My dreams over the years varied a lot but they usually had one thing in common and that was the People from the Doors. In one dream maybe it was just a single one of them chasing me along a beach beside a huge gray ocean and my feet would get stuck in the surf’s muddy sand. I couldn’t go inland though because I knew the rest of them would be there even if I couldn’t see them through the mist. I couldn’t swim into the water either because they’d be waiting for me there too below the surface. Then in other dreams it was like an endless army of the People from the Doors would be chasing me through the streets of a city that looked all burnt black and crumbling with these thousands of white moths flying in and out of all the windows with no glass. The moths would be clinging to the clothes and hair of the People from the Doors too. But worse things than the dreams started happening when I turned eighteen. That was when the People from the Doors and other demonic or alien entities started slipping into my reality from the Plane of Eternal Torment to try to claim my soul. As you can see I don’t know whether they are supernatural or alien or extradimensional entities or maybe all those things are the same anyway.
Even though these entities now entered right into this world they were sly about it and made sure no one else saw them. Like they could only show themselves to someone who had invited them and that meant someone who had chosen the wrong path. I lived alone in a little studio apartment off campus that my parents paid for and sometimes at night when I was wide awake I’d hear whispering outside my locked door or outside my windows even though I was on the third floor of that old house. Once I saw a face looking in at me through one of those third storey windows but when I say it was looking at me of course I mean it had no eyes only that gaping black mouth. After that I kept the shades drawn all the time and the curtains closed. I was grateful there wasn’t a closet in the apartment and I don’t think I would have even moved in if there was one. But I saw entities even at school. Once I looked out the window during class and saw someone standing under a tree pointing right at me. I couldn’t see their face in the tree’s shade but it looked too black to just be shadows. More like a deep pit like a black hole in space waiting to suck my soul right out of me. Another time I went into a ladies’ room at the mall and I saw feet under one of the stall doors but the shoes were a man’s and they were all caked in muddy sand and covered in thick spiderwebs so I turned right out of there. Then there were the white moths I saw everywhere on campus and off. They kept getting in my apartment and one night I killed five of them. I never slept that night so I didn’t go to class the next morning.
More and more I skipped going to my classes but it didn’t worry me much because I knew I’d mostly entered college just to get away from my parents and their misguided concern. Not that it was wrong of them to worry about me of course but their worries should have been about the forces that I had unwillingly invited into my life as opposed to whatever they thought was going on in my head. Eventually I dropped out of college altogether and I couldn’t hide that from them for long but I still refused to come home. When they finally drove out there looking for me luckily I was at my boyfriend’s apartment at the time so they didn’t find me and after that near miss I moved in with him. I hadn’t told them I had a boyfriend so they didn’t know where to find me. He was my first (and only) boyfriend and I’ll call him Rich.
I met Rich at the mall where I was working part-time at Starbucks and he came in and started talking with me and said I reminded him of the singer Fiona Apple except I’m more blond. I liked that because I love her music and Fiona is beautiful with pale blue eyes like mine so I knew Rich thought I was beautiful too. He asked me out and so one night we went to see a movie at the cinemas right at the mall after I got off from work. So that was the start and we began going out to other places and finally one night we ended up at my studio apartment. He was the only person besides my parents who ever saw it. This was before I dropped out of school. I think part of the reason I dropped out of school was not just because I was too tired all the time to go to class but also because I wanted to spend more time with Rich. Anyway we made love the first time he came to my apartment and afterwards I cried in his arms. It was scary to be so close to someone else but so beautiful for the same reason. So like I say when I found out my parents were looking for me I asked Rich if I could move in with him and he was so gentle and sweet and said yes.
You might think being beside Rich the entities would stop harassing me but that wasn’t the case. They weren’t afraid of one mortal man and that shouldn’t have surprised me. One night I woke up and saw a huge white moth resting on Rich’s face while he was sleeping. It covered his eyes with its wings like a masquerade mask with no eyeholes. I slipped out of bed as quietly as I could and in Rich’s toolbox I found a hammer to kill the moth with but then I woke up all the way and remembered Rich thank God. So I just shooed it away from his face with my hand instead. Then I tried to catch it so I could kill it but it flew out through the bedroom window. I hurried downstairs and outside to go after it bringing the hammer with me. The big moth fluttered down the street and around the corner onto another street but I kept running after it through the empty streets until finally I saw it disappear into a house through an open window. I peeked inside and didn’t see anyone so I opened the screen in the window. I didn’t know how the moth got through the screen but it wasn’t really an earthly creature so it wasn’t bound by earthly things. I tiptoed from one dark room into another and finally crept upstairs. On the landing three closed doors faced me and something familiar about them gave me a chill. Suddenly one of these doors opened and a figure stepped through whispering at me harshly. It was one of the People from the Doors with the moth perched on his shoulder. The entity’s pajama top was open so I could see fern-shaped patterns across his pale skin like he’d been hit by lightning. They call those arborescent burns I read once in a British forensic medicine book I have from 1964 with all kinds of horrible photos in it. As the entity came toward me I swung at it with the hammer. After all those years of running from the People from the Doors in my dreams it felt good to finally stand my ground and fight back. But the moment the first entity fell two others came out of the doors onto the landing so I turned and swung at them too. Black blood gushed out of their giant mouths and I didn’t stop hitting them until their windy whistling sounds stopped. Somehow in all the confusion the moth flew away and I didn’t see where though I suspect it got outside again somehow.
