The Door in the Basement

It glowed green as only things of both great beauty and great danger must. 

I did not know it then, but the pocket watch of both my husband and my life was being wound for its last time, and how tightly wound was not ours to know. We were the ticking hands of a flesh and blood clock losing a little sliver of time with each passing moment. 

And it was his doing that undone us. His and that damned light and all it represented.

The awful thing he had been working on all Summer would no longer be able to be contained by the tiny space of our basement. That green light and the horror that was its source would soon bleed out into the rest of the house and the world beyond in only so many days, just as that beautiful and terrible light had when I first had seen it.

---

Bill had lost yet another job, the third this year and he seemed to be giving up entirely. That's when he spotted the odd ad in the magazine he'd been reading.

"Look at this Nat!" he said. Passing the magazine over. "A door to nowhere."

I looked at the ad while knitting and watching jeopardy. I'd been on my feet all day, having done my third twelve-hour shift of the week, looking forward to my three-day weekend.

It looked innocent enough. Some kind of do-it-yourself kit. A waste of money, maybe just the thing he needed to take his mind off of things.

"You should order it," I said with a little smile.

"I should," he said, perfectly happy with the prospect of the project.

---

The package arrived at the beginning of Summer. Three large boxes with instructions I was sure would lead to him giving up before he'd even start. He surprised me, however, giving himself to the full task, taking it above and beyond its instructions, excitedly running through the house grabbing kitchen appliances and even dragging the old computer downstairs with him, saying how he had ideas for how to improve it, how to make it bigger.

At first, it was good just to see him happy. To see him lose himself to the work of the project. I never resented the money he spent on it, never thought twice about what it was he was supposed to be building down there. 

I thought it was a good thing. I thought, maybe it'd lead to some new job skills.

But then he shut the basement door, even putting a padlock on it. And then came the green light with all its curious little secrets. And then he came up from the basement less and less, almost never having dinner with me, grabbing plates of food and rushing back downstairs, shutting the door hard in my face as he did.

---

One of the few nights Bill had actually come up from the basement and joined me for dinner, I decided to try and break the silence.

"How's your little project coming along?" I asked.

"Little project? It's the single most important thing in human history."

"What's that mean exactly?" I asked.

He looked at me for a long moment, his eyes painting a painfully obvious picture of every condescending thought he held against me.

"Imagine a door between our world and…" he said, looking around, "…somewhere else. Imagine being able to open such a door. Being able to step through and walk to other worlds."

Walk to other worlds? I felt my stomach twist. He was having a nervous breakdown. 

"Bill, walk, where, exactly?" I asked.

"I don't know, the instructions didn't say. Just, somewhere, nowhere, I don't know."

He went back to eating. I looked at him for a long aching moment as he shoveled mashed potatoes and bits of biscuits into his mouth. He ate excitedly, like a small child having to eat lunch before getting to go back outside to play.

I pushed potatoes around on my plate and ate very little. I wanted to know what he had really been up to in the basement. I wanted to know why he had put the padlock on the door. I wanted to know why there were so many strange sounds coming from down there, sounds that didn't quite fit the world I had always known and loved in our little neighborhood.

---

A few days later, I found myself standing at the basement door, playing the padlock, dinner ready and no husband to share it with.

"Bill?" I called, my face against the shut basement door.

I heard a muffled sound as if he had answered me absentmindedly.

"Bill," I said, this time a little louder. "Dinner's ready."

"Dammit Natalie, I'm busy down here!"

"I'll leave it on the table for you," I said. More determined than ever to get behind that locked door.

There were terrible sounds in the basement. Sounds that kept me awake at all hours of the night. Sudden ripping sounds that clawed at the back of my skull and gave me strange dreams. Whatever he was up to down there was getting to me in the strangest ways.

Was this what it felt like to lose grip on reality?

---

And then I reached my breaking point. Knitting and eyeing the door. I decided there was a time and place for proper and polite and a time and place for blind fury.

I had had enough. I was getting into that basement and I wasn't knocking on the fucking door to do it either.

I stood just outside the door for a moment making a deal with my darker self. I nodded once as I straightened out my skirt and pushed my hair back, making sure there were no loose strands.

"Bill darling," I called down, standing near the door, " I'm about to bust the door down to the basement, do you mind?"

