Behind the Door

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Despite her resolve, she decided not to ask Cicely about it. It had been made clear that asking more than once from the Door invariably resulted in death, but there had been no such discussion about the consequences of opening the Door. Cicely had said nothing about that, other than never to do it. Maybe no one was left alive who remembered what was on the other side, or what happened to people who tried to find out. Or maybe it was something that the old folks wanted sole propriety over, a thing just for them to have shared. Either way, Kari would not be deterred. She suspected Cicely would strongly disagree with her plans, but Kari just wouldn’t tell her. Maybe Cicely did have stories, but Kari didn’t want to know if others had tried to take back their letters and failed. She didn’t want to be put off of her mission. She couldn’t be.

  Kari couldn’t forget Jessica entirely. Memories both good and sad, she now understood, were all she had left.

  So she’d just take the letter back. There had to be a way. Under the best and perhaps most miraculous of circumstances, maybe she could dig it out from under the Door, just slide it out with a stick or something. Something. And in a worst-case scenario, she would plead with “them behind the Door” or trade something to get her letter rescinded. Surely she couldn’t be the first person who had ever tried to take back a letter, even if it meant breaking the rules. And wouldn’t the law of averages indicate sometimes people succeeded?

  Probably not, the new voice in her mind told her. In fact, likely not. Why do you think the number-one rule is never to open the Door?

  She swept the voice from her mind.

  As she rushed around the house looking for her purse and keys (they were never where she thought she’d left them), she recognized that she probably wasn’t thinking clearly. Cicely had been very specific about the letter and its contents being out of one’s hands once delivered. And she’d been just as clear about not using the Door twice. What was done was done, by Cicely’s estimation. But fear overrode logic in Kari’s mind. She never wanted to open that shoebox and have absolutely no recollection of the significance of the items within. Nothing seemed like a greater betrayal to her daughter than to forget her. She hadn’t been able to protect her little girl, but she’d be damned—literally, if it came to that—if she’d let all maternal bonds just go up like wisps of smoke.

  Kari would get that letter back if it meant opening that damned Door herself and taking it out of the hands (or talons) of whatever was on the other side.

  She opted to go back at night. She considered going while there was still light out, but ultimately discarded the idea. During the daytime, the Door had been so much wooden planks. Whatever magic in it seemed to come out at night, or at least appeared to be much stronger then. While it might be safer to open the Door when its magic was ebbing low, the likelihood that she would have access to her letter, wherever it had gone, would be lower too. No, if she was going to stand a chance of success, she’d have to go when there was enough of the magic to allow her access to wherever her letter really was. Besides, she didn’t want to wait another day. By tomorrow morning, it was possible she would have forgotten all about Jessica.

  That night, she retraced her steps through the woods, this time with just her keys and her phone with its flashlight app. It seemed to take less time to find the Door than it had on her first trip. It loomed up out of the dark before she was quite ready for it, hovering still and silent, surrounded by its oaken sentinels. Those oaks seemed so much smarter than the people of Zarephath, as far as Kari was concerned. They sensed the unnatural aspect of the Door and shrank away from it, but people…well, they had poked and prodded at it and only accepted its somehow sinister apathy when shown just how alien a thing the Door was.

  And what was she here to do? Really, if the Door was some kind of wild alien beast, then she was essentially planning on opening its mouth and sticking her hand in.

  She glanced around the shadowed woods as if she might get caught, then took a deep breath and knelt down in front of the Door. She peered under but saw nothing. The hum was electric, though, setting her stomach atilt with its reverberation. Her hands in the dirt felt nothing coming up from the ground; the hum was most definitely coming from the Door. This close, she didn’t have much hope of it working, but she grabbed a nearby stick and swung it in the space between dirt and wood on the off chance that she might catch the corner of the letter and drag it out. She had no such luck, though. Her stick did little more than kick up puffs of dry earth.

  Sitting back on her haunches, she huffed, then tossed the stick. Okay, so it was going to have to be the hard way, then. She looked up at the Door. It hummed, uninterested in her.

  Slowly, she got to her feet, backing off a foot or two so she could knock on the door. The sound was swallowed by the hum. She knocked again, harder, but that sound too was muted and without echo.

  “Uh, hello?” Kari leaned in again so that her forehead was almost touching the wood. “Hello? Is anyone, uh, there?”

  She thought she heard something like a squawk and a hiccup from the other side, but it could have been wishful imagination.

  “Hello,” she tried again. “I’d like to please speak to the… um, the gods behind the Door. If you’re there, I mean. I hope. I delivered a letter about memories of my daughter almost a week ago, and I was wondering if I could please have it back? Please?” Kari began to cry. “Please. I made a mistake and I just…just want to undo it. I miss my daughter, but I don’t want to forget her.”

  When she received nothing in the way of response or even recognition, she began to cry harder, pounding on the Door. “Please! Please, I’m begging you! I don’t want to lose the only thing I have left of her! I want to take it back! Please! Just undo this and I’ll do anything! I promise! Please!”

  She could barely hear her own desperate cries, devoured as they were by the hum from beyond the Door. She rested her forehead against the wood then and let it all out—the pain, the loneliness, the guilt, the shame—all of it in a flood of hot tears against the rough surface of indifference.

