Devil’s Harvest

Esson had two hours to prove himself.

Two hours to change his family’s future.

Two hours to get the licatherin to Barth’s father in the first interstellar drug deal of his thirteen-year-old life.

He pressed a hand to his pocket and hurried into the woods—away from the meeting that had changed his family’s fortune. Dead, knee-high grasses scratched at his bare legs. Everything smelled dry and brittle. The folded cash in his pocket felt like a good luck charm.

It had been a risk, standing his ground, making Dustin—Barth’s father—pay half upfront for the drugs. But it had paid off, literally, and Dustin had looked at Esson with a grudging respect.

But it would all fall violently apart if Esson didn’t deliver.

A worried knot of pressure made him want to piss more badly than he could ever remember in his life. He broke out in a cold sweat in spite of the summer’s morning heat. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Dustin stare after him and Barth as the two boys rushed into the shade of the trees.

“How much more of the Devil’s Harvest can you even get?” Barth said.

“What?” Esson said, glancing back. The pressure from his bladder made him feel like a balloon about to burst. He needed to find a place to piss, but Dustin was still in sight.

Barth sported a swollen jaw from the punch his father had dished out before giving them the two hour deadline. If Esson failed to meet Dustin’s deadline, his chance for making the money his family needed would vanish. Fury lodged in his stomach, two hours wasn’t enough. There was no reason for the deadline except Dustin wanted to be cruel and, Esson suspected, test Esson’s commitment to their deal. Dustin said if Esson could make the deadline, there would be more business opportunities ahead.

But if Esson failed—Dustin had smiled coldly.

It had taken everything inside Esson not to shiver in spite of the heat.

Dustin had a reputation. A violent, cruel reputation, especially with those who failed him.

Esson gritted his teeth. He would not fail.

Barth’s camo t-shirt was dark at the armpits from sweat, the matching hat stained with dirt and smashed down over his greasy hair. “My dad’s expecting a lot of the Devil’s Harvest. How much is there?”

Dustin had dismissed Esson’s name for the drug—licatherin—and changed it to Devil’s Harvest, saying it would sell like crazy with the new name.

Esson took a deep breath but immediately regretted the pressure on his bladder. He shouldn’t have drunk so much water before the meeting. The drug sometimes took time to work, and he had wanted to dilute it—both to make his last few drops of the oil go further and to slow down the side effects.

Esson had already taken Dustin’s money. He should have waited until he had all the drugs in hand, but he hadn’t expected the two hour ultimatum, and it was too late now to undo his mistake. “I’m stealing it. I don’t know. A lot.”

Esson had stolen two bottles of licatherin oil last week, given part of one to Barth’s father to try, and kept the rest for himself. The licatherin smelled like licorice and made his skin tingle, helping him feel the potential doors around him. It also gave him energy on an empty stomach, clearing his mind, and making him feel a little reckless.

Well, more than a little.

The money Esson had gotten for just that one partial bottle made his head spin. When he handed it over to Grandmother, smiling, proud of himself, she had looked at him funny. He thought for an awful second she wasn’t going to take the money. But she did, stuffing it into her bra when she thought he wasn’t looking. Then she commented in a tone like she noticed he was wearing a different shirt than normal that he looked a little bruised and was he feeling okay?

Esson ignored her comment. He had also caught the tint of purple to his skin these days. It was a side effect of the drug. For the last several days his mother had looked at him with a grim set to her lips.

And his father?

He hadn’t noticed a thing.

Dustin didn’t know about the skin color side effect yet. Esson planned to have the rest of the money in his hands first.

Barth opened his mouth. “We should—”

Esson held up a hand, looking behind them. Finally, they were out of sight. He ran behind an oak tree and took a long piss. He chose not to notice the lavender tint to his urine. When he finished, he collapsed against the trunk in relief.

“Come on, Eddy,” Barth said. “Stop fooling around.”

Esson rubbed his face with his hands. Eddy was his name here because Esson sounded too strange—like it was the kind of name for someone from another world.

Which was exactly the case.

He didn’t know much more than that—his family came to this world, Earth, through a door his father opened when Esson had been six. His sister, Maella, had been four, his brother, Josa, one.

Barth loomed into view, a sneer on his face. “Worried about pissing your pants? My dad’s not that scary.”

