Behind Dark Doors (the complete collection): Eighteen suspenseful short stories

by Susan May

  Most of the time the explosive sounds and blinding lights were an annoying intrusion into my day-to-day life. A life which was nothing more than interlinked moments of mundane shuffling from the couch to the bathroom to the door to family get-togethers that I “must attend to keep my spirits up.”

  The last thing I ever needed was a damning reminder that, by some kind of divine joke, I was one of the unfortunates to land on that Normandy beach on June 6, 1944.

  I glanced at the rooster clock—a ridiculous piece of bric-a-brac that Mavis had purchased at a thrift shop, on our honeymoon in ’Frisco back in ’52. I’d always hated the thing, but it had been fifteen years since she’d passed, and now it served as a reminder of her ability to see the beauty in things that were nothing more than junk. Probably why someone as full of life as Mavis wound up with a broken soul like me.

  The rooster clock’s hands showed 2:45. I figured I could sit there another hour and watch some idiot try to sell me something on the shopping channel, or I could pull this creaky body up and answer the call of the flashes. Then I could stand there and enjoy the wonderful vista of mortar shells raining down on my front lawn. And wait.

  Eventually, the switch in my head would flick off and the twisted part of my mind that played this history reel would be satisfied with its daily quota of reminiscence.

  Tonight, even my knees had joined the cacophony of pain, and I wondered if losing my legs—as so many of my compatriots had done—would have prevented the aches that plagued me daily. If, in losing limbs, they were the lucky ones. A splutter of laughter escaped my lips at the thought. Those complaining legs, with the addition of will and patience, were still capable of getting me across the room to watch the fireworks. So I pointed them in the right direction and willed my body forward.

  I knew by the time I reached the window the shelling would have all but stopped. It rarely lasted longer than the time it took for my heart to begin the familiar pounding and my mouth to dry to a parchedness that no amount of water could quench. It would stop because it had achieved its goal. It had reminded me and proved its power over time. It could rest, knowing I was still its puppet, still its slave, and that still I feared it.

  Tonight it was a persistent tormentor. As I reached for the lace curtains, and brushed them aside to peer outside, I wondered if tonight it had a point to prove. It had called me to the window, when most nights it was content to hurl its nightmare intrusion into my living room, my kitchen, my bedroom.

  Tonight it wanted me to follow it.

  I’m coming. You bastards, I’m coming.

  The curtains felt dry and brittle in my hands, the lace catching on my rough, furrowed fingers. The coolness of the night leached through the glass, and as I pushed my face to the window, the cold kissed my skin.

  A flash exploded.

  My image reflected in the glass as the flares flickered and flashed beyond it. I looked like some kind of ghost arisen from the battleground. Sparse white hair sprouting out at I-don’t-care angles, a nose twice the length it once was. Eyes dark and hollow, and tired, so very tired. It was a face infested with lines, not of a life lived, but a life experienced through a veil of memories that hung so thick that only the strongest emotions struggled through.

  There it was, beyond my reflection … a seventy-year-old war looking as fresh and real as the day it was lived. Damn, if the vision wasn’t brighter and even more vivid tonight.

  Across the road, the snipers sat in their bunkers, their guns unmoving: deadly black sticks poking over the sandbags, waiting to strike with a near-silent phht. Behind the stoop of Patrick Smith’s house—a single man with a penchant for blondes with big hips—perched the machine gun battalion. Yes, those bastards didn’t miss a trick, and neither did Patrick, from what he’d shared—which I didn’t care to know, but still he shared.

  Pinpoints of red flared from the stoop, lighting up like a hundred angry eyes. The bullets smacked into the garden wall, the front door, and the bushes near the mailbox. Dirt flew up, exploding into the air in an arabesque of green and dark brown, spraying grains of sand and soil upon my driveway.

  Thanks for the aeration of the lawn, you kraut devils.

  I could feel the momentum of the assault building, just as I had that 1944 June morning.

  I was in the 2nd Ranger Battalion. They sent us into Omaha Beach as a distraction, so that the Dog, Easy, and Fox Companies could take them out from inland. They hadn’t told us that before; we only learned of it later in the history books.

