Beyond The Door

by Jeffrey Thomas

  The others called down to him after long minutes had passed. As you may guess, there was no reply. The man had disappeared.

  No one dared descend into the pit again. It was filled in, covered over. The government took possession of the property, and fenced it off. Some other men, more cautious, more learned, came to study that covered spot and the various anomalous phenomena said to occur there. But it wasn’t for another fifty years, or so, that the town built a train station there. A train station that was not open to the general citizens of Gosston.

  The transitional zone between our two realms is a long tunnel, and I’ve heard whispered stories of what the workers experienced when they laid down the tracks that pass through it. Another disappearance, one man disemboweled, one man with his eyes clawed out (by a beast, or by himself to stop his eyes from seeing something terrible?). Two men committed to asylums. Finally they had to use prisoners to complete the work—no one else was willing.

  Usually the journey back and forth between our respective realms is uneventful, but sometimes there are glitches, snafus. As fate would have it, one such problem occurred on my own very first journey on the train, from Gosston to Worcester and beyond to Boston.

  I couldn’t help but shudder the first time I saw the tunnel, a very short distance from the train station. That yawning black maw. There were no lights in its leviathan’s throat, and when the train passed inside it was as though we had rocketed into outer space—but space as it would be after the very last star had gone cold.

  Utter blackness, the train rushing…rattling…me swaying in my seat, both fists clenching the handle of my briefcase. My reflection was very sharply defined in my window, and with my eyes pooled black in my pallid face I was almost too afraid to gaze upon my own seemingly transfigured visage.

  Then, apparently the train’s operator spotted something obstructing the tracks, and the train had to be brought to a halt. This made me rather anxious, I must confess. I leaned closer to my window, trying my best to make out at least some feature out there. I was alone in my car, and at that point had seen no one who might explain why we had stopped.

  As I was staring out the window again, after having glanced about fruitlessly for a conductor, a flash of lightning briefly lit the sky. The sky? When had we emerged from the tunnel? I hadn’t noticed, for the landscape outside was as absolutely black as had been the tunnel’s interior—and yet we had embarked only a brief time ago, in the brightness of early morning! But I had been told it would also be morning on the other side!

  The strobe flash of lightning had, for an instant, illuminated a house in the distance, large and antiquated. It was the only feature I had made out on the flat plain that seemed to lay outside; there had been no hills visible in the distance, no trees alongside the tracks or the house…no neighboring houses, either.

  At last the conductor entered my car, causing me to whip around in my seat, startled. He is a red-haired man named Barney whom you yourself may have met on the Framingham/Worcester Line. Should you meet him again, you mustn’t broach that I revealed to you that Barney is a Gosstonian, like myself. This was my own first encounter with him, though we are long acquainted with each other by now.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ he reported, ‘but there’s been a temporary delay…we should be back on our journey shortly.’

  ‘But what is it?’ I asked him.

  ‘Something on the tracks, sir…we’re just waiting for our way to be clear again.’

  Perhaps it was only some debris needing to be removed by the train’s personnel. But later I wondered if it had been something else, something sentient, that needed to clear itself off the tracks before we could continue.

  ‘Are we on the far side now?’ I asked the conductor. ‘This is what it looks like—night?’

  Barney replied, ‘We haven’t yet left the tunnel, sir.’

  ‘Haven’t left the tunnel? What?’ Confused, I turned to once more gaze through my reflection at the scene beyond. At first I discerned nothing in that inkiness, until another lightning flash illuminated that house again. The house appeared larger to me this time, but then my glimpses of it had been so brief.

  ‘I shouldn’t look outside if I were you, sir,’ Barney advised. ‘Perhaps you should rest your eyes for a bit until we’re underway again. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must see to the other passengers.’

  I hadn’t seen any other passengers, but I supposed they had their own cars to themselves, as did I. I didn’t protest as Barney continued on his way, and left me alone once more.

