More Tomorrow: And Other Stories

by Michael Marshall Smith

  ‘I’ve brought your delivery’ the woman said, and then frowned. ‘Look, are you alright?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said, turning to grin broadly at her. My mind felt like a runaway lift, soaring back upwards to reality. ‘I just nodded off for a moment, in the kitchen. I still feel a bit, you know.’

  Mrs Steinberg smiled. ‘Of course. Give me a hand?’

  I followed her to the top of the drive and heaved a box of cat food out of her van, watching the house. There was nothing to see. I thanked her and then carried the box back down the drive as she drove off. I walked back into the house and shut the front door behind me.

  I felt absolutely fine.

  I walked into the kitchen. As I’d expected, the men had disappeared. I looked slowly around a kitchen which looked exactly as it had since before I was too young to remember. Everything was normal. Of course.

  I must have fallen asleep making tea, and then struggled over to the front door to open it while still half asleep. I could remember asking myself if I was having a dream, and deciding I wasn’t—but that just showed how wrong you could be. It had been unusually vivid, and it was odd how I’d been suddenly awake and alright again as soon as I stepped out of the front door. But it had been a dream. Here I was in the kitchen again, and everything was normal. Clean and tidy, spick and span, with all the rubbish in the bin and the pans in the right places and the milk in the fridge and a smashed mug on the floor.

  That was less good. It was my mug, and it lay smashed at the bottom of the fridge. How had that happened?

  Maybe I’d fallen asleep holding it. Not terribly likely, but possible. Or perhaps I’d knocked it over on waking, and incorporated the sound into my dream. This was slightly more credible, but where exactly was I supposed to have fallen asleep? Just leaning against the counter—or actually stretched out on it, using the kettle as a pillow?

  Then I noticed the fridge door. There was a little dent in it, with a couple of flecks of paint missing. At about head height. That wasn’t good either.

  I cleared up the mug and switched the kettle on. While it was boiling I wandered into the hall and the living room. Everything was fine, tidy, normal. Super. I went back into the kitchen. The same. Great. Apart from a little dent in the fridge door at about head height.

  I made my cup of tea in a different, non-broken mug, and drank it looking out of the kitchen window at the drive. I felt unsettled and nervous, and unsure of what to do with either of those emotions. Even if it had been a dream it was a very odd one, particularly the way it had fought so hard against melting away. Maybe I was much more tired than I realised. Or ill. Food poisoning could make your head go very strange, as I’d learned after a couple of college friends’ attempts at cooking anything more complex than toast. But I felt fine. Physically, at least.

  I carried the box of cat food into the pantry, unpacked it, and stacked the cans in the corner. Then I switched the kettle on again. Suddenly my heart seemed to stop.

  Before I had time to realise why, the cause repeated itself. A soft chinking noise outside the back door. I moved quickly to the window and looked out. There was no-one in the drive. I craned my neck, trying to see around to the back door, but could only see the large pile of firewood that lay to one side of it.

  Then I heard the noise again. I walked slowly into the back hallway and listened, slowly clenching my fists. I could hear nothing except the sound of blood pumping in my ears. I grabbed the knob and swung the door open.

  Stillness outside. A rectangle of late afternoon light, a patch of driveway, and a dark hedge waving quietly. I stepped out into the drive, and stood and listened again.

  After a moment I heard a very faint crunching noise. It sounded like pebbles softly rubbing against each other. Then I heard it again. I looked more closely at the drive, peering at the actual stones, and noticed that a small patch about ten yards in front of me appeared to be moving slightly. Wriggling, almost.

  They stopped, and then the sound came again—and another patch stirred briefly, about a yard closer than the first. As if registering the weight of invisible feet.

  I was so engrossed that I didn’t notice the whistling straight away. When I did, I looked up. The blond man was back. He was standing at the top of the driveway, carrying a bicycle with the wheels slowly spinning in the dusk. He whistled the top line of a perfect harmony, the lower line just the sound of the wind. As I stared at him, backing slowly towards the house, the crunching noise got louder and louder.

