Beyond The Door

by Jeffrey Thomas

  I saw the cigarette dangling from the man’s mouth for only a second, and then our car banged its nose through the black-painted hinged double doors. It took an immediate jolting left, and we lurched straight into the realm of dark magic. Dark magic as rendered by dry ice, strobe lights and fluorescent paint. Debbie yelped and buried her head into my shoulder as one garish demon after another shot up from behind a gravestone, sat up in a coffin, or dropped down from a hangman’s noose. If they were to be dragged outside, their papier-mâché forms would look as pitiful and harmless as vampires desiccated in the sun’s light. But here, in their own domain, they had power.

  Our car banged into another room, and air blasted our faces as a recorded voice cackled maniacally. Debbie was too scrunched down for me to kiss, but at least I had my arm tightly around her. I looked down at her and laughed, and when I looked up again a spotlight came on to illuminate a ghoul just in front of us. It was a female manikin seated in a moving rocking chair. This figure was far more realistic than the papier-mâché fiends, perhaps a retired department store manikin reduced to this less glamorous profession. The figure wore a long white nightgown, the low-cut V of its neckline revealing a large, oddly shaped knife jutting out of her upper chest. There was no blood, though. The figure looked weirdly virginal, like a sacrifice.

  Long blond hair framed her vacant, beautiful face, a black ribbon fastened around her throat. Her head was cocked off to one side, almost resting on her shoulder.

  Then the spotlight went out, the car took a hard right, and we burst through another set of double doors into the night air.

  As we stumbled away from the haunted house, and as I cast glances back at the cloaked operator, Debbie took my arm and laughed. ‘Look at you!’ she teased me. ‘You look even more shaken up than I am!’

  After that year, the speedway shut down and stores began to sprout up from its lot.

  I married young. Not Debbie, but an attractive young woman named Paula I met at the University of Lowell. We divorced young, too.

  Between wives at twenty-four—the year being 1981—and feeling rather lonely as Christmas neared, I decided to accept my cousin Bill’s invitation to spend the holiday with his family. Following his own career move, Bill had settled way up in Ellsworth, Maine.

  Maybe not the best time to take a long drive to Maine, though. Snow was beginning to fall across an already snowy landscape, the sky weighing heavily above me like a ceiling of solid white stone. I kept myself cozy, though, with frequent stops for hot coffee and an endless stream of Christmas music on the radio.

  Radio stations would fade in and out, however, as I passed across the New England states, and maybe...maybe...this accounted for what occurred when my car entered a terrain of forested hills—misty through the falling snow—and wide open hollows. I crested one gradual rise to find a long, low dip in the land spread before me. Nat King Cole was drowned out in a sudden wash of static. And through the crackling disruption, distantly, I heard other music. It was very faint, but it almost sounded like the music of a calliope.

  And it was as my car started descending into that broad lowland that I spotted the double Ferris wheel, looming above a fringe of evergreens on the horizon.

  The bulbs that bejeweled the Ferris wheel glowed through the mist, and even from here I could tell the wheels were turning against the sky, like a machine wringing the snow from the air.

  A carnival...in winter? Up here in a lonely space between small, far-flung Maine towns?

  And...could it be that one? But surely there was more than one carnival that featured a double Ferris wheel.

  Despite the heat turned high in my car, I shivered. I had the uncanny feeling that, unconsciously, I had been following the carnival across the land. Across the years.

  Even more uncanny was the feeling that maybe the carnival was following me.

  The road snaked between hills, through long corridors of trees. When I ascended a rise on the opposite side of the wide basin, I expected to have a better view of the Ferris wheel, and probably more of the carnival.

  Instead, I had lost sight of it altogether.

  I was tempted to turn off, to turn back, and try to find it again. Find the right path to reach it. But for what? Why?

  The snow was beginning to pick up, threatening a real blizzard, and afternoon was wearing on. I knew I couldn’t afford any such detour.

  The calliope music had faded, and so did the static a few moments later, Gene Autry taking its place.

  On my drive back home to Massachusetts, a few days later, I watched for the carnival to reappear.

  It did not.