Esson put himself back together. Barth only had the guts to say that now that his father was gone. The next task loomed like a mountain. But the cash in his pocket comforted him. He needed to ditch Barth and steal the licatherin without Barth discovering his family’s secret.

Since before he could remember—this secret rule had controlled every part of his life.

Never open a door.

People in his family who broke the rule tended to unleash otherworldly violence upon themselves and everyone around when they opened something as simple as a drawer.

People in his family who broke the rule—they had all died.

That’s what he had been taught, at least.

He came from a family of doormakers. He had been trained from birth to never open a door.

Except.

He had broken the rule.

He had opened a door. Multiple doors, over the past few months, and he was still alive.

Esson hiked through the trees, ignoring the weeds scratching his legs. He took a random path while thinking about how to ditch Barth. What would Dustin use Esson for if he found out Esson could open doors to other worlds? Nothing good.

Suddenly Esson felt a push. He landed chin first on the ground, pain shooting up. He flipped onto his back and blocked Barth’s punch, then landed his own punch in Barth’s gut.

“What the hell?” Esson said.

“I know this isn’t the right way,” Barth said, gasping for air.

Esson pushed himself up and rubbed his chin. His stomach flipped. “What are you talking about?”

“I followed you before.” Barth’s face flushed. “I know your secret.”

Esson followed the creek to the back field of some old farmer’s property. The field butted up against the woods and was used as a junkyard for rusting tools, broken down cars, an abandoned refrigerator, and a shed that leaned so far over, one more good storm would knock it down.

Esson stalled for a moment, keeping his focus away from the secret door he had left open. What did Barth know?

Barth scanned the field, taking in the machinery, the shed, the fridge, then looked expectantly at Esson.

“You don’t actually know anything,” Esson said, feeling both relief and anger. If Barth didn’t know, that meant Dustin still didn’t know either. It also meant Esson had fallen for Barth’s stupid lie.

“Whatever.” Barth grimaced. “I lost you after you got here. Where is it—where are the drugs—on the other side of the field? Don’t lie to me.”

“It’s here,” Esson said. “The place is right here.”

Barth brought a fist to within inches of Esson’s face. “I said don’t lie to me. I followed you here, but when I got here, you’d gone somewhere else.”

Esson laughed. “Yeah, you could say that.”

Barth’s expression turned ugly.

“Wait here,” Esson said.

“No way!” Barth said.

“Where I’m going… where the drugs are—it’s dangerous.”

“Letting my father down—that’s dangerous. That’s the kind of thing people do when they want to get hurt.”

There was a long silence between them. Birds fluttered in the air, bees buzzed from flower to flower, the creek gurgled somewhere behind the trees.

Two hours.

Esson had two hours and he was wasting precious minutes arguing with a jerk like Barth.

He should have gotten all the drugs before making the final deal with Dustin. But the deadline—the made up, just-for-kicks, two hour deadline had been a surprise. He should have known, but he was never thinking things through—that’s what his sister, Maella, would say. His father liked to say that Esson acted first and thought better about it later, when it was too late to take anything back.

He patted the cash in his pocket.

There was at least three months worth of rent, with more to come.

His way of doing things had paid off big time.

“Fine,” Esson said, confidence renewed. “Let’s go.”

He led them to the refrigerator, feeling its hum as if plugged in, even though it was rusting in a dirt field.

Barth didn’t feel a thing of course. That was the Devil’s Harvest inside Esson. He had never felt vibrations from doors until he had tried the oil.

The refrigerator was old, dingy white, and sat unevenly on the dirt. Weeds curled around it, yellow, sharp, sticky, brittle. The handle had fallen off, and orange, rusted holes from the bolts remained. Little trails of rust ran down the front of the fridge from the holes like tear tracks down a face. It sat a few feet away from the rundown shed, like someone had intended to lug the fridge inside but gave up on the last few steps.

Esson ignored the stickers that caught in his shoes. Barth cursed behind him but otherwise stayed silent.

If he showed Barth that fridge, there was no going back.

Esson took a deep breath and blocked out the blue sky, the yellow field, the broken down machinery, Barth’s anxious breathing, the smell of soil and grease. Because of what he had found on the other side of this door, he had gone behind his father’s back and made a deal with Dustin.

