Beyond the Doors Read online

  “Um…you there!” cried Aunt Gladys. “Girl! Niece!” She turned to Zack. “I don’t know her name. I don’t know your name! What’s your name?”

  Hiding a smile, Zack opened his mouth to answer, but Aunt Gladys held up a hand to stop him. “Later. First your sister.” She spun back to face Janice. “What’s your name?”

  “Janice,” replied Janice.

  “Janice. Lovely name. Inside, please. I’m going to raise the drawbridge.”

  Janice dutifully complied, shuffling back across the moat into their new, hopefully temporary home. Once inside, she and the others watched in mute fascination as Aunt Gladys strained her muscles turning an iron crank on the wall. The massive chains groaned at the effort, sounding like diseased elephants wailing in misery, but slowly and surely, they pulled the massive, four-story drawbridge up until it finally clanged loudly into place and became, once again, a wall.

  “Good. Okay. Well then. I have to work.” Aunt Gladys spun and marched out through the archway leading to her bedroom.

  “Aunt Gladys!” Janice called out. “What about us? What should we do?”

  Aunt Gladys stumbled to a stop, her body turning back an instant before her feet got the message. “Oh!” she exclaimed in surprise once she had her balance. “Oh yes. Right. You can…you can…” She looked around the room as if hoping to find “How to Be a Good Aunt” instructions written on one of the walls. “You can…get settled. Yes. Good. Pick any room you like. Not mine. Not the kitchen. Another room. Help yourself.”

  She nodded, pleased with her decisiveness, and turned to go. Then her mind remembered something important, and she stumbled forward a step before her feet agreed to come to a halt. “Don’t touch any doors.”

  Satisfied, she hurried away, leaving them alone.

  “She’s insane, isn’t she?” asked Sydney.

  Zack halfheartedly defended Aunt Gladys, saying she was “eccentric” and “scattered” and “not particularly child-friendly,” but Janice had her doubts. Everything about their long-lost family member seemed sketchy. Even the way the sweaty, smelly lawyer had plucked her name out of the blue had seemed sketchy. Janice didn’t like sketchy. Sketchy often led to truly doubtful, which in turn led to extremely suspicious. Which was how Janice felt about this whole deal.

  Sweaty, Smelly Lawyer Guy hadn’t even been able to find the actual note their mother had written. Miss Guacaladilla had done some online sleuthing and determined that their mother’s maiden name had indeed been Tulving, that she had indeed had a younger sister named Gladys, and that Gladys Tulving was not currently a wanted criminal. Beyond that, there was little the Internet was able to tell them. She didn’t even seem to have a Facebook account.

  So here they were in this strange woman’s strange house, and Janice felt a gerbil-sized pit in her stomach.

  “Is anyone else worried about this arrangement?” she asked. “I mean, Miss Guacaladilla just leaving like that? How do we know this woman’s even our aunt?”

  “Gladys has to be our aunt,” said Zack. “Why else would she take us in? Why else would Miss Guacaladilla leave us here? You’re being paranoid again, sis.”

  “I’m not being paranoid!” shouted Janice. Zack raised his eyebrow at her in that really annoying way he had and she sighed. “Okay, maybe I am being a little bit paranoid. Do you blame me? Have you seen this crazy house? Who lives like this?”

  “We do,” stated Alexa.

  “For now,” muttered Sydney with serious disapproval.

  “Look, Janice,” began Zack. “I know you’re—”

  “Don’t even start with me, Zack,” she interrupted.

  “Start what?”

  “You’re going to be all calm and cool and collected and make me feel like I’m overreacting, and I won’t have it! I’m the oldest here, not you! I know you sometimes forget that—”

  “You could stand to act like it once in a while,” he interrupted.

  “Oh!” Janice fumed for a moment, while Zack stood, waiting. “You’re a jerk, Zack,” she said finally.

  “This is boring,” announced Sydney. “If you two are going to have your usual fight, you don’t need us. Alexa, you hungry? Let’s raid Aunt Gladys’s kitchen.” She took her little sister’s hand, and the two of them walked out of the room.

  Janice and Zack watched them go. The act of their sisters abandoning them to their tussle drained all the energy (and most of the fun) out of it.

