The creatures hadn’t rushed them in the woods because the humans could have scattered and fled, but here, in front of the Door, they were fish in a barrel. Kathy’s time was running out. She wasn’t sure how long the eight of them surrounding her could hold onto each other.
“Hold on!” Bill shouted. “Don’t break the circle.” He stumbled forward from a blow to the back by another tentacle, but held fast to Cole’s and Kari’s hands.
Kathy spoke the words louder and faster. She wasn’t sure what would happen once the incantation began to work, but she knew that around the ninth iteration, she would begin to see the change. She hoped the others could hold on, both figuratively and literally, for that long.
When Gracie cried out, she closed her eyes. The best she could do for these people was complete the incantation, so she kept saying the words. A burning in her hands had begun to travel up her wrists and down from her injured shoulder, but she focused the pain into speaking louder and louder. The hum, matching her volume, had increased to a roar and then a howl.
When she opened her eyes, she saw splintered fragments of wood sticking out of her palms. The wooden box had disintegrated completely, and in her hands, she clutched a bluish-green disc whose sharp edges bit into the inside bends of her fingers. There was something like a face in the center, and it screamed along with the howling from behind the Door. She held it higher, just over Gracie’s head and toward the Door.
She entered into the ninth repetition of the incantation and the blue glow travelled farther up her arms. Bluish mist poured out from around all sides of the Door. The howl was deafening now, and the pain in her hands and wrists was threatening to cause the muscles in her arms to seize. All around her, the circle remained unbroken, but she could see from their terrified faces that their strength was ebbing.
Kathy finished the words, and suddenly the Door blew inward.
The disc in her hands flew over Gracie’s head and through the opening, which Kathy stared at in awe. Beyond the neat, rectangular edges of this dimension was a storming black sky with angry purplish-gray clouds. Bright blue lightning flashed, striking quicksilver waves that spit their spray and foam against a far-off island. On the island, as Kari had described, was an immense tower, glowing faintly blue.
“Oh my God,” Kathy breathed, but her words were lost in the din.
A series of shrieks preceded first one blur, then another and another, as the creatures were sucked out of the darkness. They narrowly missed the members of the circle as they were pulled through the open space. All eight of them, too terrified to move, gaped at the opening or watched the creatures zipping by them. The opening was sucking in everything: the thick darkness, stretched to plumes like smoke, which had made the night so opaque, the hums and howls and screams, the blue mist.
A creature whizzed past Kathy and over Gracie’s little head, but before it could be funneled into the storm on the other side, a tentacle smacked the wood of the Door and held fast. Another wrapped around Gracie’s arm and yanked her free of the circle, pulling her into the opening and dangling her over the water. Louise screamed. The tentacle holding onto the Door let go, but Gracie remained.
Toby was holding the girl’s arm with one hand; the other had the gun pointed at the creature holding onto her. A number of mouths bloomed suddenly in its flesh and Toby began to fire. The gun made no sound, but the bullets flew…and found their mark. The creature let go of Gracie and Toby pulled her back through the opening, shoving her toward Louise, who scooped her up and held her tightly.
Another creature flew by, wrapping a tentacle around Toby’s wrist and wrenching the gun free. It fell down and disappeared in the monstrous waves. The creature yanked him through the opening before letting go, but he grabbed at the planks of the Door. Bill dove for his hand and held on. Kathy ran to hold onto Bill, Kari and Cicely held onto her, and Cole held onto them. Rob held Louise and Gracie, moving them away from the pull of the wind.
“Toby!” Kathy cried out.
The Door began to close.
“Pull!” Bill shouted. The group pulled, but Bill slid forward. The force of the incantation threatened to flush them all through the Door and slam it shut.
“The Door’s closing!” Rob called out.
“Pull!” Bill shouted again and the group pulled, but Toby was on the other side now, buffeted by the storm winds that Kathy had created.
The Door slid even further closed.
Toby glanced at Kathy and then fixed his gaze on Bill. “Let go,” he said, and although his voice should have been swallowed by the storm, Kathy could still hear him.
“What? Toby, no,” Bill said.
“You’ll die!” Kari cried. “You can’t!”
They tried again to pull him through, but the storm was getting stronger. Having reclaimed the remains of that other dimension, the Door was ready to close. It swung forward a few more inches. Now the edge of it was close to Bill’s shoulder.
Toby, who looked scared enough, shook his head. “The Door’s closing. You have to, or the whole lot of you will get sucked in too. We don’t have time to argue. Just let me go.”
“Don’t do this, Tobias,” Cicely said. “You don’t have to do this.”
Toby smiled at them, but his eyes were sad. To Kari, he said, “I’m so sorry.” Then, to the others he said, “It’s okay. Let me go. It’s okay.”
The Door bumped up against Bill’s shoulder. The older man looked sad, but he knew Toby was right.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly.
“Don’t be. I’m ready.”
With a final, pained look, Bill nodded, then let Toby go. Toby fell backward toward the silver water and disappeared under the waves. Kathy saw him surface once, wave and even smile, before another wave washed him under for good.
