Behind the Door

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “Oh?” Kari was still mulling over all the older woman had said.

  “No one uses the Door twice. It isn’t done.”

  “So, it’s never been done, or isn’t done anymore?”

  “In every case I can think of, the person who used the Door again had his or her request backfire, and the person died. Every case. No one asks anything of the Door twice.”

  Kari nodded slowly. “This is a lot to take in,” she finally said.

  Cicely nodded. “I know, sugar. And as far as I’m concerned, if you think the risks are too much, I sure would understand that. I wouldn’t blame you if you chose not to believe a word I’m saying, just wanted to chalk it all up to the folk ramblings of some crazy old lady. I’ll consider the whole matter dropped. As I mentioned, I have some mixed feelings about the whole thing. But if you do choose to…to go ahead with asking the Door for some peace of mind, I’ll back you. You’re a good woman, Kari. You deserve to have that tragedy taken away from your heart and mind. But ask for that, sugar. For the love of God, just ask for it to be taken away.”

  * * * *

  Carl “Deets” Dietrich made his way through the woods by memory. He’d brought a flashlight, but it hung by its key ring clip from the belt loop of his faded jeans. He couldn’t quite bring himself to turn it on—that would have made the surreal too real, too much like conscious action and not like sleepwalking. Plus, he didn’t want anyone to see or know, if possible, that he was out there using the Door. He didn’t want to answer questions and he certainly didn’t want to spark rumors. As he saw it, he was in enough trouble already.

  It didn’t matter if the flashlight was on or not—Deets knew the way. The moon was unusually bright that night, and he’d scouted the area a few times before under the guise of hunting. No one had asked why he never bagged anything. People seldom questioned his failures anymore.

  He clutched the letter tightly as he tromped through the underbrush, worrying about how loud his footsteps sounded, worrying about the sweat from his palm somehow seeping through the letter and blurring the ink, worrying about the wax on the seal breaking. Mostly, though, he was still worried about the cops finding evidence linking him to that hit and run on Derber Avenue. He was so tired of worrying. So tired…

  His uncle was the one who had suggested the Door without even realizing it, shortly after reading about the accident in the paper. It was an accident, but Deets had panicked. God, how he’d panicked. He hadn’t been drunk, but he’d been drinking and it had been dark and a little foggy and—

  He’d gotten out to try to help the boy, but he looked…crumpled, like a wadded-up piece of paper that someone had splattered red paint on, then left in a puddle of it. He was twitching a little, but then he stopped and seemed to somehow sink even further into himself. As Deets stared in wide-eyed horror, his breath hitched over and over and over until he was sure he was hyperventilating. A moment’s flash of surety that he would pass out from fright right next to the body in the road came almost like a physical shove, causing him to stumble backward, then flee for his car.

  He managed not to have to pull over to vomit until he’d put a good five miles between himself and the scene of the accident. The crime scene. He doubled over again and dry-heaved at the thought of it, half-blinded by his own headlights. The cops would find him, would check cars on the road for dented, bloody bumpers. Maybe they could even find his vomit and test it for DNA. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He stumbled back to his car. What was he going to do?

  It was well after three-thirty in the morning when he let himself into his boss’s service garage and a quarter after five by the time he’d managed to wash off all the blood and hammer out the dents. The boy had left only two: one on Deets’s bumper and one on the hood of his car. The windshield was still intact. He thought the boy must have been light, a fragile little thing to do so little damage to his car, and he fought the urge to throw up again.

  He was home in bed by six, with no one the wiser, so far as he could tell. No witnesses, no evidence—just nearly overwhelming guilt and fear. Despite those feelings, though, exhaustion overtook him and he fell asleep. Saturdays were his day off, so no one woke him—no police banging on the door or angry family members, the boy’s or his.

  When he stopped by his mom’s for a late breakfast, his uncle was reading about the hit and run of an unidentified teenaged boy on Derber Avenue. It took every fiber of Deets’s being not to snatch the paper out of his uncle’s hand.

