The Apocalypse Door,
Part 22
by William Todd

The attic wore the smell of the clammy night air and took on a more malign character in its garment of darkness. As John peered up into a blackness that had been partly eaten away by the hall light, it reminded him of a bleak dungeon. The gloom quickly faded when John turned on the attic light, but his growing anxiety did not.

Footsteps replaced the cadence of the rain on the rooftop and brought the space to life as John and Sandy climbed the stairs.

As soon as he reached the top, John began inspecting the attic floor.

“What exactly are we doing up here, anyway?” Sandy asked.

John replied, “Stupid as it may sound, looking for a key.”

“To what?”

“Don’t know.”

“So this person who just pranked you told you to look for a key?”

“Are you usually this easy?”

“Funny.” He bent down on his hands and knees and started looking under piles of clothing, under old furniture and in dark stretches of floorboard. “There was a time in my grandfather’s life when he first moved here from Scotland that, for whatever reason, he rarely ever mentioned. All I know is that for a period of two or three years he lived in a small town, Thurmond, in southeastern New York State before moving here. He said it was as an uneventful time in his life, and he grew bored with the area but never really mentioned anything about his living there beyond that. Now this man who just called says he’s a priest, and he knew that my grandfather had lived there. I don’t think just anyone would know that kind of information about my grandfather. At least not someone pulling a phone prank.” He paused in his search long enough to scratch his head, and he looked up at Sandy and gave her a conceding shrug of his shoulders. “He seemed to know enough for me to give him the benefit of the doubt. And besides that, there was something about the man’s voice that made me want to believe him. A sort of desperation. Bored Saturday night teens don’t normally carry the conviction this one had.”

“You’re a push over, John Walker,” she said.

“It doesn’t take much.”

She gave a half-hearted look around the dismal room and said, “Okay, so what’s so special about this key?”

“I don’t know. Special enough that this priest is supposedly coming to get it--a priest from Scotland, no less. Says my grandfather took it from a monastery. It belongs to the Catholic Church.”

“He was a thief,” she joked.

“I hardly doubt it.”

“And why are we looking for it up here?”

“Because I think I found it earlier today looking through that old trunk behind you--another reason why I decided to believe him.”

She took a seat on the trunk as John fumbled around on the dusty floor. “So why can’t you find it now?”

“I don’t want to say. Just let me find it first. Then you’ll see why maybe a priest might be interested in it.”

He recalled how the strange key had jolted his body with some sort of electrical charge when he’d touched it. And how the room began spinning wildly, and he began hearing things, seeing things. That singular fear that had earlier made his heart pound through his rib cage still troubled him, though Bill and Sandy had done a good job of keeping his mind off of that strange event. What was that key for? he asked himself. Why did the Church have such a key, and where’d they get it? How did Amos end up with it?

Suddenly, between a pair of shoes under a rack of old clothes, John saw the key. “I found it,” he said over his shoulder.

Sandy went and knelt down beside him.

Between an old pair of black wingtips, she saw the ornately-carved key. “This is what the hub-bub is all about?” She picked it up to examine it and a second later felt the shockwave radiate up her arm before John had a chance to stop her. It fell from her hand as she stumbled backwards and fell onto her butt against the base of the trunk almost ten feet away.

“Are you okay?” he asked, amused but concerned that she may have hurt herself.

She just stared at him wide-eyed.

“Guess I should have told you that would happen, but I didn’t know you were going to pick it up.”

“W-what the hell was that?” she stuttered as she rubbed the prickling feeling from her hand.

“Isn’t it odd? It bit me like that too when I came across it earlier today. I have to admit, though, that I thought--or should say hoped--that I had imagined it. You proved me wrong.”

“I-it must have been static electricity or something, right?”

“That’s what I thought at first, but now I’m not so sure.”

He looked intently at the key. As if he were struck dumb and was still uncertain that what had just transpired and what had happened earlier was a farce, a trick of some kind, he said, “Let’s see if it’ll do it again.” He took a slow, deep breath and exhaled then rubbed his fingers together nervously as he reached down and grabbed the key. An abstruse charge of electrons, like a snake of raw energy, raced up John’s arm and propelled him rearward almost landing atop Sandy. A growing fear told him to relinquish his grasp, but the energy that had made Sandy instantly let go had somehow froze his fingers tight around the key. Within seconds, the entire room began to oscillate, twisting and contorting its contents with lightning quick speed, blurring together horizontally then vertically like a television out of whack. Colors melted together. Separate shapes fused into one through a bizarre, macroscopic osmosis, rendering nothing in the attic individually perceivable.