  “Our usual fight?” asked Janice. “What is she talking about?”

  “Who knows?” answered Zack with a shrug. “It’s Sydney.”

  They stood in silence for a moment more, and Janice found herself running her eyes over the drawbridge mechanism. “That’s a really weird front door,” she mumbled, walking up to it and examining the crank.

  “It’s unique, I’ll give it that,” agreed Zack. “I suppose we should go pick our rooms?”

  Not having any better ideas, Janice shrugged and followed her brother out of the room, but not before giving the drawbridge/door thing one last look. It was massive and solid and about as impenetrable as a door could be. Perfect for keeping people out.

  Or keeping them in.

  “What are you hungry for?” asked Sydney as she led Alexa into the long, narrow kitchen.

  “Chocolate,” answered the seven-year-old.

  Sydney giggled at her sister’s optimism. “I dunno,” she said. “Aunt Gladys doesn’t seem like a chocoholic to me.” Reaching the refrigerator along the inside wall, Sydney yanked it open, ready to forage, but found herself stepping back in surprise.

  “Wha…?” she breathed. “Huh.”

  “Oooh! Something good?” Alexa bounced to her sister’s side. Upon seeing the contents of the fridge, however, she became equally unenthusiastic. “Oh. Well. I like milk.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Sydney. “Looks like that’s a good thing.”

  The fridge was packed top to bottom with gallons of milk. There was, quite literally, nothing else inside. Sydney carefully closed the fridge door, as if it were a bomb set to explode at the slightest jiggle.

  “Maybe the pantry?” she asked rhetorically, moving on. They looked up and down the room, searching for a pantry, before Sydney just began opening cabinets at random. There were bowls, cups, and spoons, but not much else. Finally, she opened a cabinet and found rows and rows of identical boxes of cereal.

  “ ‘Honey Nut Oat Blast Ring-a-Dings,’ ” she read, frowning.

  “For the milk,” offered Alexa.

  So much for a balanced diet, thought Sydney. However, the cereal seemed to be more or less fresh and none of the milk had spoiled, so she went ahead and poured out a bowl for each of them.

  After gobbling hers up and admitting to herself that it was both filling and tasty, Sydney started tapping her fingers on the counter out of boredom while waiting for her little sister to finish. Unfortunately, Alexa was a notoriously slow eater, and after another minute, Sydney couldn’t sit still any longer.

  “Stay here and finish your cereal,” she told Alexa. “I’m gonna go peek upstairs.”

  “Ormph-kmph!” garbled Alexa through a mouthful of Honey Nut Oat Blast Ring-a-Dings.

  Sydney wandered back through the archway separating the kitchen from the…the…room that looked pretty much just like the kitchen except it had a wide set of stairs plopped in the middle of it. This is a crazy house, she thought.

  The wooden stairs creaked slightly as she climbed, and she gripped the railing just a bit tighter than she might ordinarily have done. Though she couldn’t say why, she felt more and more nervous with each step. When she finally popped her head up onto the second floor, she went from nervous to freaked out in the space of a heartbeat.

  “Huh,” she mouthed. “Doors.”

  They were stacked in piles on the floor, leaning against one another along the walls, and lying atop or across every piece of furniture in the room. They were plain, ornate, painted, sanded, large, small, and everything in betw
een. Some looked modern and dull like a door you might find in an office building. Others seemed ancient and majestic, as if they belonged in a haunted castle or an enchanted palace. Some doors were thick, others thin, but all had two things in common. One, they were each made entirely of wood. And two, there were no knobs.

  Sydney reached out to run her fingers along a bright blue door that looked like something out of a grand estate, probably French, but suddenly stopped herself.

  “Don’t touch the doors,” she said, suddenly understanding Aunt Gladys’s cryptic instruction.

  Oddly enough, even with more doors than Sydney had ever seen gathered together in one place, the doorways of the room were as bare as the ones downstairs. Sydney glided softly from one room to the next, constantly shaking her head as she encountered more and more doors tossed willy-nilly into every corner of every room. There seemed to be no pattern to the collection, no rhyme or reason. Just more and more doors.

  Great, thought Sydney. She’s a hoarder.

