At the time, that had seemed like rock-bottom. He couldn’t imagine screwing up his life any worse. Of course, if that had been the case, he might have asked the Door to give him his family back. He was superstitious, a trait magnified by the jungles of Vietnam, but he might have gotten past the fear of inadvertently harming his loved ones just for a chance to redeem himself in their eyes.
However, one can only use the Door once (folks knew that even back in the seventies), and as it turned out, his move from Newark, New Jersey to Zarephath, Pennsylvania gave him another, more pressing reason to use the Door.
She had been hitchhiking in the rain. What he noticed first were her legs, pale and shapely beneath a pair of denim shorts. When she turned and hooked a thumb in his direction, he saw a naturally lovely face whose turned-up nose dripped water off the tip. The girl had blond hair, parted in the middle and currently plastered across her forehead and down her arm. He had stopped his van alongside her and rolled the passenger window down. It was really coming down out there, as evidenced by her soaked-through tie-dyed tank top; the slopes of her breasts and nipples protruding under the thin, wet fabric drew his attention. He had been a little drunk (which, he’d come to find in those days was sort of like saying someone was “a little pregnant”), but he thought she knew exactly what he was looking at and was hoping it was enough to get her a ride.
It was. She hopped in, bringing a scent of water and pine with her, as if she’d been sleeping outside. It was a pleasantly earthy, even sexy kind of scent, and he breathed it in. He missed the scents of women.
“Where to, beautiful?” he slurred.
“Anywhere you’re going is good with me,” she said. “Can I have one of those beers?”
He nodded at the half-gone six-pack at her feet. It was his third of the night. “Help yourself. Heading to Zarephath, over the border there.”
The girl cracked open one of the beers and took a sip before answering. “Going to see the Door?”
“The what?”
She smiled at him. “Never mind, honey. Zarephath is fine.”
“Good. Hand me that vodka in the glove compartment, will you?”
“I got something better,” she said, and shoved a pill in his mouth. She handed him the vodka from the glove compartment and he used it to wash the pill down. So many years later, he couldn’t remember much about the pill itself, not even the color, but after it slid down his throat, things slowly began to change.
Bill was a talker when he was drinking, and that night was no exception. He told her all about Helen and the kids, spinning it in a way that might garner him sympathy and maybe a little more. She seemed like the kind of girl fully willing to pay in trade for rides. He remembered that part.
The girl listened semi-sympathetically, finishing off the remaining two beers as he navigated the rain-slicked back roads toward the PA border. When she crushed the last can and tossed it into the backseat, her eyes took on a kind of dreamy, hungry look, and turning to him, she began stroking his crotch. He remembered that part too. It felt good; it was the first warm, nonjudgmental touch he’d experienced since he first returned from ’Nam. He felt himself grow hard under her touch and shifted in his seat. She undid his pants and lowered his zipper, freeing his hard-on so she could grasp and stroke it. She ended up giving him road head until he couldn’t take it anymore and pulled the van over.
Bill had never been a violent drunk or even an angry one, but he’d been a mean son of a bitch when he was high. He took whatever the other GIs handed him and let it take him over. He was fearless then, a berserker. He’d destroyed the enemy, saved the salvageable from among his fellow soldiers, and put others, begging for mercy, out of their misery, and when he was high, none of it mattered. His platoon liked fighting high. How else could they have mowed down so many Vietcong in that village?
Yeah, he was someone else when he was high, and he didn’t want or need to bring that someone home. For Helen’s sake, he’d left the drugs behind when he’d stepped on American soil. The drink would have to be enough. And it was, until the night he’d picked up the girl.
What came after his pulling the van over, he remembered in hazy, jagged pieces. He remembered her under him, grinding her hips against him, and he vaguely remembered entering her, but he couldn’t recall the things she was saying that had made him so angry and ashamed. He could see in his mind her blue eyes getting big, her mouth a shrieking, silent O. He might have had a hand on her neck or chest—that was lost to the fog of drugs and time. He thought maybe he might have called her Helen. When he dreamed of that night, he dreamed of punching her, over and over, everywhere.
