Four months ago, my mother died peacefully in her sleep at the age of sixty-eight. I wasn’t exactly heartbroken at her unexpected passing. We had been estranged for over twenty years. I hadn’t even seen her since I had left home for the last time, bound for college. No phone calls either, just an occasional Christmas card with a brief, impersonal message passed back and forth.
My mother had never been a very warm or nurturing presence as I was growing up. Looking back, I think it probably had something to do with her own difficult childhood as a second-generation Irish immigrant in a large working-class family. There was also her older brother…who had committed suicide when she was only ten. We had never gotten along and had clashed often, especially after I entered adolescence, probably because of our vastly different personalities. Whereas I had been a cocky, irreverent, laid-back teen, she had been hard-working, stern, cold and often harsh.
After graduating college in ‘06 (the first in my family to finish high school, let alone earn a degree) I had moved to the city to pursue a career. I had never gone back to visit her, not once.
As I was her only close living relative (my father died when I was still very young, and I had been an only child) I inherited my mother’s home after she died. It was the same house I had grown up in and had also been her childhood home; she and my father having bought it from her parents after they got married.
I wasn’t thrilled about owning the house. I had too many bad memories of it. Also, it was an ugly old place, and always had been. A dilapidated two-story clapboard, well over a hundred years old, in a low-income neighborhood of similar decrepit houses. It had probably been a nice place to live at one time; the area where it stood had originally been one of the more upscale parts of the town where I grew up…but that had been before the Great Depression, and the area had gone into an economic decline long before I was born – hell, even before my parents were born.
I had no interest in keeping the property and intended on selling it. But before I did, I decided to make the long-overdue trip back home and take one last look at the place where I had grown up. Not so much out of a sense of nostalgia or familial obligation; I was just curious to see how my mother had spent the last years of her life, and also, I wanted to check the house and see if there was anything I wanted to take with me before it went on the market.
My job keeps me pretty busy, so it wasn’t until last month (three months after her funeral) that I finally found the time to break away and take a few days off.
It was a gray, dreary day about a week before Thanksgiving when I finally made the hour-long drive out of the city and back to the town where I had spent my childhood. The old neighborhood hadn’t changed much; it was still as depressing and impoverished as I remembered; the same shabby houses, same tiny, unkempt lawns, same weedy, cracked sidewalks and bumpy, poorly maintained streets.
I parked alongside the curb and got out of my car, taking a moment to stand and regard the house I hadn’t laid eyes on in over two decades. It looked even more bleak and squalid than I recalled as a kid: peeling paint, sagging gutters, crumbling foundation, cracked windowpanes. Even when compared to its nearly identical run-down neighbors, it somehow stood out in even sharper contrast, like a testament to all the poverty and hopelessness I had experienced living there; everything I had fled to college to escape from, vowing I would never be as poor as my parents had been.
Already I regretted having come back.
With a sigh, I reluctantly stepped up the walkway to the front door and unlocked it with the key the executor of my mother’s will had given me after her funeral.
I entered and began to inspect the house. It was remarkably unchanged. At some point my mother had replaced the old analog TV in the living room with a modern flatscreen, but apart from that, everything seemed to be exactly the same. Same threadbare furniture, same tacky knickknacks, same faded wallpaper.
I went upstairs and walked down the narrow hallway, pausing at my mother’s doorway. Dull sunlight filtered in through the shabby curtains, illuminating the gloomy bedroom. I stared at the bare, sagging mattress on the bed where she had died. Her medications still cluttered the bedside table.
I stood there for a couple minutes, lost in thought, then moved on. I went to my old bedroom next. At some point after I’d moved out my mother had turned it into a storage room. My bed and dresser were gone. So were the posters that had once decorated my walls. The shelves that had held my high school sports trophies (I wondered briefly if she’d thrown them out or had put them in the attic) now contained spare towels and extra toiletries. The air was musty.
I went to the undressed, dusty window and peered out at the drab late-autumn afternoon. The house was silent apart from my own breathing. My mother had died alone in this dismal house; the house she, unlike me, had never been able to escape from. The very air felt freighted with bad memories. Nothing good had ever happened here.
“I finally came home, Mom,” I whispered, my voice choking on the final word. I felt the sting of tears in my eyes. Even though I still didn’t mourn her as I probably should have, I did feel an overwhelming sense of sorrow and regret that we had never reconciled while there had still been time or had been closer during her last few years. There was nothing here I wanted to keep.
