Behind the Door

by Mary SanGiovanni

  This time, when Ed handed him the whiskey bottle, Toby took it. “I hadn’t heard the talk. Been trying to avoid people as much as I can until I got a handle on why these feelings came back. Thought maybe I’d written the letter wrong or something. Like maybe I hadn’t specified how long I wanted the feelings to go away. Thought it was just me. But you say it’s happening to everyone?”

  “Everyone who used the Door, so far as I can figure. Which is a hell of a lot more people than one might think. I didn’t put much stock in it until yesterday, to be honest, but then one of them things attacked me.”

  “One of what things?” Toby was trying to understand, but Ed wasn’t making a whole lot of sense.

  “I told you, I don’t know what they are. I’d have to be able to see them to describe them, wouldn’t I?”

  “Yeah, sure. But you keep bringing up the Door. I don’t get how this stuff happening to you is related if you’ve never used the Door.”

  Ed sighed again and gestured for the bottle. Toby handed it to him and he took a long swig from it. Ed shook his head. “I lied.”

  Toby raised an eyebrow but said nothing.

  “I asked it once to make sure I never got found out and never got caught. That what I might have done or might someday do, you know, with the boys…that it would never come back to haunt me. I was just a boy myself, really, when I asked.”

  “And you’re saying, what? That your letter essentially got returned to sender?”

  Ed made a face, evidently finding Toby’s response distasteful. “In a way, I guess. I keep hearing things. People muttering things, calling me names and such, leaving little threatening notes all over the house, but when I look, no one’s there. And these bruises,” he gestured at his face and body. “It’s like getting sucker punched, only I can’t see nobody punching me. Sure as hell feel it, but there ain’t nobody around. Mighta thought it was a stroke or something. Dementia, something like that. But it ain’t. I know that. Something’s wrong with the Door.”

  “Okay. Okay, then. So what do we do about it?”

  “I don’t see that there’s much we can do. Ain’t like we can call the police and file a complaint.” He laughed, but it was a brittle, bitter little rattle in his throat.

  “Ed, you can’t keep going on getting the shit beat out of you.”

  “Don’t have much of a choice, do I?”

  “Maybe you could leave for a while, get away from that Door and whatever influence it has. Pack up and run.” It was what Toby had done after Dingmans Ferry. He’d packed up and left and hoped nothing would follow him out to Zarephath. The law hadn’t, certainly, but his own guilt had always been a step or so behind him.

  “Wouldn’t do no good. People have tried to outrun the reach of the Door after foolishly sending some second letter or after them getting not quite what they wanted. Ain’t no one ever been successful, though. I suspect running away ain’t going to matter much.”

  “So what, then? Let invisible monsters beat you to a pulp?”

  Ed cast a forlorn look out the window. The night had collected along the tree line at the edge of the woods, and Toby figured that to Ed, it must have seemed like a gathering of those invisible enemies, amassing for a moonless attack. It wasn’t too hard for Toby himself to imagine shapes in the shapeless, and an animosity in the inanimate.

  “Do you want me to stay tonight?”

  “Why?”

  “In case they come back.”

  Ed turned to him, too intoxicated and too exhausted to hide his gratitude. “Yeah, if you’re not busy. I’d appreciate it.”

  “No problem,” Toby said.

  The two watched outside the window, standing guard over the advance of the night.

  * * * *

  People in town were talking.

  There had been an announcement in the Monday paper, a flier at the market, a folded note in Kari’s mailbox from the sheriff’s office. There was to be a town meeting that Wednesday, and all were strongly encouraged to attend. Evidently, the mayor and members of law enforcement wanted to discuss a problem with the Door.

  Kari felt sick to her stomach. She thought she knew exactly what problem they wanted to discuss. She and Cicely were discussing it over coffee on Cicely’s front porch. Kari had been watching the wind chimes, taking in the way the wind stirred them, but then carried away their music, out of earshot. She thought of telling Cicely that they might be broken, but decided it wasn’t that important.

