Beyond The Door

by Jeffrey Thomas

  One of my favorite displays was a large diorama, housed in an alcove and contained behind a glass wall, of about a half dozen preserved human bodies…most standing but with two or three crouching around a mock campfire, the background being a crude painted scene of a prairie at twilight. A hidden tape recorder played cricket sounds, the crackling of a fire and distant strange tribal chants. According to a plaque beside the exhibit, these grotesque mummies were the remains of a rare and obscure tribe of natives who predated the arrival of the white man, and thus were garbed in buckskin and headbands decorated with beads and feathers. What made them so rare was that each member of this little tribe shared a congenital deformity due to inbreeding, and that was that their noses were upside-down. Whether this were authentically the case or the result of clever taxidermy, one could plainly see on the leathery shellacked faces of these primitive tribesmen that the bridge of the nose lay just above the upper lip, while the nostrils were inverted and situated almost between the eyebrows. A card at the feet of each figure purported to give their tribal names, and the translations of those names. I remember some of these translated names being “RAIN SNORTER”…“SNEEZE-IN-EYES”…“STARE-AT-SNOT.”

  But the attraction that Amos was best known for, and my own favorite as well, was his flea circus. Now, I had seen a flea circus on TV once…fleas harnessed to and pulling miniature rickshaws and chariots, fleas twirling in miniature carousels, swinging on tiny trapezes or walking a tightrope. But this was something else, something surprisingly less exotic. The fleas were inside little terrariums, dioramas with scenes that resembled the kitchens or living rooms of ordinary houses—nothing so extravagant as the mansion of Jasper Amos—and magnifying glasses were set up here and there so you could lean in and observe the creatures more closely…though the lenses seemed poor or the angles were askew, so that the creatures appeared rather blurry, less than focused. In any case, Amos’ troupe of fleas were engaged in quite mundane tasks, such rocking in a rocking chair in front of a tiny toy TV, or standing upright at a sink filled with cotton to look like soap suds, wearing an apron and washing dishes—you could even see the elbows moving as the arms worked within those bogus soap suds. A flea seeming to clack away at a miniscule typewriter in a matchbox office cubicle, or two flea shapes jumping around under a blanket on a diminutive bed. (That one I didn’t understand the first time I saw it, until I was twelve and blundered in on my parents one time and—ahhh!)

  Every time I visited that house of anomalies and wonders, at some point I would turn and Jasper Amos himself—a balding man with dark but uncannily bright eyes—would be there peering out from behind a drape or from a doorway, and smiling directly at me…me…as if all this had been created especially and only for me, and every other guest was merely incidental. It was a rewarding, and unsettling, sensation.

  But not everyone was so beguiled by Jasper Amos’ personal museum. My town was then, and still is, governed by a board of five selectmen. This board, at that time, consisted of several colorful and distinct persons. One of them was Missy Willard, who always wore a large flowery sun hat even in winter. Another was Tobias Phelps, who wore a red bowtie and a suit too small and tight for his rotund form, and Fred Chalk who was a troop leader in the Youth Scouts and thus always sported his beige uniform of shorts and a shirt brimming with pins and badges. This board of selectmen was decidedly not entertained by the museum of Jasper Amos, because his monstrous mansion was not zoned for business, and perhaps because the town was not benefitting financially from the proceeds the museum took in—and so, after it had only been operating for about a year following the demise of Mrs. Amos, the selectmen ordained that the museum should be shut down, the doors to the monstrous mansion closed. This was done, and for a short time the museum was no more, Amos’ collection enjoyed only by himself.

  But I say a short time, because within mere months of the board’s decision, one by one the members disappeared. Some theorized that Missy Willard and Fred Chalk had run away with each other, but what of the other three? They were never heard from again—all five of them gone within a matter of several weeks.

  About a month after the disappearance of the last selectman, the town had a new board of selectmen. And not only that, but the Amos House of Oddities & Curiosities once more opened to the general public. In a show of good faith, on the first day of its reopening all five members of the new board of selectmen made a show of visiting the museum themselves, even grinning for photographers from local newspapers.