He couldn’t take back that deal now.

Anyway, he was tired of hiding and running and pretending there was nothing wrong with his family. Esson removed the stone set keep the door from closing on the fridge. He pushed the fridge door open, but stood so that Barth could not see inside. If the fridge door ever closed, he would lose everything.

Doors never opened to the same place twice. At least, not the half dozen doors he had opened and closed over these past few months, daring death each time, searching for a solution to his family’s money problems.

The vibrations from the door made his teeth chatter. The inside of the fridge—wasn’t. Instead, the door opened to a sort of broom closet lined with shelves, space enough for several people. In front of him were carefully positioned boxes to cover his side of the door if anyone bothered to look. The inside was dark, musty, and filled with equipment—straw brooms, wooden buckets, glass containers, cleaning brushes, a half broken chair.

Esson ignored all that while he pushed the boxes aside on the shelves, his eyes searching for the other door on the far side of the closet. Sometimes it was open, sometimes it was closed.

A faint line of light marked the bottom edge of the door frame. If he was lucky—

Damn.

The door was closed today.

Esson stepped back and released his breath. He bumped into Barth.

Barth hissed. “Where’s the stuff?”

“We have a problem.” The door’s vibrations made his head swim. Being this close never felt good.

Barth tried to push Esson aside. “Where is it?”

“I need you to do something.” Esson didn’t know how to explain so he just said it. “I need you to go into the fridge and open the door on the other side.”

“You must think I’m an idiot. You want me to climb into that fridge so you can lock me inside of it? Are you trying to kill me? Where are the drugs, Eddy?”

“We’re running out of time.”

“You’re running out of time. I vouched for you with my father.” Barth’s voice rose, a note of panic in it now. He rubbed his swollen jaw. “He’s going to make us both pay.”

If Esson tried to open the closet door himself, like this, without any preparation, not only would it not go where he needed it to go, whatever or wherever he opened the door to would likely kill them.

Esson thought quickly. “You don’t have to go all the way in. Just lean through. It’s a small enough room you can, I don’t know, step one foot inside, and just pop it open.”

“So why can’t you do that?”

“Because it’s locked against me!”

“You’re not making sense.”

What would Barth believe? Every argument he tried in his mind felt more unbelievable than the last. Especially the truth.

I can’t just open a door. Every time someone in my family opens a door—cabinet door, front door, refrigerator door—it opens to another place, and someone usually dies because of it.

Yeah.

There was no way Barth would believe any of it in a million years.

They had less than two hours.

“Just do it,” Esson said, thinking fast. He noticed Barth’s swollen chin again. “If you don’t, then we might as well go back now to your father empty handed. This is a test for you as much as it is for me. What do you think he’s going to do to you if you come back with nothing again?”

Barth’s face paled.

Esson backed up until he was at the edge of the field near an abandoned lawn mower. “Look, I’ll stand way back over here. I’m not trying to trick you. But I can’t take all the risk. You have to prove we’re going to be partners in this. That we have each other’s back. Just open the door and I’ll do the rest.”

The tires on the lawn mower were both flat and looked almost like they were melting into the ground. A fraying rope looked like it had once tied the seat to the mower, but the seat had gotten knocked loose and now the rope drooped across the machine like the longest worm in the entire world.

Barth was at the fridge door, watching Esson.

Esson nodded. Come on.

He couldn’t let Barth know his family’s secret, but he couldn’t get the licatherin unless someone else opened that closet door.

Finally, Barth peered into the fridge. His body froze, probably while his brain tried to make sense of what he saw.

A fridge that wasn’t a fridge. A closet to nowhere.

Not nowhere.

A closet to all the Devil’s Harvest that Esson needed.

Esson jiggled from foot to foot, nervous, like he had to piss again.

The shed door near the fridge was open, a padlock hung from the latch. Esson stopped moving. All Barth knew right now was something was strange about that fridge. If he took Barth through with him, there would be too many things that would require an explanation. If Barth knew everything, it was only a matter of time before Dustin found out. Esson shivered. He didn’t want to imagine what Dustin would do with that kind of information.

