Behind the Door Read online

  Her eyes had gone shiny with tears. She looked hurt and angry now, those subtle changes in expression that he’d come to read after almost forty years of marriage. He knew her pretty well, or at least, had always thought he did. He thought he knew the signs of her having an affair with Mark Westerfield. It turned out he was wrong, but he hadn’t known that and probably wouldn’t have believed that anyway back when he gave Mark the chest.

  “He died of a heart attack,” Flora said as if to fix that truth in place. That was what the coroner had determined, that Mark’s heart had given out, possibly due to some great shock. Grant thought he knew what the shock was, or at least where it originated.

  “Yes…outside the Door. He did. And they never found the box. It didn’t come back to me. I figure he used the Door to wish it right back where it had come from. Maybe hell’s on the other side of that Door and that stone was a little piece of it. I don’t know. Maybe I should have been the one to wish it away, and then it would have killed me instead.”

  “It was a heart attack,” Flora whispered, as if unable to let the idea go. “How—how could you—”

  “I’m so sorry. Flora. I’m sorry I did it and I’m sorry I never told you everything.”

  “I never—”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  “So why?” She looked crestfallen and he flushed with shame. He couldn’t look at her.

  “I thought you did at the time. I was an idiot.”

  “That thing you gave him killed him.”

  Grant looked her steadily in the eye, though the rest of him felt shaky. “Probably. I was so afraid of losing you…I didn’t think. I just felt. But Flora, there’s more.”

  The waitress came by to top off their coffees and they fell silent. When she was out of earshot, Grant said, “It’s back.”

  Flora gaped at him a moment, then said, “The chest?”

  “Found it on my workbench in the garage this morning.”

  “Oh, Grant,” she said, putting her hand over his. “What are we going to do?”

  He appreciated the gesture and the inclusion of herself in the planning of a solution. He’d expected a lot more anger and distance from her. “I…I honestly don’t know. It’s back and it shouldn’t be, and I don’t think we can wish it away again with all this weird stuff going on around town. I don’t know how to get rid of it without…without….” Getting myself or someone else killed, was what he was going to say, but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  She patted his hand. “We’ll figure something out. Look at me—we will, okay? It’s going to be okay. That chest—it’s in your garage right now?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Okay. Okay, good. Let’s give it some thought and this evening we can discuss our options. Let’s not jump to any hasty reactions.” She was mad about Mark; he could tell. She had every right to be. He’d sentenced an innocent man to death, one way or another. However, she was still there with him, still in the thick of it with him, and that meant the world to him.

  “All right,” he said. “Flora, thank you. I mean it. I love you.”

  “I love you too, hon,” she said, and tried to give him an encouraging smile. “We’ll figure this out together.”

  Caught up as they were in their conversation, they never saw Ed, confronted by his own secret, out in the parking lot.

  * * * *

  Ed Richter had wanted a cup of coffee. He considered himself quite a connoisseur of the coffee bean, his taste buds in tune with all the subtleties of flavor, and aside from importing the expensive stuff, the best coffee in Zarephath was served at Alexia Diner.

  Unlike Grant, the mechanic down the street from his store, Ed did close up shop on Sundays. The handymen and do-it-yourselfers in Zarephath knew to get what they needed on Saturdays and get their work done on Ed’s day off. It had been working out nicely that way for the last few years.

  Ed liked going to the diner on Sunday mornings because he liked watching the families. They came in after church services mostly, young parents with their broods of children. He didn’t have a family of his own, knowing that even as a young man that particular path in life would be a disaster. He wouldn’t have admitted to being lonely, exactly, but he did find some comfort in the presence of other people sometimes.

  And of course, there were the boys. He especially liked watching the families with the little boys.

  He had managed to cross the better part of the lot, his thoughts on coffee and people-watching, when a force hit him from the side, knocking him to the pavement. He felt the jarring thud in his bones and wondered if any of them were broken. He looked around for what could have hit him, and at first saw nothing.

