Beyond The Door

by Jeffrey Thomas

  FIRST EDITION

  Beyond The Door © 2011 by Jeffrey Thomas

  Cover Artwork © 2011 by Zach McCain

  All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  Boston’s South Station was a nexus. From here one might catch a Greyhound, Peter Pan or MBTA bus, and on the lower level a Red Line subway train…or a Silver Line subway train that could take one to that other nexus point, Logan Airport. Behind the great building with its curved old façade facing onto Dewy Square, one might board an Amtrak train for Maine, or at the same platform a commuter rail train to other cities in Massachusetts. South Station was the terminus of the Framingham/Worcester Line, among others. Trains that arrived here had to travel backwards the way they had come, like a snake with two heads and no tail.

  It was from the Framingham/Worcester Line that Ware disembarked at South Station. Like the others hurrying from the train to the glass-faced rear of the building, he tucked his head into his collar against the fast-falling, stinging blizzard that had turned the city’s towers into uncertain looming outlines. Around him poured interchangeable, hard-faced men and women on their way to work or on business trips, carrying briefcases or pulling luggage with rattling wheels. They and the others like them who flowed through this city in buses and subways, in cars and taxis and on foot, were like sullen, distracted nerve impulses being transmitted in some titanic and complex network of neurons and synapses.

  Ware was grateful for the relative warmth once he was inside the station, with its high ceiling from which hung huge banners advertising some new phone device. Each banner featured a figure who was only a silhouette, with this gadget in hand—either prancing, dancing or cavorting in glee at being able to converse with the blank-faced silhouettes on neighboring banners.

  The moment he entered the station, Ware heard the old woman ranting in a loud, slurred, phlegmy voice. She was standing by the huge glass windows facing onto the row of train platforms, bundled in a filthy coat, her long gray hair like a tangle of cobwebs and rags, her face flushed red and flecked with open sores. She was addressing the people streaming in through the door that Ware used, pointing at the glass with one hand and shouting, “You think it’s cold now, but a fire is coming! A fire that will burn this city to ash, and every one of you will be burned to a pillar of salt! The fire will come first on a train—a train will bring the fire here and the blaze will spread, and the people through this door when that happens will be screaming and pulling out their hair and their eyes will be melting in their heads!”

  Her babbling meant nothing to Ware, who dismissed it as a sad combination of religion/alcohol/dementia, and he kept his eyes turned away lest she meet his gaze and address him in particular…but when he had passed the old woman he heard her continue, “You think the last stop on that train is Worcester, Union Station, huh? Well it’s not! There’s another stop, the true last stop they don’t want you to know about! I know…I came back from there last night! I was there! I fell asleep and missed my stop at Union Station, and when I woke up I was alone except for the conductor—and I found him dead in another car! I think he died from a heart attack so he couldn’t make me get off at Union Station!”

  This part of her rant was more interesting to Ware, and he stopped to look back at the madwoman, but she didn’t notice him as she went on yelling at the people flowing through the door. “I was sixteen when I got on that train just two weeks ago, and look at me now! Two weeks later and look at me now!”

  An attractive young couple who looked like college students laughed together at this last comment, and the old woman focused on them, pointing her other hand at them as she continued pointing out the windows, and barking, “You can’t believe what I had to go through to get back here—you can’t believe it!”

  She turned then, as if she had suddenly sensed his stare, and locked eyes with Ware directly. And when she turned, through the open front of her coat he saw her T-shirt and soiled blue jeans. Her T-shirt bore the image of a popular young music group.

  Ware broke his eyes away, making a pretense of checking his watch as he put more distance between himself and the madwoman. This was the morning’s first train into South Station from the Framingham/Worcester line—6:31 AM. How exact, that time. Not 6:30, but 6:31. How precise a system, with no time or patience for deviance, the unexpected.

  He knew the towns on that inbound line from the folded train schedule he’d acquired. Worcester, Grafton, Westborough, Southborough, Ashland (what a dismal name; it sounded like the aftermath of the apocalypse the madwoman predicted), Framingham, West Natick, Natick, Wellesley Square, Wellesley Hills, Wellesley Farms, Auburndale, West Newton, Newtonville, Yawkey, Back Bay…and South Station. The end of the line. But also, a hub from which so many other directions and destinations might be taken.

  Behind him, on the giant train information board hanging from the ceiling, the departure and arrival times changed with a tikka-tikka-tikka-tikka sound. He didn’t look up at this information, instead focused on his immediate desire to empty his bladder of the coffee he’d finished before picking up the train. But as he neared the entrance to the restrooms, on the left side of the station along with most of the food services, he saw that a heavy stream of people who had just arrived on his train and others had the same desire as he. Not one for crowds, especially in a men’s room, he decided to wait a little for the traffic to thin. Anyway, his need wasn’t so great, and he wasn’t pressed for time, so he switched his attention to perhaps acquiring himself a new cup of coffee. His eyes swept the station, with its various restaurants and food stands. There were counters for burgers, pizza, and what passed for Chinese food to the average American, but of course his best option was an Au Bon Pain (what did that mean in French, “A Good Pain”?) situated out on the open floor of the station, an island of enticing warm aromas. He waited in line here, bought a serviceable large hazelnut with cream and sugar, then stood off to one side (there were many small tables scattered across the station’s glossy floor, but right now he spotted none available) tentatively sipping at his scalding coffee and observing the bustle of people all around him. Particularly women. Their bodies were padded thickly against the cold, but he considered himself a “face man” anyway. And his taste in faces was eclectic. Black women, Asians, Latinos, white…close to his age, or (preferably) much younger. His covetous gaze hijacked a ride on this woman, then that, jumping from one to another like a thirsty flea. Again, most of these faces were set in dour, distracted expressions, but the fine snow in the hair and on the shoulders of the newly arrived lent them a glittering glamour. When the ephemeral glamour quickly dissolved, however, it would leave them damp and smelly like wet dogs.

