorway would be waiting for her, the doorway that was etched in her fragile memory, glimpsed often in that moment before sleep and half remembered from the countless dreams. She did not like to remember the dreams. She knew the feel of the heavy gnarled wood, and the hinges black to remind her…

Well this time she would not awake to the comforting tick of her bedside clock and the familiar shadows of her own room. She had made a choice. This time it was not a dream. This time she would face the fear that had haunted her since childhood. She must know what it was that lay hidden behind that big old door.
A strange calm had settled over her,   a sense of destiny in the final few steps. Time seemed to stand still. The air was electric. It was almost as if the terror she had felt so many times had prepared her for this very moment.

She took a deep breath, the air making a whistling noise as it filled her eager lungs. It was just the same as she had remembered from her dreams, the knots in the gnarled wood like faces grimacing at her plight.

She put out her shaky hand and grasped the tarnished handle. Closing her eyes, frantically trying to recall her childhood prayers, she twisted the handle and with a deep sigh the big old door swung slowly open.

A cloud of dust rose silently into the thick air. It caught in her throat as she gasped for oxygen. Light-headed, she clung to the door-frame, the pressure in her head building in time to the thumping of her frightened heart. Eyes cast downward she studied the uneven floor beneath her unsteady feet. It had been so long, she thought,…so, so long.

Her movements stirred the stagnant air. She hastily covered her open mouth with her small white hand, stifling a gasp as the dust stung her unseeing eyes. She could not seem to focus, her vision unable or unwilling to adjust to the strange light that now poured forth from the open door.

It was then that she heard the sound, registered it and tried desperately to push it away, to bury it again in the subconscious depths from where it had arisen. The choked sobs, the desperation, tore at her heart as she shook her head violently from side to side. She felt she could not bear the feelings that avalanched toward her. Her knees buckled as she fell to the floor with her arms flung over her ears, but the sound echoed inside as well as all around her. She felt she was a vessel afloat in high seas, the wind and storm raging all around her, the undercurrent of the ink black ocean, pulling her downward into a whirlpool that sucked and dragged at her very soul.

The blue tricycle lay on its side, the dust thick on its upturned frame, the scattered picture books strewn like confetti on the hard lino floor and the doll. Oh God, she had forgotten the doll, its blue eyes half closed, the knitted dress still in one piece, the velvet ribbon her fumbling child fingers had so carefully tied in the faded golden hair, still scarlet after all these years.

Memories came flooding like tidal waves, one overwhelming wall after another. The dam had finally burst with the weight of the water it had been holding back. She was engulfed,

….she had opened the door at last.

This passage that I have written, is symbolic
of the inner journeys that we all embark upon sometime, in our search for wholeness. By taking those dark stairs down into our subconscious, we may discover those closed inner doors, and re-open them with the light of understanding. So that gradually we can retrieve and integrate all of the lost pieces of ourselves that are hidden in darkness behind the doors ... awaiting our descent.