I left my former bedroom and went downstairs.
I don’t know what motivated me to go down into the basement. There was nothing down there that would have interested me. I could just as easily have left the house right then and gone home. Maybe it was just a desire to be thorough; I had already checked out the rest of the house, and once I left, I knew I would never come back.
The basement door was in the kitchen, between the refrigerator and the pantry. I opened it, flipped on the light, and descended the creaking wooden steps to the bottom.
The basement was located directly beneath the kitchen. It was a small, dank, low-ceilinged room hardly bigger than a walk-in closet. Rough stone walls and a concrete floor dimly illuminated by a single bare light bulb. It was mostly barren except for the washer and dryer, a shelf full of cleaning supplies, and some old tools cluttering one corner.
I looked around with passing curiosity. When I turned to the rear wall, I couldn’t help but crack a small smile.
“Still there.”
For as long as I could remember the back wall of the basement had been dominated by a huge canvas mural depicting the black silhouettes of jitterbugging 1950’s teenagers dancing against a white background. I had no idea why my grandparents (presumably, since they had owned the house before my parents) had put it there; maybe as a lame attempt to add a little cheer to such a dingy space.
Whatever the reason, it was still there after all these years, although now it was badly faded, the canvas dirty and mildewed and tattered with age.
Still smiling I started to turn away to leave the basement (and the house) …but at the last second something caught my eye. I approached and crouched down for a closer look, puzzled.
The bottom of the old mural had pulled away from the wall and curled up a few inches over the years, probably due to the dampness of the basement…and what was revealed wasn’t bare stone but wood.
Intrigued, I grasped the frayed edge of the mural and pulled it up more, the rotted canvas ripping a little, exposing more wood. For a second, I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Then it hit me, and I was stunned.
It was a door.
A secret door hidden behind the old, tasteless mural for God only knew how many years.
A dozen questions rushed through my mind upon this discovery, chiefly among them: Who had hidden this door? Why was it hidden? And most importantly: what was on the other side of it?
In a sudden burst of excitement, I unthinkingly seized the mural and pulled it with all my strength, tearing it completely away from the rear wall of the basement, fully exposing the concealed door. I stood there, transfixed in shock, staring.
The door looked ancient; somehow it appeared even older than the house itself. It was rounded at the top, constructed of thick, heavy slabs of wood bound together with iron bands. There was no knob; just a large iron pull-ring. It looked like a door you’d see in a medieval castle. An old – but still relatively modern-looking – padlock was fastened to a hasp that secured it to the wall.
But what surprised me most of all wasn’t so much the door itself but the large manilla envelope that had been stapled to it. And carefully printed in faded letters on the envelope was my own name…and a message in big block letters: FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NEVER OPEN THIS DOOR!
I pulled the manila envelope loose and examined it closely. It didn’t look like it had been left there anytime recently. It seemed to have been there for a long time; years, maybe even decades. Maybe since I had been a very young child. I recognized the handwriting as my mother’s. There was something inside the envelope; it felt like some kind of document.
I looked at the envelope and it’s ominous warning – FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NEVER OPEN THIS DOOR! – then at the mysterious door, the ancient-looking, out-of-place door that had been kept hidden in my childhood home for all this time, then back at the envelope in my hands. I was utterly baffled.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NEVER OPEN THIS DOOR!
So of course, like the idiot I was, before even opening the envelope to examine its contents, I made opening the door I was explicitly instructed to never open my first priority – notwithstanding, the Love of the Supreme Being.
But really, who could blame me? Who in my position would have been able to withstand the temptation to act in direct opposition to such a grave edict, regardless of the potential consequences? Curiosity killed the cat, right? There was a locked door in my old house that had remained a secret from me my entire life. Obviously, it had been kept a secret for a reason. Said reason was almost certainly detailed in whatever my mother had left for me in the envelope. I could have taken the time to look at the contents of the envelope for explanation, but quite frankly I didn’t feel like taking the time to do that. I needed immediate satisfaction. I wanted to solve this enigma in the most direct and prompt manner possible. I needed to open that fucking door!
I looked at the padlock. It didn’t seem likely I would find the key after all this time. And besides, upon closer inspection, I realized the keyhole had been filled with solder – making a search of the house a moot point.
I looked over at the old, rusty tools cluttering the corner of the basement. I rummaged through them, thinking I might find a crowbar or something I could use to pry off the hasp. Instead, I found something even better…a large bolt cutter! Perfect!