  “Please,” she whispered, and it was then that she heard a low grumble, a sound that was almost words. It was very faint, but she knew it was no trick of the imagination that time. Something was behind the Door, maybe listening.

  She renewed her pleas, pounding on the Door until the heels of her fists hurt, but no further reply made its way across to her side.

  “Fuck!” she shouted, and the oaks seemed to cringe, equating her with the unnatural thing in their midst. To herself, she muttered, “Fuck this” and grabbed the doorknob, turning and yanking with all of her strength.

  The Door swung open slowly but with force and—startled—Kari fell backward onto her rear. She’d figured deep down that no one ever opened the Door because it was locked, but clearly, that was not the case.

  Kari could feel the change in the air before anything else. The humming had stopped as if the movement of the Door had flipped a switch.

  She shuddered, but crawled closer to take it all in.

  Beyond the crisp edges of this world was a rectangular opening onto another. Through it, Kari could see a silent, raging ocean in shades of silver and gray, extending for miles in all directions as far as visibility allowed. An eighth of a mile or so out from the place directly below the Door, with waves crashing violently against it and occasionally obscuring it from view, was a rocky island. A large slate tower of intricately carved arabesques rose up from the island, slanted slightly to the right. The structure reminded her of mausoleums, with its facade so impervious to everything but death.

  Above the tower and the sea was a midnight sky, utterly starless. That, maybe, terrified her most of all; it meant the world on which she was looking was no known place in her universe, but rather, some place far beyond where even the seemingly endless stars could reach.

  Then Kari saw the creatures. She tried to breathe, but couldn’t draw th
e air into her lungs.

  What she noticed first was the movement, the emergence of misshapen heads and long, jointed appendages from the savage surf, dark shapes clawing onto the rocky shore and then darting between the large, heavy boulders. She couldn’t make out much detail, other than that their body parts seemed disconnected beneath the skin, as if parts of their skeletons worked independently of each other. They had to have been terribly large for her to make out any detail at all. Occasionally she caught an eye, shark-like and casting its own yellowish glow, which seemed to flow over the back of one of the creatures or sink into the skin to reappear someplace else. She also saw mouths; many, many mouths that opened onto other mouths both ringed and lined with teeth, and from those inner mouths flailed—what? Tongues? Tentacles?

  They were looking up at her.

  It took her a moment to realize it as she teetered dizzily on her knees at the edge of the Door, but a number of them had paused in their scrambling and were clawing up at the sky in her direction. Eyes opened in the grasping palms, then closed and were replaced by mouths. They were calling to her. Oh God, oh God, oh God They were calling to her….

  The shore was teeming with the creatures now, and what were they? The town’s sins and secrets, their ugliness and hate and jealousy and perversion in physical form? Or some terrible gods who fed on such things?

  When the first one sprouted leather wings, Kari screamed and threw herself away from the opening. She sat there, trying to catch her breath, when she realized the starless world beyond was no longer silent but droned, like the bass buzz of sawteeth, and she realized what was coming.

  “Shit! Shit!” She scrambled to her feet and ran to the door, yanking on it with all of her strength.

  It wouldn’t budge.

  “No! No no no, this can’t be happening, this can’t—” she pulled with all her strength, then went around to the other side and threw her weight into the Door. It skittered a few inches, then seemed to catch in the dirt. She screamed into the night and the forest around her shuddered in reply. She threw herself against the Door again and was relieved to find it moved with her. She gave it one last shove and as she did so, she happened to look up on the world being closed off—right into the glowing eye of one of those things, not more than five feet from her face. She screamed again, the full tank of adrenaline in her body providing just enough strength to slam it shut, cutting off the glow of that hateful, glowing eye and that awful buzzing that had almost vibrated itself into words.

  She was left with silence, a cold darkness that had grown unseasonably colder due to a breeze picking up around her, and a little swirling dervish of leaves at her feet. The door itself stood as it always had: silent, immobile, ageless. Cicely had told her the old-timers loathed what it could do, what it held beyond, what it could give and what it could take away. Now, she understood. She hadn’t before, not really; blind and deaf as she was in her grief, but she finally understood why Cicely had seemed so reluctant to tell her about it. There had never been a chance of getting her letter back, never an opportunity to undo what she’d so hastily done, and now, she was going to forget about her precious little girl forever.

  Tears blotted out the world and she felt her hands ball into fists and pound the thick wood of the door without much conscious thought. She hated it too. And she hated herself for using it.

  Chapter 5

  The day after the opening of the Door, the wind blew differently through the town of Zarephath. It worked its way into crevices in homes and stores and flew up under layers of late summer clothes to draw goose bumps across the skin. It tangled wind chimes instead of running its fingers playfully through them. It knocked over garbage cans. In the afternoon, it sighed as if it carried the weight of the world’s sadness on its back, and that night, its banshee wail caused the citizens of the town to shiver and mutter and overthink things.

  It could have been the coming of the fall, the turnover of heat and sun and substance to long shadows, chills, and uncertainty. It could have been, but Toby didn’t think so.