  As he again surveyed the constellation of small circular tables—more to continue his feast of faces than to find a chair for himself—Ware saw that the madwoman had seated herself at one of them, unwrapping a portion of hamburger she had salvaged from a trash barrel. With crumbs of bread and meat on her lips, spitting more of the same as she spoke, she looked up at no one in particular and growled, “You think I wanted to stay there in Gosston? With that eye in th
e sky like the fucking Goodyear blimp? It found me wherever I went—I couldn’t hide! It looked right into my mind! You think it’s a fucking picnic in Gosston? Don’t fall asleep on the train to Worcester! Don’t fall asleep if your conductor drops dead!”

  Gosston, Ware’s mind echoed. He knew it wasn’t on his train schedule. He wanted to go to the woman then, hand her some money, but he refrained. He turned away, noted the bookstall called Barbara’s Bestsellers, considered browsing a bit, but then a glance told him that the flow into the restrooms seemed to have slowed to a trickle. Seeing this as his chance, before another train could disgorge its passengers, he strode in that direction. Ah, but what to do with his coffee? It was too hot to drink, too full to trash. He decided to take it with him, set it down somewhere—on the sinks counter or the top of a urinal, if it could rest there without toppling.

  But when he entered the men’s restroom, he discovered that it was still very much occupied. Men stood before the row of urinals opposite the sinks, and around the bend, at every other urinal besides. Ware suffered from bashful bladder, in any case—on occasion, elbow to elbow with other men planted before urinals, had even had to abandon the attempt, zip up and leave a men’s room uncomfortably unrelieved—so it was the toilet stalls he turned to. He saw a pair of feet planted under the partition of the first stall, and a man was just entering the third in the row. Thus, it was the second door he reached out to. He found it unlatched, and opened it wide—only to be met with the sight of a man’s bare legs, his trousers and boxer shorts bunched in folds around his ankles. Oddly, Ware noted that the man’s red-white-and-blue striped boxers resembled a pair he himself owned, even as he quickly shut the door again. He could understand it not occurring to a child to latch the door to a public toilet stall, but he was swept with irritation and embarrassment, and before he could think to restrain these emotions he remarked aloud, “Where I come from, people lock the toilet stall door.”

  A voice on the other side of the metal door, with its scratched and blistered enamel paint, responded, “Well where I come from, people knock on the door before they open it.”

  If Ware had been irritated before, this terse response to his remark doubled the feeling, and he rejoined, “Well where I come from, people don’t need to knock, call through the door, or get down on hands and knees and look under it to see if someone’s using the toilet or not.” (Had he not been so close when he tried the handle, he might have seen the other man’s feet under the door without the need for stooping.)

  “Well, where I come from,” said that voice on the other side of the door, “men who like to look at other men defecating don’t make a lot of excuses for it—they just go to the internet for that.”

  The door to the first stall opened and an elderly man emerged, still straightening his belt, leaving that stall available—but Ware wasn’t done giving this unseen stranger a piece of his mind. In a voice that shook with his effort to control it, he said, “Where I come from we don’t make insulting speculations about people we don’t know.”

  “Well where I come from,” the stranger retorted, his voice a bit hollow as if he were crouched down hiding in a metal box, “we don’t get so homophobic and frazzled if we accidentally see another guy sitting on the john.”

  Ware hardly wanted to end up coming to blows with a man over an unlatched toilet stall door; if this stranger wasn’t going to back down, maybe it was best he swallow his pride a bit? One of them had to remain civilized. Besides…what the man in the stall had just said about Ware overreacting to catching a partial glimpse of him stirred a memory from Ware’s youth, which might very well have inspired such a strong reaction in him.

  In a calmer voice, in a tone of concession, Ware said, “Where I come from, there’s a low income part of town, a slum pretty much, of old rundown houses—I lived around the corner from there growing up. People that made me nervous walked its streets: foreigners from countries I couldn’t guess at, raving derelicts and shabby prostitutes, though I didn’t really know what they were back then. I had a classmate who lived in this slum, and one year he and his brother set up a kind of ghost train ride…well, a walkthrough ghost train ride, through their garage and a work shed in their backyard. They even incorporated the house next door, which had sat vacant since its elderly owner had gone to live with a relative.