  “No leads, it says. They don’t know who the bastard is that hit him. Damn savage, is what I say. Probably drunk too.” His uncle sipped his coffee, oblivious to his nephew blanching behind him.

  “That poor boy’s parents,” his mom murmured over her frying pan of eggs. Deets felt the color leave his face. The boy hadn’t even really looked like a person when he’d hit him, so the idea of him having a family, people who would miss him, hadn’t really occurred to Deets.

  “And you want to bet they never catch the guy? Not if he knows about the Door. Guy can fix it so they never find out.”

  His mother gave her brother a sharp look—she’d always been superstitious and never let such talk, particularly about the Door, happen in her house, not after what happened to Deets’s grandfather. She noticed her son then and smiled at him. “Hi, honey. Want some eggs?”

  Deets wasn’t remotely hungry, but returned a weak smile and nodded. His head had begun to pound.

  The Door. He could go to the Door.

  He wrote the letter that afternoon, wording it as carefully as he could. The next part was a little tough; Deets was squeamish when it came to blood. However, he managed after the second try to run his fingers close enough to the blades on his razor to open up a small wound across the tip. Quickly, he cupped the blood and moved to the candle he’d “borrowed” from his mother’s collection. He lit the candle and as soon as the wax on top near the wick liquefied, he let the blood patter down on top of the candle. Then, blotting his finger with a tissue, he folded up his letter in thirds. He wasn’t sure how to seal it, but decided on tipping the candle so that some of the liquid wax with swirls of his blood landed on the edge of the paper. He then pressed it to the fold.

  There. It was done. Now he just had to deliver it.

  He managed to find the Door in the daytime about a week later. It had been a very long week. He flinched every time the phone rang and felt his stomach curl into a tight ball of terror every time there was a knock on his front door. He wasn’t sleeping and his nerves were wearing thinner and thinner. Every “hunting” trip out to the woods had been a failure, and he’d been on the verge of screaming like a madman at the trees when he turned and… there it was. He sucked in a breath. He’d found it.

  It was nothing like he’d imagined; somehow he’d pictured an ornate gothic door of polished mahogany with gold filigree and intricate carvings, or maybe something glowing and swirling within a shining frame of silvery branches, like a fantasy portal in a video game. There was nothing fancy or unique about it, though, other than the fact that it was a freestanding, rectangular door and frame in the middle of the woods. The Door itself had been constructed of heavy wooden planks, weathered to a pale gray and held together with thin crossbeams ostensibly nailed to the planks at eye- and knee-level. The doorknob was a burnished bronze, simple and round, but there was no plate or keyhole. The frame, which flanked and crowned the Door, was composed of big, heavy-looking cobblestones arranged two and three wide, and the Door was set a half-inch or so above the threshold, allowing just enough room for something like a letter to be slipped beneath. As Deets stepped closer to it, he thought he heard a low, distant hum.

  Awed, Deets reached out a hand, hesitated, then lightly touched the wood and then the stone. Both felt worn smooth, but intensely solid and strong—so strong that it was as much a mental impression as a physical sensation. It was almost as if the Door vibrated with strength,
and the sensation was enough to make him draw his fingers back quickly.

  He circled the Door slowly, but the far side of it looked more or less like the front, minus the doorknob. He even tried peering under it, but of course, there was nothing to see. Whatever was really on the other side of the Door, whatever his mother was so afraid of, was not going to show itself now in broad daylight. He’d have to come back at night.

  And he did. As an hour and then half of another passed while he still navigated the woods in the dark, a new worry emerged—that he wouldn’t be able to find the Door again, or if he did, that something would go terribly wrong. It made him think of his grandfather. He didn’t know the whole story—his mother was unwilling to tell him and his uncle was evidently unable—but he knew it involved his gramps’s own nightly trek out to the Door, and how something had gone wrong some time after he’d slipped his letter under the Door. Deets could only imagine what his gramps had asked for that left him a half-charred thing with a rictus smile, contorted, almost curled in on itself, which the police had found later the following day.