  I am fifty-two now. I remarried at twenty-six, found happiness with a woman who maybe wasn’t any goddess, but who loved me and gave me a daughter—who has in turn given me a grandson. Maybe we weren’t so happy that our then nineteen-year-old daughter gave us this grandson so early, but I can’t complain about my best buddy in the world.

  Gerry is a precocious first grader, better on the computer than I am. He loves video games, too, scary ones that make me start and flinch to watch. Movie monster toy figures, all that cool boy stuff. Maybe he’s a little morbid, but it may be the times.

  I took my best buddy out with me on the flimsiest of excuses, everywhere on my errands. On this particular evening I was returning him to my daughter’s apartment in Milford—I myself having moved back to Eastborough from Worcester before I met her mother—and sharing between us the last of an order of large fries from our stop for some burgers, when from the corner of my eye I saw something like a constellation in the shape of a giant hourglass, glowing against the slate gray November sky. When I looked over that way directly, my heart launched itself against the inside of my sternum as if our car had crashed into a wall.

  It was a double Ferris wheel, towering above the intervening buildings and trees.

  ‘Gerry,’ I said, without looking over at him, ‘want to go to the carnival?’

  ‘Huh?’ He sat up higher in his seat beside me. ‘What carnival?’ But then he spotted it, too. ‘Oh wow! Yeah! But...won’t Mom be mad if we don’t come home now? Maybe we should call her.’

  ‘I’m sure she’ll understand,’ I muttered, already turning my car onto another street, to take me toward that galaxy of lights slowly rotating against the sky.

  Gerry didn’t protest again; I was the adult and the onus was on me. I could have called my daughter, and in all likelihood would have gotten her blessing, but I didn’t want to chance it lest she say no. And I didn’t want to wait until tomorrow. It might not be here tomorrow.

  As I followed the Ferris wheel lights, like a beacon, I was doubly confused. For one, how could a carnival have gone up in my hometown, practically right under my nose, without me having seen or heard something before this moment? And I was also confused as to where precisely the carnival could be situated. Somewhere not too far from Eastborough’s center, yet I couldn’t think of a space in this built-up little town that might accommodate it. But shortly before I reached that space I had figured it out. The carnival had been erected on the former site of a company called Odyllic—former because a few years ago, the whole complex of factory structures, warehouses and offices had been swept by a fire of suspicious, or at least unknown, origin. I remembered there had been concerns about toxic materials remaining after the fire—though I couldn’t recall ever learning just what exactly they had produced or manufactured at Odyllic—but the buildings had all been torn down by now. As far as I knew the property had not yet found a buyer, despite the prime location right here off the ever-growing town’s center.

  We parked on an adjoining street, and walked with the throngs that approached the carnival, mesmerized as we were by the lights, the smells, the sounds. One of these sounds, in the background, was calliope music...and I shuddered.

  I bought a block of tickets from a gray-faced old woman with one white, blind eye seated in a booth that reeked of her body odor, and then Gerry was bolting to join the queue in f
ront of a ride that made me nauseous just watching its insane spinning and gyrations. Its operator, a burly young man with a shaved head and spirals tattooed all over his face like a Maori warrior, saw me watching him and ran his tongue over his lips. I looked away quickly.

  So was this the same carnival, then? I couldn’t be sure. Some features, like the Ferris wheel, the merry-go-round, looked all too familiar, but there were so many newer rides and attractions, updated trailers from which food was sold or out of which games were played. Gerry survived his dizzying ride, though he wove like a drunken man as he walked toward me—grinning drunkenly, too. We continued exploring, Gerry somehow finding room in his little belly for all manner of junk food despite our recent fast food excursion. More and more I suspected this was indeed the same carnival I remembered...transfigured, mutated by the years, but the same under its patched and repainted surface. Perhaps in the interest of political correctness, but more likely due to stricter laws, I found no beer garden or girly shows.

  I did find a number of sideshow tents, however, some so distinctive, so familiar that I no longer held any doubts. But there was one such tent that I didn’t recall ever having encountered before in all the years I had attended. The main sign outside read: HEADLESS WOMAN—STILL ALIVE! Another sign showed a woman with a clean, bloodless stump for a neck, dressed in a long white gown and seated on a chair. Above this, the words: SEE HER LIVING BODY—WITHOUT A HEAD!