I opened the bolt cutters and fastened the blades to the padlock’s shackle. With a bit of effort, I was able to snap the padlock. I tossed it aside and grasped the iron pull-ring.
I had no idea what I was expecting to find on the other side of the door. A wild menagerie of different possibilities flashed through my imagination; everything from hidden valuables to dead bodies. I had to quell my excitement by reminding myself that this was probably how Geraldo Rivera had felt in the moments before opening Al Capone’s hidden vault.
I hesitated for a moment, bracing myself for whatever discovery I was about to make…then pulled hard. The door opened with surprising ease given that it had to have been shut for…well, God only knew how long. The hinges moved smoothly and soundlessly. I pulled it all the way open, and stared through the doorway at…
Nothing.
Nothing but blackness. Utter blackness.
I took out my phone, turned on its flashlight, and aimed it into the darkness, but it illuminated nothing.
Shit!
Thinking the phone’s light simply wasn’t powerful enough, I rushed back upstairs and frantically searched through the kitchen cabinets and drawers until I found the big 4-cell Maglite I remembered from my childhood. A long, heavy flashlight with a powerful beam. I turned it on to test the batteries, saw it worked, then scrambled back into the basement.
I shined the light into the doorway…and was perplexed.
The flashlight’s beam didn’t reveal anything in the dark space beyond the threshold. It didn’t cast a spotlight circle of brightness upon the rear wall of the secret room or disclose anything the room might have contained. The beam of light seemed strangely…diffused. The beam didn’t seem to penetrate the illimitable blackness so much as be absorbed by it. It was like aiming a flashlight at the night sky. As if there was nothing solid for the shaft of light to fix upon.
I couldn’t make sense of it. What I was seeing was impossible.
Standing there, contemplating that Stygian abyss, I had the impression that I was looking upon some vast, lightless space of unknown enormous proportion; a space that seemed to illogically defy the physical dimensions of my mother’s house.
I felt a sudden flood of overwhelming, existential dread and horror; something close to madness. I felt as if I was peering through a doorway into the Godless black void of nonexistence that must stand beyond the furthest reaches of the universe, a place where nothing was or ever had been or would be. It was like looking into the mouth of hell.
“Robert…”
For a few seconds I didn’t even register the voice, thinking perhaps I had only imagined it. But then it spoke my name again.
“Robert…”
It was my mother’s voice. I recognized it clearly even though I hadn’t heard it in more than twenty years. My dead mother’s voice…whispering my name from the black gulf beyond the doorway.
I was galvanized with sudden primal terror, so intense that coherent thought became almost impossible. I began to tremble. I couldn’t even breath.
The voice spoke again, faintly, as if speaking from a great distance, but unmistakably my late mother’s. And the urgent pleading in it was also unmistakable.
“Please, Robert, help me…”
This isn’t real, some part of my mind spoke up, trying to maintain its sanity and make logical sense of what was happening. It cannot be real. You’re dreaming.
“Please, Robert, help me,” the disembodied voice beseeched, imploring desperately. “Help me. It’s so cold and dark in here.”
The voice was trying to coax me through the doorway into the unknown blackness. And with sudden chilling certainty, I understand it was not my mother speaking to me, attempting to lure me to it.
“Please Robert–”
My paralysis snapped. I reached suddenly, compulsively for the door and slammed it shut, blocking out that awful, unnatural darkness.
Immediately the voice fell silent.
Gasping, with a sudden rush of panicked adrenalin, I closed the hasp. My eyes darted around the basement. The padlock was ruined, but I found a screwdriver amidst the old tools and inserted it into the hasp, securing the door.
Then I ran upstairs, pausing only long enough to grab the still-unopened envelope my mother had addressed to me.
I fled the house, leaped into my car, and drove away. And I haven’t returned since.
*****
When I got home about an hour later, I was almost back to normal. I spent most of the return journey in a state of shock, driving my car on autopilot barely aware of my surroundings, until I was only a few miles away from my apartment. Then I had to pull into a gas station as I was struck by a crippling panic attack. I opened my door and thrust my head out just in time to avoid vomiting into my car. Then I just leaned back with my hands over my face, weeping and gasping, for ten minutes, until I had myself more or less back under control.
I entered my apartment, shut the door, then sat down on my couch and examined the manilla envelope I had found on the hidden basement door.