If one could imagine the combined effect of a myriad of hallucinogenic drugs, the world twirling around in front of John and Sandy, like a bizarre, life-size kaleidoscope, was ten times more bizarre.

Sandy cried out and reached for John’s arm but upon touching it, her clenched hand went through it as though it was a three-dimensional hologram. She cried out again.

Their heads were on the verge of exploding from sensory overload, spinning ever quicker, then vibrating spasmodically, seeing everything and nothing at the same time, the feeling of falling then floating, turning, twisting, horizontal then vertical, as if somehow transferred into the vortex of an F-5 tornado, careening, gyrating--oh God!--, faster, faster, faster.

And then the room stopped.

Sandy almost became sick from the dizziness. She gagged but managed to hold it back.

 Breathing to the point of hyperventilating, they each looked around the now quiescent attic then just stared at each other, pale, dazed.

Sandy apprehensively touched John’s arm again. It was solid now. Shaking but solid.

John brought the key up to eye-level and held it there with a gaze as strong as the iron grip that clenched it, and more thought out loud than spoke, “What the hell did my grandfather uncover?”

Then, something began forming in the dead air in front of them.  A pin hole of bright, neon-red light hung in mid-air about five feet away.

“Do you see it?” he asked, not sure if he was hallucinating.

Stunned and paralyzed with fear, Sandy could only nod in agreement.

Suddenly, instantly, it got bigger. A stream of hot gas, like a current of noxious air carried along by a lava flow flung back their hair and reverberated in waves along the front of their shirts. The two crawled across the floor toward the back of the attic as it grew.

Its shape and size expanded in rapid increments like a balloon filling with air--first to the size of a basket ball, then a tire, then finally halted its augmentation at roughly five feet across and seven feet high, ovoid now.

John couldn’t help but feel as though they had been flung headlong into an episode of The Twilight Zone, but the surreal reality of the spasming room and this subsequent manifestation scared him far more than anything Rod Serling could have ever conjured up.

The universe within the floating postern appeared to have illimitable distance, like looking into forever, and it seemed alive now like a giant slithering behemoth. Within the inner space of that strange, suspended ellipse, sinuous ranks of an orange-red vapor ascended like Arizona heat from a black-topped road. It was as though they were looking into a smelting furnace full of liquefied iron ore.

Torridity now seeped out into the cold attic, turning their cheeks red. Their eyes reflected the amber color of the furnace-like hole, making each look as if they were possessed, and the demon lived in their eyes.

“What in God’s name is it?” Sandy could only whisper.

“I-I think you’ve got your directions mixed up,” John replied.

Both looked on in fear and amazement--but mostly fear.

Lightning struck again outside, and its ferocity seemed to lend power to the sinewy flux because it, too, brightened for the length of the strike. Rain pounded at the attic roof like nature’s fist then fell silent. Hammered, then fell silent again, as though it knew what was being unleashed inside and was trying to gain entry, desperately wanting to be a part of what was happening.

Chilling susurrations now began to sound from within the hole, quietly at first like a legion of lamented whispers still a long way off but gradually getting louder. Their tone had a cabalistic quality that spoke of a dark and unquenchable hunger.

“Make it go away, John!” Sandy pleaded. “Please make it go away!”

The words had no sooner spilled from her mouth when a golem shadow overtook the portal. The red-orange color within turned a most deep-maroon. Unexpectedly, from the other side, something reached a long, charred-black arm out into the attic. It was inhumanly large and muscular with queer, discolored bulges like large pustules over its entirety. Its digits were tapered into talon-like barbs, as sharp as any surgical scalpel. When it clenched its fingers into a mammoth fist, the overlying flesh ripped apart, sounding like fall-withered leaves being trampled underfoot. It flexed and tore and snapped and cracked and oozed an impossibly blacker exudate from each seeping wound. The dripping puss ate at the wooden floor like acid.

The background noises were getting louder now, more ominous, just beyond the shadow-thing. Torturous cries and ear-splitting wails filled the room and were amalgamated with more awful chittering like gnawing teeth, grunts and snarls, half-human, half-animal, half-something else, hungry, desperate.

John’s mouth was dry and sour. The knot in his stomach grew painfully tight.

