The Doorway

by Alan Spencer

  “Is it time for another nail? The more blood they spill, the looser their lips become.”

  “You son of a bitch! What if nobody you dragged through that doorway knows who killed Deborah? What if you never find out who killed her?”

  “Then I’m in the red forever. I can suffer in purgatory, but poor Deborah, I won’t allow it! Give me more names. People you know. Anybody. Now.”

  Morty stammered, then clenched his teeth as a new jolt of pain spread from his hand to the rest of the body. Any slight movement of his hand was pain city.

  “Why aren’t you questioning the detective and the reporter?”

  “Because I’m giving them every last chance to discover Deborah’s killer. But you, you haven’t uncovered anything. You’re useless to me.”

  “I have uncovered things, Ted. Goddamn you. You’re so upset your wife was taken away from you, have you considered how you took away both my daughter and my wife? You tarnished their memory. And for what? For your sadistic pleasure?

  “Yeah, okay, Ted, I’ll tell you what I know. Forgive me, Glenda. Forgive me, God. You see, I was a quarterback for the high school football team, and—”

  Fingers clasped onto a single nail, then the hammer swung down hard right below the knuckle of his pointer finger.

  “YOU’RE STALLING.”

  A gushing steam of blood spurted from the nail’s point of entry and hit Morty’s eye. So piping hot, then so ice cold, it gave Morty a jolt, a solid reminder that this was his life on the line and nobody was going to save him.

  Morty became a wordsmith.

  “I’m not stalling. During one of my football games, I threw away a pass into the crowd. The football hit Glenda in the face. When I found out it was her, and that I’d broken her nose, I was secretly happy. I owed her an apology. I would ask her out to the prom, and I’d get laid. It wasn’t until later that I fell in love with her. But I did fall in love with her. We rushed into marriage because I got Glenda pregnant. Later, I doubted my feelings for her, and questioned my life—”

  Ted grabbed another nail from the pile and gave Morty a menacing stare.

  “No, not another nail! Hear me out! You owe me that much. Ted, you lunatic, I’m trying to tell you something important. I thought you were insane—fuck it, you are insane!—but the things I’ve learned today reminded me of something.”

  Ted hovered next to him with the hammer raised.

  “Look, look! I finally remember something. You’re right. A few fucking nails, and shit, my memory’s crystal fucking clear, isn’t it? Listen, I wasn’t sure if I loved my wife, and I was in a really dark place about my life, all of it, and, and, and you see, I read her diary one day. The passages were normal woman stuff. I was flipping randomly through it and would stop to read a few sentences. One passage bothered me so much I couldn’t read it all. It talked about being high. Glenda had taken several pills she couldn’t identify. Glenda questioned her perception of what happened, or if it even happened at all. She was hanging out with friends in an abandoned house. At one point, it was so late, everybody had either fallen asleep or passed out. But Glenda woke to somebody standing over her. They were taking Polaroid pictures of her asleep. The flash of the camera woke her. She said she knew who was taking the pictures, but she didn’t know his name. He wasn’t invited to the party. He was just a kid who lived in the neighborhood who was socially awkward. Glenda told the guy to fuck off, but she said the way he ogled the Polaroid picture afterwards and talked to it instead of her, it gave Glenda the creeps.”

  “Who was this man?”

  “Like I told you, she didn’t know his name. I don’t know his name! Please, look, we can narrow it down. I’ll help you. Just stop the killing. I can tell Detective Larson about this guy, and he can go to the station and find out who this guy is.”

  “Why didn’t you tell him about this person sooner?”

  “Because it was a diary entry. I’m only telling you what jumps out at me about Glenda. And the nails through my goddamn hand are making me really scour my memories for something to make you stop hurting me. I still don’t know what it has to do with Deborah’s death. I’m reaching for anything. I’m trying to help you. I’m cooperating, even if you are a psycho.”

  Ted’s face bent into a snarl.

  “You have more you can tell me. I’m going to dig a little deeper. Another nail for you!”

