The Doorway

by Alan Spencer

  “Apologize by buying me and my daughter a pitcher of beer and the first game of pool at Side Pockets.”

  “You got it, man. Let’s make it five pitchers of beer.”

  “Five it is. Then we’ll—”

  Morty looked up to case the room when he saw something that horrified him. The sight made no sense. It was so illogical. He blinked his eyes several times trying to un-see it. How many times would he need to fact check what was right in front of him before they escaped this house?

  Bruce saw it too, then Cheyenne did.

  Bruce stood near the stairwell and stayed there. Cheyenne remained cautiously behind her father. Morty kept his distance from the mannequin. His eyes were glued to the mannequin’s head. It had taken a bullet. Half the head had shattered. Real bone, blood and brain oozed down the plastic body.

  Morty didn’t know what to make of it.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Officer Chris Wright was upstairs one moment with the rest of the squad, then the next moment he was shielding his eyes from the blasts of searing bright red light. Consumed by the strange heat, unable to do anything but let whatever happened happen, it wasn’t until that insane red vanished that he could open his eyes again. He was standing in a living room.

  Officer Wright wasn’t alone.

  He hit the deck, dodging bullets. From the kitchen, from the upstairs staircase, from behind and in front of him, his fellow officers were blasting their firearms.

  “Who killed my wife?”

  Officer Wright stayed low, trying to figure out who was being shot and asking that strange question. It sounded like the words were coming from a jilted psycho fresh from a sanitarium breakout.

  Shotguns tore up chunks of the wall in mighty blasts. Single shots quickly turned into sporadic death warnings as the officers’ desperation increased.

  Desperation from what, Wright couldn’t tell from his position hiding behind a couch. Bullets were breaking things everywhere, going astray, pounding through the floor and raining chunks down from the ceiling. It’s like everybody had lost their minds going trigger happy.

  “Who killed her? Why don’t you know? Why didn’t you find out?”

  Wright rolled to his right when a series of bullets shot up the couch, sending up tufts of cotton and padding into the air.

  They’re shooting everything except the goddamn perp!

  Retrieving his .28-issue revolver from his holster, Wright was about to do some shooting of his own when he saw Officer Sarah Greene suspended in the air. A machete’s blade stuck out of her lower back. She was being held up so high that gravity and her body weight caused the machete to slide up. Greene screamed as the machete slid upwards until the blade schlicked out of the crown of her skull. She tumbled down onto the floor, everything inside her spilling and slopping onto the wood floor as her body performed wild death spasms.

  Officer Wright had dated Sarah Greene twice, and things weren’t going so bad. It wasn’t third base territory, but he was beyond first base. Plus, he knew enough about her to admire the woman, and here she was damn near split in half by this psycho!

  Wright unloaded six shots into the towering man who did this center masse. Wright would stop the fucker’s cold heart. The bullets entered and exited the man’s body, awarding Wright the sight of high spattering blood. What it didn’t award him was pain or death.

  The man stood there as if he’d been hit by snowballs.

  The bullets meant nothing.

  This guy’s high on PCP. Cranked up. I guess I’ll have to keep shooting him.

  Wright was disturbed by the sight of the man who was now studying him closely. The perp wore eye gear over his head, like one would in woodshop to avoid flying splinters in the eyes. The man also wore a paper-thin surgical mask covered in shades of dried and fresh blood. He was dressed in a dark blue painter’s suit with black boots. In each hand he clutched a hammer.

  The deranged man with the wicked bulging eyes and raging voice shouted again, “Who killed my wife?”

  The killer turned to the left.

  “Was it you?”

  Both hammers swung on either side of Officer Ray Tompkin’s head, the collision making the man’s dome erupt. The crack of hammers against skull was like concrete wrecking into concrete. Wright watched Ray’s features disintegrate into red motion.

  “Did you murder her?”

  The hammers vanished from the psycho’s hands to be replaced by a huge roaring chainsaw. How he did it, how it was fucking possible…Officer Wright couldn’t react or think hard enough to come even close to producing a reasonable explanation.

  The killer charged into the living room, and in his wake, claimed hands from almost half a dozen wrists so nobody else could fire their guns. Every officer in the room was in a panic as their stumps-for-hands bled in generous spurts onto the floor.

  Officer Wright backed into a corner behind a lone standing chair, staying silent. He feared it could be him too with the spurting stumps for hands. The victimized cops stood there screaming in shock, losing stream after stream of blood onto the wood floor. The killer double backed, swinging the chainsaw higher, shifting about the room at impossible speeds, swinging, arcing the menacing murder machine in his hands to deadly precision. Officers’ heads came off their necks as if flesh and bone were butter and popsicle sticks. Lobbing off their heads so fast, heads crashing against one another in mid-air.

  The murderer shrieked:

  “You’re supposed to protect and serve!”

  “So why is my wife dead? Why is her killer still out there?”

  “I guess I have to do everything myself!”

  “I don’t need you people! I’ll find the killer myself.”

  “Is it you?”

  “I will find you and murder you like you murdered my wife!”