  But I didn’t heed his advice, and immediately turned to the window again. Within seconds, yet another fluttering blue flash, followed by a low rumble that seemed to roll slowly toward the train like an ocean wave, but dissipated before reaching it.

  Outside, that rambling old house—but this time, I was surprised to realize that the reason it had seemed larger on my second glimpse was because we had drawn closer to it…and were now closer still. The train had been making creeping progress, then, hadn’t stopped completely—and yet I had felt no movement. Normally, the rattling vibrations of the train in motion were quite distinct.

  No…no, I was certain. Even as the sky lit up once again, and I saw that the huge house with its many dark windows now almost filled my view, I intuitively grasped the truth. The train had stopped. It was the house that was moving…closer and closer to the train.

  And it wasn’t just a house. It was the former sanitarium owned and run by the parents of Edwin Cronos. It had disappeared many, many years before my birth, so of course I had never seen it, but I knew…

  I looked around wildly for the conductor again, though I knew he was not there beside me. When I looked back outside the window, the blackness was so pure that I felt surely, surely the house could not be looming so near!

  And yet, the lightning revealed that it was—even nearer—so near I thought that if it should continue, the house would soon be resting flank-to-flank against the train. And then what? Would it push the train over? Trample and crush it, with me trapped inside?

  The former asylum had shifted so close, in fact, that I could plainly see a figure framed in one of its windows, face and palms pressed up against the glass—peering out at me just as I peered out at it. I saw much in that flare of lightning—and the image remains imprinted on my mind forever.

  The figure’s expression was blank, its eyes glazed and dead, but its mouth worked soundlessly. It was nude, its head shaved bald—which made it quite evident that a surgical scar completely encircled that head, as if the top of its skull had been sawed off and then reaffixed.

  The figure was a man, once apparently of a large and sturdy frame but now with his flesh drooping on his bones. He was not old, however. As distressing as his appearance was, I would never have believed him to be over a hundred years old—had the lightning not picked out the crude tattoos on his body, including a blue teardrop tattooed on the man’s cheek.

  Just then the train jolted into movement once again, pitching me in my seat, and I seized hold of the back of the seat ahead of me to steady myself. My fingers nearly tore into the upholstery.

  The prolonged, flickering lightning flash had faded. Only a black void outside, as we continued on our way. When another lightning burst came a minute or two later, there was no longer a house visible, near or far. Not a single feature on that flat, enigmatic plain between planes…and it remained that way, until we emerged out the other side of the tunnel, into the bright morning air of your world.

  I have traveled through the transitional zone numerous times since, and thankfully have never encountered the house of Edwin Cronos again. But on each and every occasion, I look out through my own reflection warily…wondering if this time, another interdimensional storm will brew, and reveal that which should remain in darkness.”

  The man whom Ware had been speaking with through the door let out a sigh. But it didn’t sound like a sigh of impatience or derision; rather, more like a sigh of appreciation,
even contentment. Through the door, the stranger said, “Where I come from, not many people would believe that story—but somehow I do. Every word.”

  Ware smiled. “Where I come from we know how to thank someone for a compliment like that.”

  Then, he was startled and turned as a man stepped into the restroom behind him—followed quickly by an influx of other men. His own story of the transitional tunnel had made him jumpy, but he realized that this group of men pouring in had just disembarked from the first train or trains of the new morning. Once more, the nexus that was South Station would be swarming with bodies, humming with their voices.

  Out of the blue, the man in the toilet stall said, “Sorry, but I really have to go now.”

  “Oh,” said Ware, thrown by the rather abrupt shift in the approach to their discourse. He looked at his wristwatch, a jumble of arrival and departure times—uncertainly recalled and thus incoherent—tumbling through his mind. “Is your train coming?”

  “No…I mean, I really have to do my business on the toilet now. I feel a little funny about it with you standing just outside the door.”

