Behind the Door (Short Story)

Behind the Door
March 28, 2004

There I stood at the intersection of William and Morgan Avenue in front of a rust colored sign with bold white letters that read “DANGER Construction in Progress.”

I could hear the muffled voices of workers high above. For a second I thought that I could never be a construction worker because I was too afraid of heights and would have seemed ill placed among beefy, tattooed and sun scorched men who chew tobacco and dry shave with dull razor blades. No, that wasn’t for me. There wasn’t a thing complicated about this. My brother and I tumbled off our two-storey house one summer while trying to put up a radio antennae. Heights? No can do.

I noticed out of the corner of my eye nestled between two bricks and a broken two-by-four a gold colored door lock with a key inserted in the key hole. The set looked too clean to be discarded, and the key had a little white tag hanging from it like the ones you see at the Five and Dime store when you buy a brand new key. I reached for it when I suddenly saw a flash of light.

The tarnished key that hung from my neck on a shoelace was not a symbol of privilege but instead of necessity. We lived on the corner of Tomlin St. in the house with broken windows and wandering, emaciated cats. Our front door opened only after I turned the key to one o’clock and followed this with a swift kick to the bottom left quadrant. It never failed to open for me. If you kicked the right corner, the door would open without the use of a key, but I tried to avoid this. People in our neighborhood watched everything and lived to suck in the despair surrounding them.

Occasionally I would fake the key turn and just kick the hell out of the door thereby tricking all passersby with any thought of breaking and entering our shotgun house. It was a system that seemed to work.

If you wandered to the back of our house you would see two rusty Westinghouse stoves, one Sears refrigerator with a missing door, a 1972 Ford Maverick with no doors or windows, and a tree swing with a rope but no swing –all leftovers from past tenants some alive some dead. All of our neighbors resembled our back yard in all its degradation.

As I recall there was a small doghouse too, but no dog in sight. He was dead, poisoned one summer by a group of drunken Mexicans that broke into the house. Since they were clueless about the intricacies of our front door they chose to kill toothless Webster and climb in through an already broken window. Wetbacks!! The joke was on them. There was more in the way of junk inside the house than there was in the backyard.

It was in the middle of July one sweltering summer when I remember inserting the key to the front door, but noticed it already open. I looked over my shoulder, bit my lower lip gently. There was an acrid stench in the air as I walked in to the house. The smell was just like what you’d find at Joe’s Bar & Grill during the summer months when they’d get behind in their garbage bill and their dumpster would morph into a holiday food feast for the city’s population of rats –which of late seemed to be multiplying like rabbits. There they were in rat heaven, lingering long enough at the wasteland of rotted food to urinate and leave their droppings everywhere. They seemed to arrive in shifts. Their smell was enough to singe nose hair and make you want to hurl.

I could hear a low humming drone when I took a few steps inside the house. Where the sound originated was not as important to me as the fact that it was present. As I recall I had the eerie feeling you get when you enter a dark room and realize there is another being there sharing the space with you, its intention of evil or good unknown.

I had been away for several weeks working for my uncle Ben, and trying to earn a few dollars for a used car I had my eye on at Smith’s Auto on Clairmont Avenue. My body ached from picking cotton all day and my fingertips looked like they had accidentally met the blade of a bean grinder. So I was really not in the mood for anything unusual.

Uncle had acres of cotton and profited nicely from each year’s harvest, but it was all taken in by hand as he was too damn cheap to invest in modern machinery. He was a Luddite from the get go –anything modern just made him groan. My bed and stereo were the only two possessions that I cared for at the time.

Why was it so dark in the house and why did it smell like vomit and sewage stewed for hours till it was soupy. I noticed a painting on the wall of Jesus in a red robe with words written across his chest but it was too dark to make out what they said. The longer I stared at the picture the more it seemed to change.