He remembered her screaming in the rain and running beyond the beam of the headlights into the night. Whatever happened then was lost to the darkness, as well.
At some point he must have passed out, because he woke up in the back of the van where he’d been with the girl. His mouth was dry, his dick was limp, and his body ached all over. His head felt like metal was folding its sharp edges into his soft tissue. He sat up and looked in the rearview mirror. The burning on his cheek emanated from three angry red scratches just below his eye and his lip was split. He examined himself and found he had more scratches on his left shoulder, his chest, his neck….
He didn’t notice the blood where the girl had been lying until several minutes later. There was a small puddle where her ass would have been, and little smears against the rear window and the back of the passenger seat. He had a bright, painful flash of a naked girl running and screaming, the rain streaking the blood on her body. He looked around for her clothes but couldn’t find them; she must have taken them with her.
But what had happened? What made her run away like that? What had he done?
Bill had found that sometimes when he blacked out, pieces came back to him over the course of the next few days. That didn’t happen, though, as he made the long last leg of the trip to Zarephath. He couldn’t remember—in fact, never did.
He half-expected to be picked up by the police upon his arrival in Zarephath. He figured the girl would make her way to town, likely on foot as he couldn’t imagine her trusting any other motorists for a while. She’d go to the police and file a report on her attack and the cops would be looking for his van. He had told her that was where he was going, after all, and at the time, he’d seen no reason to lie about it. The self-loathing he felt eclipsed his fear of arrest. If the cops cuffed him and brought him to jail, he’d go quietly. He had nothing, was nothing—well, that wasn’t true. He was, evidently, a monster, a werewolf unleashed by some unidentified pill popped into his mouth by a girl whose name he’d possibly never know. And monsters were dangerous; a cage seemed like a reasonable place to put him.
He discovered upon arriving in town, however, that the police were not looking for him at all. One gave him a curt wave when Bill’s van passed the patrol car on the road, but otherwise, there was no sign in the light of morning, waning to evening, of anyone looking for him.
He expected the police to come for him all that week, and the next, and for the first few months after. He even went and got a job at the Monroe County Sheriff’s Department, though he wasn’t sure himself if it was to keep closer tabs on a possible investigation or to build up enough guts to confess. He thought a hundred, maybe a thousand times over the next few years of going to his fellow officers and telling them about that night, but he’d long since cleaned the blood out of the van and his minor injuries had healed. He didn’t even have the victim’s name. The girl apparently wasn’t a local; Bill got to know nearly everyone in Zarephath, as it was one of Monroe County’s municipalities, but neither she nor anyone like her showed up anywhere. She wasn’t anyone’s daughter or granddaughter, at least no one’s in town. He wondered a few times if he’d hurt her so badly that she bled out somewhere and died in the woods, but scans of local newspapers showed nothing. He’d even driven a couple of times to
the town that encompassed that particular stretch of road and read their newspapers, and still he found nothing.
He still felt guilt, despite his ardent attempts to protect and serve. He felt self-hate, even though he’d responded to rape calls and had even prevented a couple in the line of duty. He often took out his police-issued .38 and considered blowing away what was left of his alcohol-sodden brain. As he sat on the bed, holding that gun more gently and longingly than he’d ever held Helen, he realized he’d found his own personal rock-bottom and it was hell.
Then Ed, the local hardware-store guy, told him about the Door. They were both fairly young men then, not friends but friendly, and although Bill had never taken to the way that Ed sometimes eyed the young boys that came into the store with their fathers, he’d never gotten any police complaints about Ed and figured him to be a decent enough guy. He’d heard Ed mention the Door in passing, as a bit of local color, and Ed had seemed genuinely surprised that Bill knew nothing about it. He’d been happy enough to fill Bill in on the details; back then, people weren’t as tight-lipped about the Door as they were today. And desperate as he was to get out from under the weight of whatever indistinct, but awful thing he’d done, he’d written a letter and slipped it under that damned Door.