  I went through the brothers’ haunted attraction once—I guess I was eleven or twelve at that time. I had to pay a quarter admission. Some kids went through together in little groups, but I was the only customer that day, and the brothers said they’d be waiting for me in their home. I didn’t believe them, of course, not the way they were grinning…I knew they’d be somewhere along the way, waiting to jump out and startle me. Their grins made me nervous. Living in that bad part of town as they did, they were a little beyond mischievous.

  I started the haunted walk by entering their garage through a side door—the garage door itself was closed, and its little windows had been taped over with cardboard or such. There were a few scattered candles, but they threw little light; one found their way through the attraction by following a yellow cord that had been strung throughout. I held onto it with one hand, like a lifeline, as if I were walking the deck of a ship on treacherous seas and I was afraid that deck would suddenly list radically, and throw me off into cold drowning waves.

  Behind a stack of boxes, a crude manikin—a scarecrow really, with a black hood over its head—was bound like a prisoner to a rocking chair, which was rocking somehow…maybe a string was tied to it. The manikin sat in front of a TV set, which was running but showing only static. The TV’s light was reflected brightly in the manikin’s eyes. I don’t know what was behind the eyeholes in that black hood…bits of mirror, I think.

  There were more creepy props. Nothing too creepy. Then the folding garage door lifted up just a little, making me jump, and a voice outside growled, ‘Escape! Escape while you still can!’ I saw that the yellow cord ran across the floor there, under the garage door, so I got down on hands and knees and crawled under it…back outside. Then I got to my feet and followed the cord from tree to tree—another hooded manikin was hanging by a noose from one of them—until I reached the work shed in the back yard.

  More scariness in the work shed, but again, nothing too scary…until a third hooded manikin lying on the floor with a knife in its chest leapt to its feet and chased me outside. My heart was pounding now and I wasn’t having much fun, but I didn’t want to look like a coward and back down in front of these tough kids…so I followed that yellow cord to the dilapidated old house of their former neighbor, which I entered through the back door.

  It was filthy inside, and I could picture an elderly woman who had owned too many cats or dogs and allowed them to defecate and urinate everywhere. The linoleum floor tiles in the kitchen were peeling up or worn away entirely, and wallpaper had sloughed away in long ragged sheets like decaying skin. The ceilings were water stained and cracked, and real cobwebs hung down from them in greasy loops. Again, most of the windows had been covered over and the only light came from candles here and there.

  A disgusting meal had been laid out on the dining room table—I didn’t want to know where the brothers had acquired the animal skull, a dog’s maybe, that served as its centerpiece. Rotten fruit, moldy bread, glasses filled with water dyed to simulate blood, and some hooded manikins sitting around this feast. I was all tensed up inside, reluctant to turn my back on them as I waited for one of them to jump up at me…but none did, and I continued running my hand along the strung yellow rope into another room.

  Here, in the front hallway, a touch of cold gray light entered the derelict house through a window that had been shattered. Shards of glass were scattered on the floor, stained with blood, as were the fangs of glass still remaining in the frame. Now, a thick trail of dripped blood ran up a staircase along with the yellow cord, and I followed both up the creaking steps to the second floor.

  Even before I reached the upper landin
g, I heard an eerie sound. It was a wet, rumbling growl, rising and falling…dying away only to come back again with a sudden, violent surge.

  On the landing, the yellow cord ran to the right, presumably toward some bedrooms…but the trail of blood continued on to the left. Ahh…clever, I remember thinking: they knew my curiosity would compel me to leave the trail. Then some figure would spring out, no doubt, and boom at me that I had violated the rules and I would become one of the black-hooded prisoners myself if I didn’t flee immediately.

  But I followed the trail of sticky, drying blood down the dark hallway anyway, until I found myself standing in front of a closed door.

  From under the bottom edge of this door, a pool of blood had spread across the hallway’s old floorboards. That gravelly, wet, rising and falling growling sound came from behind the closed door. It sounded like someone retching, vomiting…yes, it was vomiting, because I heard the fluid splash on the floor. Between bursts of this vomiting was a terrible, thin wheezing. It was very realistic and unsettling. Maybe I was reminded too much of occasions that my father had been out drinking, and came home staggering drunk, only to vomit up all that whiskey and beer in the bathroom sink. An unpleasant association.

  The vomiting ghoul behind the door didn’t throw the door open and lunge out at me as I expected, even when I finally turned away and again picked up the trail of the yellow cord. I followed it into a bedroom, where yet another scarecrow figure lay lashed to the bedposts with kitchen knives stuck through both eyeholes of its hood. This was the climactic scene, but the manikin didn’t stir and it seemed anticlimactic after that vomiting stranger behind the closed door. The ragged end of the yellow cord was nailed to the wall, where a big red question mark was painted. It just terminated, the way the trains terminate at this station so that you have to go backwards the way you came. So I turned and followed the yellow cord back down the stairs to the front hallway. Suddenly, when I reached the foot of the stairs, the front door flew open and two black-hooded figures seized hold of me and dragged me roughly outside. They wrestled me to the ground, though I didn’t fight back, and one held me down while the other leaned over me with a knife in its hand. But then this figure pulled its hood off, and there of course was the grinning face of my classmate. His brother let go of me and removed his hood as well, and they both helped me back to my feet.