Finally, there’s my favorite option for bringing demons into the world: Some drunk idiots think they’re making up magic spells and, it turns out, they really are.
A lot of vodka, my first tipped dollar from my first diner customer crumpled in the center of a chalk outline, and a shitty attempt to remember lines from The Craft. That’s what it was. Until the earth shook and a portal opened up in the wall of the fucking diner.
And it spoke.
Ten minutes later, with a lot of crashing noises, there he was, a man in a long black coat, looking like death, breaking through the basement door with a sword in one hand and a gun in the other.
After a bunch of killing and a lot of salt, Ryan, in his delightful way that is somehow terse and sarcastic at the same time, explained the world: Demons are real. Other dimensions are real. He added something nasty about string theory in there, but I was too drunk for that.
The Door I’m looking at now is probably a spontaneous one. I say this because nobody with any hint of gothic drama in their soul would go to the effort of opening a Door in an industrial washing machine.
“I try to keep the nurses from putting anything in there—it just feeds it,” Owen’s saying. This Door is just swirls of purple and green, like a bruise. The laundry room is deafeningly loud, ten dryers on high, seven giant washing machines chugging along, and the air is muggy and smells like bleach and old people and tears. The lights are bright, and the walls are stacked with pastel sheets, blankets, scrubs, and gowns. Next to Owen is a bright red bucket labeled For Emergency Use Only; I’m pretty sure it’s filled with salt.
In the middle of all this stupid weird normality, there’s this one machine with an “Out of Service” sign taped on and a small porthole to Hell behind its metal hatch.
A pretty porthole to Hell. “My Door doesn’t look like that,” I murmur, and reach my hand out. Ryan’s quick—he slaps my hand, hard, and it stings, and I snap out of the weird daze I’m in.
“My Door doesn’t look like that,” I repeat louder, ignoring that I almost touched a Door to Hell. Am I stupid? Possibly.
Owen either doesn’t notice, or is actually polite enough not to call me on it. “What’s your Door look like?” asks Owen curiously.
“I thought they all looked the same.” I direct this statement to Ryan, who shakes his head a little.
“Most of them do. Some of them don’t.”
“Very helpful.” I turn to Owen. “My Door is a big portal. It’s got an arch at the top, maybe a foot wide, made out of stone. The bottom’s stone too, a full doorway, and it looks like maybe you could step on it a little without actually going into Hell. Right after is a wrought-iron gate. Or, um, hands. One or the other. They unclasp when the Door opens to spit out demons.”
“Wrought-iron hands?” asks Owen skeptically. He crosses his arms and leans beside the washing machine Door. His uniform shirt stretches nicely over his biceps, but I pretend I don’t notice. I’m still pissed that he was taking shots at Ryan earlier; only I’m allowed to do that.
“Allie was a goth as a teenager,” says Ryan dryly.
Nothing could be further from the truth. I was a pathetic mall rat when I was a teenager, with too much money and too little fashion sense. I had a yellow leather jacket and six pairs of the same high-heeled shoe, each in a different color. And most of the time, my manicure matched my shoes, and my shoes matched my handbag.
Not that Ryan would know that, I guess. When we talk, we talk about the Door, and demons, and what I should ask the day cook to add to the menu for the next week. Not about ourselves. Still. Where’d he get the idea that I was goth?
Maybe it was the summoning Doors to Hell thing. I bet that is it.
“So.” Owen lifts a shoulder, then lets it drop. “I don’t know what to tell you guys. It’s here.”
“You can tell us why it’s swirling like that. And why it doesn’t talk,” I say. It’s weird, but . . . my ears itch, deep down. Like maybe the Door is trying to talk to me, but can’t. I bet I could hear it if I just got closer, though.
“This Door never talks. It doesn’t give us anything either, although sometimes people live who really shouldn’t.” Shouldn’t because they’re too messed up, or shouldn’t because they’re bad? Owen sounds like each word is being drawn out of him slowly and painfully. And I’m drifting closer and closer to the Door. It smells—it smells purple. What does that mean?