  Then the suited man was standing with his nose almost touching mine. ‘Hello again,’ he said.

  The blond man started down the driveway. ‘Greetings indeed,’ he laughed. ‘Come on, in we go.’

  Abruptly I realised that the very last thing I should do was let them back into the house.

  I leapt back through the door into the hallway. The suited man, caught by surprise, started forward but I was quick and whipped the door shut in his face and locked it. That felt good, but then he started banging on the door very hard, grotesquely hard, and I saw that the kitchen was getting messy again, and the fridge was old, and I could barely see out of the window because it was so grimy. A slight flicker in my mind made me think that maybe I’d missed the smallest fraction of a second, and I realised that it really hadn’t been a dream. I was back in the bad place. As I backed into the kitchen I tripped and fell, sprawling amongst cartons and bacon rind and dirt and what appeared to be puke on the floor. The banging on the back door got louder, and louder, and louder. He was going to break it, I knew. He was going to break the door down. I’d let them back and they had to come in through the back door. I’d come in through the wrong door…

  Suddenly understanding what I must do, I scrambled to my feet and kicked my way through the rubbish. The fridge door swung open in my way. The inside was dark and dirty and there was something rotted inside, but I slammed it out of the way, biting hard on my lip to keep my head clear.

  I had to get to the front door. I had to open it, step out, and then step back in again. The front door was the right door. And I had to do it soon, before the back door broke and let them in. I could already hear a splintering quality to the sound of the blows. And the back door was about two inches thick.

  The hallway was worse than I expected. I skidded to a halt, at first unable to even see the front door. I thought that I must be looking in the wrong direction, but I wasn’t, because I finally spotted it over to the left, where it was supposed to be. But the angles were all wrong, and to see it I had to look behind me and to the right, although when I saw it I could see that in reality it was still over to the left. And it looked so close—could it really be less than a yard away?—but when I held my hand out to it I groped into nothing, the fingers still in front of the door when it should have been past it.

  I stared wildly around, disorientated and unsure even of which way to go. Suddenly the banging behind me got markedly louder, probably as the blond man joined in, and this helped to marginally restore my sense of direction. I found the front door again, concentrated hard on its apparent position, and started to walk towards it. I immediately fell over, because the floor was much lower than I expected. It actually seemed be tilted in some way, although it looked flat and level, because although one of my legs reached it easily enough the other dangled in space. I pulled myself up onto my knees and found I was looking at a sort of sloped wall between the wall and the ceiling, a wall which bent back from the wall and yet out from the ceiling. The door was still over on the left, although to see it I now had to look straight ahead and up.

  Then I noticed another sound beneath the eternal banging, and whirled to face the direction it was coming from. I found that I was looking through the living room door, and that it gave into sheer darkness, a darkness which was seeping out into the hallway like smoke, clinging to the angles in the air like the inside of a dark prism. I heard the noise again. It was a deep rumbling growl, far, far away in there, almost obscured by the night noises
and the sound of vegetation moving in the wind. The sound didn’t seem to be getting any closer, but I knew that was because the living room now extended out far beyond the house, into hundreds and hundreds of miles of dense jungle. As I listened carefully I could hear the gurgling of some dark river far off to the right, the sound of water mixing with the warm rustling of the breeze in the darkness. It sounded very peaceful and for a moment I was still, transfixed.

  Then the sound of another splintering crack wrenched me away, and I turned my back on the living room and flailed towards where the front door must be. The hall table loomed above me and I thought I could walk upright beneath it—but tripped over it and fell again, headlong onto the cool floorboards. The mat had moved, no, was moving, sliding slowly up the stairs like a draught, and as I rolled over and looked at the ceiling I saw the floor coming towards me, the walls shortening in little jerks.

