They always left that door open, those strange neighbors of
my married uncle where he lived up in West Milford .
And it always bothered me each time I went up to visit for a
weekend or a week (the length of time depending on how much trouble I’d gotten
into recently or whether my mother was acting up in the hospital and they
needed to keep me calm.)
Half swung in, this was a small cellar door with four dirty
panes, and a large gray shackle for a padlock – which hung from the unlatched
loop like a silver drip.
It haunted me each time I saw that door, and made me ache to
go over and shut it. I kept thinking something might come out that I didn’t
want to see, some terrible, gruesome beast or monster. But it is exactly that
which kept me from going there.
Sometimes, sleeping in a room on that side of my uncle’s
house, I heard the lock rattle in the wind, or the rusted hinges groan.
In morning, I would glance at the window for some sign of
the beasts I was sure had wandered out and come near to the window where I
slept. But I saw no sign.
I also never saw sign of the neighbors that supposedly lived
there, and presumed they stayed in the upper spires of that old house.
When I came down to breakfast with my uncle and aunt and
their batch of kids, I must have looked pale. My aunt asked if I felt all right
– presuming I was upset about my mother. My uncle, grumbling from behind his
newspaper, told her to leave me alone, meaning that I had to learn to deal with
life’s tragedies. He was always such a practical man. I dared not ask either
about the house next door or its strange neighbors, or why they kept that
basement door open all the time.
So on this particular day when I went outside after
breakfast, I could not stop staring at that door. Its gaping hole was like a
hole in me.
And so I started towards it, grimly determined to shut it,
my small feet stumbling over tuffs of grass growing between the stones of the
walk, kicking them by accident so that they clattered ahead of me like an
advertisement.
I cringed with each unintended sound and the door grew
larger at my approach, as did the windows above, dark and dirty, so that I
imagined each of them framing faces that looked down at me.
I shivered even though it was hot. The palms of my hands
sweated as I came face to face with the hole in the world and reached in with
my small hand to grasp what seemed to be a very large door handle.
I yanked on it. The door, groaning like something dying,
came only half way before catching on some stone embedded on the dirt inside. I
kicked the stone, and then pulled the door again, slamming it, causing a
shudder to ripple through the whole house. Then I ran like hell back to my
uncle’s house, and around the other side where I didn’t have to see it, shaking
when I got there as if the temperature had dropped to below zero, and yet
filled with intense pride.
In the middle of the night, I dreamed of groaning and
moaning, and fierce monsters that were pounding on the door to be let out.
When I woke in the morning, I stared out my window only to
find that someone had opened the door again.
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