Beyond the Doors Read online

  “What is it?” asked Zack.

  “Guava-prune-carrot-soy energy drink with egg and protein powder,” she said. “My own mix.”

  They passed. She shrugged and poured herself another glass. “By the way. Don’t tell my sister about meeting me. We have a history.”

  “Not anymore, you don’t,” said Zack.

  Charlotte lowered her eyebrows suspiciously. “Not any…What do you…?”

  “She doesn’t remember you,” he explained. “She doesn’t remember us. She doesn’t remember anything.”

  Her eyebrows remained lowered even as her eyes themselves scanned left and right as if looking for someone else to explain what Zack was talking about. When she failed to find anyone, she pressed forward with her best guess. “My sister’s memory has been altered?”

  Her children nodded. Her eyes widened. Her hands shook.

  She dropped the pitcher of guava-prune-carrot-soy energy drink with egg and protein powder onto the kitchen floor.

  Janice and Alexa found themselves surrounded by white tile walls and sterile metallic sinks. A row of mirrors lined the wall above the sinks, and opposite them were six swinging doors, each a few inches off the ground.

  “We’re in a bathroom,” said Alexa.

  Janice chuckled at her sister’s observation. “Do you have to go potty?” she asked jokingly.

  “No!” answered Alexa very seriously.

  Janice hid a smile and looked around the room. Suddenly, she gasped and pointed. “Look!” she chirped. “Look, look, look!”

  Alexa turned and looked.

  “What are those?” she asked, confused.

  Alexa might have been stumped, but Janice knew full well what a line of urinals against the wall meant. “Boys’ bathroom! This is a boys’ bathroom!”

  “What!” Alexa was scandalized.

  “Ew! Ew, ew, ew!” Janice couldn’t help but flap her hands in agitation. “Out! Go!”

  The two girls nearly trampled over each other in their rush to exit the men’s room.

  They emerged in an old movie theater lobby. The scent of popcorn invaded their nostrils as they skidded to a stop.

  “Hey!” sniped the pimply faced boy behind the counter, his voice bouncing up and down between octaves. “What are you doing in there? That’s for boys, not girls!”

  “Sorry,” said Janice, tensing up. “We’re sorry. We didn’t…I mean…”

  “I had to go,” said Alexa, putting her hands on her hips. “You got a problem with that?”

  Pimply Faced Boy flinched and backed down. “No. Enjoy your movie.” He shuffled away to pump some fake butter flavoring into the popcorn machine.

  Janice breathed an uneasy sigh of relief while marveling at her little sister’s ability to intimidate a teenager. She knew a dorky kid working at a movie theater probably wasn’t going to be their most difficult challenge in searching for Zack and Sydney, but she’d take a win any day. She wasn’t thrilled to be back inside this weird world of memories where everything was covered in a faded yellow wash. She hoped they found their siblings quickly.

  “Where do we meet them?” she asked.

  Alexa squinted her face together in thought for a moment, then relaxed. “I dunno,” she admitted. “They didn’t say.”

  “Think back. What, exactly, did they say to do?”

  “Open a new door.”

  “We did that. What next?”

  “I dunno,” repeated Alexa. “They didn’t say.”

  Janice felt the first inklings of panic creep into her belly. “Do we just wait for them? Do we have to find them? How do we go from one memory to another? How do they know we opened a new door?”

  Alexa shrugged. “I dunno.”

  The panic made itself right at home in Janice’s belly, sending tendrils of uneasiness worming through her body. “You have that doorknob, right?” she asked.

  Alexa reached into her pocket and held it up with a smile. Janice was overcome with an urge to take it out of her sister’s hand, march up to a door—any door—and get out of there that very moment. She was only able to hold out because she knew if she tried to swipe the knob from her sister, it would turn very ugly very quickly.

  “Good. Put it back in your pocket,” she said. “Keep it safe.”

  Alexa did as asked, then turned toward a pair of dark doors leading from the lobby into one of the theaters. “Maybe they’re already here,” she announced, walking forward.

