It took Bill pulling a few strings to get the town together on such short notice—calls to the current sheriff of Monroe County, a great bear of a man named Timothy Cole, as well as Mayor Forsythe, the folks at the Zarephath Ledger, and Amanda Pulaski at the Historical Society, since the only space big enough to hold a town meeting was in the basement of the History and Heritage Center. Bill pulled it off, though; Kathy was impressed. By Wednesday evening at seven, those notable heads of town and county were gathered at long folding tables equipped with microphones. The sea of folding chairs set up in neat rows across the rest of the basement were filled; other townsfolk stood behind the chairs near the door.
After the mayor and current sheriff had their official say, Bill took the mic. “Thank you, Mayor Forsythe, Sheriff Cole. And ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming out tonight. We appreciate your participation tonight. From what I understand, this is the first meeting in almost seventy years regarding the, uh…the Door in the Zarephath woods.”
There was an agitated murmur from the crowd that Bill silenced by holding up his hand.
“You may be aware of some unusual events happening in town. Before we get too far into the discussion of the nature of these events, I think it’s important to stress that not every misfortune is or should be necessarily associated with the Door. That could lead to potentially dangerous misunderstandings. Hear what I’m saying, folks: Please do not jump to conclusions about your or other people’s misfortunes or difficulties being related to the Door.
“That said, as I’m sure at least some of you have noticed, the Door or some force connected to it seems to be reversing or otherwise undoing requests made of it, reaching back for the last few decades.”
The uproar of frightened murmurs took longer to quiet that time. Questions sprung from the crowd:
“Oh God—why?”
“How do you know?”
“What happened? Are we in danger?”
“How can we stop it?”
“Please, please,” Bill said into the microphone. “Please, settle down. That’s what we’re here tonight to discuss.”
The crowd settled back into their seats, but their expressions and body language spoke of deep fear. Kathy couldn’t help but wonder how many of them had been tempted or had succumbed to the temptation of using that alien version of a wishing well in their midst.
Bill continued. “This is still a working theory, but seems to be supported by the limited firsthand evidence reported by townspeople. We’ve brought in an expert in matters relating to this sort of thing, and she will speak to us about the situation and answer any questions you have to the best of her ability. Please welcome Kathy Ryan.”
There was a smattering of uneasy applause as Kathy stood and took the mic from Bill. “Uh, hello. My name is Kathy Ryan. For over a decade, I have been a consultant to law enforcement agencies across the country regarding crimes with distinct occult, preternatural or supernatural elements and aspects. I am well aware of your Door, and have spent some significant time and resources amassing what information I could about it.” She paused. The crowd before her was silent. She felt their eyes on her, on her scar. She saw some of them balk at her tone, which was so practiced a mix of authority, confidence, and inarguable reassurance that it pervaded all her speech now. She waited a few seconds to see if they would argue her credentials or ask questions, but no one spoke. She supposed any town so used to the unusual in their everyday life would feel no need to question a woman claiming to be an expert in the unusual. That was good—one hurdle jumped.
She continued. “We suspect that sometime in the last week or two, the Door opened. We don’t know on which end. It is closed now, but we suspect that something came through nevertheless, and we believe whatever it was is responsible for the reversions. We would like to identify and contain this force if possible, and minimize further risk to you, the people of Zarephath, particularly users of the Door and those marginally involved with it by association or involvement in the letters others have written.”
As she spoke, she noticed a lot of poking and prodding between the people, whispering and grumbling. Her understanding was that the cardinal rule for living in Zarephath was to never, ever, under any circumstances open that Door. She understood their panic, but mob panic was always a dangerous thing. If she could have seen a way to gather information on a smaller, quieter scale, she would have. However, she believed time was of the essence and where her files were lacking, only the townspeople could fill in the blanks. So she kept talking.
“I understand that many of you are frightened at the prospect of an unraveling of requests and what it will mean in terms of the well-being of yourself or others. That is why it is going to be of vital importance that you lend us your assistance—anonymously, if desired. Yes, I’m saying that in order to help you, I need you to help me. Understand that I am not here to judge you and frankly, I don’t care why you used the Door. But if you want to save yourselves, your families, and friends, I just need to know that you did, and what you have been experiencing as a result this past week. Sights, sounds, smells, and of course, any physical contact. I need to be able to identify what, specifically, is attacking you so that I know how to fight it.”
After that, the crowd did erupt in noise, and it took the mayor and Sheriff Cole to herd them into some semblance of order to ask their questions.
“Are you really going to take this information anonymously? What if folks don’t want anyone to know they used the Door?” The question was posed by a harried-looking middle-aged woman with a messy bun of mousy brown hair. She wore a T-shirt that read Aliens took me…and brought me back.
“Absolutely. We’ll be setting up interviews by phone and written request, to meet at a time and place that is both convenient to you and discreet. The interviewing team will consist only of myself, retired sheriff Bill Grainger, and Sheriff Cole. No one else will be aware of your participation if you wish to remain anonymous.”
A male with a baseball cap and gray T-shirt stood up and asked, “How did the Door open? I thought it was locked.” There was a chorus of agreement on that point. It had likely never occurred to a number of people to even try to open the Door under the assumption that it had some kind of cosmic lock.
Kathy replied, “We don’t know at this time how or why the Door opened, although given what we know about the Door, we don’t think it’s likely it was opened from the far side.” Outrage rippled through the crowd, so she added, “This does not mean we’re accusing anyone here or blaming anyone for opening the Door. Please do not take it upon yourselves to try to assign blame to your fellow neighbors. That Door you have out there is not from this dimension. I’m sure you know that. As such, we can’t be one-hundred percent sure at this time how to predict its behavior. We can offer theories based on patterns we have seen from years of field research and observation.”
