She continued. “We suspect that sometime in the last week or two, the Door opened. We don’t know on which end. It is closed now, but we suspect that something came through nevertheless, and we believe whatever it was is responsible for the reversions. We would like to identify and contain this force if possible, and minimize further risk to you, the people of Zarephath, particularly users of the Door and those marginally involved with it by association or involvement in the letters others have written.”
As she spoke, she noticed a lot of poking and prodding between the people, whispering and grumbling. Her understanding was that the cardinal rule for living in Zarephath was to never, ever, under any circumstances open that Door. She understood their panic, but mob panic was always a dangerous thing. If she could have seen a way to gather information on a smaller, quieter scale, she would have. However, she believed time was of the essence and where her files were lacking, only the townspeople could fill in the blanks. So she kept talking.
“I understand that many of you are frightened at the prospect of an unraveling of requests and what it will mean in terms of the well-being of yourself or others. That is why it is going to be of vital importance that you lend us your assistance—anonymously, if desired. Yes, I’m saying that in order to help you, I need you to help me. Understand that I am not here to judge you and frankly, I don’t care why you used the Door. But if you want to save yourselves, your families, and friends, I just need to know that you did, and what you have been experiencing as a result this past week. Sights, sounds, smells, and of course, any physical contact. I need to be able to identify what, specifically, is attacking you so that I know how to fight it.”
After that, the crowd did erupt in noise, and it took the mayor and Sheriff Cole to herd them into some semblance of order to ask their questions.
“Are you really going to take this information anonymously? What if folks don’t want anyone to know they used the Door?” The question was posed by a harried-looking middle-aged woman with a messy bun of mousy brown hair. She wore a T-shirt that read Aliens took me…and brought me back.
“Absolutely. We’ll be setting up interviews by phone and written request, to meet at a time and place that is both convenient to you and discreet. The interviewing team will consist only of myself, retired sheriff Bill Grainger, and Sheriff Cole. No one else will be aware of your participation if you wish to remain anonymous.”
A male with a baseball cap and gray T-shirt stood up and asked, “How did the Door open? I thought it was locked.” There was a chorus of agreement on that point. It had likely never occurred to a number of people to even try to open the Door under the assumption that it had some kind of cosmic lock.
Kathy replied, “We don’t know at this time how or why the Door opened, although given what we know about the Door, we don’t think it’s likely it was opened from the far side.” Outrage rippled through the crowd, so she added, “This does not mean we’re accusing anyone here or blaming anyone for opening the Door. Please do not take it upon yourselves to try to assign blame to your fellow neighbors. That Door you have out there is not from this dimension. I’m sure you know that. As such, we can’t be one-hundred percent sure at this time how to predict its behavior. We can offer theories based on patterns we have seen from years of field research and observation.”
“So you’ve seen other Doors? Doors like that one out in the woods?” an old man in a wheelchair hollered from the far side of the room.
“Other portals, yes. Not like yours, though; not exactly. In many cases, the portals could only be opened or activated from one side. The Door in Zarephath seems to possess many characteristics of a portal like that. Other portals can be opened from either side, given someone has a key and knows how to use it.”
“Can you keep the Door from opening again?” a young girl in the front row asked. She looked about nine and absolutely terrified.
Kathy softened for a moment. “I hope to. I’ll certainly do my best, sweetie.”
“We have time for one more question,” Bill cut in. “Then we’ll give you information on setting up appointments to speak with us privately.”
A man in the back of the room raised his hand. Despite his boyish handsomeness, his eyes looked haggard, as if sleep had eluded him those last several days. “Can this force you mentioned, this whatever it is that escaped from behind the Door—can it kill us?”
The room grew silent, awaiting her answer. She paused—not long enough for them to pick up on it and panic, but long enough to think through how to answer that.
“That,” she said, “is what I’m hoping to determine from you fine people. I suspect there is a physical-interaction component, to be honest with you. But I promise I’ll do everything I can to keep it from hurting anyone.”
“I hope you can,” the man said softly.
* * * *
Bill awoke in the darkness, one foot in the real world and one foot still in his dream. He turned to his digital alarm clock. It read 4:00. He’d been having a dream, though the details were fuzzy. He thought it might have been about the night with the hitchhiker, but he could only remember streaks of blood mixing with rain. It was already fading, though, and he mashed the remnant sleep from his eyes with the heel of his hand. With a groan, he got up and trudged to the bathroom and stood over the toilet, waiting for the stream of urine to begin flowing. He’d found that the older he got, the longer it took to get his dick going, regardless of what he needed it to do. He’d also discovered the need to make these nightly bathroom visits more frequently, which wreaked havoc on his sleep.
When he was done, he splashed some cold water on his face and headed back to bed. Still groggy in his head, he almost didn’t notice the shape moving on the bed. He got within a few feet of it before his brain registered what his half-closing eyes were seeing.
Something was moving beneath the covers in the dark.