  Old Dwight’s meteorologist gave the okay, when the tides, the moon, and the weather would be our allies. It was a good plan, except the weather just wouldn’t play ball. So you lose a few men because overcast skies means the air support can’t get through. Five thousand is a good number, isn’t it, folks? That’s acceptable, unless you’re one of the five thousand. It’s acceptable, unless you’re one of the forty-five thousand who lived, but waded past the bodies, past your friends dying around you, past the horror. It’s all very acceptable from a room with a map and names that end in Company, Battalion and Squadron.

  Often when the flashes visited me, I wondered how Eisenhower made that choice: throwing us, and the 1st, and the 29th Division to those devils in order to claim that beach. Did he put the numbers in a hat? What was it for? Now we drive their cars and visit their beer festivals.

  A grenade landed just below my window. It wouldn’t explode while I watched it. They never do. Too much detail. I don’t get all the detail. These experiences: fugues, Dr. Clarke tells me. My version of post-traumatic stress disorder doesn’t supply the detail. That’s normal for me. I don’t get faces or direct explosions, just distant visions of gun flares, flashes, and buzzing bullets, and an inescapable hell.

  I thank my brain for that small mercy. If I’d had to watch my buddies die over and over, see the pain on their faces, hear their cries, and look into their pleading eyes, I couldn’t have taken it.

  I looked down through the glass; the grenade sat there, nestled just next to the rose bush, black and waiting. Waiting for me to react, to run, to allow it to win, to allow it to impact my life.

  I stood still, watching it. It would disappear in a moment, unable to withstand the assault of my stare.

  Ten, nine, eight, seven, six …

  It’ll be gone by three.

  Five, four —

  When the flash came, followed by an explosion that pierced my ears like the smashing of a thick glass wall, it was so unexpected that it threw me back across the room. I staggered, reeling, both arms swirling in mad circles as I fought to gain my balance. My hand caught the arm of the lounge chair and immediately I grabbed for its solidness, falling backward to half-land on it, my ass embedded in the cushion, my legs hanging over the arm.

  That was new.

  I pushed my body back up, my heart solid and thick in my chest as if the blood had pooled there, forcing the muscle to work overtime to shunt it out.

  My feet shuffled beneath me toward the window. Move faster, you bastards.

  The flashes had dulled, though the sounds were still there, cracking and banging. When I reached the window, I pushed my nose to the glass and looked down.

  The grenade was gone. As it should be. As I knew it would be. The rose bush was alone in all its floral glory. In the moonlight, the white petals shone as if kissed by the sun and not its darker sister.

  Across the way, the snipers were still sending their zinging bullets toward me. From the top of the street, I could hear the rumble of the trucks and the tanks.

  It was almost over. The tanks only invaded when this thing had worn its way down, when the hallucination had run out of steam, as if they were the final resort of the battle.

  That’s when I saw him. His face was clear as day, as if he were here, now, instead of reaching across seven decades of time and memories.

  Young Charlie O’Shea stood near the elm tree at the edge of the property. He held his gun before him, clenched between hands shaki
ng with the knowledge that he had only minutes to live, or maybe one chance in ten of survival. His helmet hung back over his head—it never fit him right. Even at this distance, I could see the sweat slicked across his brow, the whites of his eyes as he swung his head left to right, frantically looking for a way through the melee.

  Then he turned to me, and our gazes met. That never happened before. I never saw the eyes. I never saw the faces.

  Our eyes met as if we were only feet apart. He mouthed some words, really tried to send me a message, but all that hit me was the surprise at seeing him there, and curiosity at why.

  Then the bullet struck. If his damn helmet had fit him right, he might have been okay. Those helmets could take a hit sometimes. But it was back on his head, with his forehead standing out like a shining, white target.

  In a slow second, during which I felt I could see the bullet move through the air, his head disappeared in an eruption of red and white matter, and his body collapsed like a rag doll.