  “No, they can’t be,” said Janice, taking another scan of the room. “We just opened this door. This memory. It doesn’t work like that. I think. Does it? I’m not really sure. I don’t really understand how any of this—Alexa!”

  The little girl, tuning her bigger sister out, tugged the door open and slipped into the darkened theater.

  “Alexa! Wait!” Janice rushed in after her sister.

  The theater seemed about half full, though it was hard to tell since it was so dark. On the gigantic screen in front was a ten-foot-tall cartoon pelican dancing with quite a bit more expertise than is generally found in that species. Janice sort of half recognized the movie, but her attention was more focused on the little form of Alexa calmly marching down the aisle, yelling, “Zack! Sydney! Are you here?” at the top of her lungs.

  “Quiet yer trap, little girl!” barked someone in the audience.

  “Zack? Is that you?” Alexa called out.

  “Hush up!” yelled someone else in the audience.

  “I’m looking for my brother and sister,” announced Alexa. “Zack? Sydney?”

  “For crying out loud, we’re trying to watch the movie!” shouted a third individual.

  Janice caught up with Alexa, quickly grabbed her arm, and pulled her down into a crouch. “You can’t just yell out like that in a crowded theater,” she said.

  “But it’s not real,” said Alexa. “They’re just a memory.”

  “They’re still people,” countered Janice hurriedly. “Well, memories of people. I mean…well, they…huh.” She was stumped.

  Alexa pulled her arm free and stood up. “Zack! Sydney! Where are you?”

  “Will somebody shut that little girl up?” hollered someone in the audience.

  “They’re obviously not here, Alexa,” whispered Janice. “Let’s get out of—”

  Before she could finish, she was smacked in the head by a well-thrown shoe.

  “Ow!” she cried.

  “Keep it down!” screamed a very menacing voice from the audience.

  “Did you throw a shoe at that girl?” asked someone else in the audience. “How dare you?”

  “I can throw whatever I want at whoever I want, lady!” barked the shoe thrower. “It’s a free country!”

  “Somebody should throw a shoe at you!” responded the woman.

  “If you two don’t shut up, I’m throwing shoes at both of you!” snapped someone else a few rows back.

  “Go ahead and try it!” yelled the initial shoe thrower, standing. “I’ll turn that shoe right around and send it straight up your—hey!”

  The man lurched forward as a large boot clonked him in the back of the head. He swiveled around, furious. “That was a boot! Who threw that?”

  Accusations flew and tempers rose as more and more people began yelling at one another and throwing various items of footwear back and forth. Janice took hold of Alexa’s wrist and bolted up the aisle. “We’ve got to get out of here!” she hissed.

  Alexa did not disagree.

  The two girls emerged from the darkened theater into the seemingly blinding glare of the theater lobby to find Pimply Faced Boy snarling at them. “You guys are troublemakers,” he announced. “I’m gonna call the cops!”

  “Alexa! Run!” cried Janice.

  Her sister turned on the afterburner and ran ziggedy-zaggedy through the lobby like a flustered moth. Janice heeded her own advice and also broke into a run, slowing just long enough to steer Alexa toward the front door.

  “Hey!” cried Pimply Faced Boy.
“Get back here! I’m making a citizen’s arrest!”

  In less than a heartbeat, they were out the door.

  “What do we do, Janny? Where do we go?” Alexa clung tightly to her sister’s hand, all hint of bravery gone.

  “I don’t…We should…” Janice looked up and down the street. There were no signs of life anywhere, no indications where they should run next. We should just get out of here, thought Janice. This is too dangerous.

  She was about to ask her sister for the doorknob when Alexa squeaked like an excited helium balloon, let go of Janice’s hand, and rushed toward one of the shops.

  “Alexa! Wait!” cried Janice, but she soon saw it was pointless. The store to which Alexa ran was a pet shop, and the front window was filled with small, fluffy, unbelievably soft bunnies. The gravitational mass of this overwhelming cuteness was a pull Alexa simply could not resist. Janice quickly hurried after her sister.

  Approaching the store, Janice saw Alexa pull open the front door and stop, momentarily frozen upon seeing a blank wall of darkness within. Something about this darkness made the hairs on Janice’s head stand on end, and she called out to her sister, warning her not to enter.