The closer I moved toward my bedroom door the louder I could hear the humming. It sounded like a fan with a weary motor. I stood in front of the door with my head turned slightly and eyes wincing. I could hear a subtle tapping that had no pattern, random taps like bored, wandering, fingertips on a tabletop.

I pressed my ear to the door. …tap … tap tap … bzzzzzzzzzz … tap tap. I could hear what sounded like muffled voices but could not make out anything of what was being said.

I slowly run my hand down the side of the door and reach for the knob. I feel vibrations and the incessant thumps and taps. My nose could not take the stench any longer and so I reached up and pinched my nostrils while I turn and walked into something that after 22 years I can still recollect as if it happened yesterday. In retrospect I never would have opened the door had I known what was awaiting my senses on the other side.

When I was nine years old some of the boys in the neighborhood trapped a rat in a Sears cardboard box out under the expressway on Morris Boulevard. They poked and prodded it for hours until it lay motionless and uncaring like a whore on her twelfth trick for the night. Eventually, they stabbed the rat through one eye with a coat hanger turned spear and then hung it from a tree branch in front of St. Matthew’s Church of the Holy Passion. It was Nathan’s idea really. His way of saying “Fuck you!,” to Father Briggs for what he’d done to him one snowy evening after mass. Nathan never talks about it. He just did shit all the time to unnerve the priest.

The dead rat swung there dripping blood and decaying on the morning I, not looking, plowed right into the rotted flesh. Three weeks later I swore I could still smell the hideous stench that oozed from it and had left an ugly rash on my face -setting our family doctor into a tizzy. But that same stench was now in my nostrils again.

When I told Nathan I had walked into “Brat” (a name coined by the gang in honor of the priest and the rodent) he just shook his head in dismay and said, “Sorry, that shouldn’t uh happened to ya, Briggs should’ve got that not you. Fuckin’ black crow bastard!”

Still, I smelled that stench for a long time. And here it was again to remind me of not only my past, with all it’s soiled laundry but of my present and future and the sheer hopelessness of my useless existence. I smelled inside of Brat.

I felt my heart racing as I slowly opened the door and …

“Henri! It’s me, sweetheart- your mother. Oh baby! You’re going to be okay.”

I could not move my head an inch because it was closed up with bandages just like a mummy’s head is. My eyes, however, darted from left to right and no doubt communicated the distress and fear I was feeling. I felt my heart pounding in my chest.

Where was I and why was there a priest in the room. There was a loud heart monitor connected to a child in the bed across from mine and the droning of the heart beat, audible as it was, reminded me of something in my dream but I could not make the connection.

I overheard my mother tell my uncle Ben that she just knew the salve that Missy Martin swore healed her own boy one day when he came down with that that god awful influenza was what brought me to life again.

In her excitement she reached three fingers into an old jar and they emerged with a pasty white cream that mother in her enthusiasm feverishly smeared on my exposed chest. In a flash there was a hideous smell in the air that also seemed to remind me of something I had thought of before but could not place it.

Reverend Nathan from Sacred Heart of Christ Church was holding my hand when I came to and repeated several times in what seemed like a few minutes that the accident was meant by God to happen to me to bring glory to Himself. Seems that my accident had brought about quite a stir at our church –which had undergone internal strife after Reverend Bratt’s expulsion over pedophilia.

In the weeks that were to follow I eventually came to hear the full story of what had happened to me.

I was standing on the corner of William and Morgan Avenue where a sizeable city construction project was underway. My last recollection was of dropping to my knee to pick up what I thought was a new lock and key that had fallen from the site. One of the workers above dropped a hammer just as I stood and tilted my head upward to see where the lock and key may have fallen from. I saw something from the corner of my eye. The hammer struck the side of my head and partially embedded itself, I remember seeing a bright flash of light and suddenly found myself standing in front of a door, turning a key, and kicking it.

In my dream I recall a heinous odor, a calibrated thumping sound and a mysterious door with something ominous and indefinable behind it that sucked the breathe out of me, left me speechless, numb and with only a memory to visit a thousand times over.