Doors

Or sometimes they come back. (Yeah, I went there.)

I wrote this YEARS ago for a special issue of a sci-fi/fantasy magazine I was an editor for. We did it for an autism benefit. I have three autistic children. Paul is very much modeled after my son when he was about 5 or 6. It was HARD writing this story. I had to take a long break before I could get it finished. I hope you enjoy it.

Bill heard the door again. It opened and closed and opened and closed. The noise went on like this for a good thirty seconds before he lost his patience. Beer in hand, he strode down the hallway to his son’s room. Sure enough, the boy was standing in the hall opening and closing his door in a brisk rhythm. He wasn’t smiling. If anything, his fierce look of concentration was a little intimidating. At least as intimidating as a five-year-old could ever get.

Photo by Efe Kurnaz on Unsplash

“Pauly!” He snapped at his son. The opening and closing continued. He knew Pauly’s hearing was fine, but there were times when it seemed like he was in another universe.

Bill shook his head. He knew he needed to be patient. So far as the doctors could tell he was autistic. He couldn’t help his fascination with doors and spider webs and garbage trucks. The fact that he could talk, even if it was only for the last two years, and functioned otherwise reasonably normally made a diagnosis tricky according to every specialist they could get in to see.

He consciously softened his tone. “Pauly?”

Big brown eyes looked up from the elfin face. “Yeah, Daddy?”

What aggravation had been building for the last few minutes melted away. “Hey buddy. I need you to take it easy on the door okay?” He worked to keep his voice low and his tone bright. Paul had always been very fragile emotionally.

A brief cloud crossed the little boy’s face, and he frowned. “Okay.”

He ruffled his son’s hair. It had grown long over the last year. Paul loved to play with it endlessly. “That’s good son, that's good. Fifteen more minutes til bed time. ‘Kay?”

Paul gave a double thumbs up. “Story tonight, Dad?”

“Guaranteed, little man.” He tipped the bottle at his son. “Guaranteed.”

Satisfied the doors would stay closed for the rest of the night, Bill walked back up the hall to the living room. It was sparse and felt too empty. If he were honest with himself, it had been that way since Libby passed. A few of her things were still on display, a painting she had done and a few sculptures. There were no pictures. Those he had stashed away for a while.

Out of sight generally meant out of mind for Paul. With no pictures of Mommy he didn’t seem to mention her as much. Not that it was just for his son’s benefit. Bill kept his only picture of her in a nightstand drawer. He looked at it every day and it always caused a stab of pain. Until that went away, he didn’t think he could have anything like that on the wall. It probably wasn’t healthy for him or his boy to deal with the grief that way, or not deal as the case may be, but raising a son as different as Paul was hard enough.

He collapsed into the sectional sofa and waited for Paul. The boy had a knack for knowing how much time passed. Not a tick more than fifteen minutes would pass before he’d materialize with the latest storybook.

One last swig finished the bottle and he let his eyes slide closed. The sound of low jazz from the television and the warmth of the house lulled him. At one point he jolted at a loud bang and mumbled, “No slamming.” Even that didn’t bring him fully alert.

Eventually, he was awakened by a pressure in his bladder. He blinked his eyes at the clock on the cable box and saw that it was two in the morning. A mix of panic and guilt washed over him. Paul hadn’t come to get him to read. That had only happened two other times, both when the boy had been dreadfully sick.

He struggled to his feet and stumblewalked down the hall. Paul’s door was closed.

Slammed shut.

That was odd too. His son always demanded the door be left open a crack, not too wide and for God’s sake not shut. He grabbed the handle and turned it. It opened easily enough.

There was the race car bed.

Bought by his mother.

The dark blue sheets tangled in a mess.

Just like dear old Dad’s.

The reading lamp clipped to the headboard was on.

He can’t read yet, and he’s not there. Oh God, where is he?

With a trembling hand, Bill flipped on the overhead light as though that extra illumination would reveal something hidden. The floor was spotless, every toy in its place on a group of shelves. Dinosaurs silently fought other dinosaurs. Spacemen stood in rank and file. The only thing missing was the little boy.

“Paul.” The name came out a whisper. “Pauly.” This time a ragged yell. Then something struck him. The room was positively frigid. He stepped quickly to the one window. It was locked and solid. There was no way for someone, particularly a small someone, to leave and latch the window after themselves.