  The older woman seemed disinclined to leave the house, though. From the way she kept glancing back through the screened upper portion of the door, she seemed uncomfortable with being inside as well. She looked exhausted.

  Cicely had been telling Kari about Rita Nunez and Alice Cromberg, neither of whom Kari had ever met, though she’d heard the names from Cicely before. Alice, a friend of Cicely’s from church, had freely admitted to her church lady friends that she was pregnant, despite the fact that she was seven years strong into menopause. The woman was as far along as she’d been at fifteen when she’d delivered a panicked letter to the Door, asking for her to have never been pregnant at all. Alice was a talker, comfortable in the center of attention even when those around her weren’t, and didn’t mind telling people that she hadn’t wanted to kill the baby, but only make it disappear, and she had worded her letter as such. Then she woke up three mornings later simply not pregnant, and had cried in relief and not asked too many questions. There was no doubt in her mind that her unpregnancy, as well as her current situation, were due to some magic from that Door. And she wasn’t the only one.

  Kari was more worried about Cicely, and inquired about her health.

  The old woman paused, seeming unsure how to answer. Then she said, “Bad dreams, I guess. I hope that’s all they are.” She smiled sadly. “Actually, I suppose it’s more than that. It’s…” Her voice trailed off and she smiled shyly. “I’ve never really talked about this before. See, I was married once. I may have mentioned that.”

  “In passing,” Kari said, nodding.

  “His name was Reggie. Aw, sugar, when I met him, it was love at first sight. He was handsome, strong, funny….We used to have these long talks out on this porch here, just sitting and rocking and looking up at the stars.” Cicely’s smile faded. “Men change sometimes, though. They disappoint you—some men do, at least. Reggie…well, he could be cruel too. Had himself other women from time to time, and never took any guff from me about it. He’d get so angry over such little things, mostly when he drank. He’d pinch and hit and kick…once, he burned my stomach.” Cicely had a sad, faraway look on her face as she rubbed her stomach just above the navel. Kari said nothing, waiting for her to continue. It was difficult to hear, but it was the most Cicely had ever revealed about her life.

  “I married him when I was nineteen,” she told Kari. “We were married forty-nine years. And then one day, I’d had enough.”

  “You left him?” Kari asked.

  She chuckled dryly. “He left me, in a manner of speaking. I used the Door. I wished him away.” She sipped her coffee.

  Kari stared at her a moment, unbelieving. It seemed so bold a thing for Cicely to do, and yet at the same time, it struck Kari as exactly the solution Cicely would come up with. “You…and it worked?”

  “Oh yes,” Cicely said. “Three days after I asked, he went off to work and never made it there. Police found his car out on the road by the woods, where we parked that time I showed you the Door, remember?”

  Kari nodded.

  “Out there, they said. They found his car, his wallet with his license and credit cards. They even found his shoes. Didn’t find him, though. No trace. No blood or bone or hair or anything.”

  “Wow.”

  “They searched the woods for days after. I remember them bringing in the dogs. And I remember the sheriff at the time, Bill Grainger—he was kind. H
e often came out to the house when Reggie got too loud and the neighbors called the police. He knew what kind of man Reggie was. And he told me, sugar—he said, “Maybe some things are a blessing, Miss Cicely. Maybe some lost dogs don’t really need to be found, eh?”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “And I agreed. I was so…so relieved. And Bill called off the search that day.” She shook her head. “They weren’t ever gonna find him anyway. The Door had worked its magic. Gave me just what I asked for. And God forgive me, but I couldn’t help hoping that them behind the Door had taken him to their side of things, because I didn’t just want Reggie out of my life, I wanted him out of this world.”

  Kari squeezed the woman’s knee and Cicely smiled gratefully. “Aw, sugar, I’m sorry to be unloading on you. It just feels good to talk, you know?”

  “Any time, Cicely. You can talk about anything, any time.”

  “Aww, you’re a good woman, sugar. I appreciate that.”

