Ben Larned

Beyond the Red Door

 

 

Officer Ryans turned onto Cedar Lane some time after sunset, as he was instructed to do. The street was silent aside from the crush of his tires and the wash of his headlights. He was not surprised by the stillness; he knew, like anyone else who lived close by, that night passed without movement on Cedar Lane. With the last rays of the sun shining feebly across the treetops, all the shades would be drawn, the doors locked and bolted. The pattern was adhered to rigidly, and without fail each night found the houses lifeless; all silent, aside from the scarlet-curtained window of the house with the red door.

 

Like his fellow officers, Ryans knew the stories about the house. The station received at least one call per night from this street, reporting in harsh whispers any number of disturbances – the dark murmurs at ungodly hours; blasphemous shadows against the curtain; the silhouettes that crept through the door only to burst out hours later, howling in the most extreme agony, or never to emerge at all. No one could provide specifics beyond these details, as they knew to stay inside, and their observations had to be made through parted curtains or by listening against the walls. The sergeants at the station kept a file of these stories and read them aloud on quiet nights. Officers shared their hypotheses – mafia, sex trafficking, devil worship, some new and terrible drug – but the claims never held enough substance to warrant a search of the house. So the calls came, and they could only spread their whispers, and wait.

 

Then a report came, just the night before, that sent Officer Ryans to the red door with simple orders: look, catalogue, and get out. He had not been given specifics about the prompting incident, and he had not asked for them. Ryans had learned early on not to ask questions.

 

With the hum of night close at his ears, Ryans stepped out of his car and looked to the curtained window. Its glow was murky, and seemed to be cut out of the fabric of the darkness itself, attached to nothing but air. He stood for a moment, captivated. It held a thousand shapes within its little hole. He shook himself before he could get lost, and remembered his duty. The air was humid with the stories and he felt them cling to his skin in unpleasant beads of sweat. Ryans did not consider himself a superstitious man, especially not in the face of such a mundane thing as a noise violation, which he assumed was what the report said. But the sight of the red door, solidifying with each step across the cracked sidewalk and toward the lawn, made him remember the unearthly speculations. For a black moment he cursed the sergeant for sending him. But he kept his stride firm and mounted the steps of the house without shaking. He thought distantly of the rumored figures entering this door and never again coming out; then he knocked three times against the surface, sending tremors through the unknown recesses of the house beyond.

 

The echoing knock died down across the street and Ryans did not hear anything from inside. Then, from far away, he detected the click of heels approaching the door. He stepped back as it slid open slowly, revealing a dark woman, awash in a blood-colored light that kept him from comprehending any detail in her features.

 

“Hello,” she said, her voice a breath from another time.

 

Ryans did not know how to respond; the tinted light had made him forget. It took him several tries just to say, “Officer Ryans with the state department. We got a call from someone… complaining about noise, just… a few minutes ago. I need to take a look inside.”

 

He tried to focus on the woman’s face, perhaps gauge a reaction, and suddenly felt himself slipping away, beneath turgid waters rank with sick beauty. It took too much strength to remove himself and grip onto reality again. When he did, the woman was still looking at him, expressionless.

 

“There was no noise here,” the woman replied; or so Ryans thought. It could have been his own voice.

 

“I’ll need to take a look inside anyway, ma’am. There have been reports…” But the words were nonsense, nonsense in the face of the light, the features that he could not place. Perhaps she knew his confusion and would chase him back to the station with her laughter. He held tighter to his senses – the cool air, the weight of his gun on his hip – and felt himself slipping still further.

 

The woman did not laugh. She instead took a step back, as if inviting him inside; yet her eyes, protruding from the haze of her other features, did not welcome him.  “There may be all sorts of stories,” she said. “But very few are able to understand.”

 

“Ma’am, if you don’t step aside, I’ll…”

 

She locked gazes with him and he was engulfed in vertigo, as if the porch had dropped from under his feet. Maybe the air in the hour is poison, he thought, and laughed to himself. “Come inside and you will be faced with many things,” she said, “that you are not meant to be faced with. Despair deep as ocean trenches, and elation high as the most distant star. Most who come inside have at least a microscopic grasp of what they will see. They have read the forbidden books and breathed the forgotten fumes. But you, you are not prepared at all. I cannot be responsible. It is your choice, but I assure you, once you make it, there will be no going back.”

 

He forced himself to step forward, an inch away from the threshold, and he focused his vision. The woman’s face was even further from him now, lost in a whirlpool of non-color. It must be drugs, he thought, they’re running drugs and I’ve breathed the smoke. That would explain the howling figures and the people who never returned. But he knew that these thoughts were a lie. The woman’s face told him so.

 

“I’m just doing my job, ma’am…” he managed, but the words were sloppy, wasted breath.

 

“Some wish they had never gone beyond this door,” she said. “Some, no matter how far they travel and how intensely they prepare, are not ready to cross the boundary. We who live here are the keepers of the doorway, the stewards of the dark looking-glass that reflects back aberrant truths. We may admit others who are worthy to look and behold. But those who look and are not worthy are not allowed to stay.”

