Then I noticed another sound beneath the eternal banging and whirled round to face the direction it was coming from. I found that I was looking through the living room door and that it gave into sheer darkness, a darkness which was seeping out into the hallway like smoke, clinging to the angles in the air like the inside of a dark prism. I heard the noise again and it was a deep rumbling growling far far away in there, almost obscured by the night noises and the sound of vegetation moving in the wind. It didn’t seem to be getting any closer but I knew that was because the living room now extended out far beyond, into hundreds and hundreds of miles of dense forest jungle, and as I listened carefully I could hear the gurgling of some dark river far off to the right, mixing with the warm rustling of the breeze in the darkness. It sounded very peaceful and for a moment I was still, transfixed.
Then the sound of a violently splintering crack wrenched me away and I turned my back on the living room and flailed towards where the front door must be. The hall table loomed above me and I thought I could walk upright beneath it but tripped over it trying and fell again, headlong onto the cool floorboards. The mat had moved, no, was moving, sliding slowly up the stairs like a draft and as I rolled over and looked at the ceiling I saw the floor coming towards me, the walls shortening in little jerks. Another splintering thud and now I had no idea which way was up.
As I lay there panting a clear cool waft of air stroked my cheek. At first I thought that it must have come from the living room, although it had been warm in there, but then I remembered rather than saw that I was lying on the floor and that the breeze must be a draught coming under the front door. I must nearly be there. I looked all around me but all I could see was panelling and floor and what was behind me. I closed my eyes and tried to grope for it but it was even worse inside so I opened them again. Then I caught a glimpse of the door, far away, obscured from view round a corner but visible once you knew where to look. On impulse I reached my hand out in not quite the opposite direction and felt it fall upon warm grainy wood. The door, the bloody door. I’d found the front door.
I pulled myself along the floor towards it and tried to stand up. I got no more than a few inches before I fell back down again. I tried again with the same result, feeling as if I was trying to do something very unnatural and bizarre. Again, and this time I reached a semi-crouching position, muscles straining. I started to slump down again but as I did so I threw myself forwards and found myself curled up, my feet a couple of feet from the floor, lying on the door. Forcing my mind not to even try to come to terms with this I groped by my side and found the doorknob. I tried to twist it but the sweat on my hands made them spin uselessly on the shiny metal. I wiped them on my shirt and tried again and this time I got some purchase and heard the catch withdraw as the knob turned. Exultantly I tugged at it as with a tremendous crash the back door finally gave way.
The door wouldn’t budge. Panicking, I tried again. Nothing. By peering down the crack I could see that no lock or bolt was impeding it, so why wouldn’t it bloody move?
Footsteps in the back hall. Suddenly I realised that I was lying on the door, and trying to pull it towards me against my own weight. Silly me. The footsteps reached the kitchen.
I rolled over off the door onto the wall beside it and reached for the handle but I’d gone too far. As the footsteps came closer, towards the kitchen door into the hall, I scrambled across the slippery wall, grabbed and twisted the doorknob with all my strength. It opened just as they entered the hall and I rolled out through it, fell and landed awkwardly and painfully on something hard and bristly and for a few moments had no clear idea of where or who I was and just lay there fighting for breath.
After some time I sat up slowly. I was sitting on the doormat, my back to the front door. At the top of the drive a passing couple were staring at me curiously. I stood up and smiled, trying to suggest that I often sat there and that they ought to try it as it really was a lot of fun, hoping to God that they hadn’t seen me fall there from about two-thirds of the way up the door. They smiled back and carried on walking, mollified or maybe even hurrying off home to try it for themselves, for all I knew. I turned hesitantly back towards the door and looked in.
It had worked. It was all all right again. The mat was on the floor, right angles looked like 90 degrees again and the ceiling was back where it was supposed to be. I stepped back a pace and looked across at the back door. It had been utterly smashed and now looked like little more than an extension of the firewood pile.
I walked back into the hall through the front door, the right door, and shut it behind me. I wandered carefully and quietly into the living room and the kitchen. Everything was fine, everything was normal. Just a nice normal house. If you came in through the right door.
The wrong door was in about a thousand pieces now, of course. I thought about that for some time, with a cup of tea and what felt like my first cigarette in months. Less than an hour had elapsed, I saw with frank disbelief, since I’d first come downstairs.
The wrong door. It was coming in through there that took me to wherever or whatever it was that the house became. Coming in through the front door brought me back to wherever it was that I normally lived. So presumably I was safe so long as I didn’t leave the house and come back in through the back door. They couldn’t get me.
Presumably. But I didn’t like having that door in pieces. The wrong door, the door through which they had to come, was in pieces. Being safe was only part of the problem. I wasn’t going to feel secure until that portal was well and truly closed. It wasn’t precisely clear, however, what I could do about that.