  He heard someone mutter “pervert.” Startled, he scanned the parking lot for the speaker, but found he was the only person outside. Puzzled, he pulled himself painfully to his feet and made his way across the rest of the parking lot.

  He supposed it could have been vertigo—he was getting up there in years—but it had never been a problem before. Besides, he had never heard of cases of vertigo producing auditory hallucinations. It could have been some new budding guilt, maybe brought on by all the time he’d been spending with Toby. The guy was weak-willed and soft, burdened like Lon Chaney’s tragic character Larry Talbot with a beast inside himself that he couldn’t accept and couldn’t control. Maybe some of that was finally starting to rub off on Ed in his old age. He doubted it, though.

  There was one other possibility, one he wouldn’t have thought of if not for all the talk around town that week. He didn’t want to give it any credence, but he guessed he’d have to consider it and plan accordingly.

  Ed hadn’t exactly been honest when Toby asked him if he’d ever used the Door. He had once, but not for the kind of altruistic purpose that Toby had. Ed had been a young man with the kind of secret that, in a small town like Zarephath in 1963, could have gotten him tortured and killed on a good day. Ed had used the Door to ensure his safety. It had seemed like simple self-preservation at the time. He’d written a letter asking that he never got caught or prosecuted by the law for any crimes he had committed or would commit against children. He’d also asked that he be protected from vigilante violence or mistreatment by angry or suspicious townspeople. He was painstakingly careful in how he worded it all. He knew requests could backfire and his, if not properly laid out, could blow up in his face in horrific ways. He took his time with it and delivered it only once he was satisfied he’d minimized risk to nearly nothing. And in the fifty-four years since, all he’d asked for had been given to him. He was a careful and secretive man by nature, but his letter had assured him a veil of secrecy that had protected him even at his most careless.

  Until now.

  The waitress, a nice girl named Tara, led him to a booth by the window. He said hello to Grant and Flora as he passed, but didn’t linger too long; they were clearly in the midst of discussing something private, and he didn’t want to interrupt. Once he was seated at his own table and had ordered his coffee, he gazed out the window again. His wrist and hip ached where he’d landed on the pavement, and the side where he’d been hit was surely going to bruise. But who—or what—had hit him? So far as he could tell, he’d been completely alone in the parking lot.

  It might be worth preparing himself for the worst-case scenario. If it turned out something had gone wrong with the Door, if people’s letter requests were being upended somehow….

  He felt a wave of sickening heat despite the diner’s air-conditioning. He was genuinely afraid for the first time in fifty-four years. His gaze swept the diner, but no one else was paying him any attention at all. Good. For now, he was—

  Then he saw the napkin. He was sure it hadn’t been there when he’d sat down, and no one had come close enough to the table to slip it to him, even when his attention had been turned to the window. He would have felt or heard someo
ne go by. There it was, though: an unfolded napkin with a message hastily scrawled in pen.

  We know what you did.

  We’re going to put you down like the sick dog you are.

  The world wavered in front of him. He picked up the napkin with shaking hands and scanned the diner again. No one was watching him or glaring from behind a menu, taking in his reaction. He knew he must have looked pale and sweaty, but no one noticed. He looked down at the napkin again, then crumpled it into a ball and stuffed it in his pocket. He slid out of the booth and toward the door as fast as his protesting body could take him.

  By the time the waitress returned with his coffee, Ed was gone.

  Chapter 8

  Kathy met Bill Grainger at the entrance to the forest in Zarephath, on the edge of town. He was pacing by his truck when she pulled up, a serious look on his face. He waved as she parked. She cut the engine and got out of the car, then gave him a hug. Bill was never terribly comfortable with expressions of affection like hugs, but Kathy could tell it pleased him deep down.

  “Good to see you, Bill.”

  “You too, hon. How’ve you been? How’s that Irish guy?”

  “Reece. He’s good. We both are, thanks. So…tell me about the Door.”

  Bill exhaled loudly. “Right to business, huh?”

