Undead as a Doornail

by William F Aicher

  Now you might be wondering why I don’t just take the doors off the hinges completely. And the simple answer is darkness. The less the light gets in, the stronger the connection.

  So, I took up the length of rope I left sitting on the nightstand and stepped into the cramped, empty space of the closet. The dusty floorboards creaked under my weight, and a knock from my forehead sent the lone incandescent bulb swinging. My shadow danced across the closet, just like you’d see in a haunted house, and I pulled the door closed. With one end of the rope tied to the doorknob, I cinched the other around my waist and pulled it snug, letting out a tiny gasp of breath as the knot tightened.

  Better to keep the knot strong and my lifeline firmly intact than to risk the rope slipping off again like it did last October.

  Now, for this next part, you might think I have some sort of meditation, mantra, or magic spell I chant to open a portal, but that’s not quite how Eitherspace works. At least not for me. For me, I go about things a little differently, and as far as I know, I’m the only one my patent-pending method works for.

  I reached down into my pocket, pulled out my Altoids tin, and opened it up. A whiff of peppermint caught in my nostrils, but the mints themselves had long ago been consumed. Now, just a few waxy balls rolled around the tin. I took one, put it in my mouth, and pulled the chain to plunge the space into darkness. Stepping slowly ahead, I moved until the mildewed plaster of the walls met my fingertips and leaned forward. My eyes closed and forehead resting against the wall, I bit down on the little capsule and waited.

  But I didn’t have to wait for long. Even though I’d started to build up a bit of a tolerance to the stuff, potassium cyanide still works. And within a few seconds, my body started to seize up, my mind went as black as the space around me, and I fell forward—forward through the wall and into the darkness of Eitherspace.

  It’s a place only the dead—or undead—can enter. At least that’s what I’ve assumed. Never had official training or anything, and kind of discovered it by mistake. But Eitherspace is a place I’ve been plenty of times before. The point with reality on one side and the ethereal plane on the other where you’re stuck between living and dead. On your way from one existence to the other. A kind of limbo no-man’s-land where, if you know how to travel it, you can take a trip anywhere you want.

  Problem is, you gotta die to start the journey. And the fact that I found myself there now, in this empty void of blackness and space, meant the suicide capsule did its job like usual, and I was dead. Still, even though I’d been here before, the dizziness and confusion settled in just the same. When you’re in Eitherspace, up is down and left is right, and nothing quite makes sense. Eventually, you can get some gauge and sense of direction, but you won’t find any ground to walk on, and there’s nothing everywhere you look. You just kind of step and swim and the air is denser than air in everyday reality, but not as thick as water. You can feel it around you like you’re moving through a fluffy cloud of black gelatin, and everything is deathly silent. Like your ears are stuffed with cotton balls, you’re trapped in an anechoic chamber, and decide to slide on a pair of noise-canceling headphones for good measure.

  Traveling here also doesn’t really make much sense. Not in the normal sense of travel. There’s no beginning, and there’s no end. Once you’re in, you’re in. And finding your way back out can be impossible. That’s what the rope was for. It was my lifeline—literally. My foolproof method to find my way back home.

  But I wasn’t going home. I was going to Nancy’s place. That big old house down on North Genesee Avenue, and getting there wasn’t as simple as putting in a GPS coordinate and asking Google to give you directions. Nothing here follows the geographic layout of reality. It’s everywhere and nowhere, and you can get where you want to go, or you might end up lost forever. Each of these possibilities seems equally likely, and the first time I found myself here all those years ago, what felt like seconds had been much, much longer.

  To travel where I need, I’ve found the best thing to do is kind of “will it” to happen. Eitherspace exists as much in the mind as in another space, and to be honest, I am pretty sure it’s the same place we go when we dream. Or if not the same, at least something very similar.