Bill’s head whipped left and right. He simply wasn’t here. Desperate, he ran from room to room. The bathroom they both shared was cluttered but empty. There was no tiny form in his bed or under it. Closets were empty, as was the kitchen and dining room. That only left the outside. Panic kicked his heart into the next gear.

He shoved his right hand in his pocket. The house key was still there. He checked and the front door deadbolt was locked and only a key would unlock it from either side.

He rushed to the back door. Sliding glass led into a sizable expanse of now-dead grass. Winter’s chill had done it in. A few yard toys still littered the area, not ready to be put into storage until the first snow. No Paul, though.

“Pauly.” He yelled into the darkness, heedless of waking the neighbors.

The rational part of his brain knew without a doubt that there was no way his son could get out of the yard. The privacy fence was too tall to climb and the latch too high up to reach. Still, Paul was smart for all his different-ness.

Then he heard a noise, a faint whisper. “Daddy.”

He turned slowly, closing the sliding glass door. “Pauly?” This time he used his best ‘let’s go play’ voice, even if it was a little strained. “Paul is that you?”

“Daddy, help me.” Paul’s voice was clearer, but still so faint.

He couldn’t tell which direction it came from, but he would bet his last penny that it was from inside. “Where are you, buddy? I can barely hear you.” He worked hard to keep the panicked edge out of his voice. Paul was small enough that he could conceivably fit into some of the ductwork, though how he would have gotten in there was a mystery.

“Opened... Daddy... Can’t get...” The boy’s words were being swallowed by distance or a barrier or both.

Walking fast, but trying to remain as quiet as possible, Bill moved towards where he thought his son’s voice was coming from. Fat tears splashed on his shirt front. “Keep talking, son. Daddy’s coming.” He kept his words loud, but fought hard to keep the tears out of them.

A soft thudding, like a muted bass drum, came from the direction of Paul’s room. “Daddy!”

Bill found himself back in Paul’s room. It was still cold, though maybe not as cold as it had been. “Are you in here son?”

“Here, Daddy. Here, here, here. So cold.” The voice was so much weaker and seemed to come from midair.

There was no vent right in the area, in the floor or the ceiling. “Pauly, listen to Daddy. I need you to come back through the door. Find where you went in and open the door to come out. I’m right here.” His voice broke. “Daddy will catch you.”

“Scared, Daddy.”

“I know, baby, I know. I just need you to listen and try hard. Push open the door.” He didn’t even know what he was talking about. There was no door here.

Loud thud, you heard a loud thud. His thoughts were nearly as loud.

“Push hard, son”

Something shimmered in the air a few feet in front of him. It wasn’t like glitter, more like the air just off the blacktop on a summer’s day. The air in front of him warped and split revealing utter blackness.

“Keep going, Paul. It’s a door. It’s just a door.” He reached forward to grab at an edge, but there wasn’t one. If it was a door it wasn’t one like any he had ever seen. Movement near one edge caught his eye. Light streamed into the darkness from Paul’s lamp, but it didn’t cut through it as it should have. It quickly diffused like it was going through a liquid.

“Coming, Dad.” A sweat-soaked brown head pushed out into the air of his bedroom.

Bill rushed forward and cradled that beautiful little head. The shoulders came next and soon the whole body. Paul filled his arms and he cried, hugging and kissing his son’s chilled features.

“Wanna sleep, Daddy. So tired.”

Bill didn’t know whether to let him sleep or not. His brain shunted aside the weirdness of a door from nothing. He carried his son to the couch and sat down. Holding him with just one arm, he didn’t want to let go just yet, he grabbed the red fuzzy blanket on the back of the sofa and swaddled them both in it. He wasn’t physically cold, but the warmth was mentally soothing.