  An unsettling chill washed over her. This was wrong. People didn’t collect doors. That was just too weird. There was something else going on—Sydney was sure of it.

  Then Alexa screamed.

  Alexa screamed as the monster came toward her.

  The monster screamed right back, equally frightened.

  This made Alexa pause, because she wasn’t used to monsters being scared of her. Of course, she wasn’t used to monsters at all, her only real experience with them being Elmo and friends on Sesame Street. For all she knew, real monsters were big scaredy-cats who trembled at the sight of seven-year-old kids.

  Maybe that was why they hid under beds.

  Alexa had finished her bowl of cereal and set out to find either Sydney or something fluffy.

  It had been a fun adventure at first because (a) she rarely got to explore anywhere without one of her older siblings hanging around, and (b) she hadn’t yet encountered the monster. She had passed through sitting rooms and dining rooms and rooms that were being used as closets and rooms that were being used as libraries and rooms that weren’t being used at all. All of them without doors. Once she had even walked through a bathroom, with the toilet just sitting there. That had been very disturbing.

  But then she came upon the weirdest thing yet.

  A door.

  It was on the inner wall. And big. And round. And metal. There was a big steel wheel in the center that begged to be turned. It was a serious door, guarding serious things.

  Mesmerized, Alexa approached the bright, shiny door, reaching for the bright, shiny wheel sticking invitingly out of the bright, shiny center with her grubby, Honey Nut Oat Blast Ring-a-Ding–covered little fingers. Then she, too, remembered Aunt Gladys’s warning against touching any doors.

  She couldn’t disobey Aunt Gladys on the first day.

  Alexa was stuck between the absolute need to be a good girl and the equally absolute need to open the door. A lesser child might have simply imploded from indecision, but in a stroke of genius, Alexa thought up a handy-dandy solution. She would not touch the door; she would only touch the wheel. The wheel was not the door.

  It was a pretty convincing argument for a seven-year-old.

  Satisfied she wasn’t being bad, Alexa stretched her fingers out just a little bit farther, her eyes wide with anticipation. But before she could achieve her goal, the strangest—and, frankly, spookiest—thing happened.

  The wheel began to turn on its own.

  Alexa immediately pulled her arm away and stepped back, frozen in a mixture of fear and curiosity. Was Mommy behind the door? Unicorns? Something small, cute, and fluffy?

  There came a quiet-yet-solid-sounding clang, and the wheel stopped spinning.

  The door began to open outward.

  Alexa wanted to run, convinced that whatever was about to step out of that unknown room would be terrible and horrible and evil and would probably eat her. She took a step back, then a second, then stopped. Because whatever was about to come out of that room might also be wonderful and magical and fluffy. She was torn.

  Her first glimpse of the monster was the top of its head popping up from behind the door like a hand puppet. It was a strange, netlike head obviously hiding something even more hideous beneath. Alexa had frozen in terror, her little heart pounding up into her throat.

  It’s terrible and horrible and evil, she had thought. I was right!

  When a slimy, rust-colored claw had reached up to grab the top of the door and push it farther open, Alexa had suddenly found her voice, letting forth a titanic scream that reverberated through every room of the house.

  That was when the monster had screamed right back.

  Not wanting to compete, Alexa stopped screaming. As she waited for the monster to get a hold of itself, she noticed that the slimy, rust-colored claw wasn’t actually a claw. It was a big rust-colored rubber glove. And the weird, netlike white head? It was an odd hat. Over a head.

  As for the voice screaming out from behind the netting…

  “Aunt Gladys?” Alexa asked.

  Aunt Gladys reached up with one shaking glove and fumbled the netting off her head. “Goodness! You startled me! I’m startled! Don’t do that again!”

  “I’m sorry,” responded Alexa. “I got scared.”

  “You were scared? I was terrified!” Aunt Gladys waved the netting in front of her face for a moment, catching her breath. “No sneaking. Can’t have sneaking.”

  “Okay, Aunt Gladys,” promised Alexa. “I won’t sneak.”

  “Aunt Gladys?” asked Aunt Gladys. “Oh! You’re a child! One of”—she lowered her voice and nearly spat the word—“Charlotte’s.”