  Over the past few decades, I’ve learned to control my dreams through a process called lucid dreaming. I’ve learned to will myself to sleep, and to build triggers into my dreams to let me know I’m dreaming. My most common trigger is a pink softball—and so I’ve taught myself to implant pink softballs in my dreams by concentrating on them as I go to sleep and pass from the waking world to the dreaming. Eitherspace isn’t quite the same, as I know I’m there every time I visit—and rather than be filled with fantastical sights and experiences like our dreams, I’m surrounded by an empty space crowded with nothing. But the same general concepts apply, and like a dream, if you know you’re there, you can control reality to your liking.

  And that’s how you travel in Eitherspace. Or at least how I travel. In the blackness, I imagine the place I need to be, and reality shifts around me like a blacked-out version of Inception. Locations move, and doorways appear and disappear until finally, everything stops, and you’re left with a new doorway in front of you. Then, leaving as simple as stepping through a doorway.

  There, in the void of Eitherspace, I floated. The emptiness spun around me as my hair and clothes floated in the dense liquid black, and I concentrated. I thought of Nancy, and I thought of her address. I pictured the room in my mind the best I could envision it, knowing that even if my imagination were incorrect, it was the willing of reality that made the travel possible. If I believed that was Nancy’s place, and I could see it in my mind, my vision was as good as real, and space would adjust to my will.

  Eventually, a door began to materialize before me, the inky black taking form amid the rest of the nothing until it solidified and shimmered against the empty backdrop. I reached out, twisted the handle, and fell through the door, alive and well in Nancy Langenkamp’s bedroom.

  Chapter Three

  When you come back from the dead, it takes a little while to find your bearings. All that back and forth of heart pumping, not pumping, oxygen to your brain, etc.? It gets to you. And that’s without factoring in any of the side effects of traveling to Eitherspace, which has its own complications. Lying on the floor of Nancy’s bedroom, it took a few minutes for the feeling to return in my fingers and toes and the whole process stung like a billion pins and needles all stabbing me at once. Imagine the worst sleeping foot or other limbs you’ve ever had, and then apply it to your entire body.

  When I came through, my biggest concern was whether the room would still be occupied. Police tend to spend some time in a crime scene once they’ve started an investigation, and more often than not you run the risk of barging in on a grieving parent or other loved one still in the room. And even though when I come back to life after a trip through Eitherspace, I come back fully clothed and healed of any wound that took me there, I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve been lucky to escape from a herd of questioning detectives wondering how in the hell I wandered into their crime scene.

  As I lay there, half-paralyzed on the carpet of Nancy Langenkamp’s bedroom, I thanked God the room was empty. With the lights out and only the glow of the full moon through the east window as my guide, I searched the space and breathed a sigh of relief when my eyes fell onto the closed door to the hallway. Probably taped up with crime scene tape on the other side, to make sure no one came in or out without the police knowing.

  Still, the house was far from lifeless. The sound of stomping feet and hurried conversation filtered through the vents and floorboards up from the first level. I’d risked a lot coming here this soon, and the chances were high that police were still on the scene. And if even if they’d left, the parents wouldn’t be able to sleep. I could imagine Mrs. Langenkamp sitting downstairs on the couch, a cup of coffee in her hand, shivering with a blanket over her shoulders w
hile her husband rubbed her shoulders and the police asked for any information or a recent photo that might be useful. Did she have a boyfriend? Any enemies? Was she happy at home? Had she been talking to any strangers online they were aware of? Problems with drugs?

  Or maybe the police were already gone, left the parents to deal with the grief and uncertainty that comes from the disappearance of a child (and to a parent, even a teenager is a child), and she was at the window, pacing back and forth waiting for her baby to come home.

  I flexed my fingers and toes as the needles vanished, and mobility returned. After a few more seconds, I pulled myself to my feet, and the first thing I did was step across the room to the window. Squad car still in the driveway, lights off now so as to not cause any more disturbance in the neighborhood than had already happened. Along the street, lamps glowed in several windows, signaling the few who had been awoken by the flashing lights and sirens when things first went down. Silhouettes against some of them indicated not everyone had given up on the show, and still hoped to see some action tonight from the nightmare on North Genesee.