Paul began snoring softly. It wasn’t long before Bill followed him into sleep.

~~~~~

This time the annoying chirp of his cell phone’s alarm clock woke him up. When he realized Paul wasn’t in his lap he started to panic again, but the boy was curled up in one corner of the sofa. The earthy aroma of freshly brewed coffee drew him to the kitchen. Home automation was his salvation now that he was raising a child on his own. He didn’t know how his mom had done it without some of the modern conveniences he took for granted.

He filled a big blue mug and looked through the sliding glass door. The sun was coming up on schedule, so he knew the world hadn’t gone completely bonkers.

“Where did you go, son?” Or had it all been a nightmare? There was no way to know for sure. “Nightmare. I’m going to go with that.” In the growing light of day it made the most sense. His son couldn’t have possibly opened a doorway like that.

The soft whisper of feet on wood crept up behind him. “Mornin’, Daddy.”

He turned, swallowing a mouthful of coffee. “Morning, pal. Get the cereal out of the pantry, and I’ll grab you a bowl.” The two Blake men went about their morning routines, falling into it like well-oiled cogs. Before Bill knew it, the boy was on the front steps waiting for the carpool, and he was at his laptop, logging in.

A double horn beep let him know that Mrs. Henderson had pulled up. He walked to the bay window in the living room and watched as Paul climbed in the side door of her minivan. Now he could focus all of his neurons on the day ahead. An hour later and he hadn’t read more than two emails, looked at the backup logs, or done anything else vaguely productive. Even Reddit and his other favorite social networking sites held no fascination for him.

He kept coming back to the search engine and typing things like “wormhole” and “space warp”. Old news articles, Wikipedia entries, and MySpace pages for bands long gone were hardly useful. Before he knew it, it was almost lunchtime. Paul would be back from his half-ay pre-K program any time now. Bill’s stomach reminded him now would also be a good time to get some lunch started. He didn’t really have an appetite, but he hadn’t eaten since dinner last night.

“Bill...” The whisper floated to him. At first, he wasn’t even sure that he had actually heard anything. He turned down the speakers on his laptop and waited. For a full five minutes, he strained to hear any more words.

“Maybe I just need a nap.” He shook his head and reached for the volume controls

“Help me, Bill.”

The tiny, dark brown hairs on the back of his arms stood up. This time he heard the faint voice clearly. It was distant, but distinctly female. “Hello? Who’s there?” He stood, pushing back the expensive office chair.

“Bill, I’m so cold. I need you.”

He knew the voice but didn’t want to think about it. Surely he was wrong. She was dead. There was no coming back from that no matter how many religions or late-night movies insisted to the contrary. Still, he couldn’t deny his ears, could he?

One thing he was fairly certain of was where the voice was coming from. He walked to his son’s room and stopped just outside the closed door. When his hand touched the brass knob he hissed and withdrew his hand. It was beyond just cold. He had a flashback to the movie about that little blond kid, of tongues and flagpoles. The giggle that escaped him was almost as scary as the situation.

Steeling himself against whatever he may find on the other side, he wrapped his hand in the hem of his shirt and opened the door. “Libby?” Just for calling her name, he should check himself into the hospital.

“I’m here Bill. Please, you have to get me out of here.” It was like Paul’s voice from last night. She was just on the other side of a thick door. Maybe he was mistaken. Maybe it wasn’t her? He didn’t know which idea was crazier, that his dead wife was talking to him from beyond the grave or that his son had somehow opened a portal to the “other side”.

A thick ball of nausea formed in his stomach. He couldn’t get to her. Only his son could open the door. “I can’t sweetheart. This is Pauly’s door. He can get to you. I can’t.” He rubbed at his temples. “God, I’m going crazy.”

“Not crazy, Bill. It’s me, it’s Libby.” Her voice seemed even closer, almost close enough to touch. It was like she was pressing her lips against the door jamb.

“This is wrong. This is so wrong. What’s happening?” A sob caught in his throat. It just wasn’t possible.

“Remember our trip to Cancun? The little shack we stayed in? The walls were so thin. You said that you could huff and puff...”

“And blow the door down.” He finished the sentence for her. It felt like every hair on his head had joined those on his arm. The smell of ozone filled the room and the world went dim for just a second. He sank to the floor. “Gonna pass out.”

“You can get to me, Bill. If Pauly could get to this place, you can. I want to be with you and with our son.”

He breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth slowly and evenly. The world brightened again. “How? Can you tell me how?” He thought of her body rotting in the ground. Even he wasn’t sure what ‘how’ he was asking. How could she be coming back? How could she join them if she had no body? How could he open the door?