And before Ryan can stop me, I reach out a hand again and touch the Door, touch the swirling purple and green, touch its bruise.
There’s screaming in my head, shrieks of rage and pain. I feel arms around my waist, pulling me back, but I want to go through the Door. I want to crawl inside and curl up in the purple. It’s so lonely. But the arms pull me inexorably back until I’m cold and sad and crying.
“Let me go,” I say, and I can hear it: I sound hysterical. “Let me go!”
I’m thrown to the floor, and I hear noises above me. When I open my eyes, Ryan and Owen are standing over me, and Owen is pouring salt over my head from the bucket by the Door.
“Let me go,” I sob. “It’s so lonely.”
“You idiot,” snarls Ryan. “You fucking idiot.”
“That was pretty bloody stupid,” says Owen, but he reaches out a hand to help me up. I don’t take it, because there’s a whisper in my head. Don’t touch him.
“I won’t, I won’t, I won’t,” I say out loud. I’m feeling stupider and stupider the more salt Owen dumps onto me. How much salt can a bucket hold, anyway? Breathing is easier, and my tears are drying up. When I look over at the Door, the door of the washing machine is shut, and I can’t see the purples and greens anymore.
I brush salt out of my hair and push myself up. The world spins and I think I’m going to puke. “Maybe I ought to lie back down.” And I do, slowly and carefully.
Maybe you shouldn’t touch fucking Doors into Hell. I know that whisper. That’s Ryan. I look over at him. His mouth is set into a grim line.
“I didn’t mean to touch it,” I say. “It made me.”
“I—” Ryan starts, and then finishes with, Can you hear this?
“Yes.” I close my eyes to try to stop the spins, and my whole body starts shaking.
Then, out loud, Ryan says, “Did you hear that?”
“No . . .” I open my eyes again. The nausea is receding.
“Probably just a side effect of touching the Door,” says Owen dismissively. I like him less and less every second.
“It made me,” I insist.
Ryan looks at me evenly. He doesn’t look like he’s pissed off, but he’s so damn stoic. He could have just eaten six babies and a seventh for dessert for all I know.
“We’ll talk about this later,” he finally says. I pull my knees up and drop my head between them, taking deep breaths, while he turns to Owen. “Thank you for showing us your Door,” he intones. I guess this is a ritual sentence they have to say. I don’t know. Hunters are weird.
“You’re welcome,” Owen says in the same voice, then, “It’s never done that before,” under his breath, like I wouldn’t be able to hear him. “I’ve never been pulled to it.”
“Well, Allie’s special,” Ryan says. I would punch him, but I’m still having trouble breathing.
“Are we leaving?” I ask. “Because I’d like to get away from here. No offense, Owen.”
“None taken!” And the cheerful British accent is back, just like that. “I’ll leave you two to it. You know Narnia’s back in town, right?”
Ryan blinks. “No. But—”
Owen says, “Her usual place. And you, my lovely,” he says to me, “owe me a pie.” Then he turns around and just leaves without even saying good-bye. I watch him adjust his baseball cap on his way out. I can see why Ryan doesn’t like hunters who wear baseball caps. Also, I will not bring him a nice pie. It will be peach. The peach pies are always mushy.
“Are you okay?” Ryan squats next to me.
“Would it matter if
I said no?” I ask, my head still between my knees. I wish I wasn’t wearing such tight jeans, but they were all that was clean.
“No,” replies Ryan, and hauls me up by the arm.
Even with Ryan’s arm holding me up, I’m staggering. I’m exhausted. And as we pass the washing machine that has the Door inside it, I can feel the pain again, the crying, the loneliness. I shudder.
I’m two for two now on the young-hunters-are-jerks theory, but Ryan’s still the best looking one I’ve seen. As we make for the hospital exit, him glancing at signs and me stumbling along, I look at him very slyly from the side; his profile is all straight lines and sudden dips, the kind of contours you just want to lick. His face is slightly shadowed beneath his hat brim, and I feel the urge to flick his hat off and touch him.