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Larson was tearing through boxes, and Janet was searching their contents. Most of the boxes had baby items and old clothing. The two worked in a fury to uncover anything. They doubled their efforts when the hands pounded against the doorway. The wall on the left side of the bedroom was taking a beating from the other side. They were coming at them from all angles. The corpses and monsters were bemoaning their failure to save them from the red. The collective mob was releasing their anger by shattering wooden panels and punching holes into the second bedroom’s door. So little time, and they were getting nowhere, Larson realized. He had to stall the monsters as long as he could.

  He scanned the room and located an aluminum baseball bat. Any arm, hand and head that poked through the holes would get walloped. He was horrified to slam the meat of the bat across Hannah’s gangrene melting face. Officer Wright’s jaw. Jimmy Loomis’s skull cap. The rest of them were so rotted and afflicted by damage, he was simply fighting masses of moving bones and flesh. Buying time. Swinging the bat. Calling out to Janet to hurry the fuck up.

  “I’ve got nothing here! There’s only shit in these boxes. They’re not telling me anything. We shouldn’t have gone in this room. This was a mistake!”

  “Keep looking!”

  Larson struck the bat against an eyeball. The pressure caused a rat to shoot free from the corpse’s empty other eye socket. The detective stomped the rat dead with his heel.

  Items were spread out across the floor. Janet kept rummaging through them to the point her fingertips were bleeding.

  “Nothing. There’s nothing here!”

  “Don’t stop looking. Think. Take everything you know about Deborah’s death, and, and THINK.”

  Three swings of the bat. He was playing a desperate game of whack-a-mole. The prize: fetid chunks of meat and rancid blood.

  Larson knew he had to encourage her, or his only help would crumble to the pressure of the situation. He talked out loud as he bashed anything that dared to try to widen the holes created in the walls and the door.

  “Deborah died alone in her bedroom. Somebody used a golf club to kill her. That says the person entering the house didn’t necessarily plan on murdering somebody. They didn’t steal anything. They went straight into her room. They wanted something from her. Maybe it’s not about an object. Maybe it’s about Deborah herself.”

  Janet stopped searching the room.

  “Do you hear that?”

  Larson listened.

  He heard the great churning of a powerful motor.

  Barbie was coming upstairs.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Morty shouted in agony. How many nails could be driven into one hand? When would Ted start driving nails into his other hand? Or maybe something worse? The room was so intensely red, he couldn’t see anything else in the basement but red. Was there another torture device waiting for Morty? He had to keep talking and stall, stall, stall this psycho. Even if he spared himself a few minutes, the time to die would come. The inevitability shattered Morty’s reasoning to scour his brain for clues, answers and ideas that might busy Ted. He was going to die here in terrible pain. Why prolong the interrogation?

  “I’m done, Ted. I’ve watched the people I love die, then come back again, and I’ve had to kill some of them, and they won’t die. How fucked up is that? You’ve taken everything away from me, so you might as well finish what you set out to do. If I’m going to spend purgatory with you, in this red fucking hell, I�
�m going to make it miserable for you. I swear to God I will!”

  Ted wasn’t expecting Morty to give up so soon. The lumbering man stood there perplexed. Morty saw his chance. An opportunity.

  Morty reached out with his free hand and stole the hammer from Ted’s hand. Two strikes, one to the balls, and one the head. Ted bent forward in reaction. The crack of skull against hammer was so rewarding. Ted fell onto all fours, crouched down in pain.

  Morty started working the claw end of the hammer to free the nails driven into his hand.

  Larson backed up from the bedroom wall just in time before the riding lawn mower smashed into the room. He stumbled backwards, tripping over the boxes strewn about the area. Janet screamed in horror, recoiling into the farthest corner of the room. The blades of the mower were chopping through books, clothing and tatters of wood. Barbie’s face was devious. She couldn’t hold herself back any longer.

  The woman was going to kill them.

