Behind the Door

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Bill very much enjoyed Kathy’s company and thought that, despite the scar, she was still a looker. Had he been a couple of decades younger, he might have tried to sleep with her, but word was that was a wild ride in itself, perhaps too much so for him, and so he was content to keep their relationship business. Over the years, he’d come to think of her as a friend, and while he hadn’t ever worked up the nerve to give her details, he had confided in her that he’d once used the Door himself. She never asked why, nor had she ever made him feel judged for it in any way, and for that, he was both grateful and immensely respectful of her. He thought she saw him as someone vaguely paternal and seemed to appreciate his concern in a way she never could quite express, and it made him feel good to be useful in that way to her.

  He’d always feared, somewhere in the back of his mind where all long-term fears are eventually relegated, that someday, someone actually would open that damned Door. He had hoped it wouldn’t be in his lifetime, but the “what if?” had been enough to keep Kathy apprised for her comprehensive file. He knew some day he might have to make the phone call to her about how to safely open or close the Door or otherwise undo something it had done. He’d held off, even when people’s requests went horribly sideways, because he had come to find his place among others in the town. That usually meant letting certain things stand, even if they left more questions than answers. No one knew the full capability of that Door out in the woods, and no one wanted to push to find out. It was not their Door. It simply existed in their space, and it had no loyalty to them as reluctant caretakers and sentinels.

  The Door wasn’t his first thought—not just then—upon seeing the figures on the lawn, because they hadn’t looked like people at first. They hadn’t looked like anything recognizable, really, just things without shape that quickly scattered to the shadows or took on the suggestion of forms and half-forms before melding into other shadows.

  What they looked like to Bill were the products of a brain whose gears were beginning to slip and send faulty messages to his eyes. Despite some hard living, Bill thought he was in pretty good health. He’d worked out much of the PTSD from Vietnam and since retiring as sheriff, he’d made sure to eat reasonably well and get out on nice evenings for walks. But hard living had a way of catching up to people, and so he ticked off those figures as some kind of hallucination. He’d heard old folks talk about sundowning as an early symptom of dementia and the thought crossed his mind that maybe a life of nightmares was finally running him down. He didn’t feel disoriented, though. He knew who and where he was. He knew the name of the President of the United States and the year it was. He also knew that no kind of wild animal native to the region ever got that big.

  And yet a pack of them, whatever they were, were darting back and forth across his property.

  He went to get his gun, a .38 to replace the one he’d been issued as a sheriff, and some ammo, and by the time he came back, one of the closest shapes to the front door—close enough to catch the porch light—was morphing itself into a girl that struck him as somewhat familiar. Though it was a clear and cloudless night, he saw the girl was soaked. Water dripped off the upturned nose of the naturally lovely face. The blond hair, parted in the middle, hung plastered across her forehead and down her arm. She wore a soaked-through tie-dyed tank top in which her nipples protruded under the thin, wet fabric, and very short jean shorts that hung low on her hips. From her open-legged stance on the lawn, she was staring at him with fearless blue eyes and hitching a thumb as if looking to bum a ride.

  A subconscious part of him recognized her long before that understanding broke through the surface. She was the hitchhiker he’d picked up decades ago…but she hadn’t aged at all. She was still a girl, the same one who’d given him drugs and clawed her way out from under him and run screaming into the rain-choked darkness.

  After all those years, it appeared that the request he’d made by letter to whatever dwelled behind the Door had not been answered, at least not in the way he had hoped. That girl out there didn’t look okay at all. She looked pissed.

  Bill had to breathe slowly several times, in and out, in and out, to keep from throwing up.

  She marched toward the front door, but stopped short of the walkway to the porch. With the porch light fully shining on her, he could see unnerving signs of deterioration—rotted flesh along her hairline, pronounced veins, filmy cataracts beginning to cloud the blue of her eyes, and a black decay along the beds of her fingernails that had begun to spread up her fingers.

  When her mouth formed that silent O he could just barely recall, he saw the cracked, jagged black stumps of her teeth. She pointed at him and it felt like an accusation.

  Behind her, the shadows were twitching and flickering, drawing to themselves enough substance to form bodies of their own. And they were bodies that Bill recognized. The one directly to her right was a tall, broad-shouldered man of about forty, dark-skinned and flinty-eyed, dressed in an American soldier’s uniform. His leg from the knee down was missing, though something that might have been a tendon dangled from the side of the kneecap. The missing piece of his leg didn’t seem to impede his ability to stand perfectly at attention. A bib of blood flowed from a gaping wound in his neck down the front of his uniform. When Bill looked into the face of the man, he saw the same signs of decay around the eyes and mouth that the girl showed.

  He recognized the man, of course. It was his combat platoon leader, Lt. Harry “Notso” White. Lt. Notso had been a goddamned hero, by Bill’s estimation. He’d pulled Eddie Rivers out of a hailstorm of gunfire, and dragged Marko Riggs off the battlefield when both of the latter’s legs were blown off from machine-gun fire. He’d even gone back to get Desmond Whittier when a Vietcong’s machete had severed the young private’s shooting hand right from his arm and he panicked. Bill would have died for the man—almost did—and found something earnestly painful in seeing his old lieutenant on the front lawn. The last time he’d seen Notso, the man was screaming for the lower half of his leg, and no one was pulling him to safety. No one had time. The man with the knife standing above him had slit his throat before they could even raise their guns. Bill did anyway, blowing the back of the murdering bastard’s head off.

