By Craig Rodgers
The phone is already ringing. David wakes at the sound. He turns in bed and looks about in a fog and he reaches for the phone, he presses the screen.
“Mark?”
Banging on the line, some kind of commotion and then quiet. David asks again.
“Mark? Hello?”
Another quiet moment. He starts to hang up when Mark’s voice comes through.
“I found the door again.”
He says more but the commotion returns, louder now, then click, he is gone.
_____
Mark is nodding off. He sits at his desk with notebooks open showing figures he follows in only the barest of ways. He reads and reads until numbers blur and the lamplight falling across the page takes on a false tone, the light of a stage play, dreamlike and unreal. He stumbles his way down the hall. Shoes clack on tile. He touches his face, he yawns. The bathroom door is open. He pulls it shut at his back.
The tap is modern. He waves a hand at the sensor. Water gurgles and spurts out into a chrome sink. He fills a mug and drinks. Awake now. He shakes his face and blinks. He turns and opens the door.
At first he cannot accept it. The mind reels. A hallway lays out the way but the details are changed and wrong. Green carpeting lines a floor that goes on far longer than it should. He takes a step. Hands hold the wall for safety. The warm paneling is unfamiliar to the touch. He wipes the hand on his pants.
Passages exist where none should. A doorway opens onto a bedroom. Another shows an office of sorts. A library, a den. At the end of the hall there stands a door closed to him. He approaches in slow walk. He leans, wary. Hand reaching out. He turns the knob and pushes.
The next room is cast in the pale light of buzzing overheads. Long tables divide the space. Racks of cabinets labeled in some other language take up all of one wall. All is quiet here.
He turns. The carpeted hallway at his back is as it was. The familiar bathroom of his home is there beyond the hall. He takes a breath and closes the door.
He opens the door, the same door, onto a bedroom. Sheets are mussed where someone has lain. A television plays but the sound is turned low, figures whispering between bouts of familiar canned laughter like the sound of falling snow.
A voice comes from somewhere near. Growing. He crosses the room to a closet, stumbling, catching himself. The voice is coming near. He crawls into the closet and pulls the door closed. The voice is at once gone. All sound is changed, even the unheard white noise breath of the walls is wholly altered. He opens the closet door.
Ahead is a garden enclosure. Glass walls look out on the world beyond. Houses, a street. A neighborhood entirely foreign. He moves along an aisle of quaffed greenery, ducking or peering over the rows of lush flora. Looking for a door.
At the room’s end is a small shed. Tools inside. Hoes and sheers and rakes. Gloves, seeds. Bottles for spritzing. He stoops to fit inside, pulling the door shut against him in the tiny space.
He feels the change at once. The humid greenhouse air is replaced with a dry coolness. He opens the door onto a dining room set for a meal. Sweating now. Frustrated more than scared. He checks the phone in his pocket but there is no signal here in this place. He crosses the room to a door.
They go by faster now, searching for anything familiar. Yanking open doors and running to the next. A hallway, an attic, an office, a ballroom. More of the same, with occasional deviations. One door opens onto a stadium vacant of living things. One opens onto a room in pitch dark. He does not test the walls for a switch, instead pulling the door again closed and moving on. Doors and doors. Then.
He doesn’t recognize it right away. The green carpet. The hallway. He stops when he does. Standing, breathing. His body shakes. He resists the urge to run. The phone shows a signal. He moves with a measured pace. Forward. He scrolls and dials. It crackles but it does ring. He presses it hard to his ear. The voice is there, far away. He is in the bathroom now, and there comes a pop like a room pressurized. David’s voice is there, clear.
“Mark? Hello?”
Mark closes his eyes with relief and more.
“I found the door again,” he says.
But the hair on his arms is standing, his fillings ache in his jaw. When he opens his eyes the door is closed.
David parks in a skid. He is out and crossing the lawn at a run. The lights all show in the house’s every window. Not just the windows, the open front door too. David steps inside. He goes room to room looking. Every door in the house stands open and Mark is not here. He checks again just in case. He calls friends, he asks questions. What could this be, where would he go. Each agrees to come help, even if they know not with what. With nothing left to do but wait for their arrival, David closes the front door.
Craig Rodgers is the name on several books ghostwritten by a gaggle of long dead Victorian spirits.