The Doorway

by Alan Spencer

  “Daaaaaaaaaaaaaad!”

  “She has questions to answer! She knows who killed my wife. The bitch is holding back information from me! I’ll get the facts. Everything!”

  Morty lunged for Ted. The man spiked Cheyenne to the floor, removed a hammer from his belt and swung it hard at Morty’s head. The second the hammer hit him, Morty spun and hit the floor. Moments before going unconscious, Morty vaguely heard Bruce fighting with Ted, then the basement door slamming closed.

  Cheyenne’s screams soon bled through the basement’s floorboards.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  The darkness asked questions.

  “Where were you the night my wife died?”

  A sob escaped her throat.

  No words could she muster to satisfy the demented man’s inquiry.

  “Did you enjoy smashing her head in?”

  Cheyenne couldn’t move. She was sitting in a chair. Her body wasn’t tied up. The soft nagging sensation in her hand gradually elevated into a building rage.

  “Did you like the sight of Deborah’s blood spilling out of her head?”

  Outrageous, the question!

  What could she say to the maniac in the dark?

  “Ted, I’ve never met your wife. I’ll help you find her killer. Everybody else upstairs is with me on that, I swear. You have to believe me. Ted, do you believe me? Please believe me!”

  A hard exhalation of breath. Hmmmmmph. Steps paced back and forth behind her.

  The whisper was a blast of icy air into her ear.

  “If it wasn’t you, then who?”

  Before a syllable could leave her mouth, the light bulb above her flickered on, bathing her in its crude yellow beam. The glint of steel, the hammer swung down. One single POUND, and a second nail was driven into her right hand. Staked down onto the table, blood mushrooming around the coppery nail head sticking out of the top of her hand, Cheyenne reeled in shock.

  “Not me. It’s not me! That’s all I know!”

  “Maybe it was your father? Or your cunt of a mother?”

  “Don’t you dare say those things about my—”

  POUND. POUND. POUND.

  “Ohhhgaaaaaaaaawd!”

  In the top of her hand gleamed five nail heads. She could feel blood drip onto the top of her legs beneath the table. The nails were so long.

  “Nobody from my family ever hurt you, you sadistic bastard!”

  A meanness was produced from the agony of each new nail driven into her hand. It was the pain, and the fear that was boiling over into something new and incredibly powerful, that made Cheyenne lash out.

  “If you couldn’t figure out who murdered your wife, why do you think we can? That detective has no idea. I have no idea. So everything you’re doing here isn’t in the name of finding your wife’s killer. It’s whetting your appetite for bloodshed, because you’re one of those sociopathic assholes! Throw you in a rubber room and lock away the key and let you ROT! You murdered Hannah. The poor woman, what did Hannah have to do with your wife?”

  Ted was about to drill her hand with another nail before she asked that question.

  She thanked God it made the lunatic pause.

  How could she take another nail through the hand? What would he do next to her? It’d be a thousand times worse than nails.

  There was something worse than nails.

  Words.

  The light bulb changed to red. It drew Cheyenne’s eyes to the wide array of torture implements hanging from the walls.

  Ted noticed her eyes go over the bricks scattered about the floor.

  “I built brick walls around this table so the neighbors couldn’t hear the screams coming from my basement. I didn’t want anybody interfering with my interrogations. But now that I’m here, trapped in the red, I don’t need walls. I only want to solve my wife’s murder. I’ll do anything.

  “And Hannah, she knew things. Hannah and Glenda, they’re nothing more than whores. Hannah knew your mother since they were kids. They grew up together. One and the same. And your dad, he’s so clueless. When your dad was younger, and you were just a little child, Morty would drive around and think. He knew he was forced into a life of hard labor and all of that hard luck bullshit. While your dad was driving around and thinking to himself about his life and what it could’ve been if Glenda didn’t get pregnant so early, Glenda was out having fun of her own.