I walked into the back hall and looked nervously out through the wreckage onto the drive. Everything was fine. There was nothing I needed protecting from. But I didn’t like it. Did it have to be me who came through it, or what if maybe a falling leaf or even just a soft breeze came inside? Would that be enough? Could I take the risk?
As I stood there indecisively I noticed once more the pile of firewood propped up against the outside wall of the back hall. I probably still wouldn’t have thought of it had not a very large proportion of the pile been old thick planks. I looked at the tool shelf on the inside wall and saw a hammer and a big box of good long nails. Then I looked at the wood again.
I could nail the damn thing shut.
I flicked my cigarette butt out onto the drive and rolled up my sleeves. The hammer was big and heavy, which was just as well because when I nailed the planks across the door frame I’d be hammering into solid brickwork. I was going to have to board right the way up but that was all right as there were loads of planks, and if I reinforced it enough it should be well-nigh impregnable. Feeling much better now that I had a way of sealing off the door, I set to work. I may even have hummed.
Kneeling just inside the door, I reached out and began pulling planks in, taking care to select the thickest and least weathered. I judged that I’d need about thirty-five to make the doorway really secured, although that was largely guesswork as I’d never tried to turn the back hall into a fortress before. Getting the planks in was heavy work as I had to stretch out to reach them, and I began to get hot and tired, and anxious to begin the nailing. Outside it was getting darker as the evening began, and the air was very cool and still.
As the pile in the back hall increased in size it became more difficult still, and I had to lean further and further out to reach the next plank, and this made me nervous. I was still inside, my feet were still on the ground in the back hall. I wasn’t “coming back in”, I was just leaning out and then, well, sort of coming back in but not really, because my feet never left the back hall, did they? But it made me nervous, and I began to work quicker and quicker, perspiration running down my face and arms as, clinging to the doorframe with my left hand, I stretched out to bring the last few boards in. I felt tired and irritated and was dying for a smoke but couldn’t take the time: I was anxious to start nailing. Thirty-one, thirty-two, just a couple more. Now the last o
ne I could possibly reach: that would have to be enough. Hooking my left foot behind the frame and gripping it hard with my left hand I stretched out towards the plank, my waving fingers little more than an inch from the end. Just a little further forward: I let my hooking foot slide round slightly, let my fingers slip round half an inch and tried to extend my back as far as it would go. My fingers just scraping the end I tried a last yearning lunge.
And then suddenly a stray thought struck me. Here I was, pulled out as if on some invisible rack: why on earth hadn’t I just gone out of the front door, picked up piles of wood and brought them back into the house through the front door? It would have been easier, it would have been quicker, and it wouldn’t have involved all this monkeying around at the wrong door. Not that it mattered now, because as it happened even if I didn’t get this last plank I’d probably have plenty, but I wouldn’t have been so hot and tired and it was also a bit worrying that in my haste I’d been putting myself in needless danger. I’d better slow down, calm down, take a rest.
An unimportant, contemplative thought. But one that distracted me for a fraction of a second too long. As I finally got the tips of my fingers round the plank I realised with horror that my other fingers, the ones on the doorframe, were slipping. I was slowly sliding forwards. Desperately I tried to scrabble with my fingers, but my hands were too sweaty and the doorframe itself was slippery now. I felt the tendons in my hand stretch as I tried to defy my centre of gravity and think my weight backwards, and then suddenly my forehead walloped onto the ground and I was lying flat on my face.
I was up in a second, and I swear to God that both feet never left the hall floor at once. I hurled myself back into the hallway, clutching that last bloody piece of wood without even noticing it.
Panting and almost sobbing with nervous hysteria I crouched in the doorframe, looking out. Everything looked normal. The driveway was quiet, the pebbles were still and there was none of the faint deadening of sound that I associated with the other place. I was furious with myself for having taken the risk, for not having thought to bring them in through the front door, and especially for falling, which had been bloody painful quite apart from anything else. But I hadn’t fallen out, not really. I hadn’t come back in, as such. The drive was fine, the kitchen was fine. Everything was fine.
Soothed by the sounds of early evening traffic in the distance, my heart gradually slowing down to only about twice its normal rate, I began to feel a bit better and had a quiet cup of tea, perched on the pile of planks. In falling over my right foot had caught the tool shelf and there were nails all over the place, inside and out, but there were plenty left and the ones outside could bloody stay there. I wasn’t going to make the same damnfool mistake twice.
Gathering up the hammer and a fistful of nails I laid a plank across the door and started work. Getting the nails through the wood and into the masonry was even harder than I’d expected, but in a couple of minutes it was in place, and felt very solid. I heaved another plank into place and set about securing it. This was actually going to work.
After half an hour I was into the swing of it and the wood now reached almost halfway up the doorframe. My arms aching and head ringing from the hammering, which was very loud in the confined space of the back hall, I had a cigarette leaning on the completed section, staring blankly out onto the drive. I was jolted back from reverie by the realisation that a piece of dust or something must have landed in my eye, slightly distorting my vision, and I blinked to remove it. But it didn’t go. It didn’t hurt, just made a small patch of the drive up near the road look a bit ruffled. I rubbed and shut both eyes individually and discovered with mounting unease that the distortion was present in both.