  She winked at him.

  “Okay,” he said, gesturing for her to follow him. “This way. The Door’s about an hour’s hike in. I’ll tell you on the way.”

  As they hiked through a mostly pathless forest, Bill filled her in on the rumors about town—Anne Bartkowski and the cancer that her husband Joe had wished away, Alice Cromberg and her baby some forty-two years overdue and the complications she was experiencing, and poor Rita Nunez, who started hemorrhaging in the middle of Barney’s Market. He couldn’t confirm firsthand that last event was related to the Door, since Rita had died en route to the hospital, but folks talk, and they claimed her last words before passing out from blood loss were, “No…no, it was supposed to be okay! It was supposed to be taken away!”

  “So,” Kathy said, “you’re saying the requests people made using the Door are… what? Being undone? Reversed?”

  “Sure looks that way,” Bill said. “I’m sure there are other examples I don’t know about yet that could confirm it. People are, as you might imagine, kind of reluctant to talk about using the Door. But I’d guess far more than I know about are going through some similar things, or worse. Thing is, I don’t know why. Nearest I can think is the Door somehow opened. All we put away came spilling back.”

  They made the remainder of the hike in relative silence, reaching the Door at one-thirty in the afternoon. It was, to her relief, shut. Even so, she eyed it warily. Kathy had seen it a number of times before, but it never failed to incite a mild anxiety in her. It was clearly a thing from another space and time, incongruous with the forest around it. As she approached it, she felt that familiar hum in her chest. She touched the wood and drew her hand back quickly. It was like petting a thing ready to strike. It hadn’t exactly moved under her fingers, but she could feel a kind of tension there.

  “Well,” she said, turning back to Bill, “it’s closed now. Is it possible that someone opened and closed it again? Or it closed itself?”

  “Possibly. Either way, I think the damage was done, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I would. I’ll take some energy readings and whatnot, though just the physical effects of standing near it seem to support your theory. It feels different here. The energy is different. And honestly, I’m more concerned with identifying and containing whatever may have come through. For that, I think we’re going to need to talk to those people you mentioned. I think—”

  Her words were cut off by a low buzzing so much like a saw that Kathy jumped away from the Door, convinced that something from the far side was trying to cut its way through. The wood groaned outward but didn’t break. Evidently, even from the other side, that Door was indestructible.

  Kathy and Bill listened to the buzzing, their gazes fixed on the Door, until the sounds subsided. Kathy became aware of a metallic smell that coated her throat and nose. She coughed, making a face.

  “That’s new,” she said.

  Bill grimaced, took her arm, and pulled her back toward the oaks. “We should go.”

  Kathy nodded. “But Bill, we’re going to have to get the people together—a town meeting. As soon as possible—maybe Wednesday? We’ve got to tell them what’s going on.”

  * * * *

  Toby had tried to reach Ed all day. He had an unshakable feeling that something bad had happened to the old man, living all alone in that house on the edge of town. Ed hadn’t opened the hardware store on Monday, which was very unlike him, and he wasn’t answering the phone. Monday night, Toby made the decision to drive to Ed’s house and find him.

  When Toby was little, his uncle Seth had died. He’d spent a lot of summer vacations alone with his uncle, and some parts of the vacation were good. Uncle Seth had taken him fishing and hiking, had bought him ice cream and a new bike. Some parts, like watching those movies and practicing those wrestling moves that his uncle said were special, secret things that only the two of them shared, were awkward and uncomfortable and Toby tried not to think too much about them. He’d had mixed feelings about Uncle Seth, but in the end, he’d felt bad when the man died. Uncle Seth lived alone too, like Ed, and had dropped dead from a heart attack at sixty-three. No one had found him or even thought to look for him for about two weeks, since most of the family, especially those with children, had by then eschewed his company. What police found was gruesome; that was how Toby’s mother had described it. And Toby couldn’t help but wonder what Uncle Seth would have looked like by then, rotting away for two weeks in the summer heat of his hunting cabin, alone with country vermin. It had felt to Toby like a horrible indignity to be so disconnected from the concern of other human beings that indifferent nature took more of Seth than his relatives cared to bury.

