Behind the Door

by Mary SanGiovanni

  Then he heard the thump. It was a sound he knew but couldn’t place, the kind that jarred the bones. It was, in fact, a sound of impact with bones, of their cracking and breaking.

  He was afraid to look up, but did anyway. Around him, there was only an unbroken darkness.

  “Hello?” His voice was a croak. He cleared his throat. “Uh…is somebody…?” He let the question hang unfinished. He didn’t really want someone to be out there, and the thought that someone might answer him seemed worse just then than not knowing. He took a few tentative steps forward and a huddled shape came into view maybe twenty, twenty-five feet ahead of him.

  The shape was shivering…no, it was convulsing. Some nerve had been hit or severed or disconnected from some other part, and the whole quivering, twitching shape was in shock, working through its own death throes. It didn’t look like a person—people don’t bend like that—but rather like a shrunken mannequin or like a marionette tossed carelessly into a heap. Beneath it, a blackish pool was spreading outward toward him. Either it or the shape—Deets wasn’t sure which—made a humming noise too, which could be felt as much as heard as his feet brought him closer. He was walking toward the shape without really thinking about it and he could feel its vibrations in his sneakers, going up through his legs.

  Stop! his semi-lucid brain screamed at him. Don’t go near it, for God’s sake! Stop walking, you stupid shit.

  His feet didn’t listen, though. Unsteady as he was, he was closing the distance between himself and that huddled shape.

  It was the dead kid. He knew that before he got close enough to see the injured arm and bloody jeans, the shoe that had landed halfway across the road. On some level, he’d known it when he heard the thump and saw the silhouette. He didn’t understand why; his request seemed to have gone well enough, and he didn’t think that there had been any time limit imposed on it. He thought he’d gotten what he asked for.

  Yeah, and maybe his gramps had too. Maybe that was exactly what his mother was afraid of. Maybe sometimes it was just as bad to get what you asked the Door for as it was not to.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered to the dead kid. His voice was hoarse. “I’m so sorry.”

  The kid’s glazed eyes didn’t blink. They didn’t look at Deets. The pained expression on the face suggested the brain inside that deflated head was too preoccupied to care what Deets had to say. In fact, he wasn’t sure the kid had even heard him until he heard a grinding sound and saw that the legs were trying to unfold themselves. This was followed by a cracking inside that heap of flesh that made Deets’s skin crawl. The splintered bones moved under the skin of the boy’s forearms as he planted a hand in the sticky pool around him and tried to hoist his upper half up.

  Deets backed away. The boy was trying to get up.

  The grinding and cracking sounds continued, bones shifting and sliding and breaking in new places to accommodate the boy’s rough, jerky movements.

  This time Deets’s brain screamed at him to run, to get moving somewhere, anywhere, so long as it was away from the thing that was literally unfolding itself before him. His feet wouldn’t listen, though. It was as if they were caught fast in the blood that was engulfing the pavement beneath them.

  He stared, slack-jawed and silent, and the boy attained a reasonable facsimile of a standing person, or at the least, like clothes hanging from a clothesline. Deets tried to tell the boy again that he was sorry, but his mouth wouldn’t work any better than his feet. He felt warmth along the inner thigh of his left leg and when he looked down, he saw a dark stain climbing his pants leg. He couldn’t be sure, though, if he’d pissed himself, or if the blood from around his shoes was reaching up for him.

  Deets looked up again and saw the boy raise a hand to him as if telling him to wait. Then the boy snapped that hand into a fist and Deets felt a sharp throb of pain in his leg so intense that he stumbled and fell over. He looked down to see his shinbone protruding out of the skin just below his knee. The pain was immense, a solid thing devouring his lower leg. It made the world go white for a bit and his stomach lurched. He tried to drag himself away, to break the boundary of the blood pool into which he’d landed, but the lightning in his leg was too much.