  And so the museum remained open for several years more…until, when I was just about to graduate from high school, tragedy struck. Another strange fire, this time in what seems to have been a basement laboratory in Amos’ mansion that no one had previously suspected the existence of. Whatever research or experiment the chemist might have been conducting outside of work was never ascertained, and all that was discovered of the man himself was a stick figure made of cinder. Amos and his wife had had no children, and so it was left to the authorities to go over such belongings of his that had survived the conflagration. Much of the mansion and its collection were lost, but there was one odd artifact discovered in the attic of the structure.

  This artifact was a cigar box, inside of which were pinned a number of fleas, apparently former performers from Amos’ flea circus. These specimens wore intricately made, unthinkably miniscule costumes, as his fleas always did—but the more the town police and fire department examined these fleas, the more familiar their particular garments became. Of the five fleas impaled with a pin in that box, one wore a flowery sun hat…one, a red bowtie and awkward-looking suit…and one a beige uniform of shorts and a shirt made colorful with a nearly microscopic array of ribbons and badges.

  Magnifying glasses were fetched, so that the investigators might study the fleas more closely, and to their horror they realized that these tiny, twisted dark bodies were not insects at all, but human remains—impossibly, horribly reduced in size via some unknown process…dehydrated or shrunken down into dry, gnarled husks that retained almost nothing of their human aspect aside from their aforementioned garb. Surely no human could survive such a process!

  And yet, with Jasper Amos’ flea circus destroyed and beyond examination, much speculation and rumor circulated. Wild theories, terrible suggestions…that maybe those other fleas that had for years entertained us by rocking in chairs, washing dishes or frolicking in bed had not really been fleas, either.”

  Ware found his throat had gone dry from talking, so while he allowed his one man audience to absorb his story’s ending he drank from his tall paper cup of coffee, though it had now gone cold and his bladder was unhappy with him. During his story, men and boys had surged in and out of the restroom like rising and falling tides, though there was always at least a trickle. Aside from the quiet listener on the other side of the door, Ware had been ignored by the others around him, as if he or they were only a figment of the other’s imagination, seen from the corner of one’s eye.

  Then Ware had a realization: that he wasn’t merely being quiet to let the man on the other side of the door digest his story…he was also waiting for the man to return with another story of his own. Not only anticipating, he was surprised to find, but desiring another story. Surprising indeed. Not only he, but all men seemed very disinclined to enter into any conversation with a stranger in a men’s room, be it in the next stall or at the next urinal. Homophobia was part of it (one’s pants down or opened, the most private of privates exposed and vulnerable), but also, society was not designed for such interaction. Toilet stalls and office cubicles, cars to enclose one in a bubble of moving space, telephones and email and chat rooms with which to communicate with anyone in the world while at the same time keeping others at bay. Privacy was another name for isolation. And Ware was more reclusive, he knew, even than most people. True, he and this man were not face to face, still separated by that dividing wall, but they were talking through it…in spite of it, as if defying it. Yes, Ware was waiti
ng, hoping, even anxious for more interaction.

  Knowing this, or anxious himself, his unseen partner in conversation obliged him.

  “Where I come from, in Eastborough,” the man sitting on the toilet said, “there was a teacher named Mrs. McClary—I don’t recall ever having heard her first name—who taught science at the high school for decades. I had her myself, and so did my daughter! When the old woman finally retired, she spent much time in her garden and tending to other hobbies of hers, one of which was her collection of insects. She didn’t do this when I was her student, but my daughter told me Mrs. McClary would sometimes bring them to class, seemingly more for the pleasure of shocking her students than educating them. My daughter has an intense fear of spiders, and she told me how Mrs. McClary once placed a terrarium containing a goliath bird-eating spider, at eleven inches across the world’s largest spider, directly in front of my daughter on her desk. ‘She had this weird little smile on her face,’ my daughter told me. ‘And when I screamed, she grinned.’