 

In his mind he was already in his car, clearing the fog from his eyes, but his lips said, “You have to let me in. It’s the law.”

 

“If I let you in,” she said, “you are responsible for the consequences. You must know that.”

 

What does she mean? he said, or thought; he did not know anymore. In the distance, he could feel the houses on Cedar Lane, watching him and drawing further back into the darkness. He longed to be inside one of those houses with the shades pulled tight. And why can’t I? he thought; why can’t I go home and live my life without knowing what I never had to see? The red door would close and the featureless woman would be a lost memory, along with the promises of impossible sights that he did not want to accept. Yes, he said without speaking, I’ll go home, and tell the sergeant that I didn’t find a thing in the house. But his foot was already through the door, and his vision was sinking into the red miasma. “Just a routine search,” he stuttered.

 

The other houses did not stir when the door shut behind him; to them, he was just another visitor in a night of quiet horrors.

 

“What did you see? In the house?”

 

Ryans looked up and was blinded by the fluorescent lights bearing down on him. It took him a moment to realize where he was – in the station, of course, had been there for an hour. He blinked and turned to Grady, who was staring at him.

 

“Nothing,” Ryans said. “Not much, anyway.”

 

Grady squinted and looked closer. “Sure you’re okay?”

 

The cold dread that had surrounded him since the morning pressed in tighter against his spine and he was aware of a dark thing creeping along his peripherals, something that he was not going to acknowledge. “Yes, I’m all good,” he said, shocked at the sound of his voice, constricted and deeper than it should have been. But he wouldn’t think about that. He pretended to stir his coffee until Grady walked away and left him alone.

 

No, there was no reason to remember. He had gone home early after the trip to – where? To nowhere – and gotten a long sleep, free of dreams. That was all. He had written the report already, turned it in; in fact, he didn’t need to remember the report at all. The dark thing at the edge of his brain would go away in time. He might move, anyway, find a newer house in a trendier neighborhood. Far away from – from nowhere. He nodded to himself and took out another aspirin. The headache, like the chill, had plagued him since he’d woken. It felt like something was drilling into the base of his skull. But it was nothing he needed to worry about. It would go away in time.

 

“Grady says you’re acting funny,” the sergeant said.

 

Ryans spilled his coffee and felt it searing into his stomach. He stifled the gasp and turned around, staggering backwards in spite of his effort to stay steady. The sergeant was towering over him, arms crossed.

 

“I got – a headache – that’s all,” Ryans said. He hated his voice; the muffled sound.

 

The sergeant frowned at him as if focusing his vision to see more clearly. “That’s not all,” he said. “Don’t give me any crap. You read the report you wrote, Ryans? Or is that headache making you blind?” He shoved the folder toward Ryans, displaying an empty page, waving it right under his nose.

 

“I’m… not blind,” Ryans said.

 

“Then you’re fucked up,” the sergeant said. “No officer of mine walks into my station high…”

 

He stopped talking and let his mouth drop. The room went silent, the only sound being a soft patter of water on a countertop. It wasn’t water, though – Ryans could see the marks falling onto the blank page, red spots. His fingers went to his nose and he stuttered, “Sorry – I, uh – nose bleed…” He pulled his fingers away to wipe them somewhere, anywhere, but they were clean. It wasn’t his nose.

 

“Ryans…” the sergeant said. “Your…”

 

Somehow, Ryans understood, and his finger went to his eyes. They came away wet and thick with blood. Only then did Ryan’s vision blur over, painting the whole room scarlet, filling his chest with black surges of horror.

 

He did not wait for the sergeant’s cry. He rushed to the bathroom, holding his eyes, unaware of whatever he was running into. Slowly, finger by finger, he peeled his hands away from his eyes, and did not look down when he heard the blood splatter against the countertop. His eyes were curtained with red, just like the windows, the windows of the house with the red door. That thought was the final tap of pressure against his mental wall; the memory surged forth in a heinous tide and rocked through his skull until he was screaming in torment.

 

The sergeant found him moments later, wet with his own blood, the scream petering out to a whisper. Ryans heard him speak, but could not distinguish the words from the horde of demon screams rattling in his ears. He was trying to fight it, to put it back and close the door again, but the mere thought of such a task caused him unimaginable pain. It was only when the sergeant started to grab him, pull him up on his feet, that he was able to speak.

 

“No!” he screamed. “I don’t want to see! I never wanted to see! She showed me nothing, nothing, I didn’t see nothing, and that’s why none of this is happening!”

 

He tore from the sergeant’s grip and rushed from the bathroom as the blood started pouring from his nose, from his ears. The pain was shrieking in his head and he thought his bones would break. It was black pain, a tunnel of dark shapes and movement, rippling from a place he had seen but never wanted to remember. No, he said to himself, I never went inside, she never showed it to me at all… But those words meant nothing to him now. His eyes had been opened.