ROBERT - FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, NEVER OPEN THIS DOOR!
I opened it. It contained a sheaf of musty-smelling handwritten pages.
I began to read, and as I read, I began to understand why my mother had kept that door a secret from me all these years, and why she had left me a warning for when I would inevitably discover it.
The first page was dated the year I was born. My mother had written this and left it for me nearly forty years before, when I had still been an infant. She must have been terrified something might happen to her or that she wouldn’t be present to warn me in the event that I stumbled upon the door while I was still a child.
I read, and I began to feel that familiar cold dread creeping into my body, just as it had when I first opened the door.
My mother had been born the year after her parents had immigrated to the U.S. from Ireland. They had bought the old house when she was five, having saved up for it for several years working their grueling menial jobs as factory workers. Even then the house had been rundown, but it had been cheap, and it was all they could afford, and they had still been grateful to own an actual home of their own, a place they could raise their family instead of the cramped slum apartment they had all been sharing.
Three years passed uneventfully in the house. The terror began when my mother was eight.
She and her ten-year-old brother had been the youngest of five children, the older three already being adults who had joined their parents in the workforce. As a result, when they weren’t in school, they were often alone in the house until the rest of the family got home in the evening. (This probably sounds like child neglect to you, but bear in mind, this was the early 1960’s and times were different then.)
It was her brother who found the door in the basement. At the time, it had been concealed behind a set of shelves that contained old jars of preserves left behind by the previous owner. It was a chilly, windy day in late fall, during their autumn break from school. They had been playing hide-and-seek and he had squeezed into the narrow space between the shelves and the wall, and that was how he had discovered it.
When their parents and older siblings got home, he had told them what he had found. Intrigued, their father and her two older brothers had removed the shelves, exposing the door. It had been locked with an ancient brass padlock – one of those round railroad locks like you see in old Western films – and didn’t look like it had been opened in at least a century. The padlock was so old and corroded that it crumbled to dust when her father gave it a single tug.
Their father had opened the door, shined a flashlight, taken a single look inside…then immediately slammed the door. My mother wrote that she had never seen her father look so frightened as he had right then; never before, and never after.
He had sternly told his five children to never open that door or ever go near it again. He had refused to answer any questions and had sent them all to bed.
That night my mother had heard her parents talking urgently in their bedroom. She had pressed her ear to the wall and listened. She couldn’t make out everything they were saying, but she did hear her father say something to her mother about “his sister laughing in the dark” and “buying a new lock at the hardware store tomorrow.” She said their voices were low and heated, but it didn’t sound like they were fighting. It sounded like they were just scared.
My mother was troubled by what her father had said about hearing his sister laughing. Her father had only had one sister, who would have been my mother’s aunt…but she had died when he was still a child living in Ireland.
My mother had been frightened…but her brother had been intrigued. He had wanted to know what his father could have seen (or heard) on the other side of that door that would have upset him so much. His curiosity overrode any trepidation he may have had. Later that night, after the rest of the family was asleep, he had disobeyed his father’s order.
He had gotten up, gone down to the basement, and opened the door.
The next morning, my mother had awakened to the sound of my grandmother screaming her husband’s name in a panic. Her voice had been coming from the basement.
The family had hurried down to the basement. My mother had observed her mother standing over my uncle, who was huddled in the corner, shuddering spasmodically. My mother wrote that she never forgot what she saw; she said it haunted her for the rest of her life.
Her brother’s face was contorted in a grimace of pure, incomprehensible terror, his eyes bulging from their sockets, his teeth bared like a snarling dog’s. His hair had turned completely white. His bulging, unblinking eyes were fixed in a direct line of sight with the secret basement door…which was standing wide open on a rectangular of total blackness.
He was alive, but was in a state of full catatonia, unable to speak or move or react to any stimuli.
My grandparents had called an ambulance and my uncle was rushed to the hospital. My father immediately bought a new padlock and sealed the basement door.
My uncle was put in a mental institution. The doctors thought he would never recover, but miraculously, against all expectations, he eventually did…although it was over a year before he was functional enough to return home.
He was never fully the same after that. He was withdrawn and quiet and morose, prone to emotional outbursts and panic attacks. He had trouble sleeping and often experienced nightmares and night terrors when he did sleep. He refused to answer any questions about what had happened to him that night and would scream in fits of hysteria if prodded. He absolutely refused to set foot in the basement or even go near the door in the kitchen that led down there. He would become violent if anyone tried to make him.
