Alex, the Dog and the Unopenable Door

by Ross Montgomery

  Alex stared back in disbelief. Matthew sighed and reached out a hand. He placed it on Alex’s shoulder.

  ‘Look, Alex,’ he sighed. ‘Just … do whatever you need to do. But don’t forget to come home.’

  With that, he finally gave up the doomed attempt to keep his feet from touching the ground and let go of the chain. He came crashing to the ground and bounced off it like it was a trampoline, speeding off and scattering the wolves behind him like bowling pins.

  ‘That’s it, Reverend!’ cried the Major from up ahead. ‘Come on, everyone – give it everything you’ve got!’

  With a sickening crack Matthew reached the end of his chain and the entire zeppelin lurched backwards in the air. The prisoners pulled and tugged and heaved and hauled until they were fit to burst. The wolves tried to fight them, but it was hopeless. One by one they collapsed on their backs, gasping for breath. With a cheer the prisoners charged, dragging the exhausted wolves backwards across the slimy rocks and heaving the zeppelin away from the centre once and for all.

  ‘So long, Alex!’ cried Matthew.

  ‘Bring back my teeth!’ Martha cried.

  And with that, the smoke swallowed them up, and they vanished from sight.

  Alex’s eyes flickered across the smoke, gazing at the point where his friends had disappeared. He lifted his hand and waved.

  ‘Bye,’ he said quietly.

  He turned around, and stepped slowly to the side of the crater. He heaved himself back up to the dusty path and looked around him. Arnauld was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Arnauld?’ he called out.

  There was no answer. Alex spun round.

  ‘Arn––’

  He stopped.

  There, in the wall in front of him, stood a door. It was made of the same stone as the wall, and was darker still. Alex stood staring at it. There was no doubt what it was.

  He reached out, and opened the Unopenable Door.

  It slowly swung open.

  Inside was a long, dark tunnel. At the end stood a pool of dull grey light.

  ‘Arnauld?’ Alex called out.

  There was no answer. He stood staring into the grey light at the end.

  ‘… Dad?’

  Silence. He gazed down the tunnel. The grey light seemed almost to glow.

  If you go in now, said the voice, you might never be able to get out again.

  Alex slowly stepped inside. It was cold and damp.

  ‘I’m not going back without him,’ he said.

  He carefully unpicked a single thread from the bottom of his jumper and tied it to the handle of the door. Then he turned back to face the pool of grey light.

  And what if you don’t find him? said the voice.

  Alex shrugged. ‘Then I’ll find what he kept going back for,’ he said.

  Step by step, he walked towards the light, his footsteps drumming off the tunnel walls.

  29

  The tunnel ended.

  Alex looked ahead of him and saw nothing. The centre was greyness. Nothing was visible. He could barely even see the ground. He looked up. Even the black walls were swallowed up by it.

  ‘It’s not smoke,’ said Alex. ‘It’s fog.’

  He looked down at his jumper. The bottom few rows had already unravelled. The thread stretched out behind him, back to the door.

  He gazed out into the fog. It was all-encompassing. He reached out a foot carefully and patted it onto the ground. The earth was hard and dead beneath him.

  There was only one way to go now. Alex put his hands to his sides, breathed out and stepped towards the centre. The walls disappeared behind him.

  His father’s ward was almost empty.

  There was a time when it would have been filled with cards and flowers, but nobody sent them any more. It was as simple as a child’s room. A bed; a table; a window. Alex’s father lay on the bed in the centre of the room, breathing, breathing, all his attention focused on breathing. His eyes were closed. His hands trembled slightly. On the wall above his head was a dog calendar.

  ‘Mr Jennings,’ said the nurse. ‘Your son is here to see you.’

  Alex’s father opened his eyes weakly and lolled his head on the pillow. He tried to fix the doorway in his sights.

  ‘Alex,’ he said quietly.

  His father was very sick. He had a mask over his mouth. His left hand held tightly onto the metal side of the bed. It had a plastic tag around it. A machine against the wall hummed.