  Too late.

  Alexa skipped into the darkness, instantly vanishing from view.

  “Alexa!”

  Janice reached the storefront and pulled the door wide. Abyssal darkness confronted her, sucking the yellowed light of the street into its void of nothingness. “Alexa?” called Janice timidly. She was torn. She in no way wanted to pass through into the black, yet she couldn’t abandon her sister. She took a deep breath, reached out her arms, stepped forward…

  And found herself in an old, rickety, long-abandoned upstairs hallway.

  “Janny? Where are the bunnies?”

  Alexa was turning in circles, utterly confused. This was obviously not a pet store.

  We must have entered a different memory, reasoned Janice. From the look of things, however, it wasn’t a very nice one. The wooden flooring was rotting and warped, paint was peeling off the walls, and cobwebs abounded. A sickly smell hung in the air—a mixture of rotten fruit and body odor. Janice shivered.

  “There were bunnies in the window,” repeated Alexa. “They were super cute.”

  “I don’t think there are any bunnies here,” said Janice, trying to figure out how this whole thing worked. She supposed they could go out through the door they’d just come through, but that would drop them right back on the street in front of the movie theater and the increasingly angry crowd, not to mention Pimply Faced Boy, who wanted to arrest them. Not an option.

  “This place is creepy,” announced Alexa as she wandered down the hallway, the floor creaking with every step.

  Creepy doesn’t do this place justice, thought Janice. Every fiber in her being screamed to get out of there, even though there didn’t seem to be any obvious threat. Still, when had her fibers ever been wrong? She looked up and down for another door to pass through—another gateway to another memory—but there were none. None intact, anyway. Plenty of half-rotten doors hanging by a single hinge or leaning against the doorframe, but nothing you could open and close.

  Alexa stopped at the top of a flight of steps. “What’s down there?” she asked.

  Janice joined her sister and peered down the stairs. There looked to be no end, no ground floor. Nothing but darkness. Total, absolute darkness.

  The fear that had thus far been lightly tapping at the back of her mind started thumping madly. Looking into that abyss, Janice felt her blood turn to ice. She unconsciously stepped away, eyes glued to the emptiness yawning before her.

  We have to leave, she thought. Now.

  “Alexa, give me the doorknob.”

  Her sister, equally terrified, nodded and slowly fumbled in her pockets for the promise of delivery. Janice felt a momentary pang of guilt for abandoning Zack and Sydney like this, but (a) she wasn’t sure she was actually abandoning them, and (b) they had to get out of this hallway.

  “Alexa?” she asked as her sister continued to search her pockets.

  “I got it….Hold on….”

  A sound erupted from the chasm of inky blackness below. A sound at once terrifying and familiar. A sound that caused both girls to freeze in their tracks. The sound of a door. A very creaky door.

  “What was that?” asked Alexa, her voice starting to tremble.

  “The doorknob, Alexa,” implored Janice. “Please.”

  But a new sound assaulted their ears. Footsteps. Deep, heavy footsteps.

  “Janny?”

  “The doorknob. Hurry!”

  As the footsteps rose, growing louder and more ominous, Alexa finally scooped the doorknob out of her pocket. She shoved it into her sister’s hands with such ferocity it slipped and clattered to the floor at the top of the stairs.

  “No!” cried Janice, dropping to her knees to grab the knob before it rolled off the top step and began a one-way journey toward the source of those horrible footsteps.

  “Hurry, Janny!”

  Clutching the precious doorknob in her fist, Janice got to her feet and reached for Alexa.

  “A supremely pleasant good morning to you, urchins,” croaked a wispy, high-pitched voice. “Have you journeyed forth to my humble abode in need of medical ministrations? I do believe an opening can be procured.”

  Climbing out of the darkness came a decrepit old man dressed in the blackest of black. His hands were gnarled and knobby, his face pockmarked and ancient, and his head covered by a top hat so purple even the yellowish filter of the memory itself failed to dull the purity of the color. Evil pulsated from his body with a physical force that knocked the two girls back a step even as their eyes were drawn to the wolflike smile on his face.