  A terrible thought occurred to Kari then, and she gasped. “Wait, so…with all that’s been happening with the Door, things undone and whatnot…what does that mean for you?”

  Cicely glanced back at the screen door. “Heard him once through the bedroom door and seen him twice. Out on the streets of town, I’ve seen him. Every time, he’s someplace closer to the house. Frankly, I don’t know what I’ll do when he gets here. And I know he’s coming.”

  “Oh, Cicely….”

  Cicely patted Kari’s knee that time. “It’s okay, sugar. The Lord will look out for me, one way or another. I just worry about other folks. So many have used that damn Door and now….”

  It took all of Kari’s will to stifle the guilt and confess to Cicely that she’d opened the Door. That had to be the cause of all these people’s problems. They were suffering bizarre aftereffects that appeared to be related to their use of the Door and that—well, that was more than likely her fault. If she’d just chosen to move forward into a state of ignorant bliss, none of this would be happening right now.

  She was so lost in that particular thought that she missed Cicely’s question.

  “Mm, I’m sorry. What did you ask?”

  “I asked if you were doing okay. Feeling any effects with all that’s going on?”

  Kari nodded. It was an honest answer. “Been thinking of Jessica more than ever,” she replied. “Sometimes, I think I even see her.”

  That was an understatement. Since she’d opened the Door, Kari had been seeing a lot of upsetting things.

  That past year, once the grief had settled in as a part of Kari’s soul, the suicide note came back to haunt her. Who was the man referenced in the note, and what had he done? She thought she could guess at the latter. Once she’d found a bloody pair of panties beneath her daughter’s mattress, and at the time she had assumed they were stained from menstruation and Jessica had been too embarrassed to tell her. Now Kari thought differently, and the rage became another part of her. One of the most frustrating things was not knowing who had hurt her little girl, or how long it had been going on. It withered a part of Kari’s soul that she hadn’t been able to stop it because she’d never known it was happening. She felt helpless. She couldn’t undo anything that had been done and worse, she didn’t even have a name that she could hang the blame on.

  She should have given the police the suicide note. She knew that. Maybe they could have found him and thrown him in jail. She hadn’t been thinking, though, of anything other than hiding that note and by doing so, making it somehow less true, a little bit less awful to have found her little girl lying dead on her pink bedspread. As time passed afterward, she was afraid it would somehow make her look suspicious that she had hidden that note. After all she had lost, she couldn’t bear to be thought of as neglectful or complicit in her daughter’s death. She hadn’t just done it to protect her daughter; she had done it to protect herself, to assuage the guilt of not knowing, of not having ever seen the signs her daughter was being hurt. Jessica had felt so helpless and ashamed that death seemed like the only answer, and Kari always felt that was as much her own fault as the man mentioned in the note.

  There was a part of her that had always hoped she would be the one to discover who that man was and make him pay without any police intervention, but she was no detective. She had been an average working mom from Dingmans Ferry with the perfectly average dreams and aspirations of a suburbanite. She wanted a new dishwasher and to fix the roof over the garage. She wanted her daughter to get good grades and her husband to like the dinners she cooked.

  Now she was responsible for unleashing what at best looked like a curse on an entire town full of people.

  She still had the note. She didn’t keep it with Jessica’s other things, but in a little locked box inside another box way in the back of her closet.

  The night she opened the Door, she’d found the note unfolded on her pillow when she’d gotten home. She’d just held it, rereading it until she was crying so hard she couldn’t see the words anymore.

  I can’t stand what that man does to me.

  She’d burned it that night, but found it intact and uncharred on her night table the next morning. So she’d locked it back in its box inside another box and hidden it even farther away, down in the basement. After that, it wasn’t the note she kept seeing, but glimpses of Jessica herself.