  “Hannah and Glenda were both into the same things. Drugs and sex. Louie Brundage, dirty Louie, and his son, Ryan, gave them what they wanted. The two bitches would meet up with them at the Brundage house and have a coke party, or whatever drugs they had on them that night. The woman would do nasty things for free blow. Old habits die hard, right? But you see, Louie and Ryan are older, and their tastes for women continued to delve deeper and deeper into the gutter. As those two scummy bastards were aging, so were Glenda and Hannah. Those guys didn’t want those older bitches coming around anymore. Hannah told me all about it during our little talk.

  “Louie and Ryan liked the young stuff. They called the young ones twats and baldies. They make me sick. And of course, Hannah and Glenda were too old for their tastes, but the two guys wanted to scare the two ladies away for good. Those guys, father and son, were crafty when they wanted to be. Louie and Ryan liked to watch Hannah and Glenda fuck each other with one of those double-sided dildos. When the ladies were done screwing each other, Louie and Ryan showed them a special trick.

  “This dildo was built special. They had a remote control with a single red button. Hannah described it in great detail. When those greaseball dumb fucks were done watching the two high whores go at it, Louie pressed that red button. Spikes came out the tip of the dildo on both ends. Louie and Ryan laughed at their horrified reactions, and then Louie, he’s extra perverted, he takes a .28 pistol and shoves it into Hannah’s mouth. He cocks back the trigger, and shouts out: BANG BITCH. Your mother and Hannah ran the hell out of there and never came back. Lesson learned. No more trips to Kirkwood. No more drug parties with Louie and Ryan.”

  The story rocked Cheyenne to the core.

  “So it’s those guys who murdered your wife, right? L-Louie and Ryan, right? It’s them. Murder solved, right? This doesn’t have to go on anymore. We figured it out. Right? Right?”

  “Hannah told me how she loved the day she heard Louie and Ryan had died. They were drunk and on a coke binge. Ryan dared his dad to play chicken with an incoming train. They drove across the tracks, trying to time it just right, so they’d just miss the bullet coming for them. Of course, they timed it wrong. They had to put the Brundage boys in little plastic evidence bags, they were in so many pieces. That happened two years before my wife’s murder. So no, her murder is not solved. It very well could be anybody. Even you.”

  The blood in her veins turned to ice.

  That outrage, to accuse her, Cheyenne Saggs, of murdering anybody, was channeled into her next words.

  “But you can’t think I’m responsible? I was maybe a teenager, maybe in my early twenties, when your wife died, right? How could I have done it?”

  “It’s not about what you did. It’s about what you know that you don’t even realize you know.”

  Ted placed the nails and the hammer on the tabletop. They were just out of her reach, not that there was much she could do with them with her hand stuck to the table.

  Ted moved deeper into the room, where the red light didn’t scare away the black.

  “What are you doing? Please, Ted, I’m in a lot of pain. I’m not trying to stop you from finding your wife’s killer. I want you to solve the crime. I swear it. But I don’t know anything. Really think about what you’re doing here. What do I know? This is between Glenda, Hannah, maybe my dad and those scumbags. I’m completely outside of it. Can’t you see what I’m saying?”

  Ted was at the other side of the room. Che
yenne had to train her ears harder to hear him. She craved any indication of what was coming her way.

  “I can do many things here, being in the red. I can craft any kind of tools to make you talk. I want to believe you, Cheyenne. I really do. But you see, everything Hannah told me, she didn’t let a word of it escape her lips until I’d ripped out four of her fingernails. Torture has its merits. I need facts. My wife fears me. Deborah’s in this house, and she refuses to see me. Deborah has forsaken me. But when I find her killer, she will take me back. Then, we can all move on from the red, to Heaven, to Hell, to whatever eternity has in store for us. If I can grant Deborah Heaven, surely she’ll love me again, don’t you think? I can see her again before I face the darkness. That’s all I want. One more chance to see my Debbie.”

  Cheyenne wanted to say a hundred different things but couldn’t.

  He showed her what he was hiding behind his back.