“I don’t know, but you have to hurry. They’re coming to get me. They’ll be here any minute.”

He heard the fear in her voice. There had been a tornado in their area a few years back. He had heard that same tone on that day when she asked him if they were going to lose everything. “Wh-, who are ‘they’?”

“My keepers. They’ll know that I’m missing and come for me. They’ll hurt me for this.” Even with the odd, muffled quality of her voice, he could hear the sobs waiting to break free.

He shook his head. “Who’s keeping you and why would they hurt you?” It didn’t sound like she was describing any afterlife he had ever heard of. Maybe Dante’s Hell, but surely someone as patient and kind as Libby had been would have earned a spot in a happier place.

“Bill, listen to me.” The sobs were gone. This was the Elizabeth voice, all business. This was the voice he heard when things with Paul were at their worst. When their creditors were demanding money or even when she was just pushing him to finish a project, she sounded like this. “You can do it. You have to concentrate. Imagine the door and imagine it opening.”

He closed his eyes, willing to do whatever it took to have her back. All questions about how this was even possible were pushed to the back for now. He had seen the door or worm hole or whatever it was last night. If not for that, maybe he’d be questioning his sanity a little more than he already was.

He saw the door as it was last night, the same size and location. Once it was firmly fixed in his imagination he imagined it opening. As he had told Paul last night, he pushed hard with his mind. “It’s a door, it’s just a door.”

“I can feel it weakening, Paul. Push harder.” Libby’s voice had changed. It was huskier, deeper. This was the voice he heard in their lovemaking.

The thought of her being here, the smell of her hair, the touch of her hand on his, made him work harder for it. He redoubled his efforts, concentrating and focusing on that spot in midair. He saw the shimmer from last night in his mind’s eye. A new burst of cold made him open his eyes. Long cracks appeared.

“That’s it. A little more and we can come through.” The voice was even deeper now. It had lost its feminine sound. Blackness began to spill out from the cracks.

“Libby?” Panic ripped at him. He butt-scooted backwards until he hit the wall.

A laughing growl filtered through the weak spot in space. “She’s here and you’ll meet her, but we’re not her.”

What had he done? Where had the door gone to? “Gotta close the door.” He closed his eyes again. He tried to imagine repairing the cracks. “Force it shut.”

In a distant part of the house, he heard the sliding door. Someone was here.

Oh, no. Pauly.

“Go away.” He shouted, whether it was at the thing or at his son even he wasn’t sure.

“Daddy?” Paul’s voice came from the dining room.

“Go outside and play, son.” Sweat beaded on his forehead from the mental effort. “Daddy’s working on something in your room.” If this thing came through, he didn’t want his son anywhere near it.

The door to Paul’s room opened. There stood his handsome little boy. “Daddy, what?”

Bill felt the thing on the other side push hard. More cracks appeared. He had repaired a few, but it wasn’t enough. “Help Daddy,, son. We need to close this door and nail it shut.” He spoke through short, sharp breaths and a voice thick with tears.

Paul’s book bag hit the floor.

The cracks began to close, and the Libby creature on the other side howled. Bill looked to his son and saw his eyes were rolled back in his head. “Pauly!”

“Closing the door, Dad.” The voice that came from the little boy’s body was what it would sound like in fifteen years or more, that of the man he would become. There was power there, and it made Bill both proud and afraid.

“Good job, son. Keep it up.” He heard an odd sucking sound and turned to see nothing, literally. The door was gone and, somehow, he knew the hole was completely repaired. Nothing would be coming through that spot again in either direction.

Paul’s eyes slid down into place again, soft, brown, and incredibly tired. “All better, Dad?”

He knee-walked to his son and grabbed him tightly. “All better, Pauly. Double thumbs up.”

~~~~~

The door to the moving van slammed down into place. Bill looked at the “For Sale” sign with a jumble of emotions. He’d miss the place as would his son. It was their home, but neither of them had slept well in it for the last month. He still wasn’t sure what happened or where the doorway had opened to and didn’t care. It may be closed and locked if such a thing was possible, but there was no guarantee there wasn’t another one somewhere else in the house.

Besides, they needed a fresh start. He needed to find a healthy way of letting go of Libby and wanted to be able to spend more time with his boy. Especially if he was as special as it seemed. He climbed up into the cab of the truck with Paul and cranked the big engine to life. As they hit the highway, it felt like they were opening a door into a new life with infinite possibilities.