Prompt: The number 13
Optional Prompts:
[object] Door
[Weather] Thunderstorm
[Dialogue] "Take a chance. What harm can it do?"
Word Count: 1776
The Last Door
"I am not paid enough for this," Rose growled, wringing water out of auburn waves that'd darkened upon soaking up the rain on their walk up to the house.
Scorpius snorted. "You're the one who claimed that we were supposed to be in this for the adventure."
"Well now I'm drenched and irritable," Rose snapped.
Albus trudged in from behind them. "I think it's sort of fitting. A cursed house, a thunderstorm raging outside— it's like one big cliche."
"We just need a power outage and some creepy little twin girls and we're in one of those stupid Muggle movies," Louis added with a snort. The last one to follow into the house, he tugged the heavy door until it fell shut with a low thud.
Albus looked around the foyer with a grimace. "Rose, Scor, you know I love you both, but is there a good reason why you had to drag Lou and I along on this stupid investigation?"
"Demon fodder," Scorpius supplied with an easy grin and a shrug.
"Ignore him," Rose recommended. "Demons aren't real, and if there was anything sinister about this house, the two of you are only here as eyewitnesses and company."
"I have been known to provide some rather stellar company," Louis agreed, shaking some excess rain from his blonde hair.
"For the record," Scorpius argued. "Demons could exist for all you know. Muggles don't know about ghosts, and yet I've had many a conversation with plenty of odd dead blokes, so who's to say wizards just haven't come across demons yet?"
"Or," Albus added with an ominous look, "they have, and simply haven't lived to tell the tale."
Rose scoffed. "Whatever. The prophet sent us here to investigate a house with a long history of disappearances, and that's what we're going to do."
Louis spun about the room slowly, eyeing the walls suspiciously. "Now, when you say a long history—"
"Centuries," Rose answered, surveying the home with a much more nonplussed attitude. Realistically, she wasn't the type to believe in unexplainable forces. For someone who'd grown up in a world of magic, she was quite the sceptic. Fate, luck, and other superstitions were, in her eyes, just that— superstitions, ridiculous and chalked up to coincidence the majority of the time.
The house itself was quite large, though it still had nothing on Scorpius's home, or even the one Rose had grown up in herself. Still, it was a moderately sized place, with walls covered in old wallpaper that'd started to tear in various spots and dull sconces to somewhat illuminate the entrance room.
Rose glanced down toward the end if the room, spotting a hallway at the end. She opted to start for it, figuring the others would follow.
Scorpius was the first to catch up, Louis and Albus a few steps behind. "Well, I think we're going to find something worth writing about," Scorpius shrugged as the group continued to move deeper into the house. "Too many people have reported weird things about this house and too many people have gone in without coming out."
"Wonderful," Albus muttered. "Really appreciate you lugging us in here, then."
"Lugging is a good way to put it," Scorpius mused with a small smirk.
They turned a corner, finding themselves facing a long hallway that ended with a solid wall. It was a dead end. Or rather, it would have been, had it not been for—
"That's a lot of doors," Scorpius said with a frown. Rose simply nodded, a queasy feeling in her gut inexplicably beginning to rise.
"What the hell is this?" Louis demanded when he and Albus caught up. "This is literally how people get murdered, Rose."
Rose rolled her eyes. "You're an Auror, Lou. You have a wand."
Albus snorted. "I'll protect you from the scary doors, Weasley."
"I'm disowning you both," the blonde sniffed. "Useless cousins."
BOOM!
A flash of light and a roar of thunder arrived instantaneously, the proximity of the lightning shaking the house.
The four wizards jumped at the sound. "Bloody hell," Albus whined. "That's not doing much to help the atmosphere, is it?"
"Stop being babies," Rose rolled her eyes, ignoring the fact that her own heart had probably skipped several beats. "It's a storm. We're fine."
Scorpius's frown deepened. "Did you count the doors? Thirteen, Rose, that's not a good sign."
Rose scoffed. "Don't give me that bad luck nonsense. It's a coincidental number."
"That is a load of hippogriff shite if I've ever heard any," Louis mumbled, crossing his arms.
"I actually agree with Rose," Albus shrugged, shoving his hands in his pockets. "Numbers don't mean anything."
"Thank you, Al!" Rose exclaimed, beaming at her favourite cousin. "Look, I'll prove it."
She started down the hall, passing each door until she could reach the last one. "The thirteenth door," she drawled in an exaggerated, spooky voice. "What will happen if I open it?"
Another flash of lightning followed, again immediately paired with the BOOM of more thunder.