  “Janny…?”

  Janice couldn’t move. Couldn’t talk. Couldn’t breathe. She remained mesmerized with terror as the old man reached the top step and leered at them, seeming larger than possible.

  “What I mean to say is…,” he rasped, “the doctor will see you now.” From out of his black, black jacket he withdrew a long, long needle. “Mayhap a prick or two shall cure what ails you. Shall we commence?”

  He came forward, holding the needle out like a jousting lance, his eyes twinkling with malice. The girls stood frozen in place as he approached, unable to react, unable to run. Janice watched the rusty tip of the immense needle come closer and closer to her face. To her eye.

  Suddenly, something large sailed over their heads and struck the old man’s top hat, knocking the purple monstrosity from his head. The creepy stranger staggered back a step, momentarily stunned, and dropped the impossibly long needle to the floor.

  “What in tarnation…?” he cried.

  Confused, Janice looked down and saw what had knocked the hat off his head.

  A shoe.

  Again with the flying shoes? thought Janice.

  “Run, girls! Run!” yelled a voice Janice did not recognize. It seemed, however, to be giving good advice, so she grabbed Alexa by the arm and ran down the hall.

  “And just where do you think you’re—ow!”

  A second shoe smacked the old man in the face, knocking him down the steps. He stumbled momentarily before regaining his balance.

  “Second room on your left!” called the voice. “Hurry! I’m out of shoes!”

  Not bothering to question their unknown savior, Janice bolted toward the second room on the left. They were just about to slip inside when the voice called out once more. “Other left! Other left! My left! Oh, galloping Gorgonzola! Turn around!”

  Alexa actually figured out what the new voice meant before Janice, and she pulled her sister across the hallway into the correct room.

  “How dare you interfere with an urchin’s proper medical care!” screamed the creepy old man from the stairs. This was quickly followed by a thunk and another cry of “Ow!”

  A moment later, a second old man ran into the room. He looked vaguely familiar….

  “F
orgot I had an extra shoe,” he said, stopping to catch his breath.

  “You’re the not-old man!” exclaimed Alexa.

  It took Janice a split second to understand what her sister was talking about, but her own memory returned just as the rest of her mind pointed out the fact that whoever this man was, he wasn’t yellow.

  He wasn’t a memory.

  “Yes! Although no, I’m quite old. I’ll explain later!”

  “Who are you?” asked Janice.

  “Moistened muttonchops! I’m your grandfather! Now, go!”

  Grandfather? thought Janice.

  “Go where?” asked Alexa. Janice took a quick scan of the room. Her sister was right—there did not appear to be any other doors.

  “The laundry chute! Quickly!”

  “You are growing children!” The taunt oozed with malignant purpose. “Neglect not your health and vitality!”

  Janice quickly spotted the lip of a laundry chute against the wall. “Over there!” she yelled. Alexa ran to the wall and struggled to lift the lid. Before she could stop and think, Janice picked her sister up and dumped her, feet-first, into the chute.

  “I do not believe I gave either of you permission to leave my office!”

  Janice turned to see the horrible old man now grown so large he barely fit through the doorway. His eyes were red and demonic, and huge fangs poked out of his mouth. He reached his clawlike hands into the room, and his fingers stretched forth like serpents, writhing their way toward her.

  “Go!” screamed the not-creepy old man who had just claimed to be their grandfather.

  She leaped head-first into the laundry chute.

  “Are we far enough back? That drawbridge can kill! Mom lost so many cats that way! Maybe we should…just in case…”

  “We’re fine, Charlotte,” droned Sydney with a slight eye roll.

  “Maybe just another few feet,” suggested her mother. “I wouldn’t want to…The drawbridge might…”

  “Is coming! No squishing!”

  Dimitri’s cheery-if-scattered disembodied voice interrupted Charlotte’s hemming and hawing. There was a groan, some clanking, and lots of gearlike sounds. Once Dimitri had agreed to let them in, he had sworn up and down that he could lower the drawbridge slowly and safely.