by Z. M. Wilmot
The Silver Door
I
We always had wondered what was behind that large silver door on the lowest floor of the city library. It was an oddity in that dusty old building, easily one and a half times the size of the polished mahogany doors that populated the rest of the structure. For a long time, I never got too close to the door itself; it was one of those items irresistible to my childish curiosity, but at the same time clearly forbade anyone from coming too close. My fear had always overridden my curiosity, and the same had been true of my two best friends – Jack and Valerie – as well.
It didn’t help our curiosity that we never saw anyone ever open that door. Many a time we would sit at the table nearest the door – though this table was still a good twenty feet or so distant – and watch it intently, all the while pretending to study.
I say that the silver door was an oddity, but in truth, the entire lower level of the library was odd. It was below ground level, and one had to walk down a spiral staircase to get to it. Five more floors extended upwards from the first, for a total of seven floors. The library was the oldest structure in town, and I would not have been the least surprised if the lowest level predated the rest of the building. The stones in the walls of that level were different than those used throughout the upper portions of the library; they reminded one of the walls of some ancient castle, very much unlike the red bricks of the structure above. The carpets on the floor were also much older, and looked like antiques brought in from the Orient.
The bookshelves down there had the same appearance as those of the upper floors, but their contents were an example of what was perhaps the starkest contrast between the upper and lower levels. While the books above were those one would expect to find in a library of this day, the books in the cold stone cellar were much older and far more sinister in appearance. Many of them were locked, and almost all were bound in thick leather, with thin yellow parchment in place of proper paper pages. Most of them looked as if they hadn’t been touched in centuries.
To make the room even more curious, at least to us children back then, was that all of the books were written in either Latin, Greek, or Arabic. None of us could read a word out of any of them, although we often tried. We didn’t go down there for the books, however, though one would describe us back then as bookworms.
We went down there to escape. Our intelligence and bookishness made the others jealous – we were teased and bullied mercilessly. The library was the only escape for the three of us – Jack and Valerie and me. We had always visited the place when we were tiny, and as we grew older, spent more and more time there.
There was one day, though – I think it was a Tuesday – when the biggest bully of them all, Billy McDermott, and his friends chased us into the library on a sunny afternoon. Terrified, we ran down the first staircase we saw – the one leading down to the lower level, where we had never before been in our lives. Billy never found us down there – perhaps the work of the doddering old men (and occasional young lady) who worked at the place, or perhaps they failed to notice the descending spiral stair. Or perhaps he sensed something about that cellar that we did not.
We found quickly that we loved it down there – we all fancied ourselves to be medieval folklorists, and the atmosphere in that basement was that of a medieval study, perhaps one in an ancient monastery. We soon found ourselves going down there every day, sitting at one of the old oak tables – maybe from an old Viking meetinghouse – reading various works of fiction we had brought from home, and doing our schoolwork.
We found the door a month or so after we began to inhabit the room, staying there every day of the week. The floor was very large, much like the others, and we never ventured far, for we never had any need to. Eventually, though, curiosity got the better of us and we went exploring. At the farthest end of the room we found the door. As I said, the closest tables were above twenty feet away; there was a large open space in front of the door. The three of us, on that day, approached the silver door, but all refused to cross that threshold marked off by the tables. We stood silently at the edge of that area for several minutes, all overcome by mingling senses of curiosity and fear. But, as always, our fear overpowered our curiosity, and we retreated back to the stairs, where we discussed our findings.
Gradually, over the course of a few months, we began to sit nearer and nearer to that door, until we regularly inhabited that table closest to it, no longer quite so bothered by the odd mixture of emotions that tended to accompany its presence.
Only once did someone other than ourselves descend that staircase and enter our domain. I do not know whether or not he was a librarian, but he was an old man in an ancient tweed jacket, supporting himself on a silver cane topped with an intricate carving of a howling wolf. He stayed with us for only a minute or so, quickly locating a gigantic black volume, and walking back upstairs with it.
