The Art Studio - Part 2

You are running. You are not sure who's chasing you, but you are running like your life depends on your fucking feet. You pray not to contract Achilles' heel. You hear a sinister laughter coming from right behind your left ear. You turn back to see, but you trip and fall, and it is a free fall like the ones you have seen in all those movies - from the top of a cliff to the sea below. You wake up, sweat adorning your forehead, and your heart racing at what feels like a thousand miles per second. You hear weird noises coming from somewhere nearby, but you shake it off and go back to sleep. Or at least, you try to.

I knew the basement was off limits for me, but you know how sometimes the one thing that you are trying to steer clear from starts pulling you closer towards itself like there's some shit-ass magnetic field reaction going on? That was the basement door for me. Though I always tried to respect my father's wish and decision, somehow, I would often end up in front of that wretched wooden door. Sometimes, I didn't even know I was standing there, as if I was in some trance, and I would only come back to my senses after my father would drag me by my hair and thrust me into my room.

Of course, this wasn't a one-off incident. Not at least when it was still happening when I was eighteen. Honestly, there was no love lost between my father and I. He hated me for being the reason mother died (although, he never really said this), and I hated him for hating me for something that was not my fault.

Four days after I turned eighteen, I had the weirdest feeling in my gut. The kind that tells you that something is about to go real bad, but you don't know what it is or when it's gonna happen. So you just wait with that annoying sinking feeling in your heart. It was way past midnight when I heard noises outside the main gate. My father had come back drunk. Again. And he was mumbling to himself a bit too loud. I couldn't make out what he was speaking, so it was what you'd consider a rather cheap version of Instagram's "Gibberish" filter. When he finally stepped inside the house, he saw me peeping out of my room. It took him an exact of eleven seconds to walk into my room and bash my head on the wall. That was enough to make me lose it. Right after he turned around to leave, I struck his head with a vase. It was sufficient enough to knock him off his senses, plus, the overdose of alcohol worked its charm.

As I walked back to my bed, I caught sight of it. Lying a few steps away from my father's legs was a rusty key to the wretched wooden door. The door to the basement.