 

Ryans did not know how he got home; those moments were lost to him, hounded out by fragments of the night before, which had shown him so many things. He was barely conscious of his attempt to reach the bed, ending in his collapse onto the floor, where he began convulsing in a torrent of blood that seemed to erupt from every pore. That black thing on the edge of his mind was rushing for him, at an impossible speed, and when he looked into its face he shrieked in the utmost despair. It had freed itself, the knowledge; he had locked it away and now it had broken free. “What is happening to me?” he screamed, though the sound came out an incoherent gurgle. “What have you done to me?”

 

Wiping the blood from his eyes, Ryans stumbled out of his car and onto the dark lawn. It was still leaking from his ears and nose, but it had stopped in his eyes long enough to allow him to drive. He no longer thought of where it all must have come from – his bed was a lake of it, his sheets forever clotted from the long night he had spent writhing against his memories. For three days he had bled like this, continuing through the agony as his brain processed the new knowledge that he had never wanted.

 

He knew he had to go back to the house. There was no other choice. The babblings of his mind were only decipherable beyond that door, in the vapor of that ungodly light. Those hours in his room had been spent repeating what he had seen, unspeakable things reared before his closed lids in half-phantom projections; the shadows of what had been summoned in the chambers of that unnatural house. It never left him, not even when he felt his brain begin to char, then melt beneath the hellish burn of those sights. The woman had been right. Now he had no other choice than to reenter, if they would open the door for him at all.

 

Ryans made it halfway across the lawn before the vertigo overwhelmed him and sent him crashing into the grass. He gasped in agony and pushed himself up so he could look into the light, filled with shadows that he now recognized. “Please,” he cried, horrified to find his voice choked with fluid. “I learned now. I believe. Please, you got to let me back in.”

 

The cry died out on the night air, not bothering to echo. A dark geyser of blood and other substance spurted from his mouth. Tears were flowing again, staining his cheeks fresh. He closed his eyes; and the visions were projected instantly, each rendering in undeniable detail the ruining truths that he had been shown – the brain-pit of primordial ooze in orbit with the blackest star; the tunnels of Crr-Sathog, the many-limbed prophet, running shallower and shallower beneath cities of death; the dream-blade of Mvh Gbtyg that haunted planets with its revolving trance; and worst of all, the nightmare hollow where faith and despair entwined in a monstrous brood, drawing closer with each breath until oblivion is all that is known, all that ever was known, where everything in time must go to converge. When these visions had first returned to him, shattering his skull and burning his brain, he thought they were just hallucinations, induced by the pain or drugs or whatever else. But now, as the blood rushed from his throat, he knew that lies would not save him. He would look upon those horrors with eyes unflinching.

 

Once the blood slowed and he could speak again, Ryans forced himself to sit upright. “I’m ready to see the truth!” he said, though his voice was no longer his own. “I know what lies beyond the cracks and I accept it as the undying master! Please, my eyes are open and I can’t close them again!”

 

The exclamation fell into the hot silence without an answer. Ryans waited, jaw hanging loose. A monstrous, searing pain took hold of his skull and he knew that he did not have long. “I’m dying,” he screamed. “You have to let me in or I’ll die! I promise I won’t run this time, I won’t deny it. Just please, open the door! You can’t leave me out here!”

 

The red curtain did not stir, nor did the click of heels clap down the eons-long hallway to save him. He could only hear the memory of the woman’s voice, telling him that he would not be allowed inside if he left. And now he understood.

 

With an inhuman shriek, Ryans began crawling toward the porch, which now was terribly far away. His fingers tore at the grass and felt it rip up in long, worm-like tendrils. He could not move fast enough to stop the agony that was surging up from within, bringing liquid flesh with it, out of his mouth and onto the eager soil. The red glow of the window blurred until its shape was once more a thousand shapes, the writhing turmoil of the things beyond the veil that fed on madness like insects fed on the wet skin of corpses. The subterranean veins of Crr-Sathog were hungry for his misery; and the primordial ooze was eager to admit him. Ryans now knew what was happening to his body, what happened to anyone’s body, in the face of such truth; the atoms could not hold together, and bit by bit he would seep into the cursed earth of the house with the red door – earth that only seemed to belong in this reality, only to those who had wisely kept their eyes away from the roiling nightmare of the distant revelation.

 

One last time, Ryans called out, “Please…” Then his voice was no longer a voice.

 

The rising sun did not find Ryans, or any other visitor, at the house with the red door. The light had extinguished the glow of the window and hushed the unspeakable chants of those not seen. One by one the other houses drew back their shades, unlocked their doors, and did not look to their neighbors halfway down the lane. They knew, through some latent instinct, that to look would be to fall; and they were relieved, though they did not know why, that they would never see what lay behind the curtain.

 

 

Ben Larned: “I am an award-winning filmmaker and writer studying film at NYU. My short horror fiction has been published in several magazines, including Sanitarium and eHorror. My first novel, a supernatural horror called “Fool’s Gold,” is available for purchase on Amazon. I have recently finished my first feature film, a psychological horror called “Chaos Theory,” which is expected to premiere at festivals in October 2015.”