Behind the Door

by Mary SanGiovanni

  The light in the center of the circle seemed brighter and somehow hotter. The music had begun to wind down to the point of becoming off-key, a minuet train come off the rails. He had a moment to hope that the slowing of the music meant the dance was over when that same tiny invisible hand grabbed his forearm and whirled him around.

  The little dress stood opposite him in the center of the circle. The sleeves reached down toward the front hem and began to lift it slowly, revealing silky little stockings. The hem pulled farther back and Toby could see the lacy beginnings of underthings. He found himself wondering if little girls had worn underthings in the 1700s, and was dismayed to realize the sight before him was giving him an erection.

  “You’re a child,” he told the dress-thing, but it only hiked the hem farther. The flickering outline of a whole child shimmered within that dress, with a lovely little powdered face and blond curls beneath the bonnet.

  Toby turned away from it and tried to break through the ranks of clothes, but for fabric, their resolve was strong. He couldn’t budge a single dress or jacket. He turned back to the little dress, his dance partner trying to seduce him in front of all the other expectant masks.

  “Please,” he said softly. “I don’t want to.” He had heard that phrase many times before. He had heard it last with the girl from Dingmans Ferry. Please, I don’t want to do this. You’re hurting me. He had found ways around the protests, though. Softer touches and sweet-tasting drinks had been his go-to methods. But he had been the one in control, and it had been about the girls and not their empty clothes.

  The little sleeve reached out to touch him.

  “Please,” he whispered to the dress. “Please don’t.”

  It was only when he came that he woke up. There were tears on his cheeks he hadn’t realized he’d shed and the front of his pajama pants felt wet and sticky. Ashamed, he tumbled off the couch and into the bathroom.

  What the hell was going on? He’d believed those thoughts and dreams about little girls were gone forever. Ed had said nothing about time limits or reversions to the way things had been before. He had said that if one requested something of the Door, that person got what he or she asked for…given that the wording was right. And his wording had been impeccable, hadn’t it? He’d rewritten and revised it until it was. So…what had that dream been about?

  He stood at the bathroom sink, staring at himself in the mirror. He’d been lucky enough to retain a boyish kind of handsomeness, an honest and almost vulnerable youthfulness that put children at ease. Although physically that face was the same, the reflection in the mirror looked haunted and the expression in the eyes worn down.

  “I’m sorry,” he told the face in the mirror as he stripped off his pants and washed up. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  He wasn’t apologizing to himself, though. He was apologizing to the girl from Dingmans Ferry. He’d hurt her even though he tried not to. She was scared and she let him do things and then after that last time she went home and….

  The desire for little girls had been taken away, but not the guilt.

  If she’d only told someone, and that someone told the police, he’d be in jail right now instead of trying to wash away the aftereffects of hell.

  He tossed his pajama pants in the hamper and put on a clean pair from the drawer. What had the girl’s name been? Something with a J, he thought. Janie. Jessie. Something like that. His mind wouldn’t let him remember. He couldn’t explain why the feelings he so often associated with her had come back, and yet not the girl’s identity. There was still a big, gaping hole where the recollection of her name should have been.

  It was dark now. His stomach lurched at the thought of eating dinner and he didn’t much like the idea of trying to go back to sleep, so he went into the den to put on the TV. He supposed he could lose himself in some mindless show for a while.

  He stopped short halfway across the room, when the TV screen came into his view. It was a flat-screen, though not mounted to the wall. Rather, it stood on a cabinet in which he had kept his DVDs, before burning the lot of them. One of those DVDs, not burned or even very charred, leaned against the TV with its case, black as a void and missing a title, standing out to him even against the dark screen.

  Someone had written a message in white across the surface of the DVD cover. Was it chalk? Paint? It was a child’s scrawl, to be sure, round and neat like the kids were taught in school. It read WATCH ME.

  Toby didn’t want to. He charged across the room and swept up the box, then crossed back to the kitchen to dump it in the trash. Whatever the contents were, he didn’t want to see them.