  As I lay there panting, a clear cool waft of air stroked my cheek. At first I thought that it must have come from the living room, although it had been warm in there, but then I remembered that I was lying on the floor. The breeze had to be a draft coming under the front door. I must nearly be there. I looked all around me but all I could see was panelling and floor and what was behind me. I closed my eyes and tried to grope for it, but it was even worse inside my head so I opened them again. Then I caught a glimpse of the door, far away, obscured from view round a corner but visible once you knew where to look. On impulse I reached my hand out in not quite the opposite direction and felt it fall upon warm grainy wood.

  The door. I’d found it.

  I pulled myself along the floor towards it, and tried to stand up. I got no more than a few inches before I fell back down again. I tried once more, with the same result, feeling as if I was trying to do something entirely against nature. Again, and this time I reached a semi-crouching position, muscles straining. I started to slump almost immediately—but as I did so I threw myself forwards. I found myself curled up, my feet a couple of feet from the floor, lying on the door. Electing to not even try to come to terms with this, I groped by my side and found the doorknob. I tried to twist it but the sweat on my hand made them spin uselessly on the shiny metal. I wiped it on my shirt and tried again, and this time I got some purchase and heard the catch withdraw as the knob turned. Exultantly I tugged at it, as with a tremendous crash the back door finally gave way.

  The door wouldn’t budge. Panicking, I tried again. Nothing. By peering down the crack I could see that no lock or bolt was impeding it, so why wouldn’t it bloody move?

  There were footsteps in the back hall.

  Suddenly I realised that I was lying on the door, and trying to pull it towards me against my own weight.

  The footsteps reached the kitchen.

  I rolled off the door onto the wall beside it and reached for the handle, but I’d slid too far. As the footsteps came closer I scrambled back across the slippery wall, grabbed and twisted the doorknob with all my strength. It opened just as they entered the hall and I rolled out through it, fell and landed awkwardly and painfully on something hard and bristly and for a few moments had no clear idea of where or who I was, and just lay there fighting for breath.

  After some time I sat up slowly. I was sitting outside the house on the doormat, my back to the front door. At the top of the drive a young couple were staring at me curiously. I stood up and smiled, trying to suggest that I often sat on the doormat and that they ought to try it as it was actually a lot of fun—hoping that they hadn’t seen me fall there from about two-thirds of the way up the door. They smiled back and carried on walking, mollified or maybe even hurrying off home to try it for themselves.

  I turned hesitantly back towards the door and looked in.

  It had worked. It was all okay again. The mat was on the floor, right angles looked like 90°, and the ceiling was back where it was supposed to be. I stepped back a pace and looked down the driveway at the back door. It had been utterly smashed, and now looked like little more than an extension of the firewood pile.

  I stepped back into the house through the front door, the right door, and shut it behind me. I walked carefully and quietly into the living room, and then the kitchen. Everything was fine, everything was normal. It was just a nice normal house. If you came in through the right door.

  The wrong door was in about a thousand pieces. I thought about that for some time, with another cup of tea and what felt like my first cigarette in months. I saw with frank disbelief that less than half an hour had elapsed since I’d first come downstairs. The back door. The wrong door. It was coming in through there that took me to wherever it was that the house became. Coming in through the front door brought me back to where I normally lived. So presumably I was safe, so long as I didn’t leave the house and come back in through the back door. They couldn’t get me. Presumably.

  But I didn’t like having that door in pieces. Being safe was only half of the issue. I wasn’t going to feel secure until that portal was well and truly closed.

  I walked into the back hall and looked nervously out through the wreckage onto the drive. Everything was fine. There was nothing I needed protecting from. But I still didn’t like it. Did it have to be me who came through the door, or what if a falling leaf or maybe even just a breeze came inside? Would that be enough?

  Could I take the risk?