He didn’t ask for his family back. He asked for that girl, whoever she was, to be okay.
He never told anyone, not even Ed and certainly not his grandson, the only family member willing to speak with him, that he’d used the Door.
Bill had plans that afternoon to go with Ed to show some young guy Ed hung around with where the Door was. He had mused in the past that for someone who claimed to have never used the Door, Ed knew an awful lot about it. This new guy, as well as a few others over the years, all had learned about the Door from Ed, and it was Ed who instructed them in what to do if they chose to use it. Sometimes Bill wondered, though never out loud, if the reason Ed was so involved in other people’s using the Door was because it made him feel superior, or at least equal, to those with secrets bad enough to bury. Bill had his own reasons for tagging along; he didn’t want anyone misusing the thing. Lord only knew what the reckless could bring down on Zarephath. He supposed, though, that if he were honest with himself, there was some meager sense of comfort in the idea that everybody sinned, and by each man’s estimation, at least one of those sins was too much to carry to the grave. It didn’t leave him with much faith in humanity in general, but it kept him sober.
The late-August sun would be setting in a few hours; they’d have to hurry. It might screw up this guy’s chances of using the Door if they were all still there after dark. He wanted a drink; even after all those years, he couldn’t help wanting something to calm his nerves. As he picked up his keys to his truck and headed out the door to meet Ed and this guy Toby, he thought maybe staying sober was the least he could do.
* * * *
Kari reached the Door a good hour after full dark, almost a week later. She’d left her purse in the car but had her keys tucked into her jeans pocket. She used her cell phone’s flashlight to navigate her way. In her free hand, she clutched the letter.
She thought a bunch of times about shoving the letter in a drawer and just forgetting the whole thing. If the Door even worked the way Cicely said—and she still had some doubts about that—she couldn’t be sure what that would mean. Was she being some kind of coward for asking that the pain be taken away from her? Was there some psychological repercussion she wasn’t thinking of, in choosing avoidance rather than processing her feelings?
In the end, though, two things made her bite the bullet and trek out into the Zarephath woods after nightfall. The first was the unflagging realization that she had done everything else she was supposed to do in order to supposedly process the death of her daughter, and nothing had worked. She had known people in her life, old men who’d lost a wife of forty years or younger teens who’d lost a parent, who never recovered from it, despite time and the patience and understanding and support of loved ones and the best intentions of the sufferers themselves. Some people didn’t heal, because some wounds to the heart and soul were too deep, too jagged. Some cracks never knitted together again. And those people didn’t just soldier on until they passed from this life to the next; rather, they faded away until they died. And Kari couldn’t bear to be one of those people. It might have been selfish or psychologically damaging or whatever else to decide she needed help in being pulled out from under her sorrow, but she was reaching a point where if she didn’t receive that help, it would bury her indefinitely. Her soul was too tired, too choked as it was, to fight for any kind of air.
The second thing that confirmed her decision was a dream which she chose to take as Jessica giving her blessing. In it, Kari was at a carnival. There were roller coasters and a Ferris wheel that seemed to graze the clouds, a pirate ship that rocked back and forth, lined with lights, a fun house with an overzealous clown mouth serving as an entrance. There were no ticket takers, though, nor ticket booths that she could see. There were carnival games as well, like the whack-a-mole, balloons and darts, and the Duck Pond, but no one overseeing these, either, other than the slightly bedraggled and mangy stuffed prizes that hung from their gallows frame around the booths.
