More darkness

I am perfectly symmetrical.

Word count: 46182

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Raymond Chandler said, “When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.” At the moment, I am nothing if not in doubt. Plus, I have a gun and am standing in front of a door. It’s the door to room 207. I decide it’s time to take control. I turn the key in the lock, and lean against the door with Kimp’s revolver in my right hand. Slowly, I open the door and lean into the room.
It is dark in here. Pitch black. The kind of darkness you have to swim through, praying you don’t sprain your ankle on some unseen obstacle. It is beyond the darkness that you find when you close your eyes. It is the essence of dark. What little light enters the room from the streetlights behind me forms a rectangle on the floor with my long shadow in its center – an ominous shape, even though it is mine.
I must make a neat target for anyone waiting inside as I stand here, silhouetted nicely against the backdrop of the streetlights and the highway. This thought enters my head and part of my mind waits for the flash of a gun, the report of the shot, the sting of a bullet, but I am unable to do anything about it. My mouth agape, I stare at the edges of my shadow, not paying any conscious attention to the danger in which I have placed myself. This is not the room we stayed in three years ago. It can’t be. Where light reveals floor, it reveals polished hardwood, not the abstract pattern of industrial carpet
I snap out of the stupor, shaking my head free of implications. I try to take a step back from the doorway, but there is something forcing me to enter the room. It is more than my curiosity about what lays waiting inside. I have a healthy sense of self-preservation, but even that is unable to resist the pull of the room. As if in a dream and without control over my own actions, I step inside. My footsteps echo loudly in the room, the sounds finding nothing to bounce off of save for the opposite walls. I close the door behind me. It clicks as it shuts and then the room is almost unnaturally quiet, as if the cars rushing by on the interstate just a few hundred feet away are not there at all.
I stand just inside the door, my right arm rising of its own accord to find a light switch on the wall. I feel like I’ve done this recently. I debate with myself about the merits of just staying in the dark; just staying here forever.