Beyond The Door

by Jeffrey Thomas

  They left the length of pipe—if a pipe it truly was—on the lawn of the Larson home over the weekend…and when they returned to work a few days later, the porthole in the side of the thing had shattered and all its contents drained away. The foul-smelling interior was now empty. Maybe internal gas pressure had burst the glass? Whatever the case, the unusual, corroded old shell was loaded onto a truck and borne away.

  That day, Mr. Larson didn’t show up for work, nor his son for school. Mrs. Larson missed a meeting of one of her social groups. Several more days passed, and still no one saw or heard from the Larson family. Mr. Larson didn’t call in sick at work, nor was the son’s absence reported to the school. As in your story of Mrs. McClary, soon the concern was such that the authorities were contacted—and policemen sent to the house on Pine Lane.

  From what I gather, there swiftly followed an emergency meeting of the town’s board of selectmen. At the meeting were also a number of school officials, a representative of one of the town’s social groups, and various other citizens.

  A day after that, there was a meeting of the management at Mr. Larson’s place of business, and the teaching staff at the son’s school.

  And a few days after that, Mr. Larson finally returned to work, the mother to her social gatherings, the son to school. But the Larsons were not quite as they had been before.

  Most noticeable was the physical change. Though their hair seemingly remained unaffected, their faces had become smooth hard surfaces, curved and glossy like the side of a glazed vase. Applied somehow to the flat surface of their new faces—if faces they could be called—were photographic representations of their former faces: Mr. Larson smiling brightly, his wife and child the same. It was as though these immobile, two-dimensional images were meant to fool people into thinking that nothing was amiss.

  The mother could once again be seen visiting the local supermarket, shopping weekly just as she always had, except now a typical cart of groceries unloaded at the checkout line might consist of ten bottles of bleach, a dozen packages of aluminum foil, three cheese graters and a bottle of Maraschino cherries.

  The son arduously bent over his desk at every class, filling notebook after notebook, but when teachers peeked over his shoulder at the pages they were always covered with gibberish and strange symbols, with disturbing little sketches in the margins.

  And Mr. Larson resumed attending sales meetings, would even get up from the table to address the others and point to notes projected on a screen…but the notes were gibberish, strange symbols and disturbing sketches, and more disturbing was the manner in which Mr. Larson spoke. Because the hard bony face would split open vertically down the middle—there was a barely perceptible fissure there on all three family members—and the two hinged halves would open and close as a series of phlegmy-sounding coughs and barks were emitted. His presentation finished, Mr. Larson’s face would seal shut again—the bisected photo of his smiling former face restored—and the others would trade nervous glances and clap appreciatively.

  The son’s oral reports, and the mother’s contributions at her gatherings, were met with similar twitchy smiles and forced applause.

  The town did its best, mostly through a silent agreement, an instinctual understanding, to make the Larsons feel at home…not to question, trouble or provoke them in any way.

  Then, one summer night there was a particularly violent lightning storm. Still, no one thought too much of it at first—until it was noticed that Mr. Larson did not come in to work the following morning. The mother missed her weekly shopping excursion.

  This time the police were more reluctant to venture into their home to check on their welfare, but they did so. However, the Larson family were gone. All that could be found was their clothing, strewn upon the livingroom carpet. Amongst the clothing were found three realistic wigs made from actual human hair.

  And the ribbon-winning dog? Well, after the initial absence of the Larson family, it had never been seen again…but the day after that severe electrical storm, the remains of a strange animal were discovered by the side of the road on Pine Lane. They were badly burnt, appearing as if a lightning bolt might even have struck the beast. It was an exceedingly thin, four-legged creature with what seemed to be an insect-like exoskeleton—and its face consisted of two featureless bony plates, gaping open vertically in death.”

  “Okay,” the man behind the door jumped right in—as if, as the stories grew shorter, or more concise, so too must the time in between them, “well, where I come from, after a severe lightning storm people in Eastborough started seeing UFOs—but a couple of witnesses who saw them up close over Eastborough Swamp said they were actually giant floating jellyfish creatures, maybe shifted here from another dimension.”