  On his back, Larson couldn’t move. The lawn mower edged towards him. Barbie leaned back in the seat to lift the lawn mower to perform a death wheelie. He had a very troublesome view of the three spinning mower blades and the gory messes caught up in them.

  Barbie was going to drop it down right on him.

  Watching this happen across the way, Janet had new reasons to scream.

  Morty worked two nails from his hands. He was near the point of passing out from the excruciating pain. Ted was stirring from the floor. The man would be up on his feet and coming at him in no time. Another nail Morty worked free. Morty had to turn his head, suck in a deep breath and concentrate when he saw a piece of bone stick up below his knuckle. One more nail he worked free. Then another nail. He dug the claw end deeper and worked the tip of the nail higher up from his hand, and jerked it back. The new dose of pain was rewarded with freedom from the table.

  Morty dodged Ted just in time. The man crashed into the table, breaking it in half. Ted growled, desperate to get back up and wrap his hands around Morty’s throat.

  Morty tightened his grip on the hammer and met Ted’s next attack.

  Hot reeking fans of air whipped against Larson’s body. The lawn mower was going to tip over and land on him any moment. How long would he feel the pain? Should he close his eyes when the blades tore him up into pieces? Would that make his death any easier?

  No time to dwell on death. Larson reached out to Janet. Janet could pull him away. Save him.

  The problem was, she wasn’t looking at him.

  “Janet, help me! Help meeeeeeeeeee!”

  Janet still didn’t avert her eyes. She held a scrapbook in both her hands. It had been thrown in her direction by the speed of the wind created by the mower’s blades. Janet’s face scrunched up into a puzzled expression. Then something flashed in those eyes.

  Realization.

  Morty drove the hammer right in between Ted’s eyes. The connection broke his plastic eye gear. The attack only infuriated Ted. Both juggernaut-sized fists squeezed Morty’s neck.

  “Aaaaaaaaack!”

  “You’re no better than the others. I won’t waste time torturing your ass. I’ll skip right to killing you.”

  Morty was dizzy and blinking dots out of his eyes. His fight was weakening before it’d even started. He dropped the hammer. He wouldn’t be able to guide it anywhere because he couldn’t see straight.

  That was wrong.

  Morty could see.

  Everything was red.

  “Oh my God, it makes sense. Detective, Detective!”

  Janet screamed when she looked up from the picture in the scrapbook of Deborah at around high school age. She recognized the picture. Janet had seen it before.

  Tommy Ranscombe.

  Tommy Ranscombe.

  Tommy Ranscombe.

  The name repeated in her head.

  The bumper sticker with the middle finger. Tommy Ranscombe who lived in the town of Kirkwood. Tommy Ranscombe who was known to hang out with the Brundage kids. Tommy Ranscombe who finally moved out of his parents’ basement and into his own house. Janet helped her second cousin, along with other family members, to move Tommy’s things into the house. Janet had seen the picture by accident in Tommy’s wallet when he dropped it. Janet remembered how he stared it, then whispered an apology at the Polaroid picture.

  Tommy Ranscombe.

  Her second cousin.

  Tommy was the one who killed Deborah.

  Much too late to matter, she realized.

  The riding lawn mower dropped down on top of Detective Larson.

  Morty’s body went limp in Ted’s hands. He hit the floor as dead weight. Did Ted think he was already dead?

  I’ll lay here. I won’t move. I’ll play dead. Ted will go away. I’ll wake up from this dream. None of this will have happened. Nobody will be dead.

  Morty floated between consciousness and unconsciousness. His view was tilted upside down. He could see Ted’s boots and his legs move up the stairs. Morty was leaving the basement.

  He’s going to bury me in the backyard. Or he’ll dump me in a vacant lot. No, he’s taking me to another torture chamber. One darker, and more evil and more insane than this entire house altogether. This will never end. He won’t stop subjecting me to this insanity until I’ve found the answer to his wife’s death.