  Toby had never been particularly sensitive or in tune with subtle signs of the universe. He was certainly not religious or even very spiritual, being largely unable to follow even the Golden Rule of doing unto others. He often thought that the disconnect of empathy in his character was what had allowed him to develop the sexual tastes that he had. Perhaps it was the other way around. Nevertheless, he couldn’t quite ignore the sense that something was off-kilter in the very fabric of his daily grind.

  Toby left work early that evening and let himself into his little apartment. Reheating the leftovers for dinner could wait. What Toby wanted was a nap.

  For most of his life, he had found sleep (and as an extension, the art of lucid dreaming) something of a refuge, in that he could be himself in dreams, free of judgment and safe from retaliation. No one would know. No one would care. No one could stop him from peeling off the heavy, restricting layers of polite society and just engaging the world as the savage thing he believed himself to be. After the delivery of his letter, though, his dreams, when he could remember having any at all, were mostly benign. He hadn’t needed to hide there, really. He’d dreamed of work meetings and grocery shopping and talking baseball with Ed.

  That evening he dreamed of fire. That was how it started: a fire in some kind of warehouse. He never saw the flames, but could feel their heat, and the smoke blinded his eyes and stuck to his nose and throat. A tiny hand with amazing strength took his and pulled him to his feet, leading him through the smoke to a wooden door just starting to warp under the intensity of the heat. Then the little hand was gone. He’d opened the door and stepped through, and in the next instant, he was on a silent, rock-strewn island with a bruise-colored, starless sky above. Surrounding the island was an ocean in mixed shades of silver and charcoal-gray, with black, shapeless things moving through the rough waves. The pounding of that water against the shoreline forced him back, the spray of the brine and surf abrading his skin with tiny welts.

  There was a tower at the center of the island, its pinnacle reaching upward much higher than he could see. Another door stood at the base of the tower. Unlike the warehouse door, this door was big, bigger than any human being would ever need, and incredibly ornate. A gorgeous gold-veined marble the color of ivory, it had an unusually asymmetrical Gothic arch shape that almost seemed to keep slipping away from the eyes, as if either they or the brain couldn’t quite process such a formation by the normal laws of physics. Around the doorframe was a series of bas-relief faces alternating with the kind of runic writing Toby had seen on the frame of the Door in the woods.

  In the dream, Toby approached the tower door. It didn’t appear to have a knob, knocker, or any other such ornamentation, so he just pushed on it. He felt a momentary hum in his hand and wrist and then the door swung open on silent hinges.

  Inside the tower was a single room with a polished floor of beautiful inlaid wood, dark mahogany and light pine. The floor seemed to be lit from some great light over his head, though when Toby looked up, the illumination fell off fifteen or twenty feet above into darkness. Likewise, the light faded outward so that Toby had no real guess as to the nature of the walls or the size of the room.

  He became aware by degrees of harpsichord music, which was growing louder. He turned, trying to make out the source, but could see nothing that might have produced the sound. As he turned back to the center of the room, he gasped.

  From the shadows on the far end of the room, gorgeous masquerade ball dresses began to emerge, convening in the spotlit center of the floor. At once, they began to dance. Toby was no expert on historical fashion, but he thought from their shape and ornamentation that they might have been early 1700s-style French gowns. As if to affirm this, the rather foppish embroidered and stockinged men’s fashions of the same era came out of the shadows as well, with jackets taking the gowns by the sleeve and parading with them in a minu
et across the floor. None of these clothes was tenanted by any visible being, but as he watched, he saw a Venetian masquerade mask appear a few inches above the necklines of the various dresses and jackets. Often these were full face masks of exquisite colors and glittering designs, with feathers and gems adorning them. When they turned away from him, Toby could see that the concave interiors of the masks were empty.

  Toby shuddered. Something about the scene struck him as intensely haunting and almost sad, despite the bemused way in which the masks tilted and turned, engaged in some silent, intimate conversations with their partners. Toby even saw one pair of masks kiss. He backed away toward the edge of shadow, intent on escaping the tower room by the same door through which he’d entered, when he felt the tiny hand grasp his again. He looked down and felt a wave of sick fear.

  There was no hand per se actually touching his, but only the little sleeve of a child’s dress of the same period. Above it hovered a small mask decorated to resemble the sweet, cherubic innocence of a child and above that, a little lace cap.

  Before he could pull his arm back, the strength of the little sleeve had yanked him forward onto the dance floor. Even in the dream, he had no real idea how to do the minuet, so he shuffled forward, his hand caught in the iron grip of the invisible hand beside him. When they reached the end of the promenading space, the hand let go of his and he bolted to the far edge of the dance floor, away from the demanding little dress, but found himself fenced in by a circle of the costumes, their sleeves touching. The masks were watching him expectantly and although their expressions hadn’t changed, there was something of malice in the sightless eyes and coy mouths. He wanted to be away from them, to change the tenor of the dream to anything else, but found his ability to influence had left him. He backed toward the center of the circle, his gaze darting from mask to mask to make sure none of them were closing in on him, but they remained statue-still, watching and waiting.