  Except…part of him did. And that scared him more than even the impossible presence of the DVD.

  He tied up the trash bag and took it out to the curb. There. He was done with it. It was out of the house.

  When he went back inside, though, he half-expected to see it propped up again against the TV screen like some Twilight Zone episode. He was almost afraid to look in the den. When he did, he saw no sign of the DVD case and allowed himself a small sigh of relief.

  It was a small victory, though. It wasn’t just the changing of the seasons that had made him uneasy. There was something else, something very off. In the morning, he’d have to call Ed and see if he could figure out just what had gone wrong with his letter to the Door.

  * * * *

  It never ceased to amaze Cicely how subjective time could be. Seven years, for example, seemed to her both a terribly long time and a blink of an eye, depending on how one looked at it. Seven years of childhood passed like an ice age, slow and momentous, while the same amount of time in the prime of one’s youth, strength, and vitality passed in a night. Seven years in prison no doubt felt like an eternity to an average law-abiding citizen and an easy stint to a hardened criminal.

  Her marriage to Reggie had been seven times seven years, a literal lifetime’s worth of hell, and way too long by any standard. Too many years of eyes that could look right through her and big feet on the coffee table next to the beer bottles whose condensation left rings on the wood. Too many times when they were scrambling to pay bills because he couldn’t get along with others at job after job. So many vicious ways of making sure she’d never get pregnant or if she did, that she’d never carry the baby to term. So many long years of his drinking and carousing with other women, his temper, his cruel little jabs, his rough, clumsy foreplay that sometimes resulted in his passing out, but more often than not led to a dozen brutish and bruising violations. Indeed, forty-nine years was such a long, long stretch of time—one she thought would never end.

  And then she had learned about the Door, and shortly after delivering her letter, he had gone missing. After that, it had been seven years of wearing what she wanted and watching what she wanted and sleeping in peace and making meals she liked, only for herself. Those seven years, which had flown by so much faster than the seven before them, were drawing to a close, and the lawyer she had spoken to last week informed her she could now get the process going to declare Reggie dead in absentia. She found a deep satisfaction in that. She’d never liked loose ends, and after all those years of Reggie’s cruelty hanging over her, she felt it was about time to see him put to rest for good.

  Not that she didn’t appreciate how events had unfolded. The Door had done right by her and she knew she was lucky in that regard. The gods behind it were capricious, and while they always granted requests slipped under the Door, the manifestations of those requests took arbitrary shape sometimes. She’d known plenty of people who were displeased, to say the least, if not outright horrified by their results.

  She was lucky; Reggie was gone. No mess, no fuss, just…gone.

  If Cicely had known that her friend had opened the Door in the Zarephath woods, she might have been worried. As it was, she set about her schedule that first night after as she did every other night, cooking d
inner that was not perfect and that was okay—because she liked it—then choosing to read because she preferred it to watching TV. Sometimes she read from her Bible, finger-worn from flipping to passages that gave her comfort or inspiration. Sometimes she read cozy little mysteries. Tonight, the chill outside put her in the frame of mind for the latter.

  She had just gotten to a part in her book describing a break-in at an abandoned motel when she heard a door slam.

  She looked up from her book, mentally ticking off her locking of each door and closing of each window. A car door outside, perhaps? She couldn’t imagine anyone visiting, though, at that time of night. Putting her book down, she peered out the bedroom window. No cars were parked in front of her house. Maybe it had been—

  “Ci-Ci, I’m home. Did you miss me?” The booming voice echoed through the darkness downstairs. Cicely’s heart froze. She recognized the voice immediately, although it had been seven years since she’d heard it. It was followed by footsteps moving down the hall.

  She closed her eyes, a hand pressed against her chest, against the scream lodged there that threatened to give away her location. With her breath held, she listened as the sounds moved toward the kitchen, then backtracked toward the den.