Apparently I am not that sly. He looks at me from the corner of his eye, and smiles like he wasn’t planning to.
God, I love that. He doesn’t do it enough. That, and the fact that he’s still holding my arm carefully, not letting me fall, his hand curled and warm, is enough for me. I guess I’ll keep him. In my kind of wobbly state, this is a pretty big decision. I giggle.
But—
Some part of me, deep on the inside, shivers. Not in a good way. Something is happening.
Do you ever get a chill, just when you shouldn’t, and a weird thought just sort of pops into your mind and you don’t know why? Here is the thought I have just had, interrupting my stupid daydreams: This is an awfully empty hallway.
“Ry?”
I try to focus. The hallway is silent except for our footsteps, and instead of people I see doors, and doors, and black.
“Hmm?” That’s not right. Ryan is . . . distracted? I mean, I’m awesome, but I have vast evidence to support that he is immune. So either I have been taken over by a succubus and am about to have the time of my life before I die by exploding (there was this one time that happened to a hunter trying to sneak a bottle of Snapple while Ryan and I were upstairs, and I got bloody water on my face when I was washing him off the basement ceiling), or there is something wrong.
“Are we still in the hospital?” I ask, because based on what I’m seeing this is starting to look like a legitimate question.
He blinks down at me, and turns, and looks—and then he carefully puts down my arm, and says, “Open the door next to you.”
I really, really don’t want him letting go of me. Almost more than I don’t want to open the door. The safety glass window shows it to be a tiny kitchen, cabinets and the top of a coffeemaker in view. I grab hold of the edge of his coat—Ryan frowns but maybe he’s glad to stick together too—and push down the handle.
The kitchen door swings out, and—it’s a damn kitchen, just a kitchen, and suddenly Ryan’s hat slams down over my head. Ryan shoves it down over my eyes, just to ruin his hat completely, I guess, and then he says, “Don’t look. Don’t even try.”
In my head, I hear him whisper. Please.
I can’t look, I want to say. What with the gross sweaty hat over my eyes. But I don’t say anything, because suddenly there are voices speaking.
The voices sound tinny and small, far away—the hat partly covers my ears, I notice, because I reach up to rub them, to get the sound out. The voices sound lonely, and sad, and did I mention lonely? The black world inside the hat turns purple. A world of hurt exists out there, and all I want is to reach out my arms and hold—
“For Christ’s sake, Allie, not now,” I hear Ryan boom close beside me. I don’t have an armful of frightened voices—I have Ryan, and I think I’m holding him back.
What the hell am I doing?
I drop my arms, and he says “thank you” in a really snotty way, and I hear the metallic swoosh of his sword slicing through something gooey. The voices suddenly stop, and I feel something wet and lumpy hit my shoes. I also feel really, really embarrassed, and more sick than ever.
I feel a hand on the back of my neck—Ryan’s. His thumb brushes against my throat just once, and then suddenly his hat is yanked off my head and my hair, already kind of gross from being woken up early by a stupid naming-no-names hunter, is now a dandelion gone to seed. I flatten it down and glare at him; I’m going to have to put it in a bandanna if these shenanigans keep up. He glares at me while he tries to reblock his hat into something more Stetson, less poke bonnet.
Behind him is a large purple monster with a lot of tentacles and a sword sticking out of it. One of the tentacles is actually lying across my shoes. The tentacle has a dusting of fur at the very tip, and I am suddenly reminded of the imaginary pet rabbit I had when I was six.
“Um,” I say. “Where’d that come from?”
He looks behind him and then turns back to me. He carefully puts his Stetson back on, and adjusts the brim. “Followed you,” he says.
He turns back and yanks the sword out of the thing. A small gush of purple liquid, slick as fry oil, comes out along with it. Ryan grimaces and heads into the kitchen I’d opened before. He wipes off the blade with some paper towels.
“How?” I ask.
He shrugged. “You touched the Door. Something on the other side wanted you—or you wanted it. It followed you home.”
Ryan hides the sword back in the magnificent folds of his coat. I’m not so blasé. “I didn’t want anything like that,” I say.
