Beyond The Door

by Jeffrey Thomas

  ‘So,’ asked my friend, ‘how was it?’

  ‘Neat,’ I told him, panting a little. To be honest, I was relieved to be outside in the relative brightness of the cold afternoon sky, rather than in that gloomy hallway listening to the retching behind the closed door, that sounded uncomfortably like my drunken father. I didn’t mention my father to the brothers, but I did say, ‘The scariest part was definitely that vomiting thing, with all the blood coming under the closed door.’

  A look of confusion came over my classmate’s face—his brother’s, too. He said, ‘What vomiting thing?’

  ‘Blood under a door?’ said the brother.

  I laughed and punched my friend’s arm (not too hard, lest he punch me back). ‘Come on, stop joking—the show’s over. You know what I mean…the trail of blood from the broken window, up the stairs…then the blood under the door, and someone pretending to vomit on the other side. Very funny, fellas, very funny. You almost made me lose my lunch, too.’

  My classmate rapped his knuckles on my forehead, then, and said, ‘Hello? Hello? Are we okay in there? I don’t know what the heck you’re going on about…what broken window? What trail of blood?’

  ‘Show me,’ the brother demanded.

  ‘Okay,’ I sighed, ‘I can see the show’s not over, then. Follow me.’ So I led them back inside, expecting that while they had distracted me some third accomplice would have cleaned up the fake blood, maybe even the broken glass, and upstairs the door to that closed room would be open and no one would be inside. A better climax than the manikin lashed to the bed, after all.

  But the blood and broken glass in the front hall were still there, and my classmate said, ‘What the hell?’ His brother and I followed him up the stairs, and down the hallway to the closed door and the pool of blood that had spread under it. But there were no more violent vomiting sounds on the other side. My friend took hold of the knob…and threw the door open.

  It was a bathroom, and on the closed toilet lid a man was slumped over. He was a young man, but in filthy clothes and unshaven. He must have been an addict, high on drugs and in an addled state of mind. He must have broken into the house to steal money or something he could sell to buy more drugs, or perhaps simply for shelter. And crawling through that broken window sometime earlier, unknown to my two friends, he must have cut himself badly on the remnants of glass in the frame—because it wasn’t bile or a recent meal that he’d been vomiting up, but his own ingested blood. A long wound in the side of his neck gaped open, and the entire front of his clothing was saturated with his blood. Blood entirely covered the bathroom floor, spreading to the hallway floor under the bottom of the door.

  Somewhere in the mere minutes between the time I had stood outside this room listening to him vomit up that blood, and the time my friends had dragged me outside, the last dregs of life had bled out of the young addict sitting there on that closed toilet seat.”

  Ware went silent then, his story completed, waiting for the other man’s response. Maybe the stranger would accept this confession as a kind of apology…would understand why, maybe, Ware—who normally hated confrontation of any sort—had reacted with such hostility. The stranger was silent, too, for a long minute, as if lost in thought or debating how to respond.

  When at last the man on the other side of the closed metal door spoke, it was in a similarly more subdued voice than he’d used previously. He said, “Where I come from, in Eastborough, Massachusetts –”

  Ware cut him off there. “Where I come from I’ve never heard of any Eastborough, Massachusetts. Northborough, South-borough, Westborough—yes. But Eastborough…”

  “Where I come from we don’t have a train stop, so it wouldn’t be on your commuter route, would it? Anyway, can I go on? Okay…in my hometown of Eastborough, there was a racetrack on Route 9 when I was a kid—called the Eastborough Speedway, in fact—and on summer nights even from my yard you could hear the distant car engines rumbling. In my lush, overgrown yard, on a humid summer’s night, I liked to pretend I was listening to the growls of dinosaurs. My father always told me I had an excess of imagination. I thought I just had a keen sense of wonder. I think that’s essential in a child. It may be the only time in our lives when we aren’t blind.