  “Where are you, Ci-Ci? Let me lay my eyes on you,” Reggie called from below. His voice boomed. It was tinged with the faintest trace of anger. Even on his best days, his voice always had that tinge of anger. She’d grown particularly sensitive to it in the later years, coming to loathe the deep bass tone she had once found so sexy.

  “Woman, where the hell are you?”

  The voice was at the bottom of the stairs. Cicely made her way to the bedroom door as the heavy tread began to climb the stairs.

  Reggie had been a big man, and powerful. She had once believed he didn’t realize his own strength, which was sort of endearing. That strength had once made her feel safe and secure. Now it scared her. Over the years, Reggie had wielded it, or sometimes just the threat of it, the merest suggestion of it, as a weapon.

  She eased the door closed as quickly and quietly as she could and locked it. The little turn of metal didn’t seem like nearly enough to keep him out.

  “Don’t you want to see me, Ci-Ci?”

  She hated that nickname. She always had.

  “Cicely.” Now the voice was right outside the bedroom door. “Don’t you want to know where I’ve been for seven years? What them behind the Door did to me?”

  Cicely felt that stuck breath grow cold and sink to her stomach. He knew. He knew she’d wished him away. Oh God, he knew.

  “Get out of my house,” she whispered.

  “Your house? Your house?” There was that tinge of anger again, a little sharper now. There was a touch of something else too in that voice, something liquid and unfamiliar. “You mean, the one I bought and paid for? Quit foolin’ around, woman, and open the door. I want to see you.”

  “I—I thought you were dead.”

  His laugh made her skin prickle. “Dead? Is that what you asked for in your letter? That what you slipped under the Door in the woods?”

  This was wrong. This was all wrong. Her head had begun to buzz, or at least it felt that way. The buzz might have been an undercurrent in that voice that was like Reggie’s, but not entirely. “Reggie, no, I—”

  “I can slip things under doors too. Wanna see?”

  Cicely took a step back. Now her heart pounded and her breath came fast, as if all her inner systems, shocked into inactivity while she watched and waited, were exploding back into life again. She felt the blood pumping through her, filling her with heat and a horrible certainty that was further confirmed by the things slithering toward her under the door.

  She screamed. Thin, slimy black tendrils that reminded her of the trailing tentacles and arms of a jellyfish were whipping back and forth across the hardwood floor, splattering some clear, viscous substance that hissed and smoked when it touched the wooden boards or the wall.

  Cicely hadn’t realized she was moving until the backs of her legs bumped the foot of the bed. She flinched, then sat, her gaze focused on the horror that was definitely not Reggie, not on his worst day, which was snapping and smacking back and forth, searching for her.

  “Cicely.” The voice on the other side of the bedroom door came again, and this time there was only the faintest likeness to Reggie’s. “Open the door.”

  “No!” she screamed. “Go away! Go away!” She squeezed her eyes shut and covered her ears, but she could still hear the wet slapping and slurping of the tendrils against the floor. The underlying buzz of the thing’s voice had taken on a timbre of its own, separate from what the Reggie-ish voice on the other side of the door was saying. She tried to tune it all out.

  What she’d asked of the Door had come back to bite her after all.

  “No matter, Ci-Ci. You can’t wish me away again. I’m back and I’m not…going…anywhere….”

  “Go away!” she screamed even louder, her voice on the verge of cracking from hysteria.

  Suddenly the voice and the slapping and splattering sounds stopped. She opened her eyes. The tentacles were gone from under the door, as was any trace of the smoking substance it had splattered on the walls and floor. Her heart sounded very loud in her ears, but otherwise, she couldn’t hear anything, voice or movement, from the hall. Afraid to move, she sat while the minutes on her digital nightstand clock ticked by. Her legs felt numb, but she forced them to move, forced her whole cold body to rise off the bed. Slowly, she crossed the room to the door. A few more minutes passed before she could get her shaking hand to reach for the knob, unlock the door, and open it.

  The hallway was dark and empty, as it had been a mere half hour ago. She chanced a step out into the hallway to peer over the stair railing, but no one waited on the steps.