  He looked up at the boy, pleading. He felt very sober then and very scared. “Don’t do this, please. Please! I’m sorry. I’m sor—”

  The boy made another fist and an explosion of pain folded his forearm backward so that his fingernails grazed the crook of his elbow. The world did slip away from him then, but only for a second, and he found himself lying on the pavement, his cheek in the blood that might have been his now. His head was too heavy to lift. His arm and leg were on fire with pain. Spots marred his vision, but he could just make out the boy hovering above him now, actually floating off the ground. The boy made a gesture like he was folding something and fireworks of agony exploded up and down his back.

  Then the spots in his vision grew bigger and bigger until they swallowed everything in his field of sight, and Carl “Deets” Dietrich’s secret swallowed everything else.

  Chapter 7

  Files on the Zarephath Door in hand, Kathy Ryan left her stark apartment and the sexy Irishman in her bed at about nine in the morning that Sunday. An old friend, a retired sheriff living in Zarephath, Pennsylvania, had put in a call about an hour before regarding the Door. He hadn’t given her much in the way of details, but he sounded worried. She’d started packing the minute she hung up. In her estimation, that Door was an inter-dimensional time bomb waiting to blow, and although the townspeople treaded lightly around it and everything related to it, that didn’t mean that something, or damn near anything, could go wrong with it at any time. Bill, like the other people in the town, was not given to knee-jerk reactions about the Door, so his call was of particular interest to her.

  She put the files on the passenger seat of her car and pulled out of the driveway. She glanced in the rearview mirror, taking in the scar that ran down through her left eyebrow and across her cheek to her jawbone. She hated that scar. Reece Teagan, colleague and live-in lover, had often told her the scar did nothing to mar her beauty, but to Kathy, it was a glaring white reminder of everything that never quite healed right inside—all her jagged memories and pockmarked thoughts.

  She shook her blond hair out so that it covered some of the scar, put the car in drive, and began the hour and a half’s drive to Zarephath. As she drove, she remembered a conversation she’d had with Bill about the Door and what was behind it. It was hard to say whether the townspeople thought there were sentient beings behind the Door or some type of force, or something else entirely. Bill called the things “them behind the Door.”

  “What are they?” she’d asked him. “I mean, what do you think they are?”

  Bill had glanced at the Door with an expression that bespoke a weight of decades. “Alien gods, maybe. Best I could ever come up with. Why? What do you think?”

  “Well, they do grant wishes, right? In mythology and folklore, a lot of powerful beings did that, in exchange for gifts. Djinni, faeries, and yeah, even the old elemental gods and goddesses…Could be something like that. Or more likely, an alternate dimension’s equivalent. Your aliens, so to speak.”

  “I dunno,” Bill said. He put a hand gently, almost paternally, on the Door. “A smart man I once knew said them behind the Door were sorrows. Secrets and sins. Fears and nightmares. Malicious lies and cruel truths. He called them ‘Brocken spectres of our secret selves and all the little darknesses of which we wish to unburden our souls.’ He said there are many words for them, but no true names. And he was convinced that they trade with us to build their number, to grow stronger.” Bill sighed. “Maybe they’re all those things—what you said and what he said.”

  “Sure. Both, or something in-between. It’s as good a theory as any,” Kathy said. She thought from the look in the older man’s eyes that he believed that smart friend o
f his, that maybe he had personal reason to believe it. He had once used the Door, after all, though he’d never told her why and she knew better than to ask. She didn’t ask him what he was thinking just then, either. She knew that look and it meant that if he’d wanted her to know, he would have told her.

  “Maybe the worst parts of us are banished there, collected and bound in whatever place lies beyond this Door. There would be, hell, decades, maybe centuries of hate and pain.”

  “Maybe, but whatever they are, they don’t seem to have either the ability or inclination to come back on you…so long as that Door stays closed, I imagine.”