  Dinosaurs. Fitting, really. The speedway has long since been a shopping plaza, and I never did see even one of its races, but for a week every summer its grounds were host to an attraction that interested me far more. It was a traveling carnival, the particular name of which—if it ever had one—I never knew.

  Was it every summer? No...I recall now that some years it was a week in spring. Sometimes the carnival would stay for a couple of weeks. Some years, to my great disappointment, it didn’t come at all.

  When it did come, my father never failed to bring me, and usually his brother would accompany us—along with my cousin Bill, who was two years younger than me. The men tended to leave us to pursue their own pleasures, though. There was a beer garden, and a girlie show. That was something I never caught even one time, either.

  But Bill and I would steal looks at this midway strip show from a distance, not really understanding what went on inside, not yet understanding the dirty-feeling curiosity that drew us to its outer orbit. One time, one of the scantily clad ladies up on the bally—as the little stage outside the sideshow tents was called—caught my eye over the balding heads of my own and other kids’ fathers, and winked at me. My heart’s clapper rang against its sides. She wasn’t a sleazy performer to my ten-year-old mind, but a princess on a pedestal in her 60’s big bleached hair and her boa-lined red negligee.

  Talk about a sense of wonder. Even before ten I was under the disorienting, the distorting spell of the fairer sex. I remember betting my sister’s friends that I was strong enough to pick them up. Talk about a pick-up line. Well, it was as good a way as any for an eight-year-old to get his arms around a beguiling twelve-year-old older woman. A precursor, though I didn’t know it then, to the amorous exertions of adulthood. But would women ever again be as magical to me as they had been back then?

  The same year the woman in red negligee winked at me, Bill and I saw another female carnival worker die. In a way.

  There was a trapeze act—a modest setup, outside of any tent. A placard posted the times the aerialists would perform. During the afternoon, Bill and I saw them performing from afar, and we’d meant to catch a later show but then forgot until it was too late to claim a good vantage point. By the time we did approach the act, brightly lit under night’s black sky, there was already a crowd so thick we could barely penetrate its edge. Standing on tiptoes and craning our necks did little to improve our view. Had we not been close to the setup earlier, between acts, we wouldn’t have known that there was no safety net stretched below the trapeze framework.

  Off to the side there was a trailer, and from it emerged the acrobats the crowd had gathered for. I had a less obscured view of the trailer, and so I could see the performers clearly before they approached the trapeze rig. There was a youngish, good-looking man who bounded ahead of the other two trapeze artists to start things off with some solo work. I watched him for a few minutes before my attention was drawn back to the other two. There was an older man who was balding but obviously still in good shape, and a young woman. They wore silvery, glittery outfits, the woman’s like a one-piece swimsuit that bared her strong, shapely legs up to the hip. She had honey blond hair tied back in a ponytail. Though to my youthful eye she seemed a full-fledged woman, in retrospect I know she must have only been twenty or so, if not younger.

  Was she the balding man’s daughter? I didn’t think so. He had his arm around her while he smoked a cigarette and watched his companion’s act, but his embrace didn’t seem paternal to me. Not the way his hand curled around one of her rounded hips, sliding up and down its curve. I should hope he wasn’t her father, anyway.

  There was discomfort on the young woman’s fresh, lovely face as she too watched the younger man perform. It looked al
most like fear. But whether it was fear of performing, or of the balding man’s affection, I couldn’t say even now. Maybe, she was having a sense of foreboding about both situations.

  The young woman was so beautiful, she put the earlier goddess out of my mind altogether. That other was more carnal; this woman was ethereal. In her shimmering silver, an angel soon to take flight. She and the balding man now sprang toward the trapeze, the man with a hand on her back as if to push her...to plunge her forward.

  They commenced their routine, and I was captivated by the woman’s grace, her legs held together and streaming behind her like a comet’s tail as she shot through the air. The older man, his legs hooked over his rung, reached upside-down to catch her. He swung her outward, and on the return arc she spun like a ballerina pivoting on thin air, reaching out for her own bar as it swung back to her. She caught it, whooshed outward...far outward.