  Nothing seemed amiss in the bedroom—just the normal room you’d expect from a teenage girl. Some stuffed animals laying on the floor, likely leftovers from a childhood she still held onto as the last vestiges of innocence slipped away. Makeup on the dresser. A spray of faux-polaroid prints on the wall—a lot of them selfies, but with a variety of friends, all doing normal teenagerly things. A shared ice cream. A view from what appeared to be Mansford Park with the Mississippi River in the background.

  Still, the room felt in disarray. And not from the messed up sheets or the scattering of books that seemed like they’d been pushed off the bedside table. No, this was something different. More a feeling than something you could see. A chill in the air. The hint of foul odor in the nose. An earthy taste upon the tongue.

  I slid my night vision goggles over my head and flicked the “on” switch, plunging the space into an unearthly green. Even with the increased vision, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror and jumped at the sight. Not that I was frightening, or looked out of sorts, but I still tend to get spooked. It’s unnerving, hunting monsters. You never know where one will come from, and most of the time they pop out from the places you’d least expect.

  But other than my reflection, nothing else in the room moved. Whatever happened here when Nancy disappeared seemed to be over, and I was starting to question whether my gut had been right on this one or it had been another case of a bad burrito from El Taco Loco. I gave the room another scan with the PKE meter, checking for any disturbances. This didn’t seem like a haunting, though you never know. Better to be safe than sorry—but usually, a ghost can’t take someone. You need to be something physical to interact with another physical item as big as a human.

  I plopped down on the edge of the bed and took the night vision goggles from my head. The noises downstairs were starting to peter out, and the creak of my butt on the bed could have been audible from down there. Damned spring mattresses. When are people going to give in and spring for the memory foam? It’s a hell of a lot more comfortable, and a lot quieter. But then again, when you have a teenage girl at home, sometimes having a noisy mattress is the best deterrent for any unwanted extracurricular activities should a boy come over to “study.”

  Hearing no disturbances downstairs, aside from the occasional wail of who I assume must have been Nancy’s mother, I laid back on the bed and groaned as my back stretched across the cotton duvet. How long had it been since I slept? Sunrise couldn’t be far off, and all this time awake was catching up with me. I lit a cigarette and took a puff while I stared at the ceiling, listening for any other sounds in the room and generally contemplating my life and why the hell I had decided it would be a smart idea to hunt monsters.

  These things weren’t my problem. At least, not usually. The occasional run-in here and there, like when you’re walking down the street, and a black cat crosses your path. Most people only see the cat. I see the spirit usually latched on to it. And once in a while, the spirits know I see them, and that pisses them off. Still, fighting off a possessed cat here and there is a small price to pay for immortality.

  I took another drag from the cigarette and puffed the smoke out in the air above me. For fun, I slipped my goggles to thermal view and watched as the cloud erupted into a brilliant display of color that slowly faded out as the cancer cloud dissipated into the room. Whoever thought smoking was a nasty habit never watched it from this point of view.

  As I rose from the bed, a rush of blood pummeled me in the head along with the nicotine, and the room spun. I snuffed out my cigarette in a pink coffee mug decorated with some distorted horses with abnormally large doe-eyes and the words “Friendship is magic!” printed on the side and got back to work.

  Little pockets of heat emanated from the doorway to closet, like wiggly stars in a night sky. Upon closer inspection, they revealed themselves to be something much less magical, however. A stream of maggots and worms and centipedes had burrowed into the carpeting, a few of them mushed by my footsteps faded out slowly out of view as they cooled to room temperature. I dropped to the floor and sniffed the polyester. Definitely where the stench of decay had been coming from. Something had been here, and it brought along a trail of death and rot.