  My daughter once complained to me, ‘You know those crazy old cat ladies every town has, Dad? Well, Mrs. McClary is a crazy old bug lady instead. If she did have a cat, she’d probably feed it to her giant spider.’

  Another time Mrs. McClary brought some caterpillars to school, and said they belonged to a genus of moths called Hyposmocoma, which live in Hawaiian rainforests. Apparently because of the isolation of these islands, she explained, the caterpillars have evolved into carnivores…that is, they use their silk to ensnare snails, sort of like spiders themselves, and then they enter the snail’s shell and eat them while they’re still alive.

  Well, one day Mrs. McClary not only didn’t bring any of her bugs to school, but didn’t bring herself to school. My daughter said, ‘We just sat there talking and talking and waiting for her, until we realized that she wasn’t coming. That was just fine by me, but one of the kids finally went to the front office to ask about her. It turns out Mrs. McClary hadn’t taken a day off or called in sick, and she didn’t answer calls to her house. Her husband passed away like ten years earlier, and she never had any children of her own.’

  And so the police were ultimately asked to swing by Mrs. McClary’s residence, to look into the elderly woman’s wellbeing.

  A youngish police officer named Penn was the one sent to McClary’s house, and as Penn related the story later, he first rang the front doorbell and when that didn’t work, pounded on the door instead. Again there was no response, so he tried the knob to see if it was unlocked. It was, and he let himself inside.

  It was obvious right away that things were out of the ordinary; Penn found that the front hallway looked like it had been done up for Halloween with those fake, cotton cobwebs people stretch across their front porches and put plastic spiders in. But these webs, which made a kind of tunnel of the front hall, were not imitation. Though repulsed, Penn even had to use his hands to tear through a few sheets of the sticky webbing that obstructed his way.

  Penn ventured into the gloomy interior of the house, and found that the dining room was similarly draped in cobwebs. They covered the walls, hung from the ceiling, shrouded the dining room chairs like sheets thrown over the furniture in an abandoned house.

  It appeared that Mrs. McClary hadn’t used her dining room to entertain guests for a long time. Instead, across the long table were placed a good number of terrariums large and small. Whether there was anything still living inside them, though, Penn couldn’t tell—buried as they were under thick veils of silken web.

  Penn called out for Mrs. McClary, moving next into the living room to find it in an identical state. On side tables and the coffee table, along with a good number of plants, were more terrariums…but when Penn peered into them as best he could through the layers of web, they appeared to be empty. Had their former contents escaped…or been eaten?

  Whereas the front rooms had been very dark, with the window shades down, the curtains drawn and webs covering the walls almost entirely, Penn found the kitchen to be brighter. For one, the webs were less extensive in here, plus the back door of the house stood open, letting in the morning sun. Penn moved to the back door, stood on its threshold and looked out at the sizable back yard, with its colorful flower beds and neat rows of tomato plants.

  And finally he saw her—Mrs. McClary—toward the back of her garden where a wooden fence separated her yard from a neighbor’s, wearing a gaudy flower-patterned muumuu. She appeared to be kneeling down at the foot of a big Yellow Forsythia bush that grew beside the fence, maybe digging up weeds, but then Penn became concerned when he realized it looked more like the old woman had collapsed onto her belly, maybe the victim of a stroke. It looked like she was crawling slowly on the ground, partly under the Forsythia bush. As Penn jumped down the back steps and started striding across the yard toward her, he hoped Mrs. McClary was simply trying to reach for something under the bush…but when he called out to her she didn’t look back at him or respond.

  It was a bit shadowy back there, in the shade of the fence and a big bordering spruce tree, but as he got closer Penn could see the woman’s heavy, shapeless body inching along at a snail’s pace…sort of undulating on her belly as if she didn’t have the strength to crawl on her hands and knees. In fact, he saw that she was dragging her legs behind her, limp in their compression stockings.