  What had just happened? Had she imagined it all? She might have been getting old, but she knew she wasn’t senile, not yet. She didn’t believe she’d nodded off and dreamed it or hallucinated Reggie’s voice and those terrible tendrils. So had it been a ghost? An aftereffect of the anniversary of his disappearance and all the memories it had dredged up? Nah. She was a tough old bird and had processed those feelings long ago. So what had just happened to her?

  The nagging thought returned that what she experienced most likely had to do with the Door, but why? Why now? She’d been specific in her letter about him disappearing and never coming back, alive or dead. She’d thought it all through. In fact, she’d secretly prided herself in how careful, how meticulous she had been in constructing the letter, and had attributed that to her better-than-average results.

  She stood at the top of the stairs and sighed. She knew she’d never sleep that night if she didn’t check the whole house to make sure he was actually gone. She descended the stairs, flipping on the lights as she moved from room to room, looking for any of the old familiar signs of his presence, and any possible new ones too. She checked for Marlboro cigarette butts on the windowsills; he used to leave them there because he was too lazy to use the ashtrays she left for him on the coffee and kitchen tables and even the bathroom sink. She glanced by the front door for his work boots or his car keys hanging on the little hook above the front hall table. She looked for beer bottles on the coffee table in the den.

  There was nothing of him in the house—no sign that he had ever been there at all. The tightness in her chest began to finally loosen. Whatever had happened, he was gone, hopefully for good. Maybe it had been some weird cosmic hiccup, some—

  She stopped short in the front hall. She’d been systematically checking the windows and doors to make sure they were all fully closed and locked, then shutting the light of each room when she was satisfied there was no trace of Reggie there. She’d been about to climb the stairs back to the bedroom when she saw the little note on the front door. It was a Post-it note, the kind she’d often left to-do items o
r even little love notes for him when they were first married. He’d never used the notes, but the handwriting on this one was unmistakably his. She went to it and yanked it off the door, her hand beginning to tremble again. It read:

  See you soon, Ci-Ci. Can’t wait to get my hands on you again. —Reg

  She felt angry then, as angry as she was scared. She crumpled the note into a tight little ball, unlocked and opened the front door, and tossed the paper out into the night. Then she quickly shut the door and locked it. She couldn’t help peering out the side window to see if some Reggie-form came to reclaim the note, either in anger or amusement, but she saw no one, no movement outside.

  Finally, she climbed the stairs to her bedroom. She closed and locked the bedroom door as well, just in case. She tried to read for a bit to calm her nerves, but she kept seeing his tight, jagged script in her mind. Can’t wait to get my hands on you again. She felt sick.

  Eventually, she gave up and turned out the light, lying in the cool dark of her room. A respectable time after Reggie had gone missing, she’d stripped that room bare, repainted it, got a new bed and new bedding, moved around the furniture, and had thrown away his clothes and effects and anything else that reminded her of her life with Reggie. It was her safe place now, a sanctuary for her, a place of serenity and rest. She’d felt safe there.

  She closed her eyes to the shadows and thought about was how thin a barrier that bedroom door really was.

  Chapter 6

  Bill Grainger finally knew it was time to call his old friend, Kathy Ryan, when some of his dead army buddies showed up on his front lawn.

  He had known Kathy, as several police officers on the east coast did, in her capacity as a freelance consultant for crimes with occult elements, particularly obscure ones. She specialized in cult activity of the more esoteric variety, and although she could not be induced to talk about it, he suspected she’d seen some wild stuff in her career, stuff like the Door that simply defied explanation. She had been called in by Bill as a matter of protocol regarding certain difficult-to-explain deaths likely involving the Door of Zarephath, and she had impressed him with her work ethic, her extensive knowledge, her attention to detail, and most of all, her sense of humor. She was very good at providing truths for his own personal benefit and reasonable lies for his files, and had helped him definitively close a number of Zarephath’s unsolved deaths.