  For the second time that night, I staggered backward to the arm of the chair and fell into the welcoming cushions. Charlie shouldn’t be there. I didn’t see faces, especially his. My head felt heavy, as if filled to overflowing with a thousand pounds of sand from that beach.

  My breath came in short, sharp gasps, and I grabbed at my chest. If I didn’t get myself under control, my heart could give out. I didn’t want Charlie O’Shea’s exploding face to be the last thing I ever saw on this earth.

  As I stared down at the worn, intricate design of coiled gold and brown vine carpet, from my periphery came the realization that the flashes had stopped. All that remained was a distant murmur of crackling and pops. I kept my head bowed until I felt sure it was over.

  When curiosity enticed me to look up, I was again alone with the empty night. Pulling myself up, I moved back to the window.

  It was then that I saw it.

  If I hadn’t run my hand over it, felt its jaggedness against my palm, I wouldn’t have believed it. “Another illusion,” I imagined Doctor Clarke saying. This was no illusion or mirage. This was real.

  My fingers smoothed over the glass and followed the trail of cracks. One stretched from the base of the frame to the mid-section, and then fractured off into four lines of pure white. They were strong and solid, as if to say: “This is our window. We claim it as our territory.”

  It wasn’t that which caused my heart to pound, it was the cracks in the wall, the jagged lines running up from the window into the ceiling in splintering roadmaps of damage. I hadn’t registered them when I saw Charlie, but now I had a vague memory of seeing them there. I’d thought they were part of it, part of the craziness.

  Now I remembered: they were there before Charlie’s appearance, and after the grenade exploded. The grenade that should have disappeared, the grenade that couldn’t be real. Yet, somehow …

  Chapter 2

  “Mr. Baker, what’s happened? Mr. Baker.”

  Claire’s voice sounded distant, tinny, as if captured in a box. It filtered through the thick darkness, pulling me awake long before I was ready to face whatever awaited in the world.

  “You’ve hurt yourself? Are you all right?”

  Unwillingly, I opened my eyes to find Claire’s round face and curly brown hair bobbing in and out of my vision. Uninvited, her arms reached under me, pulling and pushing my complaining body upright.

  Her tutting and fussing sent my mood spiraling further downward. A five-foot-nothing, thirty-something woman having enough strength to maneuver a six-foot man so easily bemused and annoyed me in equal measures. My weight, though, was forty pounds less now than it was ten years ago—not skin and bone yet, but certainly more bone. I’d stiffen my body to ensure she didn’t have an easy time of it.

  After last night, today was not a good-mood day. I grunted a reply. Once she’d propped me up sufficiently, as if I were an oversized doll, with pillows tucked between the bed’s headboard and my head, she stood back and examined my face.

  “What have you done here?” Her hand reached out and brushed across my forehead. “You’ve cut yourself?”

  A sudden throb of dull pain brought back the memory of the cracked window. I must have hit my head on something when the grenade exploded. In the confusion, with everything going on, it must not have registered.

  I waved Claire’s hand away, none too gently. Why did she keep coming here? I didn’t make her job easy. Over the years, many health workers had come and gone, spending only their allotted fifty minutes, but this one lingered.

  And she talked. Constantly.

  She prattled on about her children—two boys in school, middle school or something. She talked about her husband, her thoughts on the health system, her weather predictions, her beliefs on manners, and a repetitive exposition on the real reason for the fluctuating cost of gas. She shared her views on anything and everything, whether I wanted to hear them or not.

  I didn’t try to be good company—had given up on civil manners years ago. Didn’t share thoughts, and didn’t offer her anything to suggest I cared a whit about her life. Yet, every day she turned up and cleaned and cooked, and, of course, talked.

  When I asked her once—more out of annoyance than curiosity—why she bothered, she only replied with a smile. I knew why she really came: the goddamn government paid her to check and see if I’d died yet. That was her real job. One day she would come and complete the task.

  Now she stood there staring, hands on hips, as I wiggled my feet off the side of the bed. They made a clopping sound as they found the floor.

  Claire leaned into me to offer assistance, and received my best don’t help me look. Still she swooped.