  She’d always believed she’d give anything to see her daughter’s face again, but…not like that. She saw Jessica, heard her, but the girl she loved was now an angry thing with bluish skin and vomit down the front of her clothes and hemorrhaging in her eyes. Kari couldn’t bear to look at her, or to listen to the gurgling sounds the girl made in an attempt to blame Kari for not protecting her. Could she have? Her child’s death was not the result of a tragic accident or lingering terminal illness, but a suicide, deliberate and violent and terrible. However, like any mother oblivious to the secret life of twelve-year-olds, she had never imagined her daughter could find anything regarding the facets of middle-class suburban life so egregious as to no longer be bearable.

  That man had been unbearable. She should have used the Door to ask that the man pay for what he’d done, but again, she hadn’t thought it through. She’d only thought of her own pain.

  “Cicely,” she said, her voice weary from the thoughts behind it, “do you think what’s going on with the Door can be stopped? Like, do you think someone knows how to fix it?”

  Cicely sipped her coffee, her rocking chair creaking thoughtfully. “I hope so, sugar. I certainly hope so.”

  Chapter 9

  It took Bill pulling a few strings to get the town together on such short notice—calls to the current sheriff of Monroe County, a great bear of a man named Timothy Cole, as well as Mayor Forsythe, the folks at the Zarephath Ledger, and Amanda Pulaski at the Historical Society, since the only space big enough to hold a town meeting was in the basement of the History and Heritage Center. Bill pulled it off, though; Kathy was impressed. By Wednesday evening at seven, those notable heads of town and county were gathered at long folding tables equipped with microphones. The sea of folding chairs set up in neat rows across the rest of the basement were filled; other townsfolk stood behind the chairs near the door.

  After the mayor and current sheriff had their official say, Bill took the mic. “Thank you, Mayor Forsythe, Sheriff Cole. And ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming out tonight. We appreciate your participation tonight. From what I understand, this is the first meeting in almost seventy years regarding the, uh…the Door in the Zarephath woods.”

  There was an agitated murmur from the crowd that Bill silenced by holding up his hand.

  “You may be aware of some unusual events happening in town. Before we get too far into the discussion of the nature of these events, I think it’s important to stress that not every misfortune is or should be necessarily associated with the Door. That could lead to potentially dangerous misunder
standings. Hear what I’m saying, folks: Please do not jump to conclusions about your or other people’s misfortunes or difficulties being related to the Door.

  “That said, as I’m sure at least some of you have noticed, the Door or some force connected to it seems to be reversing or otherwise undoing requests made of it, reaching back for the last few decades.”

  The uproar of frightened murmurs took longer to quiet that time. Questions sprung from the crowd:

  “Oh God—why?”

  “How do you know?”

  “What happened? Are we in danger?”

  “How can we stop it?”

  “Please, please,” Bill said into the microphone. “Please, settle down. That’s what we’re here tonight to discuss.”

  The crowd settled back into their seats, but their expressions and body language spoke of deep fear. Kathy couldn’t help but wonder how many of them had been tempted or had succumbed to the temptation of using that alien version of a wishing well in their midst.

  Bill continued. “This is still a working theory, but seems to be supported by the limited firsthand evidence reported by townspeople. We’ve brought in an expert in matters relating to this sort of thing, and she will speak to us about the situation and answer any questions you have to the best of her ability. Please welcome Kathy Ryan.”

  There was a smattering of uneasy applause as Kathy stood and took the mic from Bill. “Uh, hello. My name is Kathy Ryan. For over a decade, I have been a consultant to law enforcement agencies across the country regarding crimes with distinct occult, preternatural or supernatural elements and aspects. I am well aware of your Door, and have spent some significant time and resources amassing what information I could about it.” She paused. The crowd before her was silent. She felt their eyes on her, on her scar. She saw some of them balk at her tone, which was so practiced a mix of authority, confidence, and inarguable reassurance that it pervaded all her speech now. She waited a few seconds to see if they would argue her credentials or ask questions, but no one spoke. She supposed any town so used to the unusual in their everyday life would feel no need to question a woman claiming to be an expert in the unusual. That was good—one hurdle jumped.