  His mouth twisted in a small, bitter smile. “I was always told to never, never open the Door. Folks before even my time had that rule as their first and foremost. I’m guessing they knew it wouldn’t be too wise to underestimate the resourcefulness—or the resolve—of them behind the Door…especially if they really are both trapped and angry about it. But yeah,” he continued, turning back to her. “So long as the Door remains closed, then theoretically, this particular Pandora’s box of fear and loathing should be of no imminent danger to anyone. At least, anyone it hasn’t already hurt in granting a request.”

  Kathy thought suddenly of her brother, locked away in a high-security cell at Connecticut-Newlyn Hospital, formerly Newlyn Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Theoretically, monsters locked away behind doors shouldn’t be able to hurt anyone. In reality, though, Kathy knew that wasn’t always the case.

  It was the Door itself that fascinated her. Kathy had dealt with portals before, but they were usually far more ephemeral and insubstantial. They were seldom like the Door, a long-standing, solid object both known and accepted as a quirky reality by the people around it. The portals Kathy had experienced in the past were usually open both ways, which is what made them so dangerous. They allowed passage of things not meant in this dimension. The Door in Zarephath was closed and still managed to affect the people nearby.

  It was really more akin to an altar or temple, in that pleas or prayers were offered at a site believed to be connected to some powerful force capable of granting them. It made her wonder who had built it, and whether it had been built on this side or the other, and to what end. Had it been meant as an altar to or portal for alien gods? If so, why had it been closed? What could be on the other side that even the Door’s builders were afraid of?

  She wasn’t sure what was happening in Zarephath, but she hoped that whatever was behind that Door was still locked away.

  * * * *

  On Sundays, Grant didn’t open the garage until one p.m. This gave the guys who worked for him the freedom to blow off steam Saturday nights without blowing off work on Sunday mornings. It gave Grant a bit of a break, and it allowed Flora to sleep in until it was time to do the accounts. Grant had often thought of just closing the garage on Sundays, but he liked to work. It gave him a sense of purpose and accomplishment, working with his hands. It made him feel useful. Still, he was getting up there in years now and his aching muscles and creaking bones had gotten him to think about taking things slower.

  He and his wife, Flora, had decided to put off the weekly paperwork for a bit and catch an early Sunday breakfast. They expected Bill to wander in some time around noon, and Edna after her nail and hair appointment. For the time being, though, they had the place to themselves, which was good, because Grant had something important to tell his wife.

  “Cicely told me that the Bartkowskis are having a terrible time of it. Anne’s in the hospital. Her cancer’s back, and with a vengeance, by the sound of it,” Flora was telling him in a hushed voice. “Remember, Joe wished it away at the Door. And Alice—you remember her from the church? Well, she’s pregnant. She’s fifty-seven, Grant!” Flora glanced around, then lowered her voice again to continue. “She’s convinced it’s the baby she asked the Door to take away when she was fifteen. She’s having a hell of a time of it, though. Sharp pains, like something’s gnawing at her from the inside out, she said. I’m telling you, Grant, there’s something going on. Something to do with that cursed bunch of planks out there in the woods. Never trusted it. People are panicking all over town.”

  Grant cleared his throat. “Honey, about that….”

  “And Rita Nunez, remember her? Folks are saying she started bleeding in the middle of Barney’s Market, like she had her period, only really heavy, you know? Just blood streaming down her legs. Then it started coming out of her eyes, her nose, her ears….” She waved her hand as if to brush away the mental image and looked out the window, perturbed. The parking lot beyond was nearly empty. “Poor girl. Can’t even begin to imagine what the Door undid on her to cause that.”

  “Flora—”

  “Grant, I’m worried. What if the Door is leaking or something? What if whatever space is behind the Door is full now, like a closet where you keep stuffing all your junk until one day, you open the Door and it all comes spilling out?”

  “Flora, listen to me, please. I have to tell you something.”

  She turned to him, a little startled. “Oh, sure. Sorry. What’s on your mind?”

  “It’s about the Door.”

  Grant could tell from the way his wife paled that she knew the gravity of his secret, if not the content. He hated to see her upset, but she had a right to know.

  He cleared his throat again. “Do you remember that wooden chest I brought home in ’89, the one that was all locked up?”