Sandy whimpered.

Neither could corral the strength needed for a scream. They just stood there awash in cold fear, despite the heat, shaking.

Dark specters began darting helter-skelter across the field of vision behind the shadow-thing like spirits late for a haunting. It clamped its hand into a vise-like fist leaving only its long index finger pointing straight out--straight out at John.

That turned his blood into icy sludge, and a centipede of terror raced down his back.

Then unexpectedly came a laugh--a deep, distorted, hellish howl that reverberated through the floor boards like a tuning fork. It sounded half-belligerent, half-insolent and wholly corrupt. It had the magnitude of a million eternally-damned souls.

Sandy screamed with all that she could summon as an inherent instinct for survival finally slapped her out of the daze that had left her mute and immobile.

The shock from the outcry and his own mortal terror helped John overcome his unyielding grip on the key, and he finally cast it back to the floor. In the blink of an eye, the moment steel and skin disassociated, the hellish opening vanished, severing the gargantuan arm midway up its bicep. It fell to the floor with a wet splud still pointing out accusingly at John.

Nothing but empty air now occupied the space where once the Hadean shadows moaned and bellowed mockingly. All that was left was the truncated, lifeless limb with its fluids eating away the floor.

Sandy shrieked, scrambled to her feet, fell, then got to her feet again, dragging John up with her, squeezing against his arm as hard as she could. He could feel her rabbit-quick heart beat thrumming against his arm as they gaped wide-eyed at the hewed limb. His was also pounding in his throat, making it difficult to swallow, for he had at last conceited the fact that the key indeed had some essence, some evil essence, and it seemed to be of an unimaginable magnitude.  

Thoughts darted across his mind like the specters had across the hellish portal. Instinctively, he knew that they had just made a tiny ripple on the surface of a newly discovered and mysterious lake. The grim implications of that disturbance were still submerged in its depths but making their way to the surface like a drowning swimmer desperate for air. He looked down at the key which lay at his feet. What on earth was it for? Maybe that was where the problem lay--it wasn’t meant for anything on earth.

With a sudden jolt the detached arm began moving, slowly, impossibly animated. It tried to maul its way across the floor to the key, pulling itself slowly along with its finger tips.

As the still-alive-somehow extremity inched its way closer to the key, and subsequently them, Sandy hid behind John still keeping her trap-like grip on his arm. “John, the damned thing is still alive, it’s still moving! H-how? What--what is it?”

“I-I don’t know. I’ve all but given up asking questions on this one.”

They stepped back again.

“W-when is the priest supposed to come get this key?”

“He’s supposed to be on his way now. A half hour away yet.”

“What the hell are we supposed to do till then?”

Remembering what the priest on the phone had said, John quickly searched his surroundings and found an old hanky in a box full of clothes. He grabbed it and, while holding it over his hand, bent down and quickly jabbed at the key a few times to see if he still got zapped. “Apparently it’s okay to pick it up if you have a barrier between you and the key.”

As he picked the key up with the hanky, the severed arm lerched out at him, though it was too slow to catch him in its grip. But it was enough of a surprise to send the two reeling back a few more steps. It clawed across the floor toward them, leaving a trail of thick, ebon muck seeping from the amputation site.

John quickly wrapped the key in the hanky and stuffed it into his front pocket.

Sandy somehow managed to calm herself and said, “I don’t remember ever being taught about this in Sunday School.”

“A story like this would certainly make for a more interesting Mass, that’s for sure,” John said, “But I still don’t understand how my grandfather ended up with this key.”

Holding hands they warily stepped past the crawling limb towards the attic stairway.

It awkwardly turned to scratch and pull its way after them as they passed.

“And as far as the that is concerned,” he continued, referring to the stygian appendage, “I have a feeling that if we’d have waited a little longer, then more than just an arm would have come through that open--.”

Without warning, the night again came alive with a devastating crash--boards splintered and glass shattered like an explosion in the down stairs foyer.

Both hearts stuttered, and Sandy took to his arm again holding fast and hard. “My God what was that!” she cried.

“Shit, I forgot!” John stuttered. “The priest said that he wasn’t the only one after this key.”

“Someone else?”

He couldn’t help but look back at the severed arm scratching after them. “Or something else. I’m not really sure I want to know.”

Sandy said, “I-I don’t think we have a choice.”

He grabbed Sandy’s hand. “Come on. Somehow we have to get out of here.”

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