I listened as he continued to hammer away at one thing or another, ignoring me as he had for one too many days before. He cranked up one of the many whining engines he had built overnight. The lights went low and then flickered. The floors began to hum up and into my feet.

Well, I had warned him, hadn't I?

I turned and went to the garage where all the women with mostly normal husbands did their mostly normal tinkerings, like fixing lawnmowers and gluing together plastic planes from wars they were either too young or too terrified to join.

I sized up my options and decided to go with the classic choice: the ax.

---

I had gone to the garage and brought hell back with me.

I drew the ax back, ready to take my first swing at the door, feet spread as much as the skirt allowed, and then I began to swing. It surprised me how easily the door caved in under the sharp edge of the ax, and just how good it felt to be so deliciously violent against the door he had shut in my face.

One swing for each day he had ignored me. One chop for every dinner I had eaten alone. One heavy thud after another as the door turned into splinters in front of me. And then there wasn't much left of the door to be violent against.

"Bill sweety, " I said, eyeing the ax blade. I licked one thumb and then ran it against the sharp edge. "I'm coming down for a visit."

---

Whatever I had planned to do when I had gotten to the basement was soon forgotten when I came to the bottom of the tiny stairs and saw the tight space of our suburban basement bulging with the moving parts of one endless flow of machinery. And in its center the ugliest door I had ever seen, sitting right in the middle of the room, firmly planted in a mechanical frame with glowing rods all around.

"What in the name of…" I began, but the machine was roaring at a fever pitch.

Bill turned and looked at me, "Natalie?"

"What is this?" I yelled over the machine.

He grinned an awkward grin as if he'd been caught doing something embarrassing and then turned to look at the odd cohesion of pipeworks releasing steam, and the green glowing rods that pumped up and down feeding a visible electric current into and around the door. 

Then he made a little Vanna White motion toward the whole thing. "She's a beauty, ain't she?"

I remembered the ax. I remembered the way it felt to bust down the basement door. I remembered all those quiet nights left alone in the bed wanting him next to me, and him never coming. I remembered every dinner I made special for him, and I remembered raking his uneaten plates into the trash, not even wanting to share it with the neighborhood cats.

There was a new door down here that needed busting, I thought, as I sized up that god-awful stale mustard yellow door sitting in its green frame with all its pulsating mechanics around it.

I ran for the door and began to chop immediately. The ax fed me all the sweet violence I had never known I was craving until I began to destroy his precious little machine.

---

I was mid-swing, trying my best to bust the door down, but finding it surprisingly sturdy when the first hint of something terrible revealed itself. 

As impossible as it may seem, there was something on the other side of that door. I felt it bang back on the door with each thud of my ax. Bill was trying to yank me away, but adrenaline made me stronger. I knocked him on his ass and gave him a look that made him cower.

That's when I made my fatal mistake. I decided to hit the machine itself. And when I did, a chain of events unfolded until it fed into one gigantic and horrible explosion of green light, chaos, and something in the fabric of reality itself being torn in two.

---

Bill's eyes were fat with fear as he ran between me and the machine, no longer protecting his precious work, but actually showing real concern for me. I felt my stomach flop as he looked at me. He mouthed the words, "run" but no sound came out.

Neither of us had a chance at that point. It was already too late.

Then everything went green. There was a sudden whooshing sound as the air first pushed outward and then sucked back in on us. We were nothing but skeletons for one horrible eternity of tick-ticking seconds, two green-tinted skeletons looking at each other across the expanse of time and space before we found ourselves returning to flesh and blood again.

Somewhere in that horrible green moment, the impossible door in its impossible frame had actually opened. Things came out of that door, too many to name, and at a firehose speed, flooding our world with their impossibilities. But that wasn't all, something bigger, much, much bigger, came pushing through the door. And when it did, everything went to hell.

That's when the world we had always knowns caved in on itself. That's when the beast from the other side of the door hunkered down and thundered through. It stood to its full height and the house buckled under its shoulders and its bone-barbed back before collapsing in around us. 

And it was out. It was let loose.

Then the horrible vision was gone and we were laying together in the chaos of our destroyed basement wondering what evil thing Bill's machine and my ax had unleashed on the world.

Outside car alarms dotted up and down the street, a muffled explosion could be heard far off and the unmistakable thudding of something very large thundered across the neighborhood. The screaming soon followed and then silence.