  He shivered, noticing only in the periphery of his thoughts that there was no breeze to chill him; the leaves on the trees remained still, waiting, holding tiny breaths, watching him.

  Deets had spooked himself just to the point of turning around and going home when the mists parted and he once more stood face-to-face with the Door, now illuminated by a shaft of moonlight.

  He approached it slowly. Somehow, standing before the Door at night held a different kind of gravity in his mind. The nebulous stories about his grandfather seemed more substantial, and the full weight of the terrible thing he did hung between him and the Door like a palpable, miasmic thing. It was hard to breathe, and he was vaguely aware that the hand clutching the letter was shaking.

  He approached the Door slowly, his mouth dry. All around him, the forest was dead silent and it was only when he got close enough to the Door to touch it that he heard even the faintest suggestion of the hum, and that was something he felt more than heard. He swallowed and the air moved stickily down his throat. He peered around the side of the frame to see if anything behind the Door had changed. It hadn’t; there was no alternate dimension, no other world. Only darkness there, and the far side of the Door, and the forest decaying into darkness beyond.

  He faced the Door again and for a moment, had the crazy notion to turn the knob and open the Door right up, to gaze into whatever was on the other side, humming faintly and dispensing benevolence and malevolence at will. His hand, in fact, had managed to close half the distance between him and the knob before that voice in his head, the one who didn’t talk nearly often enough, screamed at him to stop. He jerked his hand back, horrified. Had that happened to his grandfather? Had it been opening the Door that had killed him? And how had he come so close to opening it himself without even realizing?

  He took a step back and sank to his knees. The humming seemed to be louder, though that could have been his imagination. He tried looking under the Door again, but saw nothing but black.

  Then he thought he heard voices, whispering from under the Door. His heart pounded. The hair on his arms stood on end. His breath stuck in his chest.

  He shoved the letter under the Door and fell backward, scuttling away from it.

  At first, nothing happened. Then small indentations formed in the rock of the frame, filling with a glowing blue liquid to illuminate a series of runic characters the likes of which he’d never seen. They cast an eerie glow on the Door as well as the trees and ground nearest by. Deets wanted to scream, but couldn’t. He couldn’t move, couldn’t even really think. All he could do was watch the glowing symbols in the Door and the flash of blue light that swept the under-space beneath into which he’d shoved his letter.

  Then, all at once, the lights went out. The moon, perhaps behind a cloud now, lit nothing, and Deets was left alone in pure darkness with the Door.

  He did cry out then, a sound that could easily have been mistaken for a bird or some other night animal. Fumbling with the flashlight, he switched it on and with shaking hands, pointed it at the Door.

  It stood as it had in the daylight; silent, unmoving, unyielding, and indifferent.

  Deets got to his feet and backed away until his shoulder bumped a nearby tree. He was afraid of taking his eyes off the Door, afraid of turning his back on it even for a moment. He edged around the tree in his way and when the Door was finally out of his line of sight, he ran.

  * * * *

  Kari thought about the letter for days. After her lunch with Cicely, the older woman had taken her out to the woods and shown her the Door. It was a simple, unostentatious slab of wood, hardly something she could imagine being capable of granting wishes, as Cicely had said. Door and frame stood with no visible means of support amid a grove of oak trees, which seemed to know better than to grow too close. Kari could chalk that up to optical illusion and the power of suggestion. The low hum she felt, rather than heard, when she got close enough to touch the Door might have had something to do with it. She wasn’t quite ready, after all she’d tried in order to get better, to put her faith in magic.

  Over the rest of that week, though, the Door and its promise of peace of mind kept returning to her thoughts. She could be whole again, if it worked. She could have a life again.