  Alexa just nodded, feeling uncomfortable with the way Aunt Gladys had hissed her mother’s name.

  “Which one? Don’t tell me. Starts with an A. Andrew. You’re Andrew.”

  “Alexa.”

  “Of course! Andrew? That’s silly. That’s a boy’s name. You’re a girl. How about Alice? Is it Alice?”

  “Alexa,” repeated Alexa patiently.

  “Yes! Good. One down, two to go.”

  “Three,” corrected Alexa.

  Aunt Gladys’s face dropped. “Three? Oh dear.”

  “Alexa! Are you all right?” Janice ran into the room at full sprint, followed by Zack, who skidded to a less-than-graceful halt before he ran into her.

  “We heard you scream,” said Zack, quickly fussing over his youngest sister—a habit Alexa hated.

  “I got scared,” explained Alexa, awkwardly brushing Zack’s hands away. “There was a monster. But it wasn’t a monster. It was Aunt Gladys. See?”

  The two elder Rothbaum children turned their attention to their aunt, each unconsciously taking a step back at her appearance.

  “Don’t tell me!” said Aunt Gladys, snapping her fingers. “Zelda and Jason. Yes? Am I right?”

  Janice eyed the odd hat in her aunt’s hands. “Do you have bees in there?”

  “Bees? Where!” Aunt Gladys spun around, swatting the empty air around her. “Go away! Shoo! I’ll fumigate again! I will! Don’t test me!”

  “Wait! I don’t see any bees!” promised Janice, reaching a calming hand toward the flighty woman. “I meant your hat. That’s all.”

  Aunt Gladys relaxed and held her hat in front of her face, as if seeing it for the first time. “My hat? Oh! Yes. No. I’m not a beekeeper. Do they wear these? How odd.”

  “Why do you wear it, then?” asked Zack.

  “Why? Because I…well, no. I can’t…no. Definitely not. It’s for work.”

  “What do you do in there, Aunt Gladys?” asked Alexa. “Can I see?”

  Alexa stretched her neck to the side in hopes of peering into the mysterious room beyond her aunt. Aunt Gladys followed the little girl’s gaze and started, suddenly realizing she’d yet to close the hatch.

  “Oh!” said Aunt Gladys, quickly shoving the large door closed. “No, you may not.”

  The door clanged shut with a deep, omino
us boom.

  “Is it a rocket ship?” asked Zack.

  “No.”

  “Are you studying a horrible virus that turns your fingernails to jelly?” asked Janice.

  “No. Ew.”

  “Are there big, fluffy bears inside?” asked Alexa.

  “No!” Aunt Gladys waved her hands in front of her face as if to swat away all the pesky questions. “Stop asking! Forget the room! You didn’t see it. It’s not here. Look away.” Refusing to entertain any further questions, Aunt Gladys made to storm away but stopped as Sydney raced into the hallway (having gotten lost trying to follow Alexa’s scream) and announced to everyone she’d found piles of doors upstairs. This sent Aunt Gladys into another panic attack, which didn’t subside until Zack promised her that none of the kids would go upstairs and touch them.

  She then made him also promise they would all clean their bowls and spoons after eating their Honey Nut Oat Blast Ring-a-Dings, that they’d use a potty every time they had to go, and that they wouldn’t try to wear any of her clothes.

  This last request struck Zack as a bit unnecessary.

  The final thing she made him promise (and he could feel Janice glaring at him every time Aunt Gladys assumed Zack, and not she, spoke for the group) was the strangest request of all.

  “You will go to school,” she said. “Not now. Soon. Not tomorrow. There’s paperwork. I’m not good at paperwork. Not your problem. You go to school, right? Of course. Learning is good.”

  She smiled.

  “What about school?” asked Zack, getting used to his aunt’s scatterbrained tendencies.

  “What? Oh! Yes. School. You will go. And when you do”—she lowered her voice to a whisper, forcing all four kids to lean in—“do not open any doors.”

  The children all looked at one another, hoping somebody else understood what she was talking about. None of them did.

  “But, Aunt Gladys,” began Zack, treading lightly. “Why not?”

  “I don’t want to lose you,” she replied.