  ‘You’ve come to visit me,’ he said.

  Alex said nothing. He stepped into the room, towards the bed.

  Alex was enveloped by the fog.

  The jumper had unravelled to his chest. Each step forward picked off another line of hooks, unwinding through the grey behind him, linking him to the past by a single string. The air was silent, as grey as the fog.

  Only his breathing, his heartbeat, his footsteps, made any sound here.

  He kept walking.

  Alex sat beside the bed. The door behind him closed softly.

  His father was little more than a skeleton beneath the soft hospital sheets now. He turned to look at Alex.

  ‘Well,’ he said weakly. ‘You look very smart, in your new uniform.’

  The room was silent. His father’s breathing was hollow inside the plastic mask.

  ‘It must be the holidays,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ said Alex. ‘It’s a school day. I’m not supposed to be here.’

  Alex’s father frowned. ‘What do you …’

  ‘I’ve come to talk to you,’ said Alex.

  The room was filled with the hum of the machine beside them. Alex’s father stared at him.

  ‘Alex, you can’t just …’

  ‘No,’ said Alex firmly. ‘I want to talk to you.’

  Away from the darkness of his bedroom, in the bleak and unforgiving light of the ward, the true extent of how much his father had aged since Alex had last seen him was shocking. Alex now realised why his mother had said she didn’t want him to go to the hospital.

  ‘I want to talk to you,’ said Alex, ‘because I’m not going to wait for you to come home again. I’m not going to wait to listen to your stories. You’re going to tell me everything now.’

  Alex’s father said nothing. His chest rose and fell, as delicate as a paper bag.

  ‘And then when you’re done talking, you won’t ever see me again,’ said Alex. ‘So make it good.’

  Alex sat calmly on the chair, staring at his father. He had known for a long time what he was going to say. He wasn’t going to get angry. He wasn’t going to cry. His father gazed back. Then, very slowly, he pulled off his mask.

  ‘What do you want to know?’ he said.

  Alex kept walking.

  Stitch by stitch, the jumper unravelled.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ said Alex. ‘Why did you keep running away?’

  Alex’s father heaved out a breath. He tried to bring a hand to his face, and gave up.

  ‘The centre,’ he said eventually. ‘I had to find the centre.’

  Alex nodded.

  ‘And did you ever find it?’ he said.

  Alex’s father paused.

  ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘Yes I did.’

  Alex stared at his father.

  ‘Was it worth it?’ he asked.

  Alex’s father looked at him. His eyes saddened, like a flicker in the light of a candle. He shook his head.

  Step by step, stitch by stitch, Alex grew closer to the centre.

  There were no walls around him now. There might not even be ground.

  Alex kept walking.

  Alex threw his hands against the bed, grabbing the metal frame, shaking it with fury.

  ‘Then why go back?’ he cried.

  It was too late to stop trying now. Useless tears rolled down his cheeks.

  ‘Alex,’ said his father. He tried to put out a hand, but Alex tore it away.

  ‘Why go back,’ Alex repeated, his eyes furious and hurt, ‘if the
re was nothing there?’

  ‘Because of what I’d lost,’ cried his father.

  And then, all at once, it was happening.

  Far away, in the fog ahead, a shape was emerging from the darkness.

  ‘You must have lost something very important,’ Alex screamed, ‘to do what you’ve done to me.’

  ‘I did,’ Alex’s father said. ‘Oh I did, I did.’

  And with each step forward that Alex took, with each new line of stitches unstitched, the shape grew closer, clearer, less grey. It rose out of the fog in front of him, as if from the bottom of an ancient well.

  Alex looked down.

  ‘Then what was it?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘I …’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Squiggles,’ his father cried.

  He rolled on the bed, his knees up to his chest, rubbing his hands over his face in misery, sobbing. Alex stared at him, horror-struck.

  ‘Squiggles, Squiggles, Squiggles, Squiggles.’