  She thought about it and then nodded slowly. “The one that biker gave you in exchange for fixing his Harley? The one you were going to hold until he picked up the money and you traded. It was like collateral.”

  “That’s the one.” He gave her a nod and a tiny smile. “Remember how I asked you never to try to open it?”

  “Yeah…?”

  “That’s because I didn’t want you mixed up with whatever was inside it. It wasn’t payment for fixing a bike. I owed him money. Gambling. My last big loss.”

  Grant had been only just barely dodging that loose boundary between gambler and addict. It had never gotten so serious that he’d put up the house as collateral or anything, but it caused problems financially on a regular enough basis that Flora had nipped it in the bud early on. She’d given him an ultimatum: her or the gambling. Wisely, he’d chosen her. By his estimation, it was one of the only wise decisions he’d ever really made in his life. But the chest…that had been just shortly after he’d made the promise to her. It had been the unfortunate result of a final game that would have stripped him of his house, his car, and consequentially, his wife. The biker, Avis Morgan, had cut him a deal he couldn’t pass up: “Take the chest. Hide it for a week, week and a half ’til I pass through town again. Then I’ll pick it up.” Grant couldn’t believe that was all he had to do to pay off his debt, but Avis assured him it was. So he’d done it. He’d done it because he was scared of losing everything and besides, what could possibly be so bad and yet small enough to fit into that little chest? It was no bigger than a bread box and made of flimsy wood. He doubted it was anything that anyone but Avis, who was more than a little crazy in his own right, would have put any great value on.

  “What was in the box, Grant?” Flora asked after his explanation.

  “Something bad. Very bad.”

  “What was in the box, Grant?” Flora repeated, her voice no louder but noticeably thinner.

  “He never came to get it. I know I told you he did, but he didn’t. That was the thing, see. He wanted to be rid of it, and I guess he figured my being scared of him would keep me from ever opening it, but I …I had to know. After a while, the curiosity gave me no peace. I had to know.”

  “Grant—”

  “It was a shiny black stone shaped just like a deer’s heart, with these veins of blue running through it, and it was sort of…sort of see-through, like it wasn’t totally there in the box. I didn’t touch it. I don’t know if I can
explain why, but just looking at it filled me with such revulsion.” He shuddered. “Even so, I couldn’t really understand why Avis would care enough about some stone, especially that one, to keep it all locked up like that…until I found the secret compartment. It was under the box. Only accessible from the inside.”

  Flora said nothing. She watched him with that same pale, anxious look.

  His voice dropped almost to a whisper, even though they were practically alone in the diner. “There was a little paper, rolled up like a tiny scroll. It was an apology, Flo. An apology for ever having wished for an object from the place behind the Door. I don’t know if it’s true that the stone was from…there, beyond. If it is, I don’t know how Avis came to get ahold of it, or if he was the one who wrote the note. All I know is, when I saw that, I tried to get rid of it. I threw it away. I tossed it in the woods. I even tossed it in the lake. I was afraid to destroy it, but I sure as hell didn’t want it. It scared me. It felt…dangerous. Alive. Volatile. And every morning after, there it was, locked up in its little chest, sitting on my workbench in the garage. But I knew it was just a matter of time before it hurt me. I could sense that it wanted to. I know it sounds crazy, but I could feel intent radiating from that box. Actual evil intent. I don’t know why it didn’t kill me. But you remember, that was the summer with all those fires, those strange accidents, that series of suicides out in the woods….”

  “Oh my God,” Flora murmured.

  “So, I gave it away. I figured, that was how Avis had gotten rid of it, so maybe that was the only method that worked.”

  “Who did you give it to?” Flora had gone from looking pale and worried to horrified.

  “Well, I figured if the thing was cursed, I didn’t want to give it to anyone I liked. Nobody innocent and good, ya know? I couldn’t saddle them with that burden. I didn’t want to hurt anybody, but then…then I…I gave it to Mark Westerfield.”