"That was not another coincidence, Weasley!" Scorpius snapped, starting after her down the hall. Louis followed closely, Albus casually strolling behind them. "I'm telling you, don't open that door."
"He's right, Rose," Louis agreed.
Albus laughed, ever the enabler. "Take a chance. What harm can it do?"
Scorpius reached back to punch Albus in the arm, while Louis continued to protest.
Rose rolled her eyes at the boys and reached for the doorknob, her other hand reaching for her wand.
"Rose, don't!"
But it was too late. She turned the knob and tugged the door open, only to be met with… nothing.
Behind the door, the entranceway had been sealed shut with bricks. There was no way through, no clear view of anything behind them.
Rose rolled her eyes again. "What did I tell you? Someone probably put this up as a laugh, I told you lot that—"
But when she turned around, Scorpius and her cousins were nowhere to be seen.
Rose stepped back from the door, furrowing her eyebrows. "Al? Scor?" She started back down the hall, carefully and slowly. "Louis?" No response. Rose set aside her growing feeling of uneasiness, forcing a short laugh. "Very funny guys— where are you? We have the rest of the house to see, quit mucking around."
Still, no one responded.
Rose swallowed hard before picking up the pace and hurrying back down the hall. But after only a few steps, every door in the hall flew open abruptly.
Rose cried out in shock, jumping back toward the wall. She looked down the row of doors with wide eyes. Behind the ones closest to her were nothing but darkness— not sealed with brick, like the thirteenth one, but simply empty darkness.
With her heart pounding in her ears and her grip on her wand so tight that it hurt, Rose carefully approached one of the doors, raising her arm tentatively. "L-Lumos," she muttered, lighting the end of her wand.
Whatever was behind the door, was far behind the empty void of nothing, because even with a light on, Rose couldn't see a thing inside that door.
She felt like a failure of a Gryffindor, but Rose refused to go further into one of those rooms, or halls, or whatever they were without knowing where her friend and cousins had disappeared to.
The eeriness of the other twelve doors was too much for her to handle. Almost as though they had minds of their own, her feet suddenly carried her backwards, slowly, toward the thirteenth door.
When she reached it, her stomach sank as she realized the bricks were gone. Like with the other doors, behind this one was now a huge space of pitch-black darkness.
And a staircase.
It was unmistakable— the top of a staircase sat at the edge of this door, and Rose knew that there was no way she'd move toward them. She was a bright witch, and this was easily how people wound up dead, wizards or not.
She had just begun to turn away from the door when she heard a shout— "Rose! Rose, help, help—!"
The hairs on her arms stood up, a chill running down her spine. She was certain of two things: one, Scorpius had been screaming for help, and two, his voice had come from the bottom of those very stairs.
Rose relit her wand and ran, her survival instincts out the window as she rushed down the stairs.
At the bottom was some sort of basement room. She held the light up, moving it around to survey the place. At first, she didn't see any sign of Scorpius or her cousins.
And then, she turned around, coming face to face with Albus— or, rather, a stone version of him.
Rose screamed, jumping backwards. She waved her wand back and forth, a row of statues revealing themselves in the light. Trying to steady her breath, Rose slowly moved to see each one better. Next to Albus, Scorpius and Louis stood similarly petrified in some sort of stone.
There were others, too, faces that Rose only scarcely recognized from newspaper clippings she'd saved when researching the house and the mysterious disappearances over the years.
Rose tried to calm herself, reminding herself that she was a perfectly capable witch, armed and intelligent. She pointed her wand at Scorpius: "Finite Incantatem!" Nothing happened. It'd been a long shot anyway, she figured. She tried more spells, advanced ones, but nothing was bringing the statue versions of the others back to life.
Panic began to set in. Rose looked back at the other statues, feeling herself fall into an expanding pit of dread as a horrifying thought occurred to her.
Scorpius. Albus. Louis. That's three. From there, she continued to count, four, five, and onwards until she spotted the twelfth statue.
Twelve. She recalled everything she'd said upstairs about coincidences— surely that's all this was. It was entirely coincidental that there was only one less statue than thirteen… like the thirteen doors upstairs.
But even she couldn't deny her own circumstance. Rose looked at her friend and cousins desperately, racking her brain for something that could free them before inevitably being turned into the thirteenth statue.
BOOM! Thunder shook the house once again, and Rose found herself stumbling backwards until she fell against something solid. But this wasn't stone, not like the others. This was softer, something more—
Human, Rose realized, spinning on her heel and raising her arm.
But whoever was down there with her was faster.
The last thing she saw was a flash of light, like a crack of lightning. And then everything faded away for good.