If he pushed Barth into the shed and locked him inside, he could keep everyone safe, including his family’s secret, for a little longer. That sounded worth it right now. He could think about how to explain it all to Barth later, when he had the drugs in his hands and had returned safely back to this side of the worlds.

He ignored the little voice in his head that sounded an awful lot like Maella’s voice. It warned him he was about to act first and think later and it wasn’t going to end well. He reminded himself about all of the money currently in his pocket. Her tune would change once she saw what he brought home.

Barth leaned into the fridge, propping himself up with one hand on the door, then stepped through.

Esson fingered the rope coiled on the mower. In an instant, he made his decision. Soil and rust flecks flew into the air. He dashed across the field.

Barth came back through, setting both feet onto the ground and began to turn. “I opened your damn door. Now tell me what the hell is going on? How is that place possible?”

Esson slammed into Barth and sent them both tumbling. The weed stickers shot little needles of pain into Esson as he caught Barth in the rope. First hands, then legs. Barth kicked and punched. The old, decaying rope wouldn’t last long, but Esson only needed Barth out of the way for a little bit of time. Which was good, since that was all the time they had left.

Barth shouted, struggled, kicked, and spit out curses.

Esson slapped Barth across the face. “Shut up or they’ll hear you.”

Barth went blotchy red and his eyes watered. “Who are you talking about?” Barth screamed. “What happened to that fridge? Who are you?”

“I don’t know,” Esson said, speaking the truth. Anger bubbled inside his chest. He didn’t know because his family had kept everything secret. “But I do know there are people on the other side of that door, and if you don’t want to get trapped there, you’ll quiet down before they hear you.”

Before Barth could respond, another problem appeared, standing in Esson’s way, literally.

Claritsa.

Esson sucked in a breath.

She had walked up without him seeing her somehow.

She had shining black braids and bangs that made her seem younger than her eleven years. She was thin like a stick and her clothes were well worn like they’d been washed a million times.

She was his sister’s best friend, as much as anyone in his family could have a best friend when you couldn’t tell that friend about the most fundamental, secret part of you.

“Stop!” Esson yelled.

Claritsa flinched away from the fridge door, but then stood up straight, strong, rebellious.

She had no idea what trouble she had walked into.

“I heard his shouting,” Claritsa said, glancing first at Barth, then the open fridge, and then at Esson. “Why do you have him tied up?” She said with a waver in her voice.

“You shouldn’t be here.” Esson felt the clock ticking. There wasn’t time to explain. He had played with her and Maella in the creek often enough, exploring, racing, acting out imaginary battles in the woods. Her parents had ditched her but her grandmother was cool. Claritsa was a nice kid, she didn’t deserve to get dragged into his mess. He kicked at the ground in frustration. A dirt clod flew into the air and hit the side of the shed wall.

The shed.

The roof looked partially caved in. A few narrow gaps from missing boards let light enter. The rusty padlock hung from the latch, open, like a gift.

“I’m sorry,” Esson said. “Just know…just know that I’m probably saving your life. You don’t want to get mixed up in this. You really don’t.”

“What—”

Before she could say anything else, Esson dragged her into the shed.

She was like a wild cat, scratching, biting, punching. He wasn’t a big thirteen year old, but she was a small eleven year old. He got her to the shed door, but then she twisted and lashed out, hitting her head on the door frame.

She slumped to the ground, dazed.

This couldn’t be happening. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He was a monster. He felt the panic rising in him, ready to burst. “Ask Maella. Make her explain what she knows about the doors.”

Claritsa looked up at him, horrified, her brown eyes huge and glassy through her bangs. He had put that look on her face.

“Claritsa.” He shook her, trying to get her to focus. Instead, it made everything worse. She shrunk into herself.

He scrambled away as if burned, and backed up to the shed door. “Claritsa, ask her. Tell Maella you saw me open a door. I promise I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

He turned away, sick to his stomach, not sure if she had heard him. He closed the shed door. As soon as the door touched the frame, he cursed himself. Barth was still tied up outside, but now that the door had closed Esson could never open it again. If he hadn’t acted so quickly, he could have put Barth inside too. Now, someone else, someone not doomed with this doormaker crap would have to let Claritsa out.

Fine. Maybe he was impulsive, but he was also creative. He’d make Barth open the door when all this was over, but since the point was to keep Claritsa safe inside, he forced the padlock to click closed.