  “Well where I come from,” Ware returned, “many people have witnessed a phenomenon they call the Ephemeral Eye, which appears in the sky like a floating, green-glowing eye the size of a dirigible, and often the people who see it are left psychically scarred.”

  “Where I come from,” said the stranger from Eastborough, “multiple people have encountered the ghost of a Native American woman who haunts a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant near the lake where she drowned hundreds of years ago.”

  “Where I come from, there was a plant that manufactured pain ointment but it caused terrible side effects, and so forty years ago the place was demolished, but a ghostly afterimage of the building remains on the same spot and glows in the night.”

  “Well where I come from…” said the man in the toilet stall.

  They went on this way for some time.

  The restroom was unoccupied except for the two of them, and beyond its threshold the station had gone unnaturally silent, as if the wild blizzard had broken in through the windows and filled the great hall—burying the coffee and book stands out in the middle of its floor, rising to the feet of the silhouettes stranded on the advertising banners hanging from the ceiling, and blocking the restroom doorway just around the corner from them. Or had that apocalyptic fire swept in, the fire the madwoman had warned would arrive first on a train, turning all to ash except for the two of them, safe in this unlikely shelter?

  Ware knew it was, instead, that the hour had grown very late—past the time of the last inbound commuter train, which would have arrived in Boston at 1:30 AM. Another inbound train wouldn’t embark from Worcester’s Union Station, the first city on his pocket schedule, until 4:45 AM. He had never been to South Station at this hour before. If a security guard or policeman should come in here and find them, would they be in trouble? Be evicted? Or was it permissible for one to remain in this public place in the lonely purgatory of in-between hours?

  During their long exchange, Ware had found he could no longer bear the now considerable discomfort in his bladder, but he had been reluctant to leave his spot and use one of the urinals lest the cadence of their conversation be broken. Finally he had come upon the solution of drinking down the last cold dregs of his coffee, unzipping his pants right there and relieving himself in the paper cup (which he was grateful had been of large size). No one came into the restroom to witness this, and if the man on the other side of the door suspected he didn’t let on. Ware then returned the lid to the cup and set it down by his foot, never once breaking the rhythm of his own rapid-fire anecdotes.

  Ware had been hesitant, all this time, to relate the story of the house of Edwin Cronos—or had he only been saving it up? But what was he to do now, to follow his unseen companion’s one sentence tease about a stone graveyard cherub that had been accidentally struck by a worker’s snow plow, and repaid him for it by climbing up the side of his house and grinning in at him through his bedroom window? And so…

  “Where I come from, long before I was born, there was a man named Edwin Cronos…said to be a striking figure, thin and darkly handsome, both magnetic and oddly repellent. What makes him notable, however, is that Cronos dreamed of constructing a machine that might bridge the distances of time, space, and
dimension. Yet sometimes the mind of the dreamer isn’t enough to achieve its goal. In order to realize his dream, Edwin Cronos had to make use of the minds of others.

  But how did the brainchild of this controversial inventor come about? Raised as he was by parents who ran a sanitarium—parents whose experimental methods of dealing with the insane involved lobotomies and electric shocks—his childhood influenced his adult obsessions. In correspondence with a friend, dated 1910, Cronos wrote—and I quote: ‘We lived in the same building that housed the inmates, those wailing, weeping, cackling lost souls who were in a perverse way like an extension of our family. And did not the energies of their tormented minds fill those rooms, seep into the very walls, until the house was like a great battery alive with maniacal power? Could a building, then, be designed in such a way that it not only absorbed the mental energies of its tenants, but harnessed them, amplified them, and directed those energies to whatever purpose one might desire?’

  One can deduce that Cronos planned to use these hypothetical energies in his efforts to move through time, to pass into other dimensions. Cronos’ obsession was to see beyond our mundane reality, to cross the boundaries that limit human understanding.