Bill pushed back with some force, shoving the group behind him onto their rears, but out of the way just as the Door slammed shut. The other world disappeared, cutting off the storm, the mists, the dark, and that terrible howl, fading to a scream, then to a hum, and finally to utter silence.
For several minutes, the eight of them gathered before the Door held each other. Some cried, some laughed, and some did both at once. Others remained shocked into silence, staring at the Door.
“Did we do it?” little Gracie asked. She looked dazed, her little pink cheeks streaked with tears and dirt. “Did we make all the monsters go away?”
“We sure did, sweetie,” Kathy said. “We sure did.”
Epilogue
Kathy stayed another three days or so in Zarephath, helping the sheriff and Bill tie up loose ends, process paperwork, and clean up some of the damage. The morning following their closing and locking of the Door, she was pleased to see that despite the damage to the lawn and the front of the Heritage Center building, Deputy Edmundson and the rest of the assembled townspeople had managed to stay safe the rest of the night. Ellie and Bob, looking a little bedraggled but otherwise not seriously hurt, were proudly flanking the deputy, whose splinted leg had been broken while assisting them with the two creatures who had made it into the lobby of the building. Edmundson was checked over, but he was holding up okay. Mostly, he was pleased by Cole’s approval, which he received in the form of a smile and a hearty clap on the shoulder.
Over those three and a half days, Kathy checked in with Reece, who was relieved to hear she was safe and looking forward to seeing her when she got home. She was looking forward to it too. He had a way of soothing her even when she didn’t realize she needed soothing, and in bringing normalcy back to the places in her that she worried might be permanently hollowed out by the strangeness of her job. She had her files and laptop packed and in the car. Her wounds had been checked out by the county hospital, which issued her some new bandages on her shoulder, wrists, and palms, and an otherwise clean bill of health. She saw to it that her circle was treated and cleared by doctors a
s well, and then moved on to the rest of the injured townsfolk. She determined to her satisfaction that there was no contagion from the other world, and readings on the Door left her confident that both the entities that had slipped through and those that had tried to break in had receded back to that silvery ocean, the island, and the tower.
Kathy was particularly interested in making sure no lingering effects or entities from the world behind the Door remained. She observed, with the help of the townspeople, that while the contents of their letters had been negated across the board, they were no longer being haunted by them in any way. Kathy knew it would take a long time, maybe years, to really feel safe in their homes and familiar hometown places, but they were a resilient people, stoic like the generations before them, and despite their being given a skeleton key to another world, it was far less likely that going forward, they would use it.
There were things worth surviving rather than changing, and there were things for which surviving was the option. Kathy knew that, and so did most of the population of Zarephath.
As Kathy drove away from Zarephath, she passed the far edge of the woods. She thought of Carl Dietrich, Ed Richter, and the Kilmeisters, and finally, of Toby. She remembered telling Bill that heaven and hell were just other dimensions, other planes of existence, and she did believe that, but she hoped that where the dead of Zarephath had gone was a place where the flaw of being human, all across the spectrum, was forgiven and they were at peace.
Lastly, she wondered about the tower she had seen. It was a place of significance and import; she could feel that radiating outward all the way from the island to her spot in the woods of her own dimension. It worried her a little, because it confirmed her belief that in those dimensions between heaven and hell, there was immense power, and with it, truly godlike sentience capable of tapping into that power.
Kathy began to hum along with the radio, then caught herself and stopped. She could do without humming for a while.
She left Zarephath comfortably in the rearview and headed home.
About the Author
Mary SanGiovanni, author of the Kathy Ryan series, is also the author of Chills, Savage Woods, and the Bram Stoker–nominated novel, The Hollower and its sequels Found You and The Triumvirate, Thrall, and Chaos. She is also the author of several other novels and numerous short stories. She has been writing fiction for over a decade, has a master’s in writing popular fiction from Seton Hill University, and is a member of the Authors Guild, Penn Writers, and International Thriller Writers.
Her website is marysangiovanni.com.
Chills
If you enjoyed Behind the Door, be sure not to miss
Kathy Ryan’s first appearance!
It begins with a freak snowstorm in May. Hit hardest is the rural town of Colby, Connecticut. Schools and businesses are closed, power lines are down, and police detective Jack Glazier has found a body in the snow. It appears to be the victim of a bizarre ritual murder. It won’t be the last. As the snow piles up, so do the sacrifices. Cut off from the rest of the world, Glazier teams up with an occult crime specialist to uncover a secret society hiding in their midst.
The gods they worship are unthinkable. The powers they summon are unstoppable. And the things they will do to the good people of Colby are utterly, horribly unspeakable . . .
Read on for a special excerpt!
A Lyrical Underground e-book on sale now.
Chapter 1
Jack Glazier had worked Colby Township Homicide for going on nine long New England winters, but he had never seen blood freeze quite like that.
It certainly had been cold the last few nights; it was the kind of weather that cast phantom outlines of frost over everything. That hoary white made grass, tree branches, cars, even houses look fragile, like they might crack and shatter beneath the lightest touch. An icy wind that stabbed beneath the clothes and skin had been grating across the town of Colby for days now, and the place was raw.
