THE DOOR
By Corey Mesler
 

James Royce did not like it when his parents left him alone. Anywhere, at any time. Being sent to his room was especially galling to the ten-year-old because he liked nothing better than being in the middle of family doings. He resented his parents when they went out for the evening and left him with his older brother, Norm. And now that Norm was dating and going out on his own, James often felt left out. It was maddening and it was disorienting somehow. 

He never wanted to miss anything—even bedtime was difficult for him. He could hear the low-level burble of the TV from his room off the hallway. He could hear his mother occasionally making comment, something about “Mrs. Pewitt,” something about the church. He strained to hear—he had to know everything. Life was going on all around him.

Therefore, when he sat in the parlor—the overly decorated front room the Royces referred to as the parlor—he could feel the loneliness seep into his very bones. It made his limbs heavy. It made moving around difficult. He cursed the family for leaving—even though Norm was only in his own bedroom, down the hall, with the door closed and weird, Indian music leaking out of it.

James sat on the piano bench and studied the room. He had memorized its every contour, its minutia, like he had memorized the wallpaper at the dentist’s office, which depicted a sylvan scene of indeterminate time, a swirling, off-green representation of a world that, really, never existed. The parlor was dark, the drapes of a heavy synthetic material that blocked nearly all light. They drained the room of light. The furniture seemed made of the same opaque substance, as if the whole room was webby, or an undersea city like Atlantis. James thought about being underwater, the pressure on every square inch of you, the suffocating weight of the water.

And as he mused on things dim and melancholy and shadowy, a slight movement to his left disturbed his periphery attention. He slowly turned his head toward the disturbance, if disturbance it was. His eye fell on the closet door. James measured it. It had opened itself, he thought. While he was sitting there the door had opened—just that. It was now slightly ajar; an inhospitable sliver of darkness now appeared between door and jamb. 

A shiver went through James. Why would a door suddenly open? He did not like thinking about it. The dark sliver drew him. It was an obdurate black—a black that swallowed light, swallowed sight. James had to get out of the room—that’s what he knew. He had to get out but his limbs felt so exhausted. Could he run, or would it be like the dream where his legs would not move, as if clothed in concrete?

He looked at the door that led to the hallway and then to Norm’s room. He could make it. He could just make it.

He rose like an automaton and moved quietly out of the room. He could hear Norm’s music. Familiarity flooded him. He was safe for now.

*   *   *

“There’s something creepy about the front parlor,” James tried at breakfast the next day. His father snorted a laugh under his mustache.

“James,” was all he said, a one-word disruption of his newspaper perusal.

James’ mother was more accommodating.

“What’s creepy about the parlor, dear?” she asked, placing cinnamon toast on the table.

“I think there’s—uh—something in there,” James said. “Sort of.”

“Sort of in there?” his mother asked.

“I mean, the door in there—“ James stopped himself. A door opening itself is not exactly the most fearful thing in the mind of adults. James recognized this now.

“Never mind,” he said.

“Just stay out of there then,” his mother smiled at him.

“Squirt” was Norm’s only addendum. 

*   *   *

A few days went by. A few days of kickball and curb-sitting and sweat and mosquitoes. A few days of the Dorich brothers and their athleticism and guns. Summer was its usual under-the-surface self, voices that whisper, mumble, and intimate an adventure that is just beyond reach, one that stays just beyond reach. Summer promised much and delivered in percentages. 

So it was that one afternoon James was alone in the house—his mother standing near the backyard fence, swapping privations with Mrs. Pewitt. 

The house ticked as beams pandiculated. A fug fell over the entire house—born of heat and air that seemed weighted with something other than humidity, an indolence, an oppression. The parlor called to James—it petitioned something base and basic to human curiosity, a desire to see the worst, to experience the dreadful and then to measure one’s self. 

James entered the room as if he were entering church, a church filled with strangers who worshipped strangeness. He left the joining door open—it allowed a weak, cloying light to waft in and mingle with the murk like a poor solution. James shuffled his feet, a tentativeness that addressed the parlor’s influence.

He returned to the piano bench. Everything seemed the same as on his previous visit. He could hear the air conditioner make its mechanical sleep sounds, a machine laboring against the world’s seriousness. James imagined that in its susurration he could perceive  the voices of drowned men, of mermen and Triton’s gulag.

Somewhere in the distance a lawnmower started up, a razory buzz. And underneath it, perhaps, his mother’s bright chatter.

James had not looked at the door. Now, as confidence leeched into him, he slowly turned his head toward it. It was closed.

In his mind he could see the inside of the closet. It held seasonal things—winter things—and hence was all but forgotten in the summer, just as winter’s hardships were. James could see his coat, too-thick for comfort, his rubbers, the sled against the back wall, held in place by heavy outerwear hanging on the crossrod.