He figured he had less than an hour now.

He left Barth in the weeds and stepped into the fridge, through the open space he’d made between the boxes, into the cool darkness. The closet smelled like cleaning fluids, harsh and acidic. Esson glanced back once through the fridge door. It was like an ugly picture framed on the wall—blue sky, a scraggly line of trees, rusted out machinery disappearing in weeds that had baked too long in the sun. The shed stood at the edge of the picture frame. He could hear Claritsa shouting.

Esson turned. The closet door Barth had opened emptied into a hallway.

He walked through.

The hallway was gray, like concrete, but not quite the same material. Natural light filtered from the ceiling. Each of the half dozen times he had explored this place, he had never noticed electricity. No outlets or light fixtures or switches. The place felt old and different from any place he had experienced on Earth. Probably, he figured, because it wasn’t Earth.

He took careful, silent steps down the hallway until it opened up to a larger, factory floor area and headed for what he thought of as the packing station—the wooden crates, the straw used for cushioning, and the licatherin bottles ready, he guessed, for shipment. Though he had no idea where the bottles were supposed to go.

He would take what he needed and get the hell out of there and—he decided in that instant—close the fridge door on this place. With as many bottles gone missing as he planned to take, they would tear apart the factory and find his door.

He couldn’t let any of what he was about to do lead back to his family.

What he took today would help his family pay the rent and fix the doors and put food on the table for months.

After that? He’d figure out something else.

He listened for footsteps, talking, machinery, security guards. But all was silent. If time on both sides of the door matched up, then it was early morning here—before the factory started its work day.

Several crates were already packed. He couldn’t open those, not without risking a door. When he found a half-packed crate, still open, he realized he hadn’t brought a bag.

Stupid—his sister would say.

Impulsive—his mother would say while holding his little brother in her arms. His grandmother would shake her head and his father would look at him with disappointment in his eyes.

Creative—that’s what Esson would say about himself. It was his job to protect Maella and Josa. He was going to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. He might not have thought ahead enough to bring a bag, but that wouldn’t stop him.

He set to work filling his shirt with dozens of bottles, each no bigger than a hummingbird.

He stopped to uncork one, and took three drops of licatherin onto his tongue. Sweet licorice filled his senses.

He didn’t need the drug, he told himself. Not to do this next part, but it helped clear his head.

The licatherin sizzled through him like an electric shock. His dizziness faded. He could do this. He was so close. He would save his family and his father would have to notice him. The glass bottles clinked together in his shirt. His heart soared. They represented a solution. Money. Answers.

A shout interrupted his thoughts.

He looked around wildly, searching for the source of the noise, zeroing in on a man running toward him with a stick—no, a sword.

The guy was carrying a sword.

Esson raced away, zigzagging through the crates. The man shouted in a language Esson could not understand. He understood the sword well enough. He had forgotten about the security guard.

“Idiot!” Esson said to himself. But no matter. He had what he needed and would make it back through the door in time to close it on this guard’s face. He raced down the hallway, slipped into the closet, closing that door behind him. He used the half broken chair against the handle as a makeshift lock.

He turned, careful of the bottles in his shirt, and saw Barth blocked the way out. Barth held a rusting crowbar in his hands.

In his panic, Esson gripped his shirt too tightly. There was a crunch and he felt wetness seep through to his skin. Licorice smells mixed with the cleaning smells. Energy poured through him, bringing back the dizziness and his headache. No, wait, that was the door. The fridge door was open and he was so close to it, the vibrations pulled at him.

Barth sneered and glanced down. “Finally pissed yourself, did you?”

Esson looked down, the broken bottle of Devil’s Harvest had soaked his shorts. It didn’t matter, he told himself. There were plenty of bottles left.

“Let me through,” Esson shouted.

Something big slammed into the closet door behind him.

The guard.

“Hand over the drugs,” Barth said.

Esson bit his lip. He didn’t have time for this. He considered barreling through Barth. They could fight it out on the other side. But what about the bottles? How many would break in the process?

“Don’t even think about it.” Barth swung the crowbar around. “If you make a move, I’ll close this door and won’t let you out until I feel like it.”