  “Oh!” Ware chuckled uncomfortably, embarrassed. “Of course. Excuse me…I’ll, ah...I’ll go take care of my own business.” He bent to retrieve his paper cup of urine (it had grown cool, as had his coffee hours earlier), then turned and dropped it into a trash container. He crowded in beside others at the sink counter, washed his hands, then turned toward the dryers and held his hands under one of them. Over the roar of the device’s hot wind, to his right he heard several toilets flush in close succession…but it was a commonplace sound, a peripheral awareness, and he didn’t think anything of it at first. When he’d finished drying his hands and the hot wind died down it finally hit him, and he glanced sharply toward the row of toilet stalls. He caught a glimpse of a heavyset black man entering into the stall outside of which he had been standing for so many hours.

  Ware looked toward the entrance to the restroom, the flow of traffic pouring in and out. Was one of those men now leaving the man with whom he had conversed all through the previous day and night? Maybe that one, seen from the back…he was balding, graying a little—might be fifty-two, the age the man behind the door had given him. But that man, too, could be that age. Or that one. How could he say? They had never seen each other’s face.

  None of the men exiting the restroom against the current of those entering the restroom glanced back at him. If the man behind the door had looked in his direction as he vacated the toilet stall, how would he know that Ware was standing at the hand dryers instead of at a urinal? How could he tell whether or not Ware had already passed outside? If he had seen Ware as he left the stall, he never would have known that this was the stranger—the friend—with whom he had connected for those long hours. For that brief and transient time.

  Smiling to himself, Ware exited the restroom and found that Boston’s South Station was not filled with snow halfway to its ceiling. Was not a burnt ruin in the wake of apocalyptic flames. The great hall was as it had been yesterday when he had entered the restroom, as if all that had transpired had taken place within mere minutes. Or as if the entire episode had been a dream.

  Ware had never learned where his friend was going—whether venturing into Boston, or on his way out of the city. Whatever his destination, Ware wished him Godspeed.

  He himself now had to wait until the last outbound train headed to Worcester’s Union Station—leaving South Station at 10:20 PM, arriving in Worcester at 11:56 PM. There was a later train out of South Station, leaving at 11:25, but it didn’t go beyond Framingham. It wouldn’t take him on past Worcester’s Union Station, on past the train schedule he carried in his pocket, to his home of Gosston.

  Presumably he would be the only passenger riding from Worcester to Gosston tonight, but one never knew. Perhaps he would meet the madwoman, returning to the only place where she might now feel she belonged. Or perhaps he’d even meet his friend…his curiosity peaked by Ware’s stories, and wanting to explore the city for himself. That was a nice thought, wasn’t it?

  In the meantime, Ware had quite a bit of time to kill, and he was here merely as a tourist today so he thought he would visit the New England Aquarium, the Museum of Fine Arts or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Oh yes, and the wonderful Museum of Science—it had been a while since last he had gone there. Of course, these places were not really the same kind of experience as encountering the elusive home of Edwin Cronos, visiting the Amos House of Oddities & Curiosities, or touring a ghost train attraction created by two neighborhood boys…but they would have to do.

  Ware crossed the broad glossy floor of the station, passed the entrance to the subway, approached the glass doors that opened onto Atlantic Avenue. Through those doors, he could see that the wild snow had stopped falling sometime during the previous day or night, and it had been cleared from sidewalk and street. Through the doors, he saw the bustle of cars, buses, pedestrians.

  Smiling to himself once more, Ware reached out and pushed one of those doors open—and passed through.

  About The Author

  Jeffrey Thomas is the author of such novels as Deadstock, Blue War, The Fall Of Hades, Letters From Hades and A Nightmare On Elm Street: The Dream Dealers, and collections such as Punktown, Voices From Hades, Aaaiiieee!!! and Thirteen Specimens. He has written about Gosston before, in his collection Nocturnal Emissions, and about the fictitious town of Eastborough, Massachusetts in numerous stories. He lives somewhere to the west of Eastborough. Visit his blog at: http://punktalk.punktowner.com.

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