Then he saw it happen as if his attention were causing it. The door opened with a smart click. The same one inch of darkness presented itself. James could only stare. It opened—for him. The door knew he was there. It opened because he was looking at it. What did it want?

James looked quickly to the outer door, making sure his egress would be unimpeded. The outer door was closed. James knew he had left it open. 

Now, panic rose in him like an ague. He sprang from the bench, grabbed frantically at the outer door, his small hand glancing off the polished doorknob, until in his fumbling he was able to open it. He caromed off the walls in the hall, his breath coming in painful swallows, and he all but bowled over his mother coming inside just then, clothespins still in her mouth.

“James,” she spat a pin into her palm. “What in the world?”

*   *   *

Later, James lay on his bed with a washcloth over his forehead. He had gotten overheated, his mother said, all corrective and utility. And she comforted him with a universal palliative. 

“Don’t carry on so,” she admonished. 

James was willing to believe that he had just been carrying on. Once returned to the known world, once more among family members and adult reason, his misadventure in the parlor seemed harebrained, at best. Afraid of a door? Ridiculous. 

Later, in Norm’s room, James lay on the bottom bunk and spoke to the mattress above him as if it were his father confessor. Norm lay on the top bunk leafing through a Mad Magazine, only half listening to his moon-stricken little brother.

“There are things in the world, in the ordinary world, that when you look at them too closely, you know, become creepy. Ordinary things. You ever have that happen?” James tried to keep the whine out of his voice.

“Uh huh,” Norm said, his concentration lost on the backpage fold. 

“Really?” James said. “You know what I mean?”

“Mean about what?” Norm said, returning, slowly.

“Things. Things you are familiar with.  You look at them and they…change.”

“What are you on about?” Norm said, now all big-brotherly.

“The door in the parlor.” There. He’d said it.

“What about it?  You’re scared of the door in the parlor?”

“See..”

“Squirt, c’mon. You want to see me take that door in hand?  Is that what you want? You know what—I’ll open it. Whaddya say?”

This was the kind of action he counted on Norm for. This was taking the bull by the horns. Norm would save him from his inner demons. 

*   *   *

Someone had pulled the heavy curtains back in the parlor. A buttery shard of light fell on the floor, unredeemed. The room quivered in the gloam.

Norm looked it over quickly and then turned to his younger brother. His expression said, I don’t get it.

Norm walked to the closet door and yanked it open. Inside were the coats and toys and boxed games and dusty effluvia of seasons past. Nothing seemed menacing or inappropriate or even out of place. Norm scanned the interior.

“Nothing here, Squirt, unless you find old sleds frightening.”

James wanted to say, it’s not what’s in there, it’s the door itself. It has cognition. It knows when James is in the room. He didn’t know what he wanted to say—he simply couldn’t explain the feeling that came over him when the door opened. 

“That’s ok,” James said, investing his speech with a lightness that he did not feel. “It’ll be ok.”

*   *   *

Days went by, the measured dog-days of summer. James did not return to the parlor. He spent his time in front of the television, or reading Hardy Boys, or playing at anarchy with the Dorich boys. They rifled construction sites for their discarded gold. They stole Playboys from the 7/11. They undressed in empty houses to marvel at the differences in their private parts. Once they tormented a bat who had inexplicably flown into the sidewalk—a bat in daylight was a thing other. 

The sun was relentless, a blazing voice in the sky, rendering each day a heated trance. The boys sat on curbs and talked about forbidden things. They pelted passing cars with ice cubes. They sailed stick-boats down swollen gutter drains. Everything seemed simple, predestined. 

Norm came and went, finding his way into young girl’s hearts. He brought home a stream of varying models of young womanhood, as if his only delight was in their dissimilarity, or as if they were samples to be tried and either abandoned or venerated. They all seemed to be named Susie or Laurie. They all smiled, their brilliant teeth an exemplar of money and superior breeding. They all wore shirts that clung to their burgeoning breasts like good packaging. And they all seemed to worship Norm, holding onto his arm, or touching him when they spoke, or laughing at everything he said. Norm drifted through this time, an observer of his own life, an objective explorer. Norm did not recognize that this was a golden time in his life because we do not, none of us. James thought his brother just shy of a god.

James’ parents, at this time, also seemed to drift. But their drifting was of a different quality. They were adults who had achieved what they set out to achieve. And now they wanted nothing more than to watch it happen around them, in flow, a life like a garden. They smiled at their children, were proud of them, trusted that their lives were taking shape and form. James felt calmer in their presence. He almost forgot about the door in the parlor.

But almost is not creed. It is neither meal nor balm. Almost is a place of ghosts and recalcitrant waft.