The next day Rich showed me a story in the morning newspaper. A local couple and their ten-year-old daughter were murdered in their home maybe in a botched robbery. Now I know what a person would think but I know better. If the People from the Doors didn’t beat that poor family to death and if it really did happen to be me well I know what I saw and that would mean those three people were possessed and beyond hope. I learned that day that the way the People from the Doors can manifest in our reality is by taking over a mortal person’s body after they suck out their soul. My readers will see that this was my inspiration for the plague in Z-apocalypse being caused by an infection of demonic viral particles. Rich told me to be careful until they caught this killer in case they were still in the neighborhood and he hugged me close. I wanted to share the truth with him about my struggles but I remembered what happened when I opened up to my mother in a moment of weakness and all the years of meds and therapy that followed. I would have felt so much stronger with Rich standing beside me in my fight but I was too afraid to risk losing his love.
Rich was my anchor even though I didn’t open up to him so I called him a lot through the day when I was at Starbucks or at his apartment alone while he was working. He asked me not to phone him so much because his boss was getting upset about all the personal calls so I started just texting him instead but he was too busy to text me back much. I could see it was starting to get to him how nervous I was and I desperately wanted to explain to him but I just couldn’t. One day he got exasperated and asked me why I looked so terrible with
dark circles under my eyes and asked why I wasn’t sleeping and eating enough. I cried and said he thought I was ugly now but he hugged me and rocked me and said he was sorry. To keep myself busy when I was alone so I wouldn’t be bothering Rich at work I started writing the story that would become the first book in my planned Z-apocalypse series. I wanted to write more truthfully about my experiences but I decided that was too risky in case it might make the People from the Doors more aggressive about destroying me since I suspect they’re out there in the world in positions of power wearing human masks while they pull our strings. But still I felt like I needed to get a secret message out about the People from the Doors so I decided to hide my warning in a zombie novel because zombie stories are so popular right now and I think the reason they’re so popular is exactly because subconsciously people sense the People from the Doors are among us.
For my birthday I was tempted to call my parents but I didn’t and kept my cell phone turned off so I was pretty depressed but before he left for work Rich gave me a beautiful bouquet of flowers. I was so happy I cried but after he went to work I was washing dishes and looked over at the flowers and I saw the petals kind of moving very subtly. When I went over to look closely I saw a big white moth with its wings folded crawl up one of the flower stems. I was so upset I tried to kill the moth but ended up knocking the vase over and breaking it and spilling all the water. All I could think of was I was lucky the moth didn’t crawl up onto my face or even fly into my mouth when I was leaning close to the flowers to smell them like I did a few times. I told myself the moth must have gotten into the flowers after Rich gave them to me and he would never have knowingly booby-trapped my birthday flowers for me. Then later when I was vacuuming I found a gift wrapped present pushed under our bed and guessed Rich was going to give this to me later after he came home from work but I was so excited I couldn’t wait. So I peeled the tape off the wrapping paper very careful not to tear it and there was a white cardboard box inside. I lifted off the box’s lid and what I found inside made the air lock up inside my lungs. It was a beautiful smiling doll with long blond hair and blue eyes exactly like the one Grandma Marybeth gave me when I was a child except its face wasn’t crushed and cracked so it couldn’t be the same it had to be a replica unless Rich had the original fixed. But how did he know about the doll let alone get his hands on it unless my parents lied and really did take my doll all those years ago and maybe they had found my new apartment after all and they gave the doll to Rich. I put her back in the box but I didn’t bother wrapping it up nice again before I shoved it under the bed. I didn’t finish vacuuming and I just paced through the apartment until Rich came home. By then I was in tears and I demanded to know why there was a moth in my flowers and how did he know about the doll. He acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about so I went to the bedroom and looked under the bed but there was no doll and not even a box. I accused Rich of sneaking in through the bedroom window before he came to the door and taking the doll away again. We argued for hours after that and he tried to hug me so finally I let him hold me but only because I was so worn out. I fell asleep in his arms and I had a dream.