  What would make her talk.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  The house still had plenty to throw at the detective. One moment, he was leading Janet from the bedroom and away from Barbie and the dead baby, the next, they were facing the corpse of Heather Mangum in the upstairs hallway. Larson recognized Heather from the first time he saw her, in a body bag. Her corpse was abandoned behind a dumpster of a Family Dollar. Heather was one of Ted’s last victims before he died. The man was running out of ideas on how to hide the bodies, and towards the end of his murder spree, Ted stopped cleaning up after himself. From a criminal’s standpoint, Ted was getting sloppy.

  Poor Heather Mangum.

  Janet smelled the air.

  “Is that gasoline?”

  “Gasoline and bleach,” Heather corrected. The muscles of her throat visibly throbbed and jerked with each new word. Every part of her throat was corroded. “He poured both down my throat. My insides were boiling. I was shitting blood before I died. Maybe he won’t use those things on you. But knowing Ted, and what he’s doing to Cheyenne right now, you’ll probably receive something even worse, Janet. Ted’s an innovative son of a bitch. He’s had plenty of time to perfect his craft.”

  Larson wasn’t sure whether to fear Heather or draw information from the corpse.

  “Are you here to help us?”

  The lights in the hallway blared red.

  Janet was close up against Larson. She whispered, “This bitch might not be like the others. I don’t trust anything in this fucking house.”

  Heather’s lips dissolved when they drew into a jester’s grin.

  “I’m not like the others, no. I say if you’re going to force me to stay in the red, I’m going to have some fucking fun!”

  Heather dug into her pocket and produced a matchbook. She opened the flap.

  “I got a guy’s number from Side Pockets the night Ted hit me over the head with a baseball bat and dragged me to this house. I could’ve fallen in love with the guy who hit on me. I went to high school with the big lug. I love a guy who can make me laugh. You can drink, you can shoot up, you can fuck to get things off of your mind, but there’s nothing, and I mean nothing, like a genuine laugh to forget how shitty life can get. But I missed out on that, didn’t I?”

  Larson wasn’t sure what Heather was planning to do. But the way her face lit up with a new intensity, a plan had been hatched in her defiled brain, and she was moments from enacting it.

  “Please, Heather, we’re trying to end your suffering. What do you know about Deborah Lindsey?”

  “Her? You think you can trust Ted for anything? That he’ll let you go if you put it all together? I’m not doing a fucking thing for that asshole. He watched me melt from the inside out. If there’s anything I’d like to do, it’s make it so he’ll never ever know who killed his wife. Let him suffer for all eternity.”

  Threads of her skin melted in patches, like an acid rash that was spreading with wildfire speed. Larson could hear gurgling, bubbling and popping from within her body.

  Heather struck a match.

  Janet cried out.

  “What the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m going to set this place on fire!”

  Heather tilted her head back and opened her mouth. Caustic fumes exited her mouth. Her breath was flammable.

  Heather dropped the match into her mouth.

  Larson covered up Janet with his body right before Heather combusted into a great ball of flames.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  “Try this!”

  Morty grabbed one of the wooden chairs inside the kitchen and threw it at the basement door. The chair shattered. The door wasn’t even scratched.

  “We have to save Cheyenne! I can’t stand to think she’s alone with that fucking psychotic!”

  Bruce was as much in a panic as Morty. He pointed at the coffee table. “Grab one end, I’ll grab the other. We’ll use it as a battering ram. We’re getting down there, don’t you worry, Morty.”

  “I pray we will. I pray!”

  Morty’s hands couldn’t steady themselves. He had to work through the nerves. It didn’t help that his daughter’s screams were filtering from down below. They were single shrieks, then begging, then long, drawn out peals of agony.

  “You son of a bitch, I’ll kill you!”

  Morty and Bruce charged the basement door. The coffee table split down the middle and broke in two halves.

  Bruce threw down the half he was holding.

  “Goddamn it.”