James knew he would return to the parlor and he only half-believed that the days since he’d been there, the days of heat and distraction, had inured him, had fashioned around him a protective crust.

*   *   *

Still, James made no conscious decision to return. One day, a day of liquid hours and empty reverie, James found himself standing on the threshold of the parlor. Somewhere his mother was singing to herself, a song about Joan of Arc. James could just hear her voice, as if from afar, as if she were singing on a radio tuned low. James stood outside the room and looked at it for a long time. How could something so familiar—something owned by his family, a part of his life, a part of him--seem so eerie, so outside of workaday existence? It was like when James found himself peering at the back of his hand as it lay lifeless on the table before him. He didn’t recognize it—the russet hair on his knuckles, the knob of joints, and a queer feeling came over him. It was attached to him, yet foreign.

Now, James stepped into the parlor. There was a muffled pucker in sound, similar to a pressure drop. James worked his jaw as if the relief were there. He sat on the piano bench, his back to the door. His fingers picked out “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore” on the keyboard, a small, desultory reverberation, like rain on tarpaper.

He craned his head around toward the closet. Nothing seemed amiss. It was the door Norm had opened so casually, the very same door. Behind it were winter belongings, that was all.

James turned his body round. He forced himself to hold his gaze on the door. The door appeared to respire, a slight expansion like a current of air brings about. Yet, on this day, there was nothing fearful in its symmetry, its outline, its very doorness. James felt silly—all those days he had spent worrying over something his imagination had fomented. Really, he was a moony child, a beetlehead.

Just then it happened again. The door cracked. The black nothingness that it presented was the black nothingness that James feared most. Just that—a single, solid band of black that obliterated light, reason, hope. There rose in James a dread as dire as death, as foul as corruption. Tears welled in him, a sinister crapulence.

James quickly turned toward the exit—his hope—and the door was again closed. Had it left it open? His mind was jumbled. He turned back toward the blackness. Did he hear a whisper, a sound like the night makes? Was it his name? No, this was fancy—of course it was. James knew better than to believe that inanimate things doomed him. The world is neither stacked for nor against you, his father said. 

Yet, the closet seemed to have a connection to him. What was this connection? What did it portend?

James stood, a sleepwalker. He moved toward the closet. Was it bravery? Was it damned curiosity? He was drawn closer. 

Now, as he stood within a few feet of the opening, he was sure it was breathing, murmuring, making sounds of entreaty. James body felt bottom-heavy, his legs weighted attachments. His hand went to the knob.

The doorknob was cold, as cold as a graveyard stone. James pulled the door toward him—it moved so easily, soundlessly, naturally. The door was as weightless as cloud. It felt right to James and a calm entered him.

James stood and looked into the darkness before him. It was a void, an abyss of impenetrable blackness. Its end was time’s end, its boundaries that of the soul’s limits. James felt oddly penitent yet untainted before it. He felt as if he could stay there forever, on the threshold of something larger than himself. He knew that what faced him beckoned, as each day the time you have left beckons, a skeleton’s curled finger, a faith. 

James moved forward, his fingertips were numb. His foot felt for something solid, but, in the end, it didn’t matter. He continued to move forward.

*   *   *

Months later, James’ mother would still not get out of bed. James’ father put his hand to his wife’s brow and felt the dew there. Her eyes were vacant, scorched earth. 

“Today,” he said, hopefully. His words dropped into a crack in the world.

He went to work anyway, because one does. Because it’s eventually expected.

Norm began dating a Laurie steadily, their bond something like the middle of the fairy tale, before the part where recompense comes. Laurie had not yet pricked her finger; Norm had not yet wounded his thigh. 

And the Royce’s house where they lived and loved and wept and bled and cried and died and were reborn over and over, grew unnaturally still, as if it knew something, something beyond telling. The house was hushed now, as deeply sunk in mystery as a dreamship, and an ambiguity was present, like the ineffable matter that surely bonds one human being to another.
 

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COREY MESLER is the owner of Burke’s Book Store, in Memphis, Tennessee, one of the country’s oldest (1875) and best independent bookstores.  He has published poetry and fiction in numerous journals including Rattle, Pindeldyboz, Quick Fiction, Cranky, Thema, Mars Hill Review, Poet Lore and others.  He has also been a book reviewer for The (Memphis) Commercial Appeal.  A short story of his was chosen for the 2002 edition of New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, published by Algonquin Books.  Talk, his first novel, appeared in 2002. Nice blurbs from Lee Smith, John Grisham, Robert Olen Butler, Frederick Barthelme, and others. He has a new novel, We Are Billion-Year-Old Carbon, due out in 2005 from Livingston. Most importantly, he is Toby and Chloe’s dad and Cheryl’s husband.