My Professor’s Dark Christmas Obsession

Chapter 5

On December 23rd, Autumn woke up on Gabriel's couch and the first thing she felt was that something was wrong.

It wasn’t danger or fear. She just knew she’d woken up somewhere she didn't mean to fall asleep. Her body was one step ahead of her brain, and she already knew that a line had been crossed somewhere while she was unconscious.

The room was dark except for the Christmas lights strung around the window, and for a few seconds, she genuinely didn't know where she was.

Then it came back: Tea at the kitchen table. Gabriel reading something out loud to her, his voice slow and low and warm as the fire crackled. She must have gone under mid-sentence. She did that here sometimes. She’d just slide sideways into sleep like the house itself was pulling her down. She had never questioned it, but she was questioning it now.

She reached for her phone. Dead. She checked her bag for her charger. She hadn't brought it. Then she stood up and found Gabriel in the kitchen and told him she needed to get home.

"I don't have the right cable," he said, handing her a mug without being asked.

His face was calm and warm and utterly ordinary, and that was the thing about him that she was starting to understand got under her skin every time. The way nothing was ever wrong with Gabriel, nothing was ever urgent or alarming, everything was just fine and manageable and under control.

"Try the landline. It's in the hall,” he said.

She tried it. It had a busy signal.

She tried again. Still busy.

The third time it was still busy. She stood with the receiver pressed to her ear and listened to that flat, repeating tone and felt something cold fill her stomach.

"The lines got disconnected because of the snow," Gabriel said from the kitchen doorway, nodding toward the window. "It happens when it comes down this fast."

When she looked outside, it felt like the world had disappeared. The road in front of the house was buried under snow, and it looked smooth and unbroken. There were no tire marks and no footprints, not even the suggestion of a surface underneath.

"Stay," Gabriel said. "Just until it eases up. I've got everything we need here."

Autumn looked at the road, then looked at him. She thought about Claire Donovan. She thought about the door in the hallway and the smell of fresh sawdust and a case that had been closed.

"Okay," she said.

She told herself it was just snow.

She spent the day the way she had spent so many days in his house, reading, talking, eating the food he made, sitting with the fire and the warm lights and the patient attention he gave her like she was the only thing in the world worth paying attention to.

Gabriel was funny, easy to talk to, and generous with his time, so there were whole hours that day where she forgot to be afraid. That was the thing about Gabriel. He was very, very good at making you forget to be afraid.

Later that afternoon, the snow had slowed so Autumn stood up and said she was going home.

"The roads are still bad," he said.

"I'll be careful," she replied.

Then she pulled on her coat, picked up her bag, and walked to the front door. She put her hand on the handle and pushed. It didn't open.

She pushed harder. Still, nothing happened. The door was solid and completely immovable, and she stood there with both hands on the handle for a second, just processing that, just letting that information settle.

Then she saw the keypad.

It was mounted on the wall right beside the door, and fitted with the kind of precision that said it had not been there for years, that it had been installed recently and installed well. She had walked past it twenty times without registering it. She was registering it now.

Four digits. A small green light that wasn't lit.

She tried the handle one more time. The door didn't move. Then she turned around.

Gabriel was standing at the end of the hallway. She hadn’t heard him come downstairs. She didn’t know how long he had been standing there. He was holding a dish towel and his face was completely calm, reflecting no surprise, no concern, nothing at all, just that settled expression she had spent weeks finding reassuring and was now, right now, in this moment, seeing for the first time as what it actually was.

It wasn't calm. It was control.

"The code must have glitched," he said, walking toward her slowly. "When the temperature drops, it happens."

He reached past her, close enough that she could smell his cologne, the same one she had spent weeks associating with safety and warmth and being known. He pressed four digits. The lock clicked. Then the door swung open and cold air came rushing in. Now the real world was right there, white and silent and twenty feet away.

He held it open, looked at her, and waited.

Autumn stood in the open doorway with the cold on her face, her heart bearing really hard, and every single thing she had filed under reasonable explanations running through her head all at once.

The dead phone. The busy landline. The buried road. The door she couldn't open. The keypad she had never noticed. The room that smelled like it had just been newly constructed. Claire Donovan, literature student, twenty-two years old, found in a lake in December. Case closed.

"It's not safe out there," Gabriel said softly. He was standing right behind her now. "Stay. I'll make dinner."

And the terrible thing, the thing she would come back to for a long time afterward, was that part of her still wanted to. Part of her brain was still running the old program, telling her that this was Gabriel, he was safe, she was being paranoid and dramatic and he had just proven the door was broken.

Look, it opened, everything is fine, she thought.

That part of her brain had been trained. She understood that now. She understood it the same way you understand a thing when it is already too late to use the understanding.

She stepped back inside. Then he closed the door.

She didn't hear the lock re-engage. But she felt it. Somewhere in her brain, in the part of her that had been quietly trying to tell her something for weeks, she felt it click into place.

Gabriel went to the kitchen. She heard him moving in there, opening cabinets, running water, sounding completely at ease. She stood in the hallway, breathing and waiting until she was sure he wasn't watching.

Then she went back to the door. She pressed both palms flat against it. She pushed, testing it, but nothing happened. Not even a shift. The door was as solid as a wall.

Autumn pressed her forehead to the cold wood and closed her eyes. The code he had typed hadn't glitched. The door hadn't malfunctioned. He had let her see it on purpose, let her watch him open it, let her stand in the doorway long enough to feel the cold air and choose to come back in.

All of it was deliberate. All of it had been orchestrated. She understood now that the door had never been broken. She understood now what kind of house she was in.