“So you’ve seen other Doors? Doors like that one out in the woods?” an old man in a wheelchair hollered from the far side of the room.
“Other portals, yes. Not like yours, though; not exactly. In many cases, the portals could only be opened or activated from one side. The Door in Zarephath seems to possess many characteristics of a portal like that. Other portals can be opened from either side, given someone has a key and knows how to use it.”
“Can you keep the Door from opening again?” a young girl in the front row asked. She looked about nine and absolutely terrified.
Kathy softened for a moment. “I hope to. I’ll certainly do my best, sweetie.”
“We have time for one more question,” Bill cut in. “Then we’ll give you information on setting up appointments to speak with us privately.”
A man in the back of the room raised his hand. Despite his boyish handsomeness, his eyes looked haggard, as if sleep had eluded him those last several days. “Can this force you mentioned, this whatever it is that escaped from behind the Door—can it kill us?”
The room grew silent, awaiting her answer. She paused—not long enough for them to pick up on it and panic, but long enough to think through how to answer that.
“That,” she said, “is what I’m hoping to determine from you fine people. I suspect there is a physical-interaction component, to be honest with you. But I promise I’ll do everything I can to keep it from hurting anyone.”
“I hope you can,” the man said softly.
* * * *
Bill awoke in the darkness, one foot in the real world and one foot still in his dream. He turned to his digital alarm clock. It read 4:00. He’d been having a dream, though the details were fuzzy. He thought it might have been about the night with the hitchhiker, but he could only remember streaks of blood mixing with rain. It was already fading, though, and he mashed the remnant sleep from his eyes with the heel of his hand. With a groan, he got up and trudged to the bathroom and stood over the toilet, waiting for the stream of urine to begin flowing. He’d found that the older he got, the longer it took to get his dick going, regardless of what he needed it to do. He’d also discovered the need to make these nightly bathroom visits more frequently, which wreaked havoc on his sleep.
When he was done, he splashed some cold water on his face and headed back to bed. Still groggy in his head, he almost didn’t notice the shape moving on the bed. He got within a few feet of it before his brain registered what his half-closing eyes were seeing.
Something was moving beneath the covers in the dark.
Immediately he was awake, trying to gauge the distance between the thing on the bed and the gun in his night-table drawer without taking his eyes off the shape for too long. It looked to be about the size of a large dog, but the contours weren’t right for an animal. It appeared to be struggling to free itself from the blankets he’d thrown back a few minutes before, and whatever it was, it was making wet smacking sounds beneath them. Bill inched toward the night table.
The thing must have heard the creaking of his feet on the floorboards, because the sounds stopped suddenly, like it was waiting and listening. After a few moments, the smacking, slapping sounds resumed, and Bill crept closer to the night-table drawer. Beneath the blanket, it looked like a number of snakes writhing in different directions. Blood soaked the portion of the undersheet exposed by the moving blanket; Bill could see a wet shadow dripping down the side of the bed. He quietly eased open the night table and pulled out his .38. In one fluid move, he threw back the blanket and drew the gun on the shape on the bed.
He almost dropped the gun. The thing lying where Bill had been moments before looked like the hitchhiker from the waist up, though it was worse off than when Bill had seen it on the lawn. The plastered blond hair looked leached of color and mangy spots on her head suggested it had been pulled out or fallen out in random clumps. The eyes had flattened in their sockets and were a dull gray color now, and part of her bottom lip was missing. Her breasts were lopsided, one sliding nearly into her armpit and the other flattened against her chest. Her nipples were purplish-gray. There was nothing remotely human below her waist, which was itself a tattered and bloody mess of flesh where thin, knotted cords of blackish muscle grasped at the soaked sheets. And her stomach…
What he had mistaken for snakes were long tentacles waving and snapping at the air. They reached out to him from a hollowed-out cavern in her gut, slick with blood and some substance the sickly yellow color of phlegm. The hitchhiker’s arms reached out for him too, as if pleading with him to embrace her.
When the thing sat up, he emptied the gun into its face. It shrieked once, then folded in on itself. It was like watching a rag get pulled through a pinhole, and then it disappeared with a tiny plop. Bill stared at the bloody spot on the bed for several seconds, his brain still trying to process how the monstrosity that was there seconds ago was now gone. He took a deep breath and with a shaking hand, put the gun back in the drawer.
Then he heard the shriek outside.
He rushed to the bedroom window and peered out. Looking up at him from the surrounding darkness below was the thing that had been on his bed, except that instead of the hitchhiker’s face, there was a cavernous emptiness. It looked to him like a hole poked in a piece of paper, but the void behind it was endless, deeper than the body, deeper than the world. It was dizzying to look down into it, with those matted clumps of hair dangling into the abyss like cilia and those tentacles whipping up a frenzy all around it.
Another shriek emanated from that black hole, a thin, unnatural sound overlapped onto the air rather than moving through it. Bill was about to grab his gun again when the thing ran off on its stomach tentacles, disappearing into the night.
Bill watched the space where it had been for some moments after, scanning the darkness in an ultimately futile attempt at discerning where the thing had gone. The world outside was silent; even the crickets, tree frogs, and cicadas had packed it in for the night.
He looked at the mess on the bed, stripped off the sheets and blankets, and left them in a heap on the floor. Then he went downstairs and grabbed a kitchen chair, hauling it awkwardly up the stairs to the bedroom, where he set it down facing the window. He took his .38 out of the night table, sat in the chair, and with the gun in his lap, he waited for the dawn.