-1There's a Door at the end of my street and it's been there a very long time, as long as I can remember and even my granddad has told me of it being there when he was a "wee nipper".
Its not a strange Door but its not normal either, its green with flaking paint and made from everyday Door wood and it has four panels on the Door with triangles in the centre, it has no letterbox and has a brass circular handle and the whole Door and frame is set into soot blackened stone, nothing strange there but when you walk near it you just can't seem to walk near it, it kind of makes you swerve to the outside edge of the pavement and away from the Door.
Once when I was a teenager I pushed a friend towards the Door, because even then I knew the Door had a way of making you avoid it, he stumbled before he got anywhere near the Door fell and broke his ankle.
I've seen parents taking pushchairs past the Door with 2 side wheels on the pavement and 2 hovering above a very busy main road, they even walk in single file when there's more than 1 parent with a pushchair doing the same thing, 2 wheels on, 2 wheels off.
I guess you'd think I was obsessed with this Door the way I talk about it and in a way you'd be right but only obsessively over the last 3 months, before that I was just mildly interested in the oddity of this Door with no purpose.
I know it had no purpose because I asked the owner of the building merchants, Mr. Rick Somnething, yeah that was his name and I thought he said Rick Something at first and I thought it was highly funny he didn't know his own name until he pointed out it was pronounced som-ne-thing, anyway I asked him where the Door went and he smiled and said "Noticed it then have ya," and when I didn't smile back he said "follow me".
I followed him through his warehouse of bricks and wood and tools until we came to a brick wall, we stopped and he pointed at a particularly uninteresting piece of wall, soot blackened stone and that was it no Door or nothing.
"When my da' brought this warehouse the Door was here then but still behind this wall" he looked at the ground as if deciding whether to tell me "look at the other walls in this place boy and tell me what's different about them and the wall with the Door behind it?"
I looked around the warehouse at the four walls and tried to take in what he was trying to show me and I almost asked him when I saw that the walls were all a dirty white stone except at the place where the Door was behind and to a degree you could make out a hazy shape of a Door in blackened stone.
"My da was gonna get that Door removed and bricked up, good on 50 years ago, he even had some guy who worked for him go out to do the job,"
He went on to tell me about how the guy, Carl Benson, a bricklayer, had gone out to the Door and spent 3 hours avoiding going near the Door without even realising he was avoiding it and when he had finally gone to the Door, well nobody knows but he was found dead on the Door step of the Door, heart attack they said, and when the ambulance came to take him away the ambulance men were supposedly acting real weird around the body and when they were placing Carl's body in the ambulance it was said they were mumbling about the flies, even though it was during winter and no witnesses there saw any flies, not that many went near the body in front of the Door.
Mr Somnething pointed at the blackened stone "We have tried repeatedly to scrub away the dirtiness of the blackened stone with no success, in fact I got something for you to try, wait here!" and with that he walked off into the warehouse, I stood waiting and staring at the soot blackened wall, I could hear people on the other side of the wall walking past, probably at the edge of the pavement trying to avoid the Door.
I don't know how long later, it seemed like hours, Mr Somnething came back with a bucket filled with a soapy fluid and a hard bristled scrubbing brush and handed both to me.
"Go on then, boy," he said smiling his toothy grin, "try and scrub some off".
I walked up to the wall and dipped the scrubbing brush in the water and lathered a load onto the wall at head height and then scrubbed with all my might.
"I'll give you £5 if you get it clean!" he chaired to me and he chuckled deep, and that laugh had a scary edge to it, almost like a secret you never want to find out.
I scrubbed for five minutes and got into a sweat before I stepped back and looked at the spot I had been scrubbing.
Nothing.
Not a scratch in the stone.
Nothing.
Hang on, yeah there it was, not a mark in the stone, I was going to throw up!
I was violently sick all over Mr. Somnething's Wellington boots.
"It's alright boy, get it up," he said patting me on the back "no harm done" he chuckled, again that laugh, different this time but still cruel, I was sure of it, I pushed his hand away and bolted for the exit from the warehouse which seemed to be shrinking in on me, as I left the building I faintly heard Mr. Somnething shouting
"It's alright boy, others have done the same……" the rest was lost in the sound of me retching again on the pavement near the Door.