  To the girl’s left was most of Roger Kline. Bill had always thought Roger was kind of a prick, but he was part of Bill’s platoon and so he was a brother. He hadn’t lasted long in the war; he was too much mouth and not so much on the reflexes. It showed in the ragged piece of meat mostly hovering on the grass. His right arm from the elbow down was missing. His whole right leg and his left foot were gone. His chest was a ragged mess of churned-up skin and shredded uniform and he had burns all along the left side of his face. He attempted to wave at Bill with his remaining hand, and when he smiled, blood spilled out of his mouth and over his chin.

  Bill hovered in the doorway with his gun. It wasn’t that he didn’t think he could bring himself to shoot his fellow soldiers if he had to, but he couldn’t imagine why they might be putting him in that position. Why were they there? If the request he’d made in his letter had indeed, for some reason, been somehow twisted into this, then he could understand the hitchhiker, but then why the others? Why—

  Then he remembered Evie—sweet little Evie, a young twentysomething redhead with a schoolgirl crush on an older man. She had been employed in the eighties as a dispatcher, right out of college. A good girl, always waiting at the station with a coffee for him in the mornings and a wish for him to be well every time he went out on a call. She was a pretty little thing too—innocently, almost cluelessly sexy—but Bill had always been a hard man to get close to and she was too young besides. He kept her at a distance, but it never stopped her from watching him, sometimes starry-eyed and sometimes thoughtful. She always used to say that he looked sad—haunted, she said, by ghosts of the past, and once he’d made the offhand remark that the war had done it to him. That year at the department Christmas party
, they’d both had their share of punch and gotten drunk, and she’d confided in him that she’d spent her one opportunity to use the Door to wish that the ghosts of war that haunted them would be laid to rest. He’d been touched, but also a little unnerved by her confession. It was such a serious gesture for such a young heart, and he hadn’t known what to say. He’d thanked her by keeping an eye on her that evening and seeing that she’d gotten home safely and without any of the other officers sniffing around her, looking for an easy time. Bill knew a number of them thought that was because he was staking a claim and that he’d seen her home so he could sleep with her himself. In truth, she’d made it perfectly clear that it could happen just that way, and a part of him very much wanted it to.

  It had been the memory of the hitchhiker, actually, that had caused him to end things at her front door, gently and without any damage to her ego or her reputation. She’d been a little shyer around him after that, but the looks she gave him underscored her appreciation.

  All those years later, it was a memory he’d filed away with the few warm and proud ones, that serious, selfless thing Evie had done for him in asking the Door to take his war horrors away.

  But now Evie’s request had been rescinded too.

  It was then that he suspected something had happened with the Door that had never occurred in the collective memory of the town.

  Their letters, it seemed, were being overturned.

  He closed the front door and locked it, sinking to the ground with his back against the wood. He listened to the strangled sounds that were meant to be voices trying to form words. They went on for a long time—almost until the sun came through the windows, before falling silent. It was only then that Bill curled up on the floor and finally fell asleep.

  * * * *

  A few nights after the opening of the Door, Deets and his friend Chuck sat at a booth in the Once More Tavern. Though it was generally thought of as kind of a dive, the tavern was comfortable enough and honestly, the only local watering hole; there were worse ways in which to spend a Saturday night. The place had always been a combination of dark woods, paints, and pints, with fake leather seats and lantern lighting and well-stocked bar shelves. Once there had been a miasma of smoke almost as thick as the spilled beer scents and interior gloom, but even in that last refuge of minor vices, smoking inside had been banned.

  The boys had been there for hours already, and had already built little phalanxes of empty beer bottles on the table between them. The wooden dance floor in the center of the tavern had already begun to collect a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd that was eager for the live music to begin. Conversation between Deets and Chuck had mostly petered out due to the sound check of the bar band and the comfortable buzz surrounding each of them. It occurred to Deets among the non-thoughts in his head that this was the first time since he’d tucked his letter under the Door in the woods that he wasn’t feeling anything at all about it—not apprehension or guilt or fear or anything. He felt the way he had before the accident and it was nice. It was so nice, in fact, that at first he didn’t notice the furtive figure moving across the dance floor without seeming to touch anyone. It was that feat, though, of physical avoidance that caught his musing attention, especially considering the way the boy was limping.

  The boy’s head was bowed, but his shaggy brown hair looked wet in places, glistening under the slowly alternating lights of the dance floor. He clutched one arm closely to his chest, as if deformity or injury made it necessary to protect the limb. He was short, small in stature all around and hunched over besides, and Deets wondered in amusement if the kid was underage, sneaking in and trying to blend in with the crowd so he could drink.

  The boy wasn’t holding anything, though, in either the injured or the functioning hands. He looked like he was simply trying to navigate the crowd to reach the seating flanking the dance floor.