  “The pain will be worse! Much worse! I will paint this room with your blood!”

  Wright replayed the moment the hammers turned into a chainsaw. How was it possible? And the doorway that seemed to be burning earlier, what was up with that? He still smelled the stench of flesh, hair and bones being cooked over roaring flames. Wright could barely breathe. All he could do was channel his will into watching the killing scene and process it without making a sound or drawing attention to himself. He could be one of the armless, headless victims if he wasn’t careful.

  One by one, the decapitated cops tumbled to the ground. Wright could hear arteries spit their contents onto the floor, forming ever-widening crimson pools. He stayed where he was, waiting for the psycho to come after him. The killer only smiled at his work and the corpses spread about the room. Then Wright was taken aback when the killer started to sob.

  “I still don’t know who killed you, my love.”

  The chainsaw vanished.

  The door that led to the front yard lit up in that blazing red color. The killer stepped into the red and was gone, but not before saying, “…I never will stop looking for the one who killed you.”

  Officer Wright ran to the hallway closet, opened the door, shut it and hid in terror.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Janet remembered a moment in her college years at Ohio State. She was living in an apartment shared by two other girls. They were party girls, and so was Janet. Jungle juice and keg beer galore on weekends, especially Friday nights. This was a particularly wild Friday night because finals week had ended right up against winter vacation. Their apartment was packed with students de-stressing. Janet was drinking, but she wasn’t wasted at the point this moment happened. She had to pee, and when she stumbled into the bathroom, somebody had taken a shit on the toilet. It was one of those moments where the repulsion took its sweet time sinking in. Her mind refused to accept the problem, this being the shit on the toilet, because Janet knew she would be the one to clean it up. That hesitation was similar to right now. She wou
ld have to do something she very much didn’t want to do.

  Janet stood in place thinking about what to do next after she’d left the tiny room with the dirt-leaking corpse attacking her. She hadn’t taken any steps forward because she was afraid to do so. What took her out of the moment was the scratching on the door behind her.

  It was that damned corpse.

  Get out of here before that corpse bashes through the door.

  Janet was now standing in a bedroom. A woman’s bedroom. She had to find a way out of this house. Janet threw open a closet door, thinking it led to another room. With no other doors to choose from except the one being scratched on by the dirt corpse, she had no choice but to search the bedroom. Janet rushed to the windows first. She was on the second floor of a house. She looked out onto a street. The streetlight on the sidewalk shed a red color, coloring everything in harsh tones. Nobody walked outside. The windows in every house in eyeshot had their lights off, including their porch lights. She saw the awning below the window. Janet could crawl across the awning and make a short jump onto the front lawn and run for her life. The plan seemed feasible.

  This would make one hell of a story if she survived this. This property would be dubbed The Morty Saggs House. The Burning Doorway House. No, even better, The Bleeding Doorway House. Janet imagined herself standing in an expensive dress outside Morty Saggs’s house to film her TV special. She’d get a full two hours of network time going through each room, describing how Morty Saggs murdered his wife, and how the house manipulated the man into becoming a murderer. Janet would have a nation on the edge of their seats. She’s open up the human psyche and have it bleed all over the viewers. They would know every taste, smell and horror she had endured tonight. A level of embellishment was necessary, of course. But maybe not. She was seeing ghostly visions. Corpses in bathtubs. Something was indeed very wrong with Morty Saggs’s house. The problem was, would anybody believe her?

  What had Morty done to make the house this way?

  The answers to the questions didn’t matter.

  Getting out of here safely mattered.

  Janet attempted to raise the window up. She checked to make sure the latches weren’t in the locked position. They weren’t. Janet tried again. The windows wouldn’t budge. They were sealed into place. Had they been painted shut?

  Morty Saggs was thinking ahead of the situation. If his wife tried to escape when he was murdering her, Glenda might attempt to jump out of the second story window. It made sense to paint the windows shut from a killer’s perspective.

  Fuck it, she thought. She had her own key.

  Janet grabbed a heavy wooden chair placed in front of a vanity mirror and heaved it at the window. She expected to be rewarded with the pleasant shattering of glass. Instead, the chair broke into many pieces. The barrier was too strong. But how? It was just made of glass. Janet hit the damn thing so hard she hurt her back and shoulders slamming the chair down.

  Frustrated, Janet grabbed the table beside the bed and hurled the fixture at the window. Again, the table erupted into pieces.

  Janet pounded the window with her fists. She was doing more harm to herself than the window, not that she cared in the moment. Adrenaline erased the pain. Fear made pain insignificant. Janet could still hear that broken corpse scratch at the door.

  What would it do to her if that corpse cornered her?

  Disturbed from that concern, Janet heard the voices of men and woman shouting in terror downstairs. It sounded like dozens of people were stampeding forward. Screams and fighting followed. The blasting guns covered up any sense she could make of what was transpiring downstairs. So many bullets were fired. Most of them went wild as they ripped through the floor and created holes in the wood. One bullet ricocheted off the window. Nothing happened.

  A fucking bullet couldn’t shatter the windows!

  How was she going to escape?