  Alex turned and ran. He hadn’t known it then, but it was the last time he would ever see his father, and it was the last image of him that he would carry, the sight of him crying on the bed.

  And the last of the stitches gave way.

  A single thread stretched back from his neck now, swallowed up by the grey behind him. Only the collar of the jumper remained, holding him on the spot.

  A pair of bodies lay at his feet. One of them was his father. The other one was a dog. Both were dead.

  Alex looked silently down at the dog. He had known it his whole life, from the photograph on his bedroom wall. He knelt down and placed a hand on its chest. The fur was thick and matted, and very old. It had not been dead for long.

  Alex searched around its neck until he found the worn metal tag. He held the collar up to the light.

  SQUIGGLES

  ‘It was his dog,’ said a voice in the fog.

  Alex didn’t look up immediately. He stayed kneeling on the ground, looking down at the tag in his hand.

  ‘His dog,’ the voice repeated. It was harsher than a whisper, but not much louder. It somehow sounded like two different voices. Slowly, Alex looked up.

  On the other side of the bodies, outlined in the fog, was a figure. It was a figure in the sense that Alex had no idea where the great grey wolf before him ended and the man hunched on its back began.

  ‘Who would have thought?’ said the voice of Davidus Kyte.

  Alex didn’t move from the ground. He stayed crouched. He felt that something terrible would happen if he looked directly at the figure opposite him. Alex stared at the ground instead.

  ‘I mean,’ Kyte continued, ‘to come all the way back here? To spend years and years of his life escaping and being caught … for a dog? I never would have guessed. No, it never once crossed my mind, Alex. Not once.’

  ‘You can walk on the Forbidden Land,’ said Alex calmly.

  The figure stopped.

  ‘Yes, Alex,’ said Kyte. ‘I’m afraid your friends had no idea. I doubt they would have locked me in a room with a trap door if they had known.’

  The figure stepped forwards. The remains of a rotting parachute dragged in the dust behind it. Alex fixed his gaze on the ground, his whole body trembling.

  ‘If you’re going to kill me,’ said Alex calmly, ‘then just get on with it.’

  The figure stopped. It craned its neck for a moment. Alex knew that it was looking at him through the fog. He kept his gaze fixed on the ground.

  ‘Kill you?’ said Kyte, his voice empty of any emotion. ‘No, Alex. I’m not interested in that any more. Up until a few moments ago, of course, that was my exact intention. But now … well, there doesn’t seem to be much point, does there? Not now we both find ourselves in the same position. Not now I finally understand everything.’

  The figure almost made to laugh, and then stopped. It held for a moment beside the bodies, silently looking down at them. If Alex could have made out its face, he would have sworn it was smiling.

  ‘You know,’ said Kyte, ‘I remember the very first day I met your father.’

  Slowly, the figure began to creep around the bodies in the fog. Alex followed the shape out the corner of his eye. The legs of Number 51 walked, but with each step Kyte’s spine seemed to curve up, as if part of him was walking with it.

  ‘I was working in the laboratories back then,’ he said. ‘I ran the experiments at the second base when your father became Head of Expeditions. He came to find me – said that he had heard about what I was doing to the dogs in my tests. He wanted to shut me down. And that was when I explained what I could do for him, if he would only let me try.’

  The figure came closer towards Alex, the terrible wolf and the man on its back walking as one.

  ‘There was a way, I explained,’ said Kyte slowly, ‘that a man could fool the Forbidden Land. Fool it into believing he wasn’t quite human. Fool it into letting him step over the boundary without being thrown straight back out again.’

  Alex was trembling. He still could not see the face that was talking. In the fog, it was easy to believe that Kyte didn’t have one any more.

  ‘All it required’, Kyte croaked, ‘was to take away a human part of himself. And replace it with something else.’

  In the corner of his eye, the figure was getting closer.

  ‘All it took was the heart of a dog,’ he said.