It occurred to Kari as she wandered, lost in the dreamscape crowd, that the people were what was really off about the place. For one thing, no one seemed to walk, but rather glided around the carnival, even though their legs were moving. Their faces were pale and blurred in a way that made them seem remote and alien. No one held anyone’s hand or took much more than a passing notice of others. Parents (she knew them to be parents) moved blithely without their children, and children ran independent of a guardian, regardless of age. Neither noticed or cared about finding one another. It gave Kari the distinct and uneasy feeling that the children had been left or were otherwise unaware of a number of predators circling the crowd like vultures, looking to hurt the children.
In the dream, Kari panicked, sure that Jessica was lost somewhere and only moments from seduction and violence at the hands of one of these blurred people—one with rows of jagged teeth and a mouth as big as the fun-house entrance.
At the moment of this realization, the scene about her drained of color. The prizes in the game booths looked haunted by childhood horrors and the blurred faces took on sinister distortions. Ominous gray thunderheads raced across the sky above, crashing soundlessly together to cast a dark pall over the deteriorating scene below. Kari ran, desperately searching the booths and rides for Jessica’s face.
Then she saw the carousel.
From the top of the brass center pole, a canopy rose in an uneven peak, a twirling smear of red and blue arabesques outlined with lights, supported by thinner poles that warped and curved at grotesque angles. It was difficult for her mind to process the substance of the platform floor. It was at times a rotting metal disc whose wounds bled rust, and at other times was a mere blur, like the faces of the people she’d passed, regardless of the alternately fast and almost painfully slow rotations the carousel made. The seats of this monstrosity were not horses in any traditional sense, but things only vaguely equine, with too many or too few legs and eyes in all the wrong places and tentacles reaching for and nearly blending one into another.
There were no people on or near that particular ride, except one. One beast of mottled black and white had powerful forelegs frozen in mid-gallop, while its rear half resembled a scorpion’s back legs and tail. Its head was a thick half-braid of tentacles whose ends wavered toward the back end of the creature before it, as if looking to catch and devour it in some as-yet undisclosed mouth.
On its back, Jessica rode serene, unfazed by the coming storm or the unnatural wrongness of the place. She sailed by and was out of sight as she passed around back of the carousel, then emerged again from the other side. Round and round, she was in view one moment and gone the next, then back again, and it looked to
Kari like the creature she rode was stamping and pawing and writhing beneath her.
“Jessica!” Kari screamed, but the girl simply looked at her and smiled. Around them, the winds were gathering and grumbling, not quite a roar, but close.
“Take the letter, Mom,” Jessica said through her smile. “Take it to the door.” And she and her beast continued on in their rotation, on to the far side of the carousel. Kari waited for her to reemerge, and when she did, Kari called out to her. Jessica waved, like she’d done so many times on so many rides when she was little.
“Do it,” she said, and then she slipped away, back to the far side of the carousel. Again, Kari waited for her to pop back around. The ride slowed and then sped up again, but as it came full circle, both Jessica and the monster she’d been riding were gone. Kari eyed every beast that came around, calling and then screaming Jessica’s name, then hopped up on the platform to search the whole thing at once, but her daughter was nowhere to be seen. The empty space where she and her horse-thing had been was steadily closing as the tendrils and appendages of the other creatures reached for each other to close the gap.
She leaped back off the ride, sure somehow that it would only be a moment before whatever had swallowed Jessica would take her too, and as dream-tears blurred her vision, she woke herself up.
Remnants of that dream, mostly the unease she’d felt, returned to her and rested like a shroud as she approached the Door. Funny, the walk alone through the woods hadn’t spooked her, but her proximity to the Door filled her with a kind of ill-defined dread. Dread of what? Delivery of the letter was supposed to be a good thing, or at least, the doorway, so to speak, to a brighter future. Cicely had warned her one last time about not opening the Door and about wording her request carefully, and had eyed the letter with unsubtle suspicion, as if Kari might have switched it for a letter with different contents, but in the end, Cicely had wished her well and just before Kari left, squeezed her arm almost maternally.
Behind the Door Page 4