  No time to think. The bullets kept coming. Janet curled up in the corner and prayed one didn’t come her way.

  Staying rigidly still, she waited for the onslaught of gunfire and the sounds of people being terrorized to end. When it did, Janet once again opened her eyes.

  Somebody was standing in the room with her.

  Oh, how she screamed!

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Detective Larson was face to face with the dead corpse of a man well over three hundred pounds. The corpse’s eyes were carved out of their sockets and leaking black blood. The rest of him was rotting from the inside out and weighing Larson down against the kitchen floor.

  “Fucking goddamn!”

  Larson kept wrestling with the corpse who was dressed in a yellow stained undershirt and boxer shorts. His struggle was a losing battle. The detective literally had to scoot out from under the corpse to escape, and that took several minutes. When he was free, he stood up to survey the scene. First, he considered how he’d fallen out of a running refrigerator. The shelves and items inside of it had been cleared out, and the corpse and him were stuffed inside the box together. But when was he placed into the box? Larson checked his head for a wound, a place where somebody could’ve knocked him unconscious. There was no blood or mark on his skull. He wasn’t coming down from a drug dose either. Then the detective remembered the bright red doorway, and then being blinded by a great blast of light, and then waking up in a tight and dark place. That’s how he remembered things, but the scene still wasn’t adding up.

  The detective eyed the corpse and the fridge for several minutes interchangeably. A level of recognition kept his eyes glued on the body. That recognition grew into something more disturbing. The corpse on the ground had no eyes. Gouged out clean. Scooped hollow. On both the corpse’s hands were circular wounds that showed through to the other side of the hand. The hand was covered in ugly yellows, purples, and pustules. The wounds had become infected when the man was still alive. The man’s fingernails were missing on random fingers. Parts of his scalp were set on fire. Larson could smell the burnt hair and flesh, and he curled up his nose in repugnance.

  Larson remembered this man.

  His name was Jimmy Loomis.

  His body can’t be here. No fucking way. It’s impossible.

  Observations were turning into new connections. This kitchen, this house, there was something seriously wrong going on here.

  The detective raced across the kitchen to the door that led into the backyard. He turned the knob, but the door wouldn’t open. He checked the locks. It was unlocked. The door should’ve opened. But it wouldn’t. The detective punched and kicked at the barrier and got nowhere except more angry and pissed off.

  Turning around to face the living room behind him, Larson could see gunpowder clouds hanging about the air. He hadn’t seen the clouds earlier. It was a rich haze of blue smoke. The hot heavy cordite smell was just as potent. The bodies of more than ten officers were scattered about the room. Bullet casings covered the floor. Over a hundred rounds were spent in this room. Holes ravaged the wall, tearing open the wallpaper to reveal the panels underneath. The ceiling and floor were also chock-full of holes. These were wild shots. Guns blazing in a moment of serious panic.

  The bullets weren’t the only concern.

  Hands were cut off from wrists. Heads were chopped off from necks. There was so much blood everywhere.

  Larson didn’t have to check the bodies to see if anybody was alive. Everybody in the room was clearly dead.

  The room of grizzly death compelled the detective to try the front door, which was also stuck in place. The door wouldn’t budge.

  Larson un-holstered his pistol and aimed it at the doorknob. Before he squeezed off a shot, the corpse of Jimmy Loomis brought itself to a standing position in the kitchen. Larson heard the pulls of rigor mortis.

  The blued corpse, marbled by blacks, yellows, purples and dark reds, spoke with fluids boiling in his throat. Every word popp
ed.

  “You’re wasting your bullets, Detective. You may need them later. Those bullets could buy you time later on, or they can buy you a merciful death if it comes down to that. We’re patient for now because we summoned you here. But our patience will wear thin, and when it does, you’ll need every last bullet to protect yourself. Do your best work tonight, Detective. You can only count on yourself if you want out of this house alive.”

  As if on cue, the doorway in the kitchen lit up that awful bright red. The detective smelled burning. That awful tang of charred things. Jimmy limped towards the red doorway, walked through it and disappeared.

  The door was solid again.

  Where did the corpse of Jimmy Loomis go?

  Another question, where did the people who viciously slaughtered those officers go?

  Larson kept telling himself this wasn’t right. The couch, the television, the pictures on the wall of a husband and wife, he recognized them all, and those pictures didn’t belong to Morty Saggs and his family. This was Morty Saggs’s house, yes, but it had also been somebody else’s house at one point in time. The detective didn’t want the logic of what he was seeing to set in too deeply. If he allowed those facts to be real, what else would he have to accept?

  He refused to look too deeply into things. Doorways didn’t turn red. Corpses didn’t walk. Something real had killed these officers and brought him here. In the very back of his mind, Larson kept thinking, Things like this don’t happen for real.

  Larson aimed the barrel of his Glock at the front doorknob. Before he pulled the trigger, somebody from the hallway called out to him.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The mannequin’s head kept bleeding real blood. Inside its plastic head, Morty noticed the inner workings of a skull, brains and everything that would normally be inside a real human being’s head. Cheyenne also noticed it and quickly stood back in repulsion.