  And then, a snapping sound. I suppose a bolt had been loose, because one of the two cords supporting the bar the woman gripped came free. The angel fell—plummeted from view, behind the clustered audience. Over their screams and cries, I swear I heard a heavy thud.

  ‘Oh my God!’ my cousin Bill said. ‘Is she dead? Is she dead?’ He grabbed hold of my arm.

  ‘I don’t know!’ I said, shaking off his grip.

  We couldn’t get near the scene. The crowd had surged forward. Other carnival workers came running. I stood back and waited to see if the woman would be carried back to her trailer. As I lingered there, feeling sick with dread, a hand clamped onto my shoulder. Startled, I looked around to see my father standing behind me, my uncle beside him. My father’s familiar scents of cigarettes and beer wafted over me, grounding me. ‘What happened—somebody fell?’

  ‘Yes...a girl,’ I said.

  ‘Oh no,’ said my uncle.

  ‘Come on,’ my father steered me away, ‘you don’t want to see this.’

  ‘I want to know if she’s okay,’ I protested, looking back over my shoulder.

  ‘She’ll be okay,’ he assured me. ‘That’s not like a big circus trapeze. I’m sure she’s fine.’

  The trapeze looked high enough to me, but I tried to take heart in my father’s words. That is, until a middle-aged woman pushed her way out of the audience, doubled over and vomited onto the dirt…

  A year later, the carnival never showed up in the summer, but it did come unannounced—and for only a single day—in autumn. On October 31st.

  The word of it spread through school like a wild rumor, whispered lest too much talk disperse the reality into mist. On the ride to school, several kids had seen the carnival being erected on the speedway grounds. It created a real quandary—if we were to go to the carnival that night, we would have to forego trick-or-treating. Well, it wasn’t really that much of a dilemma. I’m sure many homeowners ended up with a lot of extra candy on their hands that night, perplexed by the scanty showing of ghouls in the streets. Most of the kids in Eastborough hounded their parents to let them go to the carnival, instead.

  My father took me, as usual, though his brother and Bill—who lived out of town—didn’t accompany us, it still being a weeknight. As usual, though, father parked himself in the beer pavilion to chat and smoke with other fathers. Like most of the kids who attended the carnival that night, I opted to wear my Halloween costume, the holiday’s magic still being in the crisp, chilly air. Maybe the magic was even heightened beyond the norm. This year, I wore a cheap, brittle plastic glow-in-the-dark skull mask fastened to my head with a rubber band.

  The carnival, I found, was decked out for the holiday, too: the aisles of the midway were festooned with strings of fat orange bulbs. Cotton cobwebs were stretched between the trailers and food stands, blown leaves snared in them like the husks of giant spiders.

  My favorite attraction was always the haunted house ride, but this year when I approached it I hesitated, as a flurry of teary specters came running out of its exit in a panic, screaming into their bewildered parents’ arms. Though I was now eleven years old, I couldn’t will myself to join the increasingly skittish line to go inside.

  Another favorite ride of mine was a double Ferris wheel, the two wheels of which would rotate around each other like the gears of some titan machine. But I saw that it had jammed, moving only a little bit with ear-piercing screeches before it jarred to a halt again, shuddered and shook with futile effort. It was full of people, children wailing on high, their voices ghostly and drifting with the leaves. I didn’t know if this were truly accidental, or another enhancement in honor of the season.

  Cheated of two of my favorite rides, I drifted on until I saw a gaggle of people gathered around an outdoors live act. I was able to negotiate my way close to the inner barrier this time. It was a knife throwing routine. A man, all in black, and wearing a black mask over his eyes like the Lone Ranger, had already pitched a number of balanced blades toward a woman who stood with her back against a much-perforated wooden board. As he readied for his next throw, the man—who was losing his hair—clamped a cigarette between his thin lips.