  ‘Cool!’ Gerry exclaimed, now having noticed the signs, too. We drew closer, near enough to read a placard that purported to give the woman’s story. It was in the form of a newspaper article, even including a blown-up photo of a car wreck, supposedly dated June, 1981. It read:

  ‘PROM QUEEN DECAPITATED IN FREAK CAR ACCIDENT.

  ELLSWORTH, MAINE. On her ride home from Ellsworth High School’s prom last night, prom queen Mary DeAngelo was involved in a tragic accident when the car she was riding in rear-ended a tractor trailer truck that had come to an unexpected stop. The driver, Mary’s eighteen-year-old boyfriend John Harlequin, was killed instantly, but Mary’s body was rushed to Maine Coast Memorial Hospital, where in a revolutionary procedure doctors managed to maintain Mary’s vital processes...even after having to remove her ruined and mostly severed head. Though her headless body continues being sustained by a variety of experimental life support systems, doctors admit they can offer little more for her than a form of living death.’

  Gerry read the whole story, and repeated, ‘Cool!’ He looked up at me, tugging my hand. ‘Let’s check it out, Grampy!’

  I stared at the crude painting of the woman seated in her chair, shapely and weirdly alluring despite her ghastly state, then tried to look into the tent itself, but of course my view was impeded by a canvas partition and the line of bodies streaming in to have a look. I said, ‘I’ve heard of this kind of thing, Gerry...it’s just a rip-off. It’s a trick they do with mirrors.’

  ‘Maybe, maybe not. You see the story, Grampy? Experimental stuff! Come on, come on!’ More tugging at my hand.

  I turned to the man collecting money for the attraction, handed over the fee and got in line. It wasn’t until we were at the mouth of the tent that for some odd, niggling reason I glanced back at the man. Though elderly, he appeared to have once been in good physical condition. Except for a fringe of white hair, he was bald, a cigarette hanging from his lips.

  ‘Come on, Grampy!’ Gerry pulled at me, made me realize I was lagging at the entrance though it was our turn to enter. I tore my gaze from the old man, and entered the tent.

  And there, across the room, she sat...the Headless Woman. As in the painting, she sat up straight in a wooden chair, her hands folded in her lap, wearing a long white gown. A barrier of velvet ropes held back the rubes who filed slowly past her, as if past Lenin or Ho Chi Minh in their glass cases, giggling and making witty wisecracks the woman would have heard a thousand times, if she’d had ears.

  ‘Wow,’ Gerry whispered, pressing against my leg as we edged closer to her in the line.

  Over a crackling intercom, a warbling recorded voice (was this the voice of the old man outside?) kept up an ongoing spiel. Most of it reiterated what was presented in the phony newspaper article outside, but there was also this: ‘She is not a mannequin. She is not a dummy. She is alive...the devices that circulate her vital fluids also preserving her youthful body, while her head has long since vanished from this earth...’

  Not a mannequin. I thought of a long ago year that I had visited this carnival...the haunted house ride...

  Eight tubes, like tentacles, sprouted up from the center of the woman’s neck stump, supported by the arms of an apparatus like that from which an IV bag would hang, before most of them snaked down into a contraption resting beside her chair—covered in gauges, toggles and glowing red lights. One tube connected with a tank of oxygen, though, while two others ran into bottles of bubbling fluid set atop the contraption, one containing a yellowish fluid and the other fluid dark red. There was an electronic humming sound, a gurgling of the liquids circulating through those two bottles, and another sound that—as I got closer—I realized was a subdued wheezing.

  As my eyes took her in—her young woman’s curves evident through that shroud-like gown with its low V neckline—I saw the woman’s primly folded hands suddenly twitch and flutter for several seconds before they settled down again.

  ‘Shit!’ Gerry hissed.

  ‘Gerry,’ I scolded him distractedly. We were directly opposite the woman now, but people were pressing behind us, urging us not to linger too long.

  Even still, it was long enough for me to notice the vertical white scar in the hollow above the woman’s collarbones.