His condition gradually deteriorated over the next year. He lost weight and developed dark rings around his eyes from lack of sleep. He became paranoid and jumped at every sound. My grandparents would have sent him to a psychiatrist if they could have, but they simply couldn’t afford it.
One night, after bedtime, he broke down crying and finally told my mother what had happened that night almost two years before.
When he opened the door, he had heard a voice speaking to him from the darkness. Not a scary or a threatening voice. It was a friendly voice. A voice he even recognized.
“Whose voice?” my mother asked him.
“Captain Kangaroo,” my uncle had stammered to her, referencing a popular children’s television show from the time that he had been fond of. “It was Captain Kangaroo. He spoke to me by name. He told me I could come inside and play with him in the Treasure House.”
He had stepped through the dark doorway, into the gulf of the unknown.
“What did you see in there?’ my mother had anxiously asked him.
My uncle had been quite for several long moments. Tears rolled down his cheeks. My mother could see fear rising in his eyes as he forced the words out.
“It wasn’t the Treasure House. It wasn’t Captain Kangaroo in there. It…” He paused to gulp, then choked out: “There are things in there. In the darkness. Things you can see but can’t see.”
My mother had been confused by that statement – things you can see but can’t see -- but my uncle hadn’t, or perhaps couldn’t explain it any better than that.
Reading those words, I felt a chill envelope my whole body, as if hundreds of ice cubes were being pressed against my skin.
Things you can see but can’t see.
My uncle told her he had been lost in the darkness with those things, hunted by them, running from them, hiding from them, unable to find the doorway that led back to the basement – “It’s bigger in there than you think,” he said, “So much bigger. It’s endless in there.” – until just by blind chance he had stumbled through it, away from that awful, Godless blackness. He told her that he probably hadn’t been in there more than an hour at most, but “time is different inside.” It felt like he had been trapped in there for many years, perhaps even centuries.
My uncle told my mother that he couldn’t stand to live with what he had experienced any longer. He said it felt like some part of him had never left that secret basement room and was still trapped in there…for eternity. He had hugged her and kissed her and told her he was sorry, then had left her room. My mother was bewildered and frightened and confused by what he had meant with his final words: I’m sorry.
That was the last time she ever saw her brother alive.
He had taken his father’s straight razor from the bathroom and slit his wrists in his bed that same night. My uncle had been twelve years old.
She had never told her parents what her brother had told her the night before he killed himself. They were already so overwhelmed with grief and horror she didn’t think they could bear it. But they must have suspected his death had something to do with whatever her had experienced in the basement. They had barricaded the door and strictly forbid the rest of their children from ever going down there again. My grandmother had been the only one to enter the basement to do the laundry, and even then, she tried to keep her visits as brief as possible. My grandparents wouldn’t allow them to talk about my uncle or his death, and even mentioning his name would cause them to get slapped – as my mother painfully learned early on. They wanted to forget about him and put the whole terrible ordeal behind them.
My mother often wondered why her parents hadn’t sold the house and moved them somewhere else for a fresh start, why they had continued to live there after what had happened. She assumed it was probably because of their lack of money.
But then, years later, when she was a young woman and married my father, her parents, aging and in failing health, asked her if she and her new husband would take the house from them when they died. My mother said that my grandmother didn’t so much offer as beg them to live there.
My mother couldn’t believe her parents would want the house to remain in the family after the loss they had suffered there, but my grandmother had told my mother she couldn’t stand the thought of the house falling into someone else’s possession…someone who didn’t know about the door in the basement. Someone who might also have children.
Reading that, I sudden understood. Understood everything. I understood why my mother had been so strict and overbearing when I was a child; so overprotective of me. Why she had always been so moody and serious. Why she had continued to live in that gloomy house with its burden of tragedy and painful memories, all those years, right up until the day she died.
I understood why she had hidden the door behind that old mural with a warning in the event that I would someday uncover it after she was gone.
She had been guarding that door. Guarding the door to prevent some other unfortunate, unknowing soul from opening it and being lured into the darkness by a familiar, trusted voice…as her brother had been.
I understood something else: I could never sell that house. I had to keep it in my possession, take up my mother’s mantle as its guardian, for the rest of my life.
There is something in the darkness beyond that old wooden door. Something terrible that doesn’t belong in our world.
Something unnatural and unholy…
Something you can see…but can’t see.