  My eyes followed the trail across the carpet from the closet, where it stopped dead at the side of Nancy’s bed. But there, another foot or two away from the trail’s end, from what appeared to be the space underneath the bed, a huge heat signature blossomed. Swelling and pulsing, the technicolor blob changed shape before my eyes, occasionally splitting into several separate parts, then back again into one.

  I ventured closer, crawling across the carpet while the bugs crunched beneath my knees. Something was under there, alright. Hiding in the dark. But when I tried to search beneath the bed, I couldn’t bring my eyes low enough to the ground with the headset on. So, I took the goggles off and placed them beside me, while I searched the room for something good for poking. Problem is, high-school girls don’t tend to have a lot of poking sticks. Since she didn’t appear to be on the hockey team or golf team, there wasn’t anything like that to poke with either. Just some pencils in a cup on her desk, and they weren’t going to help much.

  I nudged myself closer to the bed, put my cheek to the floor, cocked my ear toward the bed, and listened. A kind of scurrying, crunching sound crackled out from the darkness, along with what sounded like a bunch of whispered high-pitched voices, almost like a faint song caught on the gust of wind. I sniffed the air and caught a noseful of stench. Whatever was under there wasn’t going to be pleasant. But I reached my hand under anyway.

  My fingertips lit upon a slick powdery surface that quivered beneath my touch, then was pulled away in an instant. A sharp pain erupted from my index finger, and I yanked my hand back, away from whatever was underneath. As my hand came back into view, a flutter of wings unfurled, and a flock of parasitic fairies flew out from the cavernous dark beneath Nancy’s bed. Nasty little fuckers, they didn’t look anything like a fairy in a storybook but instead were more like a cross between a bat and an overgrown flukeworm—misshapen, winged, and fanged. The pain in my finger flared up again as I used my other hand to brush the parafairies out of my face, and once things cleared up, I saw one had firmly attached its jaw to the length of my finger.

  I flicked my hand around, choking down the urge to scream and alert everyone to my presence, but the fairy held strong. Three others swooped in at me, snatching at my hair and clawing at my face while I frantically stumbled about the room trying to shake the other one loose. Finally, I yanked open Nancy’s dresser, shoved the bastard in and slammed the drawer shut as I pulled my hand free. A loud crack rang out as the drawer closed on my fingers, and the fairy’s head crushed beneath the blow. A black mess of tarry blood sprayed the room, my face, and my clothes. And when I took my hand from the drawer, the crooked way my finge
r bent told me in no uncertain terms it had been broken.

  The violent end to that parafairy’s life sure as hell pissed off the others, and they came swooping in toward me again. As they dove-bomb, I took the flask from my coat pocket, popped the cap, and took a swig. Then I shook the rest of the whiskey out into the air, dousing those little shits until they were dripping. They sputtered in the air, and one crashed to the floor at my feet. I flicked the lighter, took it to the downed pilot, and lit him up.

  By now, my plan of keeping quiet had gone completely to shit, and the room roared up in a blaze of fire. A stampede of feet came trampling up the stairs outside, and I knew I had to get the hell out. Flaming fairies dancing in the air, and Nancy’s bed ablaze, I made a beeline for the closet. As I tore open the closet, the bedroom door broke from its frame, followed by a big black boot attached to a pissed off cop. As I dove into the closet, I unsheathed my old cutlass from its scabbard, collapsed onto the blade, seppuku-style, and disappeared back into Eitherspace.

  According to the news, Nancy’s house burned down to the ground that night. I still feel pretty bad about that. But at least no one was hurt.

  Well, no one but me.

  Chapter Four

  Believe it or not, plunging an old, rusty sword into your chest hurts. Especially if you don’t angle the thing right and have to shatter a few ribs on the way to your heart, which is what I had to do. So, when I came to in the inky void of Eitherspace, my chest hurt like a motherfucker. A few broken bones and a hole in the heart, with a big old glob of blood floating there in front of me. I winced as I pulled the sword out, screamed … and hoped nothing heard me.