  ‘It’s real, isn’t it, Grampy?’

  I stepped out of the line. Right up to the velvet rope that was all that separated the girl and myself. I leaned my body across the rope, reached out and took hold of the woman’s left hand.

  ‘Hey, man,’ said someone behind me, ‘you shouldn’t be doing that.’

  I squeezed her hand. And after a moment, it squeezed back. The hand was warm, alive. Like the sign outside advertised...STILL ALIVE.

  ‘Grampy, come on!’ Gerry pulled at my other hand. ‘Come on, before you get in trouble!’

  I allowed him to pull me away. The girl’s small hand slipped out of mine. I saw it fold across her right hand again, resting on her thighs.

  I glanced back at her one last time as Gerry and I moved toward the tent’s exit.

  ‘Hey, don’t cry, Grampy,’ my grandson told me gently. ‘I’m sure she doesn’t feel anything.’

  ‘I hope not, Gerry,’ I said. ‘I hope not.’

  Under a now black and crystalline sky, we walked away from the sideshow tent, and I threw a look back at the silent old man, oblivious to me as he accepted more money, more offerings for his debased goddess. Was she under his spell...or, in a way, might he be under hers?

  ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘let’s get home before your mom gets too worried.’

  We walked back to our car against the flow of more curious, bewildered people finding their way to the unannounced carnival.

  The Ferris wheel receded in my rearview mirror.

  The carnival was gone the next day.

  And it hasn’t returned to Eastborough since.”

  Ware waited a little for more, but the man on the other side of the door had obviously finished. Ware nodded and grunted to himself. So, it was the mysterious that intrigued this stranger…the unexplained or unexplainable he liked to discuss. Well, he had his own story to relate, which involved yet another paid attraction for those who sought secret wonders beyond life’s dreary façade—though whether his desire, or need, to share his experiences with a stranger was born of a sense of communion or rivalry, he couldn’t say.

  Ignoring the fact that the necessity to relieve himself had rather intensified, as the morning’s first coffee had completed its own ghost train ride through his system, while also ignoring the fact that the restroo
m traffic had reached a radical between-trains lull—even most of the urinals unmanned—Ware took a sip of the new (if now tepid) coffee he still held in his hand, cleared his throat and started.

  “Where I come from there used to be a museum…the Amos House of Oddities & Curiosities, the sign outside called it, for it was just that—a person’s house, that person being a man named Jasper Amos. Amos was a chemical engineer, for a large company in town called Amalgamated Concoctions or some such; it was closed down decades ago. He was well paid at his company, but he had also inherited money from his late wife, an attractive heiress who was killed when her car mysteriously caught fire while she was on her way to visit a sick friend; some even said she spontaneously combusted. In any case, Jasper Amos held an interest in biology, anthropology, and just about every other branch of science beyond the field of chemistry, and over the years had amassed quite a weird collection of items, as the name of his museum would indicate. His wife had not wanted the general public traipsing through her home, but after her death Amos opened his doors to anyone willing to pay a small fee to view his collection. He did this for the sheer pleasure of sharing his enthusiasms, because he certainly didn’t need the proceeds from his museum in order to survive.

  I remember my mother took me there the first time when I was maybe eleven years old, but afterwards I would come with friends or even alone, once or twice a year, for the five or six years that the Amos House of Oddities & Curiosities remained open—for I too have always had a keen interest in all branches of science, and in oddities and curiosities of every sort. The odder and more curious, the better.

  The first visit to any special place is always the most wonderful; every other time you return is simply an attempt to recapture a bit of that initial magic. I recall how fascinated, how utterly entranced I was to walk the long carpeted hallways and vast rooms of the monstrous old mansion that first time, hardly noticing my mother beside me at all. The house was filled not only with treasures of the natural world, but paintings both classical and abstract, art both religious and sacrilegious, furnishings and décor from around the world—everything from suits of armor to manikins wearing gorgeously embroidered ceremonial robes, from huge masses of colorful crystal in glass showcases to pressurized aquariums of ghastly deep sea fish, and terrariums containing two-headed snakes and albino turtles.