  When Cronos’ parents were only in their fifties, they mysteriously died within two months of each other, leaving the sanitarium to their son. With the funds that he also inherited, Cronos then commenced a strange construction project, altering the sanitarium in unusual ways. He brought in mechanics, electricians, workers in many fields to execute his vision. And while he was executing his vision, townspeople claimed he was also executing the sanitarium’s patients...for within a span of a single year, every one of the 29 inmates had died off. These people had been indigents, and were buried in a potter’s field. Later, though, when their coffins were disinterred for a belated investigation, eleven of them were found to be empty. The authorities had no answers, but rumors abounded...

  Rumors that Cronos had removed the brain of every inmate.

  Rumors that glass tanks had been installed throughout the house—some in the basement, others secreted inside the walls—in which those brains were preserved. And further, that the brains were in some way still alive...somehow powering the huge contraption that Cronos’ home had become.

  Some suggested that the eleven missing inmates, even with their brains removed, were kept alive within that house as undead guinea pigs.

  Some suggested that in his explorations into alien realms, Cronos captured a host of unearthly beings, and confined them in his home for study.

  Only one thing is for certain.

  On 11/29, 1912, Edwin Cronos’ fellow townspeople woke up to find that his entire house had vanished, leaving only a gaping foundation—like the skull of a man with his brain removed.”

  “Hm!” said the man on the other side of the door. “Where I come from, in Eastborough we had someone called Edward Kronos, now that you remind me…not Edwin, because I’d remember that—it was my grandfather’s name, and my middle name is Edwin in honor of him. Anyway, this Edward Kronos, if I recall his name correctly, moved into town in the early 80s…maybe this was in 1981, too, the year I drove to Maine for Christmas. I know I had already moved back to town from Worcester.

  The townspeople took notice of Kronos, because he bought a little old train station that had been boarded up since before I was born. This station was right off the center of town, perched up on an embankment where the tracks crossed an old rusty railroad bridge, which many cars would drive under every day to approach Eastborough center. My mother said she used to catch the train to Boston at this station, but as I say Eastborough doesn’t have a train stop anymore.

  In any case, the town sold Kronos the old station, and I can’t remember what it was he said he wanted to do there—if we were ever told. I think it was supposed to be some kind of private clinic or rehab center or something. We thought this, because we’d see some of Kronos’ patients around there sometimes…standing outside on the old train platform, watching the occasional freight train go by, or else facing down the embankment toward the street and staring at the traffic for hours. Even in the rain. Kronos didn’t seem to know they were out there sometimes—he’d appear in the door and shout at them, scold them, go and grab them by the arm and drag them back inside. I remember feeling sorry for the people I saw, whatever their condition was.

  I saw him myself, one time, when he snatched the arm of a young woman who appeared to be heavily medicated, spun her around and walked her back into the building. He was a dapper looking kind of guy—tall and thin, with dark hair. He seemed to make direct eye contact with me, and for no good reason I remember shivering. Not that at such a distance, in my car on my way to work, I could really have discerned the expression on his face.

  Kronos was the victim of a mysterious fire himself, and his clinic or whatever it was inside that old station burned so badly that no one could tell which of the various bodies discovered inside was his. If any of them. His patients were never identified—if patients they were.

  For years later, one of the Eastborough firefighters who responded to the scene blathered stories when he had too many beers in him…having his listeners believe that when the burned bodies were examined, they were found to be only charred skeletons—and very old skeletons at that. Some of those who heard these stories, and didn’t dismiss them outright, suggested that the old bones hadn’t belonged to any of his patients, then, but to anatomical or archeological specimens of some kind…perhaps used by Kronos for study or research.