I stood upright. Something was definitely going on at the top of the drive. The patch still looked ruffled, as if seen through a heat haze, and whichever way I turned my head it stayed in the same place. It was flickering very slightly now too, like a bad quality film print. But the flecks weren’t white, they were dark. I rubbed my eyes hard again, but once I’d stopped seeing stars I saw that the effect was still there, and I stared hard at it, trying to discern something that I could interpret. The flecks seemed to organize into broken and shifting vertical lines as I watched, as if something were hidden behind a curtain of rain, rain so coloured as to make up a picture of that patch of the drive. This impression gradually strengthened until it was like looking at one of those plastic strip “doors”, where you walk through the hanging strips. It was as if there was one of those at the top of the drive with a patch of driveway pictured on it in living three dimensions, with something moving just the other side of it.
Then suddenly the balance shifted, like one of those drawings made up of black and white dots where if you stare at it long enough you can see a Dalmatian. I dropped to my knees behind the partially completed barrier. Fear was no longer a word I had any use for. They were back.
Standing at the top of the drive, their images somehow both underlying and superimposed on it as if the two were woven together, were the man in the suit and the blond man. They were standing in a frozen and unnatural position, like a freeze-frame in a very old home movie, their faces pallid and washed out, the colouring uneven, the image flickering and dancing in front of my eyes. And still they stood, not there, and yet in some sense there.
As I stared, transfixed, I noticed that the suited man’s foot appeared to be moving. It was hard to focus on, and happening bizarrely slowly, but it was moving, gradually leaving the ground. Then, as over the course of several minutes it was raised and then lowered back onto the ground a couple of feet in front of its original position, leaving the man’s body leaning slightly forward, I realised what I was seeing. In extraordinary and flickering slow motion, somehow projected onto the drive, the suited man was beginning to walk down towards the house. Except that the image wasn’t flickering so much any more, the colours were stronger, and I could no longer see the driveway through them. Somehow they were coming back through. I thought I’d got away with it, but I hadn’t. I’d fallen out. Not very far by anyone’s standards, but far enough. Far enough to have come back in through the wrong door. And now they were tearing their way back into the world, or hauling me back towards theirs. And very very slowly they were getting closer.
Fighting to stay calm I grabbed a plank, put it into position above the others and nailed it into place. Then another, and another, not pausing for breath or thought. Through the narrowing gap I could see them getting closer and they didn’t look anything like two-dimensional photographs any longer and they were moving quicker now too. Then as I leaned towards the kitchen for a plank I saw that there was a single dusty carton on the floor. It had started.
I smacked another plank into place and hammered it down. The suited man and the blond man were now real again, and they were also much closer, though still moving at a weirdly graceful tenth of normal speed. Hammering wildly now, ignoring increasingly frequent whacks on the fingers, I cast occasional monitoring glances aside into the kitchen. The fridge was beginning to look a bit strange, the stark nineties geometry softening, regressing, and the rubbish was gathering. I never saw any of it arrive, but each time I looked there was another piece of cardboard, a few more scraps, one more layer of grime. It had barely started, and was still happening very slowly, maybe because I’d barely fallen out, but it was happening. The house was going over.
And I kept right on hammering. Obviously what I had to do at some point was run to the front door, go out and come back in again, come in through the right door. But that could wait, would have to wait. It was all developing very slowly this time and I still felt completely clear-headed. What I had to do first was seal off the back door, and soon. The two men, always at the vanguard of the change, were well and truly here, and getting closer all the time. I had to make sure that the back door was secure against anything those two could do to it for long enough for me to get to the front door. I had no idea what the front hall would be like by the
time I got there and if I left the back door unfinished and got caught up in the front hall trying to get to the door I’d be in real trouble.
So I slammed planks into place as fast as I could. Outside they got steadily closer and inside another carton appeared in the kitchen. As I jammed the last horizontal board into place the suited man and the blond man were only a couple of yards away, now moving at full pace, and I’d barely nailed it in before the first blow crashed into it, bending it and making me leap back with shock. I hurriedly picked up more wood and started to place planks over the barrier in vertical slats and crosses, nailing them in hard, reinforcing and making sure that they were securely fastened to the wall on all sides, furiously hammering and building. After a while I couldn’t feel the ache in my back or see the blood on my hands: all I could hear was the beating of the hammer, and all I could see were the heads of the nails as I piled more and more wood onto the barrier. I had wood to spare—I hadn’t even needed that last bloody plank—and by the time I finished it was four planks thick in some places, and the reinforcing strips spread several feet either side of the frame. I used the last three pieces as bracing struts, forcing them horizontally across the hallway, one end of each lodged in niches in the barrier, the other jammed tight against the opposite wall.
The Best New Horror 3 Page 40