And for many more months after that, the silver door waited, unmoving, its cold surface both taunting and terrifying, both beckoning and warning us against the secrets it hid behind its implacable face.
II
Two weeks after the school year ended in June, we were sitting at our usual table on the bottom floor of the library when Jack decided that we should find out what was behind that door. Valerie objected to this line of thought, saying that it was not our business to go poking about the library in places we weren’t supposed to. Furthermore, she continued, the library had offered us shelter for so long and so well that it would be bad luck to question its gift. She feared we might no longer be welcome there. She won Jack over with that argument, but her spell over him only lasted a few days. That same Thursday, he decided that he had to know. Valerie again argued with him, threatening to never come here again with us if he went ahead with his plan, but this time he was adamant.
They both tried to drag me into the conflict, Valerie asking me to please tell Jack how foolish he was being, and Jack telling me to tell Valerie that she was being a coward. Well, Valerie wasn’t going to stay around after he called her that, and she stormed off in a huff, presumably going home.
Without Valerie there to counter Jack’s arguments, he finally persuaded me to join his side. A few minutes after Valerie’s departure, the two of us stood at the threshold, our toes in line with the end of the table. We looked at each other, took a deep breath, and stepped forward into the space around the door.
There was no change.
We both exhaled loudly and grinned. Exchanging a glance, we both confidently strode forward to the door, stopping several inches away from it.
The door, up close, gave a very different impression than when seen from afar. When viewed from our table, the door’s surface appeared almost perfectly smooth, and glinted sharply in the dim light, hinting at an immaculately polished surface. Upon looking more closely, however, all of those perceptions vanished. It became readily apparent that the door was neither smooth nor polished, although it was still silver. The entire thing was covered in a thin layer of dust and dirt, indicating little recent use. Etched into the metal were designs of a most disturbing variety, and Jack and I spent several minutes looking over them, each lost in our own musings and thoughts.
There were carved runes and hieroglyphs that I had never before seen, appearing utterly alien to my uneducated eyes. They did not appear to be in any earthly language I had ever seen, and in between lines of what I assumed was text were vivid images of strange scenes, featuring weird beings performing odd actions. Near the top of the rectangular door was a massive head covered in groping tentacles, all wrapped around a variety of anthropomorphic figures. The faces of these figures were rendered in exquisite detail, but yet I could not determine whether they were gasping in pain or moaning in ecstasy.
Below that image was a truly hideous beast, carved in the same detail as the above, but evoking a far greater response in my mind. It was a large blob-like thing, with claws and tentacles and strange limbs whose functions I could not discern, and interspe
rsed between those monstrous limbs were innumerable gaping, toothy maws – some closed, some opened, some biting down on what appeared to be humanoid figures. The thing was on a beach of some sort, and it seemed to me that every grain of sand was etched into the silver, though I know that was impossible. Half of the scene consisted of water, and various human figures were swimming away from the beast on the beach. About halfway across the expanse of water, the swimming figures began to change direction as they fled from a second terrible monster, only half-visible above the waves. What I could see was terrible enough; a massive claw connected to a wolf-like visage, a forked tongue snaking out of its mouth to wrap around the fleeing mortals.
Further down was an image of what appeared to be a star, high above the earth, and down from it fell great balls of fire, obliterating the earth below. Humans fled before its onslaught into toothy maws lying in wait beneath the thin layer of soil.
Other countless images were shown upon that door: orgies of destruction and creation, sexual acts of which I dare not even imagine, and tortures more terrible than any human mind could ever have come up with on their own. I could not look at the pictures any longer, and tore my gaze from them.
Jack seemed less affected than me, and stared at the images with an almost greedy light in his eyes. I whispered his name, and then shook him into attentiveness. He looked at me, and the odd light that had inhabited his eyes faded. He smiled thinly at me.
“I think… we had best return tomorrow. I feel tired.” I found myself feeling the same way, and quickly agreed. We got our things together and left the library several minutes later.