He walks back out into the hall; I follow him. The demon’s corpse is collapsing in on itself. We watch it until it disappears completely. Ryan says, “I don’t know what that was, but there was something in you to catch its attention, Allie.” He looks at me sadly for a moment. “Watch for that.”
Then he takes my arm again and drags me toward the next turn of the hallway, and there are all the people, staring at us with their pain, and then the hospital lobby, and the folding doors, and a line of gypsy car service cars waiting to pick up people and take them anywhere they want to go. He hauls me into one of the cars and directs the driver to take us to the Brooklyn Public Library.
Something in me, huh? Great.
I lean my head against the window and close my eyes.
4
The library is huge, and in the middle of Brooklyn. It’s right near a park, and the botanical garden. The neighborhood sucks, though; I wouldn’t go walking after dark without a hunter to protect me.
The cab ride is nice—even without tentacle monsters, hospitals are pretty unreal. I like the city. I spent most of my life living on Long Island, which is also pretty unreal. It’s not even an island—it’s a peninsula. Lies, damn lies! I didn’t even know that it wasn’t an island until I was, like, twenty-five and looked at a map. We weren’t taught about that kind of thing in school. Why teach geography when instead we can be taught about . . . uh, other things, I guess. I don’t even remember what I was taught in school. I spent most of my time getting manicures and having my hair done and shopping.
I was, basically, your typical vapid New Yorker. I had too much time and too much money. I lived in a house that was really too big for three people—there were six guest bedrooms, a giant swimming pool in my back yard that we kept heated to a ridiculous degree so we could swim all winter, and we even had servants. Not exactly what people think of when they think of New York City—but, as any Long Islander will rush to assure you, Long Island is not part of New York City. New York City is the five boroughs, and that’s it. Most Long Islanders can’t even name all the boroughs, though; everyone always forgets the Bronx.
Stan and Amanda grew up on either side of me. They also had big houses and swimming pools and extreme topiary lining the driveways. We were given matching cars when we turned sixteen, and we drove them too fast while our parents sipped martinis and talked about the stock market and tennis instructors.
The difference now is that Stan and Amanda still live that life. I live in Brooklyn, in a tiny apartment, surrounded by art and literature and philosophy students, minutes away from Manhattan by subway. I had never been on the subway before I moved to Brooklyn.
I wish I could say that I fit right in and there was no culture shock, but I didn’t fit in at all. I started working at the diner because it was the closest thing to a job I could actually do; it was a favor to Amanda’s mother’s favorite maid that I was even given a chance in the first place. Amanda’s mother’s maid, whose name I don’t even know, because that was back when I was still too good to learn anyone’s name, despite being completely broke, got a nice bonus for recommending me for the job.
Looking back, I am pretty sure that Sally took pity on the poor little rich girl who showed up for her first day of work as a waitress in head-to-toe white Prada driving a Mercedes. I could barely parallel park, and at the end of the day my feet were so swollen I couldn’t drive home. Sally didn’t smile too much at my pain, and she let me sleep in her overheated apartment above the diner while she sat up and watched PBS, and eventually went to sleep herself in the old armchair I wish she’d left here when she moved.
That’s where the story of the Door starts, actually, because that night Stan and Amanda drove out from Long Island when I didn’t come home. Why didn’t they just call my cell phone? If they had, everything would be different now. Well, they did call, but from the street outside. I let them in through the back door, and we went into the basement with Amanda’s bottle of vodka and Stan’s tabs of X.
God, I knew how to repay kindness back then, didn’t I?
“We should mem—comm—we should do something, because today is special!” Amanda announced once we’d drank too much for sense. We drank a lot back then. They still do; I don’t. I can’t—I have too much that always has to be done. Don’t think I don’t resent the hell out of that, because I do. But what am I supposed to do about it? I have to live with it, just like I have to live with everything else; I’ve become sage and zen in my old age.
That’s a big lie, by the way.
“Yeah,” said Stan lazily, stretched out on the floor on top of some broken-down boxes. “You have a job. That’s kind of incredible.”
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