  The crowd parted for a moment, giving Deets a better glimpse of the boy, and he frowned. The sight pierced the comfortable bubble of intoxication in which he’d been hovering. The boy’s jeans had dark stains all over them and he was missing one of his shoes. That was bad, but not so bad as the odd backward angle at which that latter leg was bent, as if his knee was facing the wrong direction, or that he was dragging some shoeless bird leg behind him instead of a human one. Deets noticed that the kid left a sock-smeared trail of blood as he glided and limped, glided and limped across the floor. He turned his back to Deets, who then saw the boy’s spine visibly poking through the back of his T-shirt, a snake kinked at some very wrong angles. No wonder he was hunched over; with his spine in that kind of shape, it would have been a miracle if he could have straightened up at all.

  “Hey, man,” Deets muttered. “Look at that kid there. Someone should help him.”

  “What kid?”

  “That one right there,” Deets pointed. “Can’t miss him.” The other people on the dance floor seemed oblivious to him, though. No one cast any uncomfortable or sympathetic sidelong glances at him or the bloody mess he was making on the floor. No one moved away from him. No one even seemed to notice he was there.

  Something was wrong. He felt it full-on, but had trouble defining its outlines in his mind. That kid wasn’t supposed to be there.

  “Wha kid?” Chuck slurred. “Don’ see no kid.”

  “He’s—” Deets stopped. His mouth hung open with the next word on his lips—hurt—because the kid was more than hurt. He was facing Deets now and stood as upright as that broken spine allowed. The face, streaked along the cheek with blood, was pallid and angry. There was hate in the filmy eyes. Yeah, that kid was more than hurt. He was dead.

  Deets was sure about that, sure in his soul, because Deets had been the one who’d killed him.

  He scrambled back in the booth seat, knocking over an empty bottle and sending it arcing around the table.

  “Whoa, whoa,” Chuck said. “Whassa matter?”

  “The kid,” Deets muttered.

  “Deets, man, there’s no kid—”

  Deets was already on his feet, his eyes on the dead boy only ten feet away. The boy watched him go with those dead eyes, but made no move to follow. Chuck called to him from the booth, but the sound was eaten up by the first notes of the bar band’s opening song and by the drunk-fuzz in Deets’s head.

  He had to get out of there.

  When he hit the cooler air outside, he felt a little better, a little clearer. He began to walk toward the parking lot until he realized that Chuck had driven them there. Lurching a little on unsteady feet, he quickly shifted gears and started walking in the direction of home. It was a moonless night and a little chillier than it ought to have been in late August, and Deets shivered as he stumbled along the sidewalk. It would be about an hour walk in his state, probably. That wasn’t so bad.

  As long as that dead kid wasn’t following him, that was.

  Deets slumped against the front wall of a bank, his eyes searching the night for signs that he was being followed. He didn’t think so, but then he wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking for. A blood trail on the sidewalk, maybe. The limp gliding sound of a single shoe and a mangled foot on the sidewalk.

  He listened. He heard nothing.

  He dug into his pocket for his cell phone. Fuck this paranoid shit, he thought. He’d just call Chuck to come pick him up.

  His pockets were empty. He’d probably left his cell phone on the table next to his beer.

  Shit. Shit shit shit. Now what?

  He’d have to walk. With any luck, Chuck would drive by on his way home, see Deets, and pick him up.

  Pushing himself off the wall, Deets began the long walk back to his house.

  After a while, the town center fell away and he was on a rural road with no streetlamps and no sidewalks. It was just him now and the pavement barely two lanes wide, the vast stretches of farms to either side, and the occasional barn o
r silo. However, he knew the road and it was relatively close to home. About a mile up, he would turn right onto Beakman and then make a left onto Quaterdale and he’d be in his own neighborhood. No sweat. The only rough part would be this mile stretch of road…or was it two miles?

  It didn’t matter. He could make it. No one was following him. The air was starting to clear the drunk-haze from his brain. He’d seen something, sure, but he was drunk and the lights had been low in the tavern and he thought it very likely that he could chalk it up to stress or guilt in the morning. He just had to get home and sleep it off. He could do that.

  The glare of headlights behind him sent him veering off-road. He certainly didn’t want to get hit. That would be irony, he thought, and snorted to himself—he walking down the road, and there comes Chuck or some other asshole, drunk off his ass and swerving in his big boat of a car, clipping Deets, bending his leg backward or kinking his spine in some very wrong ways…

  He shivered again and walked faster, looking back at the approaching car behind him.

  Except that there was no car. There was no light. He stopped short, glancing around. There was no place to turn off or park on that road. The headlights had been practically on top of him—close enough so that even if the car had stopped and killed its lights, he still should have been able to make out the outlines. His eyes had mostly adjusted; he would have seen something…if there had been something to see.

  “What the—?” Deets turned again and, head down to the chill wind that had begun to pick up, he broke into a hurried walk bordering on a jog. He was firmly on the belief that people shouldn’t have to run unless being chased by cops or psychos with chain saws or some other A-level emergency of that sort. Nonetheless, he didn’t want to be on that road anymore, or out in that not-so-empty night.