“You close that door and you’ll never see me again.” Esson’s stomach sank. Barth didn’t know how any of this worked. “You’ll kill me.”

“Don’t be stupid. I won’t kill you. I’ll just teach you a lesson you and my father don’t seem to have learned yet—to never underestimate me.”

Esson heard Claritsa’s shouts from the shed. Guilt seared him as he pictured the way her head had knocked against the door frame and taken all the fight out of her. He had done that and he couldn’t ever take that back. Maella would kill him once she found out.

Esson clutched the bottles in his shirt. The door behind him sounded like it was splintering under the security guard’s assault.

He grabbed a few bottles out of his shirt and passed them over to Barth, then rushed Barth like he was a football player. Barth stood, feet planted, ready for him. Esson shouldn’t have been surprised. Sometimes Barth seemed stupid, but he was more cunning than anyone gave him credit for.

Barth swung the crowbar, hitting Esson on the collarbone. Something cracked inside Esson and all the bottles tumbled out of his shirt, breaking on the hard floor, scattering glass shards and Devil’s Harvest until the entire room filled with the suffocating scent of licorice.

Esson fell to the floor. Each panicked breath shot pain through him.

“Stay there,” Barth said, pointing the crow bar at him, and stepping back. His other hand was on the fridge door.

“No!” Esson said, holding out his hand to stop Barth.

“I’m getting my father. You’ll wish you hadn’t done any of this—”

Barth was a black hole blocking the sun, trees, home.

The door moved. Creaking.

Esson scrambled to his feet in spite of the pain. He wanted to puke.

No, no, no, no.

The sunlight and blue sky became a thin sliver, then it was gone.

Esson forced himself between the shelves and slapped his hands against the wall, searching.

The door closed with a suctioning sound. The rectangular outline of golden light stuck around for a few seconds, then vanished, leaving behind a blank wall.

Nothing.

No door, no handle.

His head spun.

Doors didn’t open to the same place twice. Doors didn’t always open to any place at all. And now Barth knew something was deeply wrong with his family. Maybe not all of it, maybe not most of it, but enough to somehow use it against them.

He had failed his family.

He might never get back home.

The pounding on the door behind him brought him back. The inside of the closet, all those bottles of Devil’s Harvest, looked like how he felt.

Destroyed. Shattered.

He would never be able to fix this.

The chair bowed and slipped an inch under the pounding the guard gave the door.

He waited for his fate.

No.

That’s what his parents had done. They had fled some terrible fate and were just waiting now. He didn’t know for what, but it was killing them, this waiting. They had stopped living. They were grieving for a life long dead, waiting for this one to catch up.

No.

He would not live like that.

There was something more he could do. It might bring out something worse than the guard breaking down the door. It might kill him. But in that moment he didn’t care.

Let them all go to hell, and if that meant he went too, so be it.

Esson wrestled with the chair, splinters digging into his fingers, pain shooting through his collarbone. He threw the chair aside and pulled the closet door open before the guard could open it himself.

The pounding stopped. There was no guard.

His heartbeat increased.

The door opened to—

Nothing.

Desert.

Miles and miles of sand for as far as the eye could see until the horizon disappeared into heat waves.

The bottles were crushed on the floor at his feet, staining the floor a dark inky purple. He noticed, as if from a distance, that his legs bled, cut up from the glass, adding red to the puddles of licatherin oil. He didn’t know how long he stared, lost in the insanity of trying to make sense of what he had just done.

When he finally came back, he let out a deep breath, as if waking from a long sleep.

He stepped across the door’s threshold and into the heat. A sharp edge dug into his leg. He looked down. The money. It peeked from his jean shorts pocket. He pulled out the cash and felt its smooth paper between his fingers. His family would never see this money now. The air in this new place was dry, the ground grainy. A brief breeze picked at his clothes before settling.

Esson gulped back a sob as he took in the harsh, empty landscape that surrounded him. The cash slipped out of his hand, the green pile of bills landing with a soft thud onto the golden ground. The breeze picked up the paper, throwing the bills lazily into the sky, taunting him.

Dustin would be angry. Barth would guess his secret.

Esson had failed completely.

He was lost.

He had destroyed his family’s future.

In two hours he had failed more completely than he could have ever imagined.