  Morty struggled to focus beyond the fact Ted was having his way with his daughter. He heard the nails driven into her hands, and Cheyenne insisting she knew nothing about Deborah’s killer. She was right. How could she? She didn’t live here at the time. Neither did he. They were innocent people swept into a crazy man’s purgatory. Morty’s mother used to always say misery loves company. Ted Lindsey was one of the most miserable loathsome people to exist in human history to do this to honest, innocent people.

  “Watch out, Morty! Coming through!”

  Morty had to think fast. Bruce had located a bottle of bourbon in the kitchen cupboard. He stuffed a kitchen rag into the top and lit it with his cigarette lighter.

  “Yeah, Bruce, fuck yeah! Do it! Burn this bitch down!”

  Cheyenne’s drawn out scream played out in the air: “Pleeeeeeeeeease-gaaaaaaaaawd-noooooooooooooo!”

  Bruce braced his body and put all of his might into tossing the flammable concoction against the basement doorway. The second the bottle shattered, the doorway went ablaze with red. Those flames swallowed up the bottle and made it vanish. Then the door was as it was: no flames, no damage.

  “It’s not going to let us through,” Morty shouted, stomping on the floor and bursting into tears. “This house is working against us. This fucking house. If you want us to solve your wife’s murder, you might actually have to help us, Ted!”

  Bruce did his best to calm Morty down.

  “You can’t expect rational thinking from a killer. The red lights, this house, the deaths, it’s all insanity.”

  “Then how do I save Cheyenne? How do we get out of here?”

  “I don’t know, friend.”

  Morty saw the corpse standing in the kitchen. The refrigerator glowed a neon red on the inside, then the door came open, and out came a fat blue corpse. He introduced himself as Jimmy Loomis.

  “You two boys need to relax a moment.”

  “How can I relax when my daughter is dying down there?”

  “Oh, she’s so dead. Sorry, pal. It is what it is. No use fighting it.”

  Bruce searched the floor for his rolling pin and quickly located it. “Who says I shouldn’t bash you over the head with this?”

  “Go ahead. I’m already dead. The problem is, I’m one of the few that still want to help you. The others who’ve died in the house are losing their patience. They’re starting to think you can’t
solve Deborah’s murder. If they believe that, they’ll outright kill you. It won’t be much longer before they come after you.”

  Morty searched the room for a weapon.

  He grabbed a broken coffee table leg.

  “So what can you do to help us?”

  “One, I want to help you calm down.”

  Jimmy Loomis removed his shirt. He exposed a bulging belly. He opened up the front of his stomach like it was a cupboard door. Inside were two cold beers standing on a rack of deformed bones. Everything else in the man’s body was hollow. The beers had frost on the outside. Ice cold.

  “Drink up, fellas. Soothe those nerves. You’ve had a hard night.”

  “I’m not drinking anything that’s been in your stomach,” Bruce said in disgust. “What the fuck’s wrong with you?”

  “Everything’s wrong in the red,” Jimmy said. “One thing I do know that’s right, you have to calm down and start thinking clearly. You’re onto something here. The answer is on the tip of your tongue, but you don’t quite have it yet.”

  “Then what do we do to get the answer?”

  “As I see it, you have only one option. And that’s to fight. Keep the bad people in the house occupied until your friends upstairs can put it together. If they can.”

  “You’re asking us to throw ourselves into harm’s way,” Morty said. “Too late. We’re in harm’s way already.”

  “You think you’re in harm’s way right now? You’ve got a few things coming your way, pal. Well, you had a chance to drink a beer. I did what I could to help you collect your thoughts.”

  From upstairs, there was a sonic boom concussion. Morty and Bruce had to reposition their feet not to fall down from being jostled. The house was rocked on its foundation. A great ball of flames shot down the stairway and bathed Jimmy Loomis in fire. He was de-fleshed by the flames and turned to bone in seconds. Then he was ashes, burned so hot.

  Morty and Bruce backed away, afraid to be cooked by the searing heat.