Immediately he was awake, trying to gauge the distance between the thing on the bed and the gun in his night-table drawer without taking his eyes off the shape for too long. It looked to be about the size of a large dog, but the contours weren’t right for an animal. It appeared to be struggling to free itself from the blankets he’d thrown back a few minutes before, and whatever it was, it was making wet smacking sounds beneath them. Bill inched toward the night table.
The thing must have heard the creaking of his feet on the floorboards, because the sounds stopped suddenly, like it was waiting and listening. After a few moments, the smacking, slapping sounds resumed, and Bill crept closer to the night-table drawer. Beneath the blanket, it looked like a number of snakes writhing in different directions. Blood soaked the portion of the undersheet exposed by the moving blanket; Bill could see a wet shadow dripping down the side of the bed. He quietly eased open the night table and pulled out his .38. In one fluid move, he threw back the blanket and drew the gun on the shape on the bed.
He almost dropped the gun. The thing lying where Bill had been moments before looked like the hitchhiker from the waist up, though it was worse off than when Bill had seen it on the lawn. The plastered blond hair looked leached of color and mangy spots on her head suggested it had been pulled out or fallen out in random clumps. The eyes had flattened in their sockets and were a dull gray color now, and part of her bottom lip was missing. Her breasts were lopsided, one sliding nearly into her armpit and the other flattened against her chest. Her nipples were purplish-gray. There was nothing remotely human below her waist, which was itself a tattered and bloody mess of flesh where thin, knotted cords of blackish muscle grasped at the soaked sheets. And her stomach…
What he had mistaken for snakes were long tentacles waving and snapping at the air. They reached out to him from a hollowed-out cavern in her gut, slick with blood and some substance the sickly yellow color of phlegm. The hitchhiker’s arms reached out for him too, as if pleading with him to embrace her.
When the thing sat up, he emptied the gun into its face. It shrieked once, then folded in on itself. It was like watching a rag get pulled through a pinhole, and then it disappeared with a tiny plop. Bill stared at the bloody spot on the bed for several seconds, his brain still trying to process how the monstrosity that was there seconds ago was now gone. He took a deep breath and with a shaking hand, put the gun back in the drawer.
Then he heard the shriek outside.
He rushed to the bedroom window and peered out. Looking up at him from the surrounding darkness below was the thing that had been on his bed, except that instead of the hitchhiker’s face, there was a cavernous emptiness. It looked to him like a hole poked in a piece of paper, but the void behind it was endless, deeper than the body, deeper than the world. It was dizzying to look down into it, with those matted clumps of hair dangling into the abyss like cilia and those tentacles whipping up a frenzy all around it.
Another shriek emanated from that black hole, a thin, unnatural sound overlapped onto the air rather than moving through it. Bill was about to grab his gun again when the thing ran off on its stomach tentacles, disappearing into the night.
Bill watched the space where it had been for some moments after, scanning the darkness in an ultimately futile attempt at discerning where the thing had gone. The world outside was silent; even the crickets, tree frogs, and cicadas had packed it in for the night.
He looked at the mess on the bed, stripped off the sheets and blankets, and left them in a heap on the floor. Then he went downstairs and grabbed a kitchen chair, hauling it awkwardly up the stairs to the bedroom, where he set it down facing the window. He took his .38 out of the night table, sat in the chair, and with the gun in his lap, he waited for the dawn.
Chapter 10
Setting up interviews to question the townspeople about their experiences with the Door and the more recent results of having used it proved tricky. Most people were not as forthcoming about their use of the Door as Alice Cromberg, who, shortly after giving her statement in the makeshift interrogation room of the Heritage Center’s basement, had to be rushed to the hospital. She had been experiencing some cramping during the interview, but as she’d gotten up to leave, she’d been wracked with a spasm of pain that nearly dropped her to the floor. Kathy, worried that she might be miscarrying, had called an ambulance.
She’d gone to the hospital earlier that day to talk to Joe and Anne Bartkowski about the aggressive return of Anne’s cancer—the poor woman looked ravaged from the inside out—and had even managed to pry from Bill that an old dispatcher with a crush on him had wished away his Vietnam-related PTSD. Their stories more or less conformed to the town gossip she’d already heard. What they proved in terms of illuminating and useful information about the Door was frustratingly little. None of the people she’d talked to so far had visited the Door or the woods or even given much thought to either since their initial letter. In all those cases, the Door had delivered with little to no negative side effects everything the letter writers wanted, pretty much the way they wanted. All that suggested was that good wishes had finally gone bad, and Kathy knew the sampling was far too limited to make the determination that it only applied to such a narrow set of circumstances.
She was particularly interested in some of the upcoming interviews over the course of the week that had not made the town circuit of gossip. Ed Richter, the owner of the local hardware store, had informed them that a number of townsfolk had laid their confidences on his counter regarding their interaction with the Door, and that if it could save people’s lives, he could part with a few names and basics that Kathy, Sheriff Cole, and Bill Grainger could use as leads. Ed had made only one request, and it was that they come out to his house to talk with him, as he was not well at the moment. In truth, he’d sounded terrible on the phone even to Kathy, and those who knew him said he sounded like death warmed over.