  I looked toward the woman, and flinched when the knife thunked into the wood above her head and quivered there, continuing an outline of her body. She was a young woman, with long straight blond hair and dreamy-lidded eyes, reminding me of an actress I had a crush on at that time: Peggy Lipton in The Mod Squad. Her arms were by her sides, her body rigid...except, oddly, she held her head cocked at a slight angle, giving her a quizzical aspect. Around her throat she wore a black velvet ribbon. Her knife thrower assistant’s costume consisted of a one-piece outfit like a bathing suit, scintillating and silver.

  My heart jammed to a halt in my chest, shuddered and shook like the double Ferris wheel as it fought to regain its proper rhythm. It couldn’t be the same girl I had seen fall from the trapeze a year ago, could it? That girl had had her hair tied back in a ponytail, but if she had let it fall free, wouldn’t she have looked like this girl? So, had my father been right after all, and she had survived the accident? If that were the case, maybe she had been grounded ever since, consigned to acts like this one instead. Her face was composed, almost waxen, those sexy dreamy eyes unblinking as they stared back at the knife thrower. Or through him.

  Suddenly, as he wound up for another throw, the equally silent knife thrower looked familiar to me, too.

  I wasn’t sure how it happened. Did a kid call out to his friend too loudly? Did the knife thrower see something distracting out of the corner of his eye? A gust of chilly breeze picked up just then; did it send a shiver through his body at that crucial moment?

  Whatever the case, his next throw went wild. The knife thunked home, but this time in the hollow between his mute assistant’s collarbones.

  Screams. Cries. The girl fell back against the board and slumped down it, her hands fluttering helplessly as if she were too drugged to respond otherwise.

  Other carnival workers rushed in, blocked my view for several minutes. The girl’s limp body was slung into the air and carried to a nearby trailer.

  In a daze, shuffling mindlessly like a zombie in my skull mask, I somehow found my way to my father in the beer garden, and stammered to him what I’d seen. He pushed my muffling mask up on my head and asked me to repeat myself.

  ‘Oh, come on,’ he said, clapping me on the arm. ‘I’m sure that was all staged, just to scare kids like you on Halloween. I’ve seen all kinds of weird things going on here tonight.’

  I could hardly argue with that statement, at least.

  My father took a new job in Worcester, Massachusetts, so my family moved from Eastborough to that city, to a small house on hilly Orient Street. We stopped going to the carnival in Eastborough. Anyway, it didn’t arrive that next year—in spring, summer or autumn—and though it did come around the following year, I was now thirteen and my father must have thought it wouldn’t be of the same interest to me.

  I didn’t attend the carnival again until I was seventeen-years-old. I had my driver’s license now,
and my father had bought me a four-year-old 1970 Javelin. Better than that, I had my first girlfriend—Debbie, a short pretty classmate who strongly resembled Maureen McCormick of The Brady Bunch. Oh, but I felt like the luckiest man in Worcester. I decided to take my very own goddess to the carnival in Eastborough that summer, the summer that we both graduated from high school, on one of our first dates.

  The double Ferris wheel was functioning properly this time, and at its very summit I put my arm around Debbie’s shoulders, drew her against me and planted a kiss on her lips. She giggled and pushed me away. ‘Hey!’ she scolded, but she was grinning. Did she feel as exhilarated as I did, up there with the carnival’s constellations of lights spread out below us?

  And this year, no one appeared to be fleeing from the haunted house ride in tears. (Well, there was always one or two.) I thought this might be another opportunity for a kiss, a longer kiss, so I pulled Debbie toward it. She kept protesting, shrinking against my body at the gravelly, distorted roars and howls coming from the attraction’s loudspeakers, but this only encouraged me more. Even before our car started into motion, Debbie had already shrunk down into her seat against me. It made me grin like the skull mask I’d worn six years earlier.

  As our car began to crank along its track to the attraction’s entrance, I took note of its operator for the first time. He wore a black hooded cloak, and the glimpse I had of his shadowed face unsettled me for some reason.