  Ted opened the basement door. He stomped into the living room. Ted avoided the wide pools of blood, the cops and corpses slaughtered on the floor. Morty imaged if someone tipped over a giant display of butchered meats, what would fall on the ground would resemble what was in the living room.

  Morty noticed the lights in the room weren’t red anymore.

  They burned yellow.

  I’m dead. He killed me, and I’m somewhere else I shouldn’t be.

  Ted’s still here.

  That’s all I need to know.

  I’m not safe.

  Not with Ted here with me.

  The stairway leading to the second floor was a mess. The steps were in broken tatters. Chopped into pieces. Ted chose his footholds carefully.

  The walls upstairs were singed black from a fire. The hallway walls were nearly see-through, with the amount of damage they’d taken.

  Ted carried him into the second bedroom.

  Morty came alive with a start. He saw a pair of human legs untouched. From the hips up, there was only red spatter and hunks of pureed meat. He saw a slice of Detective Larson’s face floating in a pool of blood. On the other side of the room was another pile of gory mess. He saw Janet’s hair tangled up in a human spine and part of her lips and nose attached to a lamp on the bedside table. A female corpse was laying limp over a riding lawn mower in the corner.

  His eyes moved away from the death. It wasn’t long before he found a special message. On the closet door, written about six inches off the ground, near where Janet’s remains were located, were words written in blood: TOMMY RANSCOMBE.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  The basement was a sacred place. That’s where he kept his women. They were there when he left the house, or when he was working, driving his rig across the country for Grober Trucking. A normal haul could take him away from home a week, maybe longer. But no need to worry. The women weren’t going anywhere. They would be right where he left them. They were beautiful. Irreplaceable. His lovelies.

  There he sat on his leather couch playing Credence Clearwater Revival on vinyl, sipping on a bottle of whiskey (it still took him liquid courage to be in the company of so many wonderful women). He slugged back a mouthful of twelve-dollar-a-bottle sour mash and steadied his nerves.

  Guidance counselor Mrs. Greeves said he was a slow learner. He was socially maladjusted. He had a slight learning disability, but with hard work, he could overcome those limitations. “They’re only hurdles, Tommy. I know you’re a good boy. As long as you keep trying, it
’s going to keep on getting better.”

  No matter how many years passed, his skin still burned when people talked to him. It was like a caught feeling. Blushing to the tenth power. He had short conversations, or cut them short, just for that uncomfortable sensation to end. He’d do anything to numb or erase that feeling altogether.

  Alcohol helped. Drugs helped even more. Ryan Brundage, his next-door neighbor (though next-door was a mile’s distance; his folks lived out in the middle of nowhere, Kirkwood, Virginia), invited him over to their special weekend parties. Louie Brundage gave Tommy drugs and booze at a higher price than Ryan’s real friends. Tommy knew he was a charity case. A pity party pal. Tommy didn’t care. As long as that feeling of unease went away, Tommy was happy. Charge him what they wanted. Fuck it.

  The parties at Ryan Brundage’s house, that’s how Tommy got started collecting his ladies. It’s how the basement became so full of his hot delicious babes. Years and years of work, and he was still building up his pieces of ass.

  Ryan and Louie Brundage would buy hookers when they couldn’t get their female friends to come over. Cheap hookers. Bottom of the barrel bitches. They aren’t pretty, Louie Brundage often said, but they always show you their parts. And they let you play with them too. You want to play with them, Tommy? I’ll buy. On me. On the house. What do you say, Tommy? Let’s get your dick wet. Huh, Tommy? How about it? Be a man. Give her the meat real good.

  Tommy said no. Drugs and booze couldn’t quell that painful blush that was more than a blush. That awkward feeling made him feel like his insides were on fire and he could puke. No, he couldn’t touch the girls. But he stood in the same room with Ryan and his friends and they’d take turns with the women. He could watch. That was safe. He could enjoy that just fine.

  Then one day, while Louie was sitting on the couch with Glenda Saggs sitting on his dick, Louie said to Tommy, Take a picture, it’ll last longer.