  Alex froze. Slowly, he looked down to the two bodies clasped in the fog before him. He looked from his father to the dog, and from the dog to his father, and how they lay perfectly together on the cold dead ground. Alex struggled for breath and fell back. It was almost as if they were trying to put themselves back together again.

  ‘No,’ he gasped.

  Kyte laughed.

  ‘That’s exactly what he said, Alex,’ he smiled. ‘He said I had gone too far … told me I was out of my mind. He shut down my laboratory and threw me out of the Expedition right there and then.’ The figure gazed back down at the bodies. ‘Only it seems …’ He laughed. ‘It seems as if he had a change of heart.’

  Alex shook his head in horror, his stomach churning. The bodies lay before him, man and dog, dog and man.

  ‘No – no, he wouldn’t …’

  ‘Yes, Alex,’ said Kyte, creeping closer. ‘He did. He was desperate to succeed. At any price. And who can blame him really? It was a perfect plan, so long as nobody knew. Both he and the dog could walk on the Forbidden Land without being pushed out – once safely out of sight of the crowds, of course. And both could be switched back round again before they came home. No one would ever need know the terrible secret … of the man with the heart of a dog … and the dog with the heart of a man.’

  The figure staggered slowly through the fog towards him, Kyte’s wrinkled hands clutching at the fur on its neck.

  ‘Only it didn’t quite work out like that, did it?’ he said, his dry breath heaving. ‘The dog never came back. He was locked inside the tower when they reeled your father back in. Couldn’t even open the door to get out. And that was when it all began to go wrong for your father. Doesn’t it all make sense now? The faster ageing, the madness, the desperation to get back at any price …’

  The figure suddenly stopped dead, throwing its head up in the fog.

  ‘And yet it never occurred to me, Alex!’

  The voice came out almost as two voices, so close to a laugh of genuine happiness that it was sickening to hear.

  ‘All those times I questioned him, all those times – I never once thought that maybe, just maybe, he could have gone through with it. He never breathed a word of it. But then, how could he have told us? That really would have been the end of it, for him and for you, for the whole Order even. I understand it now. He was just trying to buy time, a little more time, just enough to get back into the Forbidden Land without being stopped. How was I supposed to know it was for … for his dog? His dog!’

  The figure had tur
ned towards him.

  ‘But I see now,’ it heaved, catching its breath through the laughter. ‘It was the part of himself that he gave up. The key to the whole mystery, the whole terrible mess. The part that he would go through anything to get back. Only now can I … truly understand.’

  Alex looked up. The figure took another step forward, the shape of its two bodies rippling in the grey before him. His body flooded with horror.

  ‘You … you did it too,’ said Alex. ‘You swapped hearts with … with a wolf.’

  ‘Yes, Alex,’ said the figure. ‘I gave up everything for it too – just like your father.’ He laughed. ‘It turns out he and I have a lot more in common than any of us realised.’

  The figure grew clearer, step by step across the bodies. Alex tried to look away.

  ‘And me …’ Alex cried, his voice breaking. He almost couldn’t bring himself to say it. ‘I can walk here because …’

  The terrible figure was before him now, their eyes locked. When Kyte finally spoke, Alex realised that both the mouth of the man and the mouth of the wolf were moving at the same time.

  ‘Because, Alex,’ said Kyte’s voice, ‘you are your father’s son.’

  Alex shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said weakly.

  ‘Yes, Alex,’ the voices hissed. ‘You alone were born with it. You will never have to go to the lengths that your father had to go through … what I had to go through, just to find the truth. Just to get where we are now. And we have nothing to lose, Alex. Nothing! We’re closer to the centre than anyone has ever been. Closer than he ever was. The two of us can finally finish it, to go on where he never could …’

  Alex suddenly flung himself up from the ground, pushing back the monster in the fog.

  ‘No!’ he cried. ‘You’re nothing like him!’

  Alex’s eyes burned with anger. He stood up to the hunched beast before him.