  The only thing that kept her from asking for her daughter back from the dead was the mental image of her dead but animated child lumbering back from the cemetery, like some terrible ghoul. Despite her initial incredulousness at Cicely’s story, there was something so…haunted, she felt, about Cicely’s eyes when she told Kari about the boys who’d come back falling apart, rotting right off their own frames, that it had stuck with her, a shiver beneath the surface of her conscious thoughts. The old woman wasn’t making something up; rather, she was remembering something that had informed her nightmares for decades. And Kari was desperate, but not stupid and not insensitive. She wanted her daughter back, but not if it meant subjecting the poor girl to even more pain and horror than she had already experienced. She couldn’t do that to Jessica. She needed to believe her daughter rested in peace, and she could never forgive herself if that peace was interrupted or worse, taken away permanently.

  No, Kari had decided the best thing to ask the Door for was what Cicely had suggested: to have the painful memories and thoughts taken away from her head and heart. There would come a time, God willing, that she would see her daughter again, but until that time, she just wanted to forget the pain, to put it aside some place where it couldn’t drive her into the ground. She worded her letter thus:

  Please take away my painful thoughts and feelings regarding Jessica.

  Please give me peace in my mind and in my heart.

  Also, please let her rest in peace knowing, wherever she is, that she is very much loved by her mother and father.

  It had taken four drafts, but she was finally satisfied. She’d kept it succinct and as specific as possible and thought it covered everything she needed to have happen in order to move on with her life. She couldn’t see a way that it could possibly backfire on her. To ease her friend’s mind, she’d shown Cicely her letter that next week at the diner. Cicely approved with a grim nod of the head. That night, Kari had sealed it with wax and blood, as instructed, but due to the thunderstorm raging outside, delivery would have to wait. That was okay. The hard part was done. She could hold off one more night.

  That night when she slept, with the letter on the night table next to her bed, she did not dream.

  Chapter 3

  Retired Monroe County sheriff Bill Grainger had been sober for a long time. To anyone who asked, including his grandson, who was a state trooper himself down near the Pine Barrens in Jersey, he said it was the best thing he’d ever done for himself and that he only wished he’d done it sooner, when he could have salvaged his relationships with his wife and sons.

 
; Inwardly, though, it was a challenge not to drink. He missed having a cold beer after mowing the lawn. He missed the warm, sleepy feeling that a fifth of vodka gave him every night while he watched old black-and-white westerns or whatever football game was on. He missed drinking at the pub on Oak Street with the boys after work on Thursday and Sunday nights. He missed sleeping without dreaming of his army buddies getting their legs blown off in ’Nam.

  What he did not miss were the fights with Helen over how much he’d had to drink, and as a result, what other woman he’d been too friendly with at the bar or what inappropriate story he’d related with boozy guffaws at a dinner party. In fact, he’d gone to some lengths to delude himself that he hadn’t been as rough and clumsy with her on those nights she gave in and let him have sex with her, despite the fact that with the amount of booze in his system and the fragmented war horrors in his head, it was a fifty-fifty chance that he’d even be able to get it up. He didn’t miss how disappointed his children looked when he was too hungover on a Saturday morning to play catch in the backyard, go to their Little League games, or take them to Dorney Park. He skipped out on more than one Sunday-morning Mass at St. Catherine’s as well, which embarrassed Helen immensely. He did not miss those early and sporadic AA meetings where he felt he was sitting under the shadow of his own thoughts, haunted by his guilt and anger.

  People say alcoholics don’t stop drinking until they hit their own personal rock-bottom. Bill wanted to believe it wouldn’t have to come to that. He kept trying to stop drinking; he even managed to long enough to begin convincing Helen that he’d changed. He hadn’t really wanted to change, though. That, he realized, had been the problem. He didn’t want to stop drinking, but only curb it a bit, now that he was in control.

  When he lost his family, he realized he wasn’t in control and never had been.

  Bill had never been a violent drunk or even a nasty one, but he was a careless one, and that had been just a little too much for Helen. One morning in 1978, when his head pounded hard enough, it felt, to crack his skull and his stomach was a rotting hull, she had quietly packed bags for herself and the kids and left. She’d left him there in a haze of bright light and miserable pain, and he couldn’t say he blamed her one bit.