  “I’m fine,” I said, waving her away, my voice cracked and whisper-weak. Sleep offered so little benefits these days, except a brief reprieve from thought.

  “You are not fine. I want to know how you cut yourself.”

  Ignoring her, I moved to the dresser, faster than I would have had she not been there.

  I stared into the mirror. The gash across my right eye was two, maybe three inches, but shallow. Dried blood trailed across my forehead in thin red smears. Ribbons of it had run into my eyebrows, transforming them from snow white to pink.

  My unchanged clothes from the night before hung on me like a sack of gray-blue rags. I shambled out the bedroom door, leaving Claire staring after me. I needed to check that window. And the wall.

  It had to be a dream, part of the hallucination. I expected to find nothing. The thought pervaded my mind. Perhaps the head injury was the answer. There I was seeing Charlie and grenades and wilder things than I’d ever seen before, when I was actually out cold, fallen on a chair or table.

  My feet followed the treaded path from the bedroom to the living room, and then to the window, my back complaining as it always did upon first arising.

  “Where are you going, Mr. Baker?” Claire called from behind me.

  The words bounced off, just like the shells and flashes of memory that invaded my life. The window. I needed to see the window.

  It would be whole. It had to be. No cracks. No damage. The faded yellow and green flower-patterned wallpaper would be all that I would see. There would be no fissures sliding upward scarring it. It would be perfect, smooth, and right, because a seventy-year-old armament had not exploded in my flowerbed. And Charlie hadn’t been there. He was dead, and he was gone, just like all the rest. What happened on Omaha Beach that day, well, it had died with him.

  Yet, last night, the way he looked at me, it was as real as that day. The words he’d mouthed, just like then, I couldn’t hear them; would never hear them. He was dead. I was alive.

  My fingers dragged across the wall’s surface. What was real and what was not had merged. My tongue rolled around, dry and desperate, in a mouth that felt as parched as a noonday beach. A drone as loud as a dozen overhead planes filled my ears. They were there.

  In the daylight, the pattern of cracks in the glass, feathered and fine,
stood out in etched detail. Alongside the window, a two-inch-thick breach ran up the wall from floor to ceiling. Through it daylight streaked, leaving gold and silver lines on the mottled carpet.

  In comparison to the night before, the fissure in the window appeared to have enlarged. Maybe the coldness of the air, the shrinking and expanding of the wooden frame, had worked on it overnight. Or perhaps I simply hadn’t taken it all in.

  “What’s happened here?” said Claire, moving alongside me. She, too, reached out to place her palm against the wall, her skin light pink against the dirge-green floral pattern Carmen had so loved.

  What should I tell her? An explosion had drifted across time, damaged the wall, and knocked me on my ass? By the way, the ghost of Charlie O’Shea came by just to cap it all off?

  “Settling,” I said, turning back to the kitchen. Claire would leave soon. Then I would come back and study it. Attempt to fathom its meaning.

  “Settling? That’s not settling.”

  She followed me.

  “Houses don’t settle like that. It wasn’t there yesterday. You can fit your fingers through that gap. It’s dangerous. The house may be unstable.”

  I’d made it to the stove—in good time, for me. Normally, it took me twice the time to travel the distance. The lack of normal was lessening the boundaries of age.

  “I’m only worrying about coffee,” I said, as I pulled the kettle from the stove and swung it toward the kitchen sink. Before I’d completed the maneuver, Claire intercepted me.

  “I’ll make that for you.” She pulled the kettle from me and pushed it under the tap. “You just sit down, Mr. Baker.”

  Usually I would have argued, if only to see the way her lip quivered when I went too far. Today I obeyed. The quicker I convinced her all was fine, the quicker she would go.

  She didn’t go. Instead, she made two coffees and put both on the table along with a plate of sugar cookies. She pushed a steaming cup toward me, and instead of flitting off to the recesses of the house to do her “straightening,” she plonked herself down opposite me. Then she continued to talk, as if the cracks were a conspiracy in which we had both collaborated.