  Sure, Ed was a predator and perhaps by some people’s standards, more deserving of gruesome things happening to him, but then so was Toby. And Toby needed to believe that both deserved better than to be left to rot alone.

  He arrived at Ed’s around eight-thirty that evening, and as if to show impatience with summer’s last dregs, the sky was already growing dark. The house itself, little more than a trailer home without wheels, had a single light on inside, the one in the den where they drank beer, and outside hung a naked bulb trying its damnedest above the front door. Ed’s beaten-up old Buick was in the driveway. He appeared to be home. Toby parked and got out of the car.

  “Ed?” he called out. The den window was open and he thought he saw the curtain stir, but he received no answer. “Ed, you in there? You okay?”

  He made his way to the front door. Moths and other winged insects swarmed around the weak light above the door, but remained absolutely silent. Toby frowned. He found their soundlessness unsettling. The distinct absence of buzzing or tiny flapping of frenetic wings encouraged the same surreal unease in him that his dream had produced. Toby shooed the bugs away and knocked loudly. The sound was muffled, distorted in Toby’s ears. “Ed,” he said into the door, “it’s me. It’s Toby. You in there?”

  “Toby?” a weak voice floated out the den window. It was Ed. “Hold on.”

  He heard Ed shuffling to the door and fumbling with the lock, and a second later, the door opened. Ed stood there in an undershirt and sweatpants. The smell of whiskey wafted out the screen door. Ed’s hair was slick with sweat and his eyes, red-veined, hung in dark sockets. He had a bruise on his cheek and another on his forearm, and something that looked like a bite mark on his opposite shoulder.

  “You look like shit,” Toby said, opening the screen door. “Are you sick or something?”

  Ed moved to let him in. “No,” he muttered. “What are you doing here?”
<
br />   “I was worried. You’re not answering your phone, you didn’t open up the shop today, and you live out here alone.”

  Ed scoffed. “I wish. I haven’t been alone all day.”

  Toby glanced around the little hallway, peering where he could into other rooms. No one appeared to be anywhere in the house with them. He gave Ed a puzzled look.

  “What I mean is,” Ed said, gesturing for Toby to follow him to the den, “I’ve had visitors. I guess they’re gone now. Well, for the time being. Maybe because you’re here.”

  “Who?” Toby asked. “Bill?” In the den, Ed sank back into his usual spot on the couch while Toby took the armchair across from him. Ed offered him the whiskey bottle, which Toby declined, before answering.

  “Nah, not Bill. I don’t know who they are. Can’t see ’em.”

  Toby frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean,” Ed said, “that whatever they are, I can’t see them. But they’re mean sonsabitches, I’ll tell you that.”

  Again, Toby gave a cautious glance around. There were no signs anyone but Ed had been there in weeks. “It’s just you and me here, Ed.”

  “Yeah, now.”

  “But before…?”

  Ed gave him an impatient sigh. “I ain’t senile and I ain’t drunk, Toby.”

  “Didn’t say you were.”

  “So don’t patronize me. You used the Door.”

  Toby bristled a little. Where was this conversation going? “Yeah, so what?”

  “So I’d be mighty surprised if you were to tell me nothing odd’s been going on in your life right about now.”

  Toby’s face grew hot. “Some bad dreams, yeah. A few mental setbacks. Certainly not the long-term results I’d hoped for. But what does this—”

  “You listen and listen good,” Ed broke in. “Folks been coming into the store, grumbling about that Door out in the woods. Folks do that, you know, ’cause they know I ain’t got nobody to tell. They say things—things like how whatever they asked for any time from days to decades ago are going haywire. And even when folks don’t say nothing, you can see it in their eyes. Something’s gone bad out there. And I think we don’t even know the half of it yet. That Door’s giving back more than just returned letters, you get me?”