When Newgate Prison was torn down its brick and metal were scattered all over London. The scaffold on which people were hanged was burned. It was said that the cries of innocent victims could be heard in the crackling smoke from that blood-soaked wood.
Nobody knew what to do with one of the strangest things in that infamous prison. No one knew what to do with the door. It was an imposing door of solid metal. It had rectangular holes, like little windows. It bristled with metal studs, and had a huge bolt.
It was said that when criminals were led into the prison they maintained their bravado till they beheld this door. It has been claimed that the door was cursed with the power to freeze the hearts of evil men.
In front of the door the innocent experience a sense of lightness, and after it has been bolted behind them the sound of the clanging metal brings them a welcome, if brief, benediction.
But to murderers, child-molesters, and corrupt politicians the door represents hell itself. When the bolts are shot behind them darkness falls over their lives.
For over a hundred years the door has looked upon all manner of men and women. It has absorbed all the permutations of evil that can sprout and fester in the cancerous hearts of man. The door has grown solid with evil, muted with grief, heavy with sin.
Theosophists believe that objects absorb the emotions of lives in close proximity to them. This door, which could not be burned and could not be broken apart, became the most terrifying testimony of the depths to which the human heart can sink. When Newgate Prison was destroyed no one knew what to do with this great metal door which was its heart.
The door was forgotten in a heap somewhere in the city. Where it lay strange things blossomed. It became the gateway through which the spirits of executed criminals could, for a time, return to the world that had left them behind. They roamed the city, brooding on vengeance.
Historians maintain that in ancient Egyptian tombs there are false doors through which the Ka of the dead can return to the world and eat the offering left for them by the living. This discarded door of Newgate Prison was the door of the criminal dead.
At night the spirits of infamous highway robbers, cut-throats, rapists, and arsonists found their way through this neglected door, and spread waves of criminal thoughts throughout the unsuspecting city. The police were mystified at the sudden rise of old-fashioned crimes. It was as though criminal gangs had an unprecedented wave of inspiration from long-forgotten generations of their fraternity. It seemed to the police that old gangs, lurking in the underworld, had now resurfaced.
There were murders and shadow murders all across the city. Reports of the number of ghost sightings of highwaymen rose dramatically. A boy’s testimony was luridly illustrated in all the papers. He claimed to have seen a dead man with a noose round his neck emerging from an abandoned door. Psychics, spiritualists, and exorcists converged on the door and it didn’t take them long to unanimously pronounce it monstrous.
‘This is the most evil door in the land,’ a priest said.
‘This is the most pain-soaked door in the land,’ a famous medium declared.
Those who lived near the door claimed that at night they could hear cries coming from it, the cries of those who seemed shut up in hell. The clanging and bolting shut of metal haunted the dark hours. The broken howl of decapitation pierced the East End nights.
Artists were drawn to the door. Its solid abstract shape, the pattern of its grille, its nocturnal green, and its pullulating metal studs inspired canvasses with unexpected images. Artists composed some of their most infernal paintings under the aegis of its power. They claimed that something seemed to take over their hands while working. One or two artists who painted the door never painted again.
Poets found in the door a romantic image of the criminal spirit. They wrote long Byronic poems about the grimness of the fetter and the unbounded dream of freedom and about unknown doors to the underworld. One or two poets who wrote poems about the door succumbed to fatal addictions and disappeared from their respectable lives in society. One of them took to the highway and was shot dead at night by an exasperated police force. Another poet, whose case was much celebrated in the press, worked on an epic poem about the door for over seventy-two hours without a break and was found dead in his bathrobe with a bottle of absinthe at the foot of his table. The poem was destroyed by his widow. Some of the poets who wrote about the door never wrote poems again, but worked diligently in the advertising industry.
All those who came into contact with the door acknowledged there to be something weird about it. In its vicinity all things were touched by a dark enchanted power. Innocent objects within its radius took on sinister aspects. Around it crawled a torrid spectral life.
Then one day something happened which changed the fate of the door.
Children were playing nearby. They were playing games of war, games of fugitive and policemen, of hide and seek. One of the boys hid beneath the door and was never found again. He was a particularly bright boy. He was good at mathematics and had a gift for healing wounded animals. After his disappearance the hauntings by criminals ceased and the tide of old-fashioned crimes waned and fell away altogether.