  As I stood indecisively, I noticed once more the pile of firewood propped up against the outside wall of the back hall. I probably still wouldn’t have put two and two together had not a large proportion of the pile been thick old floorboards—a donation from a neighbour. I looked at the tool shelf on the inside wall and saw a hammer and a big box of good long nails. Then I looked at the wood again.

  I could nail the damn thing shut.

  I flicked my cigarette butt out onto the drive and rolled up my sleeves. The hammer was big and heavy, which was just as well because when I nailed the planks across the doorframe I’d be hammering into solid brickwork. I was going to have to board right the way up, but that was alright as there were loads of planks, and if I reinforced it enough it should be well-nigh impregnable.

  Feeling much better, I set to work. I may even have hummed. Kneeling just inside the door, I reached out and began pulling the floorboards in, taking care to select the thickest and least weathered. I judged that I’d need about fifteen to make the doorway really secure, although that was largely guesswork as I’d never tried to turn the back hall into a fortress before. Pulling them in was heavy work. I had to stretch out to reach them, and I began to get hot and tired, and anxious to begin the nailing. Outside it was getting darker as the evening began, and the air was very cool and still.

  As the pile in the back hall increased in size it became more difficult, and I had to lean further and further out to reach the next plank. This made me nervous. I was still inside, and my feet were still on the ground in the back hall. I wasn’t ‘coming back in’. I was just leaning out and then, well, sort of coming back in but not really, because my feet never left the back hall. But it made me nervous, and I began to work quicker and quicker, perspiration running down my face as, clinging to the doorframe with my left hand, I stretched out to bring the last few boards in. Eleven, twelve. Just a couple more. Now the last one I could possibly reach: that would have to be enough. Hooking my left foot behind the frame and gripping it hard with my left hand, I stretched out towards the plank, waving fingers little more than an inch from the end. Just a little further…I let my hooking foot slide slightly, allowed my fingers to slip round half an inch, and tried to extend my back as far as it would go. My fingers just scraping the end, I tried a last yearning lunge.

  And then suddenly a stray thought struck me. Here I was, pulled out as if on some invisible rack. Why hadn’t I just gone out of the front door, picked up piles of wood, and brought them back into the house through the front door? It would have been easier, it would have been quicker, and it wouldn’t have involved all this monkeying around at t
he wrong door. Not that it mattered now, because as it happened even if I didn’t get this last plank I’d probably have plenty, but I wouldn’t have been so hot and tired. It was also worrying that in my haste I’d been putting myself in needless danger. I’d better slow down, calm down, take a rest.

  It was an unimportant, contemplative thought, but one that distracted me for a fraction of a second too long. As I finally got the tips of my fingers round the plank I realised with horror that the hand on the doorframe was slipping. Desperately I tried to scrabble back, but my hands were too sweaty and the doorframe itself was slippery now. I felt the tendons in my hand stretch as I tried to defy my centre of gravity and think my weight backwards, and then suddenly my forehead walloped onto the ground and I was lying flat on my face.

  I was back up in a second, and I swear to God that both feet never left the hall floor at once. I leapt back into the hallway, grabbing that last bloody piece of wood without even noticing it.

  I crouched in the doorframe, panting hysterically. Everything looked normal outside. The driveway was quiet, the pebbles were still and there was none of the faint deadening of sound that I associated with the other place. I was furious with myself for having taken the risk, for not having thought to bring them in through the front door—and especially for falling, which had been painful quite apart from anything else. But I hadn’t fallen out, not really. I hadn’t come back in, as such. The drive was fine, the kitchen was fine.

  Everything was okay.

  Soothed by the sounds of early evening traffic in the distance, my heart gradually slowed to only about twice its normal rate. I forced myself to take a break, and had a quiet cigarette, perched on the pile of planks. During the fall my right foot had caught the tool shelf, and there were nails all over the place, both inside and outside the door. But there were plenty left and the ones outside could stay there. I wasn’t going to make the same damn fool mistake twice.