  But there was no disputing that the fire was a bad one—witnesses claimed they saw a huge ball of blue flame erupt into the sky in an explosion that rattled windows halfway across the town. And as fate would have it, at that moment a train was rushing past the station, and it caught on fire too. Thank God it was a freight train, not a passenger train, or the loss of life would have been much greater. Witnesses described the train roaring off to disappear into the night, all on fire and trailing those blue flames into the sky. A gas fire, maybe—I suppose that might explain the eerie blue color of the flames…

  But how can you explain the fact that the freight train that caught fire and continued on into the night never arrived at its destination…and was never discovered? Not intact, not as a wreck; not a nut or bolt from that train ever turned up, let alone the couple of men aboard it—and its fate remains one of Eastborough’s most provocative mysteries.”

  Ahh, thought Ware. Had the train’s alchemical flames caused it to plunge into another realm…and when it came time for it to emerge—maybe right here at South Station—would it bring the fires that would burn away the world? Or at least, burn away this world? If so, Ware hoped the doomsday train would be a long time coming. He visited this reality fairly often, and was fond of it.

  He contemplated, now, whether to tell the stranger the rest about the house of Edwin Cronos…and in so doing, divulge personal information about himself. Himself, and where he came from. Well, they had become intimate now, hadn’t they? Even if they hadn’t revealed too much about themselves—such as their names—wasn’t it revealing a lot to share the things one took interest in, those things preserved in jars of alcohol in one’s own internal museum of curiosities?

  Ware wondered about the other man’s identity. Perhaps the stranger would pull the door open at last to unveil a thin, dapper-looking man with sleeked dark hair, sitting there on the toilet like a magician in his conjuror’s box, who would grin up at Ware and intone, “But you see, my dear fellow…I am Edwin Cronos!”

  Or, would Ware push the door open, his curiosity turned to impatience, and find that the stall was actually empty? That he had been talking with a ghost all this time?

  Or, recalling his glimpse of the man’s red-white-and-blue striped boxer shorts that matched a pair he owned, might he look again into the stall and find himself seated there—an alternate version, a doppelganger of himself, who dwelt in this reality and whose existence he had never suspected
until this day?

  But maybe the man’s identity was nothing so intriguing or bizarre as any of those possibilities; just another seemingly undistinguished traveler, like himself.

  Ware found that for some reason, he didn’t really want to learn the man’s name or particulars. Wasn’t it an anonymous reader that novelists wrote for? If only for a friend or family member, wasn’t the storytelling less rewarding?

  Be that as it may, he made the decision to go on about Edwin Cronos, and thus about himself—a little about himself, anyway. And so, Ware began, “Where I come from, there is one more station on the Framingham/Worcester Line. It’s the very first station, before Worcester…or the last stop, depending on which direction you’re going. That station is in my hometown, which is called Gosston. Not many people here know about the Gosston stop—but then, not many Gosstonians know about this place, either. Some few authorities in your world, and some in mine, permit a limited degree of travel between the two, on an irregular schedule. Some people have occasionally slipped through from my reality to yours, and from yours to mine, accidentally or surreptitiously, but I am one of the few agents afforded the liberty of sanctioned travel. My employers have business dealings in your realm—in Boston, usually, though I have been to other cities. This particular trip, however, was simply for pleasure—a little bit of leisure time.

  You may well wonder, no doubt wonder—and rightly so—how this travel from one reality to another, alternate reality can be possible. Well, it wasn’t always possible. We have Edwin Cronos, in fact, to thank for changing all that.

  As I say, nearly a hundred years ago Cronos’ house vanished, leaving only a raw pit—even the basement floor had gone. The police were summoned, then workers for what we would now call the town highway department, who were to investigate possible causes, such as a gas explosion (though no one in the town had heard anything of the sort). The pit was steaming with mist in the chilly November air, and so the crew couldn’t see into it very well…were thus reluctant to venture into the hole. Perhaps they experienced an intuition, a sense of foreboding. One worker, however, was bolder than the others—a big burly sort who had been in prison before, and bore a variety of crude tattoos, including a blue teardrop on one cheek. He clambered down into the earthen foundation, slipping into the churning fog contained in that crater.