Her next few appointments were with a Toby Vernon, a Kari Martin, a Cicely Robinson, and a Mr. and Mrs. Grant and Flora Kilmeister. The couple she would have to speak to last; Sheriff Cole had informed them recently of the tragic vehicular homicide of their employee, a young guy named Carl Dietrich, and they were pretty shaken up about it. Apparently, it had been a hit and run; someone had mowed the boy down in the street. The others had requested various clandestine meetings out of the town’s watchful line of sight, and the trio of interviewers had agreed.
Kathy had reiterated to each of the townspeople she had spoken to that contents of the interviews would remain anonymous. What she couldn’t promise them was immunity from prosecution, should one of them implicate him- or herself or someone else in a crime. Sheriff Cole had stepped in on that point, uncharacteristically sensitive and soft-spoken, and had assured worried townspeople that prosecution was not their aim. Saving the lives of the people of Zarephath was priority number one, and anything else could be reasonably and discreetly sorted out later. Kathy wasn’t sure if the man was lying to them or not, but it put people’s minds at ease and got them talking, and for that, Kathy was glad.
An elderly woman by the name of Edna Tremont had been first on their list. They met her at three p.m. at a local scenic spot, Carner Park, at a picnic table under an elder tree. She always went to the park during warm months and sat at “her” table, watching the children play and feeding the birds. There wasn’t much else for her, she explained, as she was something of the “town crazy,” as she put it. The thing was, the longer Kathy spoke to her, the surer she was that Edna had one of the sharpest minds in town. Her stories about the Door were a veritable gold mine of information into its working, despite the fact that she had never used it herself.
First, she told them about some of the observed odd effects of reversed wishes whose letter writers were no longer among the living. It made for some very unsettling conversation. Some things seemed to her like big, important things, and she started with those. She tossed her bread crumbs and smiled at games of tag while she told Kathy, Cole, and Bill about a man she’d known in the forties by the name of Jeff Dietrich. Jeff was born with one leg shorter than the other and limped his whole walking life as a result. Edna told them that he saw it not only as a physical limitation, but a social and emotional one as well, and one that made him inferior to his older brother Greg. He also had a temper shorter than his leg, and had shot his brother in the head for teasing him about it, then poured gasoline on him and set him on fire. In a fit of guilt, Jeff had written a letter wishing to trade places with his brother, then hobbled out to the Door alone to deliver it. Three days later, his charred remains had been found curled up in front of the Door with a bullet wound in the blackened skull. He’d waited his three days outside the Door to make sure that his request was honored, and it was, but not with the second lease on life Jeff wanted for his brother. Greg, now burdened with the guilt of murder on his soul, had hanged himself from the very same big elder tree in Carner Park under which Edna and Kathy and the others were sitting. That was in ’48. Edna told them last Tuesday’s visit to her picnic table had led to the discovery of a pile of bones beneath a noose that was hanging from one of the branches of a tree and that she’d noticed one leg bone was significantly longer than the other.
Some things were littler, but somehow more horrifying in that there was no explanation forthcoming. These, Edna said, were things like doors in different places than they’d been days ago, a metal bar running through a cherry tree, a rusted-out car parked on a side street with a single grocery bag of dried and rotted fruit in it, and the park’s outdoor basketball court carpeted with the corpses of dead goldfish. From an abandoned house down the street from her own home, Edna could hear arguing and crying, but no one was inside. She also claimed that from the empty lot where the old theater in Zarephath had once stood, she could hear singing, but only when she stepped where the audience seats used to be. There were graves with different tombstones on them. There were people with different faces. She’d found a sev
ered skeletal arm in a birdbath on Pine Street and on the double lot on Elm, a shed-sized pyramid of stone in which there was an old sneaker, a flashlight, and a bloody pillowcase.
Edna assumed these small, strange reversions were due to letters written by the now-deceased. She could only begin to imagine the secret dreams and desires, envies and fears that had left these orphaned things to haunt places where they had once mattered so much to someone.
She also had stories to tell of living neighbors and friends, though these were no less tragic or terrible. Edna had recalled a man who had lost a leg in Korea asking for his leg back. She’d gone to check in on him with a chicken dinner, as she often did on Sundays, because he was a bachelor without a wife to properly cook for him. She had found him in his old wheelchair, looking miserable. The leg that had been returned to him had developed a fast-spreading kind of gangrene or sepsis or something, she couldn’t remember which, and had begun rotting right off his body. She’d called an ambulance for him and the last she’d heard, they were going to have to amputate. Edna also told them about a woman who had been burned in a fire in ’84 wishing for her beauty back. She continued modeling for almost twenty years after that. The police—Sheriff Cole confirmed it—had found her in the woods on Tuesday. The animals had gotten to her and gnawed off more than half of her face.
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