Jack hated the cold. He hated it even more when his profession brought him out on brittle early mornings like this one, where the feeble sunlight did little even to suggest the idea of heat.
He had caught a murder case—a middle-aged John Doe found hanging upside down from the lowest branch of a massive oak tree at the northeastern edge of Edison Park. The body had been strung up off the ground by the right leg with some type of as-yet-unidentified rope. A crude hexagon had been dug roughly in the torn-up grass beneath the body. Scattered in those narrow trenches, he’d been told, the responding officers had found what they believed to be the contents of the man’s pockets, which had been bagged as a potential starting point for identification.
Jack glanced up at the silver dome of sky with its gathering clouds of darker gray and listened for a moment to the low wail of the wind slicing at the men gathered near the body. They worked silently, their minimal conversation encased in tiny breath-puffs of white. The air carried a faint smell of freezer-burned meat that agitated Jack in a way the smell of dead bodies never really did. It made him think of lost things, things forgotten way in the back of dark, cold places and left to rot slowly. There was no closure and no dignity in it.
Of course, he supposed that closure and whatever little dignity he could scrape together for the victims of murder was part of his job.
It took an effort to focus on the body again, to duck under the strung-up lines of police tape and move toward it. He found that the closer he got to a decade of dealing with dead, clouded eyes, gelid, mutilated flesh, and distraught loved ones, the more energy it took to give himself over to getting cases started. He wanted them solved—that drive had propelled him to the rank of detective lieutenant and it made him good at what he did—but it was the starting of the investigations he had lost the taste for. It was getting harder and harder to stare the next few months of brooding and nightmares in the face.
As for the body itself, the throat looked like it had been cut—bitten, really—and there were lacerations on the naked torso, shoulders, bare arms, and face. Jack, who did his best to suppress his morbidly imaginative streak in these situations yet frequently failed, could imagine the John Doe dangling in the glacial night air, wracked with shivers as his blood poured from his wounds, cooling the fire of life in his body until there was no movement, no feeling. He was an end scene, frozen before the roll of the credits, his screen time cut suddenly short.
All of the John Doe’s blood had formed, drop by drop, fringes of crimson icicles from the lowest-hanging parts of his body, as if every part, every tissue of the man had struggled to escape that branch and its pain and death. The overall effect stripped the humanity from the corpse, leaving it a gross caricature of what it once had been.
A uniformed officer whose name slipped Jack’s mind—Morano or Moreno, something like that—nodded at him as he made his way up to the crime scene. Crouched beneath the body a foot or so from the outline of overturned grass clumps, Colby’s thin, bald, and bespectacled coroner, Terrence Cordwell, was packing up his kit.
“They’re calling for about eight to ten inches of snow, starting around midnight. Can you believe that? Probably keep up most of tomorrow,” Cordwell was saying to Dave Brenner, his assistant, who had switched from the digital camera to the film. Dave was documenting the churned-dirt hexagon and the body with another series of close-up photos. Both men nodded to Jack as he joined them.
Brenner stepped carefully into the hexagon’s center and took a close-up photo of the body’s neck wound, a gaping tear like a second frown across his neck, then stepped outside the core of the crime scene, around to the back of the torso. He whistled, holding up his pocket ruler beneath the body’s shoulder blades, and took another couple of photos. “Hey, Glazier. Where’s Morris?”
Jack crouched and peered closer at the neck wound. It looked deep and uneven, like several serrated sharp objects had torn and gouged at the neck at once. It reminded h
im again of a bite. “Nephew’s baptism. He’s the godfather, I think.”
“Poor kid. Hey, shit weather, huh? Too cold for May.”
“Cold, yeah. Not unheard of, though, I guess.”
“No,” Brenner offered grudgingly over his shoulder, and Jack heard the whir and snap of the camera taking another picture. “Up north, maybe. But still awful late in the season for more snow around here. It’s a sign that the planet is fucked, if you ask me. Global warming and shit.”
Jack didn’t answer. He wasn’t particularly fond of Brenner; the guy always seemed to have one more thing to say than Jack had the patience to hear.
Instead, Jack rose and turned to Cordwell. “So what’s the deal with this guy?”
The coroner peeled off his rubber gloves. “No ID, no wallet—but he’s got teeth and fingertips, so if he’s in the system, we should be able to find him. Dead eight, maybe nine hours. With the cold, it’s hard to say for sure until we get him back to the cave. What I can tell you is that he froze to death before he had a chance to bleed out, although the hypothermia was likely accelerated by the blood loss. These lacerations and that neck wound were meant, I’m guessing, to speed up the process. They’re animal, most of them. Not certain what kind yet, but we bagged and tagged what I’m pretty sure is a tooth.”
“Animal bites? So what, someone fed him to something and then strung up what was left?”
Cordwell shrugged. “More likely, it happened the other way around. Someone strung this guy up and left him to . . . whatever did that to him.”
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