  When he got close to the old science teacher, though, he noted that her swollen legs in the flesh-colored stockings looked very odd, very unnatural. Pulpy, like bags full of spaghetti…and was it just his imagination that her flesh appeared to be subtly squirming and shifting under that thick hosiery?

  ‘Mrs. McClary?’ he said once more, bending down over her, the teacher’s upper body hidden from him under the pretty Forsythia shrub. ‘Are you OK?’

  That was when he noticed that her whole body, under her muumuu, was rippling and squirming like the flesh of her legs inside her stockings. And that was when he noticed that Mrs. McClary had no arms.

  Apparently, no head as well.

  Officer Penn might have done two things just then. Some might have backed off in revulsion, and gotten on the shoulder mic attached to their uniform. But Penn, impulsively, bent down lower, took hold of the hem of Mrs. McClary’s muumuu in both hands, and with one strong pull dragged her out from under the Forsythia bush.

  As he dragged her, the muumuu came away from her body, as if he were pulling a sheet off a draped piece of furniture…or pulling the skin off a giant, rotting fruit. And the body that was revealed beneath the muumuu, lying there on Mrs. McClary’s neatly cut grass, was only partly human…a reduced, gelatinous mass of masticated flesh and dissolving bone. Most of that glistening, writhing bulk was instead made up of caterpillars…thousands upon thousands of caterpillars.

  Whether she had bred them or they had multiplied on their own, no one could say, but later they were identified as a previously unknown offshoot of Hyposmocoma—the carnivorous caterpillars of Hawaii.”

  Every town had such stories, Ware reflected. Not that the incidents they had shared thus far were universal, by any means, but stories of unique interest, stories of abnormalities, deviances from the cicada drone of the mundane that blanked the mind of most…the subconscious-yet-deafening buzz that drowned out the imagination and soothed the inner robot. For a more sensitive soul, however, a brightly inquisitive mind, that ceaseless drone of mediocrity might drive one mad were it not for accounts of frogs falling from the sky, an unidentifiable blob washing up on a beach, demonic claw marks spontaneously appearing on a troubled girl’s tender flesh.

  Well, Ware considered, perhaps he was being a tad too self-congratulatory. Most people held some degree of interest in unknown wonders, but it seldom extended beyond the superficiality of tabloid diversion (unless one counted religion—that predigested unknown wonder). But there were those like himself, Ware liked to think, who took a keener interest in the unknown, who had an affinity and an attunement…who embraced strange tales, and collected them as tre
asure.

  Ware was only too happy to share another such tale with this kindred soul. He considered it a returned favor. They had entered a volleyball match of such favors, and with this next story he felt he might “spike” the ball.

  “Where I come from,” he said, “there was a very respected family called the Larsons, who lived on Pine Lane. They were an affluent family, a model family, all of them attractive right down to their red-haired dog. Mr. Larson was a successful sales executive, Mrs. Larson was involved in various social groups and charity organizations, the twelve-year-old son was a straight-A student…even the dog had won ribbons in several dog shows.

  One year the town set about to digging up and replacing quite a lot of its old, lead water pipes—the streets were a mess for months. Heaps of dirt impinged on people’s front lawns, great lengths of temporary, flexible water pipes ran alongside the sidewalks, excavation tied up traffic. Even pretty little Pine Lane was excavated, and in front of the home of the Larson family an odd piece of plumbing was unearthed. It was about ten-feet-long and very thick around, as crusty with green corrosion as if it had lain at the bottom of the ocean for centuries. Whatever other pipelines it might once have been connected to, those connections were lost now and the odd piece was a discrete unit. The oddest thing about it—other than the fact that those who unearthed it couldn’t agree on its original function, some suggesting it was part of a pump, while others guessed a filtration system—was that it had a circular glass porthole, or such, riveted into its flank. The workers described viewing a murky green fluid inside the pipe through that glass, and when they rolled the heavy pipe onto the front lawn of the Larson home they could hear the sloshing liquid that was trapped inside.