I was in that endless hallway again lined with infinite doors but I felt a lot smaller than I was even at ten-years-old and I realized that was because I was the size of the doll my Grandma Marybeth gave me. I thought this could be my second chance to reach the Plateau of Perpetual Joy so this time I chose the left-hand direction. I started walking that way and walking and walking until finally I began running feeling nervous in case all those doors might burst open again but at the same time I felt hopeful if this really was my chance to be free of my curse. And finally after running for who knows how long out of breath I reached the end of the hallway. There was one last door there at the end of the hallway so I took the knob and pulled the door open. Standing there naked was a man with arborescent burns like veins all over his body but I knew that body and that smiling face. It was Rich. Rich was like an angel come to take me to the Plateau of Perpetual Joy. But then his face all came apart and scattered like torn paper but the bits of paper were really white moths that all fluttered away. With Rich’s face gone all that was left was black emptiness like a bottomless well. I had already been stretching my arms up to Rich with tears of joy in my eyes so it was too late to turn away. I screamed as he reached down to my little body and embraced me and lifted me off my feet to hug me close to his chest. His jaw opened even wider impossibly wide and his mouth covered the top of my head like a snake swallowing an animal too big for its throat. He gulped and gulped sucking my head into his throat until my screaming couldn’t be heard even to my own ears.
I woke up unable to breathe like my lungs were tight fists. In the dark I saw Rich’s head on the pillow beside me and his face was entirely black until I realized I was only seeing the back of his sleeping head. I slipped out of bed as quiet as I could and crept down to the kitchen where he kept his toolbox under the sink and I took out his hammer. It was a new hammer because I’d lost the last one but I’d never told him I took it. I went back to the bedroom and stood over him with tears in my eyes and the hammer in my hand. He didn’t stir didn’t wake up and his skin was so perfect in the darkness it almost glowed like angel’s flesh. There weren’t any arborescent burn patterns. I think that’s why I ended up not hitting him with the hammer because the People from the Doors hadn’t possessed him yet. It was only a possibility like an omen of what would happen if I didn’t get away from him right away. As long as I was beside him he’d be in danger. So that was when I realized the only way I could protect this man I loved was to run away immediately before he woke up. Run away from Rich and my parents too forever. They couldn’t save me but at least I could save them.
I’ve been running ever since. And writing this warning disguised in my novel to anyone who would listen. I’ll keep writing and warning. And I’ll keep running. Because I need people to know that the infinite doors are everywhere. Don’t touch the knobs. Don’t open them. This is the woman known as Wilda Teresa Fallon writing from the Plane of Eternal Torment. Don’t join me here. Run in the other direction. It’s too late for me.
Customer Reviews:
* (one star) WTF Indeed! (November 4, 2012)
Reviewed by Jeffrey Thomas
“This is a zombie novel like no other.” Riiight. Just like all the other interminable zombie books (and movies) are like no other. Except that the pseudonymous Ms. Fallon’s Z-pocalypse is only too similar to everything that has gone before (surprise surprise). Aside from the somewhat refreshing approach of having the inevitable plague spread via demonic microorganisms, this novel is just another tedious and embarrassing rehash of much more impressive zombie vehicles such as The Walking Dead television program or the novel World War Z. When will this plague of zombie novels ever end? Not with this novel, if you’ll notice that it’s “Book 1” in a proposed series...sigh. It infuriates me to see the high rankings these self-published crapfests boast (never underestimate the stupidity of the general public, and I’m surprised that the readers of this stuff even know how to read), though I suppose that has a lot to do with these e-books being sold at low prices, often even given away for free. Though free crap is free crap, in my book, and no sweet deal. Much more fascinating to me than her zombie yarn is Fallon’s biography, as given on this site and in the back of the novel itself. Whether a put-on or the sad delusions of a schizophrenic mind, the author’s own supposed encounters with zombie-like beings makes for vastly more intriguing reading than her fiction. And I’ll admit that as I read her bio on my e-reader, I jumped when a certain unexpected visual effect flashed on the screen. It still mystifies me as to how she was able to accomplish it, and I don’t know whether to be impressed or annoyed. For just an instant, a face appeared on my e-reader’s screen – or rather, a head with a yawning black cavern where a face should be. If Ms. Fallon could only integrate such technical magic into her stories rather than her bio, and make her stories half as invol
ving as her supposed true-life experiences, she might then have a better chance of standing alongside horror masters like Ramsey Campbell and Thomas Ligotti, and newer writers like Richard Gavin and Simon Strantzas, who are much more deserving of the high sales rank these adolescent zombie outings acquire.
Ah-ha! Got me again! As I sit here writing this review, that same effect with the empty face has flashed before me – this time across my computer screen! So is this website in cahoots with the author? Is this gimmickry something we’re going to be seeing more of from now on? In any case, you made me jump again, Ms. Fallon, I’ll give you that.
And that whispering sound through my computer speakers. It does indeed conjure the image, as the author described, of “a wild blizzard you hear whistling outside your windows on a winter night.” Just how are you doing...
Wait.
What
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THE STRANGE CASE OF CRAZY JOE GALLO
On his successful 1976 album Desire, Bob Dylan asked what made them want to blow Joey Gallo away – but only a handful of people ever knew that it had to do with the fabled grimoire the Necronomicon, written by the “Mad Arab” Abdul Alhazred.
Long before the young, audacious mobster had earned his nickname Crazy Joe, he was born and grew up as Joseph Gallo in that section of Brooklyn known as Red Hook – a neighborhood where some very odd events, documented by a writer named Howard Lovecraft, had occurred a few years before Gallo’s birth on April 7th, 1929.
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