What really happened to Narcissus, staring into that lake? Marty finds out...

Marty saw the door and tapped Alice on the shoulder.

“Look.” Marty pointed. Alice looked, uninterested.

“So?”

“It’s a door…at the bottom of the pond.”

Alice shrugged, impatient.

Marty shrugged back and pressed his lips to hers, moving his hands to warm them, forgetting.

Later, Marty remembered the door in the pond.

It was once red, he thought, now chipped to a colourless brown. And it lay at the bottom of the pond, right in the center, doorknob glaring upwards at the sky.

Marty wondered vaguely who put it there.

Marty laughed as he wondered if it led anywhere.

The next day he returned alone to the pond. The door was still there.

He knelt and looked through the dim water and thought he could see hinges, attached to the ground.

Marty left as the night fell and thought of his computer.

Marty searched the Internet.

He found nothing about doors in ponds.

Marty asked his friends and family who raised a cynical eyebrow and knew nothing.

He sat by the pond and stared at the door. He made out a smudge, now, like writing. Faint and shapeless.

The door seemed less bare now, more red, coming to life like a blooming flower.

He quit his job.

He sat at the pond every day and stared.

He sat at his computer every night and fruitlessly searched.

He sat by the lake one day and remembered Narcissus.

Entranced by his own beautiful image, or hypnotised by the door?

Marty thought he knew which it was.

Marty’s friends and family thought he was sick and despaired.

He bought lights and car batteries.

He sat by the pond 24 hours a day, staring.

The door was al red now and the smudge grew clearer every day.

Eventually is said ‘Enter’ in bold white letters.

He leaped into the pond feet first.

He ducked under and kicked to the bottom of the 8ft deep pond.

He grabbed the door handle. It opened easily, cutting through the water like it was air.

Marty expected to see black but there was only red.

Marty wondered for a moment, ‘Why red?”. The answer came as he was sucked through the hold, flailing in sudden terror.

Where Marty had sat on the edge of the pond grew a flower. A new flower, blue, a new unique member of an old family.

Friends and family named it Martissus.

The door was gone now. Into nothing, waiting for someone else to hypnotise.

The colours of the unknown universe have their purpose.

Black is the colour of nothingness.
Blue, the colour of mourning.

Inside the door millions of souls screamed.

For red is the colour of eternal pain.