Wayne Batson - The Door Within

None of the small medieval beings replied. They were good that way. They didn’t offer advice. They didn’t lecture. They simply listened.

“I mean, how am I supposed to survive high school when my only real friend is a thousand miles from here?” Aidan glowered at the fantasy figures and shook his head. There was no way he’d ever find a friend like Robby again.

Robby Pierson and his family had moved from Florida to a house in Maryland a block away from Aidan. The two boys had met in school, had homeroom together and lockers side by side, and everything changed for Aidan. Until that time, Aidan had been known to the kids in the neighborhood and at school as the overweight weirdo who sat around all day drawing castles and spacecraft. Then Robby showed up. He was tall and muscular and had huge green eyes, long blond hair, and an earring. And given his good looks and ability to play every sport better than everyone else, he was instantly crowned “so cool” by everyone-even the juniors and seniors!

For reasons Aidan still didn’t understand, Robby had decided to become his best friend. They hung out between classes, after school, and sometimes had PlayStation sleepovers on the weekends.

It was as if coolness were a magical golden powder that could rub off on Aidan just by standing in Robby’s shadow. Because of Robby, the most popular kids in the school paid attention to Aidan. They all seemed to think, If Robby Pierson thinks he’s cool, then he must be cool. It was, after all, a large shadow, and Aidan liked it there. He didn’t have to worry about being picked on, and better still, he never had to think about what to do in certain situations-Robby always knew what to do.

“Looks like it’s back to being the oddball again!” Aidan’s anger surged to the point that he was tempted to smack the little medieval figurines right off the table, but he’d already destroyed a lamp. So he hit his pillow as hard as he could and then threw it at his bedroom door.

Aidan suddenly sat very still on the edge of his bed. He had the most intense feeling that someone was outside his bedroom window watching him. He felt frozen in time, unable at first to summon the courage to turn around.

This is stupid, he thought. I mean, who could be at my window? I’m on the second floor, and there’s nothing out there to stand on… except, maybe one of the pines.

Aidan spun around and looked out the window. The front yard was full of tall evergreens, but the biggest one was rocking severely back and forth.

… like something was in there! The thought leaped into Aidan’s mind, and he pressed his face up against the glass.

Aidan looked left, right, up, down. At first he didn’t see anything. But then, up the road that ran in front of his house, there was a shadow. It was wide, spanning the road at times, and it was moving fast. That’s what caught Aidan’s eye. And even through the glass, Aidan heard a peculiar swooshing sound. Aidan looked up in the sky. Nothing there.

The swooshes continued. And the shadow rocketed back toward Aidan’s house. Aidan strained to see what could be casting such a shadow, but there was no passing cloud or low-flying plane. The shadow swooped over the house, and for a split second the sun was eclipsed by

… something.

Aidan bounced off his bed, took the stairs two at a time, arriving with a horrendous thud at the bottom.

“Hey, watch the thumping!” Aidan’s father bellowed from the kitchen.

“Sorry!” Aidan yelled over his shoulder as he ran out the front door to search the skies.

I ’m serious, Mom, it was this huge shadow,” Aidan mumbled earnestly, his mouth half full of pizza.

“I’m sure you saw something, Aidan,” she replied. “Maybe it was an airplane?”

“Mom, airplanes don’t sound like that. It was like, swoosh, swoosh!”

“I didn’t see-or hear-anything,” offered Aidan’s dad.

“Maybe it was a helicopter?”

“Mommm!”

“Sorry,” she said, holding up her hands. “But helicopters do go swoosh, swoosh.”

Aidan scowled.

“Besides, it couldn’t have been anything like that because it was in the big pine tree out front…”

“It was in the pine tree?” his parents echoed. They both had raised eyebrows.

Grampin wheeled into the kitchen and parked at the table. Aidan got up immediately and said, “Oh, never mind!”

The next morning, Aidan sat at his computer, staring at the last email Robby had sent. In it, Robby had explained that he was going away for two weeks to a special soccer camp being held at Camp Ramblewood or Redwater or Rattleweed or something like that- Robby couldn’t remember. Pro soccer players were coming to train promising junior players.

The bad part was that Robby said he wouldn’t have access to the Internet. That meant no emails would come until Robby came home in August. “Great,” Aidan moaned. “Some summer vacation.”

In the three weeks since they’d arrived in Colorado, Aidan had run out of good books and had mastered every PS2 game he owned. Aidan’s father was at the firm all day. His mom went to her new school two or three days a week to create lesson plans from the new math curriculum. And Grampin, well, he just wasn’t an option as far as Aidan was concerned.

But the biggest problem was that there didn’t seem to be any kids Aidan’s age in his new neighborhood. He didn’t even see any at the local shopping center. But at least he’d had Robby’s emails to look forward to-and now he didn’t even have that anymore.

With Robby, every day had been an adventure. Whether it was building forts in the woods, catching crayfish, or riding bikes on the winding trails behind the local high school-Robby found ways to make it exciting.

“That’s what I need,” Aidan said to himself, “an adventure!”

And there was one place in the house Aidan hadn’t checked out yet: the basement. But he didn’t like the thought of being underground, cold, and closed in. Still, he’d need to go in sometime, might as well be today.

Walking through the kitchen, Aidan passed by Grampin, who was asleep, snoring like a chorus of whoopee cushions, the coffee in his mug long since cold.

Then he spotted it-the basement door. It had a deadbolt, a chain latch, and a regular knob lock. Aidan had often wondered why Grampin needed three locks on the basement door. He’d wondered about it when he’d visited as a little boy, but not enough to ask… and certainly not enough to go down there. Aidan didn’t like basements. They were uncomfortable, damp, and full of shadows. Robby’s basement back in Maryland had always given Aidan the creeps.

Aidan had a feeling that Grampin’s basement would be worse. Could this be the adventure he was searching for?

Quietly, Aidan slipped into the basement and shut the door behind him. He found himself smothered in darkness. He groped about, flicked the light switch-nothing.

After wrestling with second thoughts, he tried to tiptoe down the stairs. But each step Aidan took made a different creak or groan, like playing a wildly-out-of-tune piano. If there was something sinister lurking in the basement shadows, it surely knew Aidan was coming.

Aidan reached the bottom step and realized with great relief that the basement wasn’t completely dark. There were three windows that, while painted a peculiar shade of green, at least let in enough light to make out shapes.

Eyes wide and straining, Aidan stepped down onto the basement floor. He half expected ghoulish, rotting hands to reach up from the ground to grab at his ankles, but none did. There were, however, other reasons for him to feel uncomfortable. It was cold-a kind of chill that seeped through clothing and made Aidan cringe. There was also a damp, mildewed smell. On top of that, it was unnaturally silent. No crickets, no rattling water heater… nothing. The only sound Aidan heard was his own heart pulsing away while he walked.