Since then I tried to avoid the Door but at the same time I was wanting to know about it and from time to time as I grew up I heard little stories about the Door from a lot of people in town, different stories but all the same feelings for nearly everyone, the Door was evil, I laughed at that one, It was a Door, it sat there and did nothing, how could it be evil.
When I was 21 I didn't laugh at the idea of an evil Door anymore, It took my best friend away, my best friend since we first started school, his name was Adam and we did everything together, we smoked our first cigarettes together, we stole sweets from the shops together, we drank beer together for the first time and spent the evening throwing up together, we smoked some pot together, we enjoyed smoking pot together until the Door had its way with him.
We were walking home on the night of my 21st birthday and we ended up on the street with Door, Twerk Road it's called, Adam pointed at the Door as we walked down the street.
"There's the weird-o Door" he laughed pointing, I had told him about the Door countless times but he just laughed and called me daft for believing such shit, I think he was just in denial about it personally, anyway Adam started stumbling over the road pulling his keys from his pocket.
"Right man I'm going home to my 8 legged wife and our slug children," he said jokingly then turned to look at the Door, "Hang on there's no keyhole?"
I said that's impossible I would of noticed but lo and behold as I looked it didn't have a keyhole just the handle.
"Oh well, don't need these" he said placing his keys in his pocket and turning to reach for Doorknob.
I screamed at him "NO!!!!!!!!!" but he grasped the handle, he looked around at me with a big grin on his face and started to turn the Doorknob.
Still to this day I don't realise how he fell and broke his spine but he ended up paralysed from the waist down, he fell funny you see almost like he was trying to twist around without moving his feet which appeared to be glued to the spot, at the same time he sort of threw himself at the ground, feet still firmly planted on the ground and managed to bang his back into the Doorknob, as he did this he sort of threw himself away from the Door and when he did he landed at my feet, looked up at me and his eyes rolled in his head and he blacked out, but before he did he murmured 2 words "Dead Roses".
He was my best friend until the day he took his own life, aged 27 years he lowered himself into his bath one night and cut both wrists from palm to elbow, we never did get to talk about the Door or what happened that night and every time I tried to talk to him about it he just blanked out and sat humming "Hey Jude" and he'd go on that way for hours.
His parents obviously wanted to know what had happened and when I thought about explaining it I thought I was liable to end up sounding guilty of something, like I said a Door just sits there doing nothing, how could I say this Door had caused such devastating damage to their only son and when they arrived sure enough the asked and I explained everything about what had happened at the Door and you know what, they looked at each other as if some understanding passed there and then asked if I was okay before going off to where Adam lay.
3 weeks later I tried to take my own life by driving my car at the Door at very high speed, it was a revenge/suicide thing you see and as I came barrelling down the road I turned the steering wheel and aimed at the building, and gods be damned my front tyre exploded, not popped or punctured but it exploded and my car skewed sideways and flipped.
I remember looking through the windscreen at the Door and I'm sure it was open, just a little bit open, like an inch or so, but how could I be sure I was flipping over sideways so fast and the Door went past so quickly it could have just been my mind, as I was knocked unconscious by the blows of the crash I vaguely heard screams I thought came from the open Door and I thought they would make my eardrums pop but then nothingness came and I slipped away.
In fact I slipped away 3 times during those next 24 hours, 3 times I died and 3 times I was brought back.
It was a week before I gained consciousness and when I did I was confused as to where I was at first, it was only after 30 seconds or so looking at unfamiliar faces that it dawned where I was, Hospital and the faces weren't unfamiliar they were my family, then it all crashed in on me as everyone tried talking to me at once, although I didn't really hear them, I thought about how I had tried to kill a Door, what a crazy thing to do and I tried to kill myself, another crazy thing, if I even mentioned it to anyone I'd be locked up in a mental institute somewhere in a straight-jacket, but I knew I was in trouble no matter which way you looked at it, I'm either totally crazy or I'm a maniac speeding at very silly speeds through a built up area.
My family talked to me all night but it wasn't until the next day when I was interviewed by the police I got a full picture of what had happened on the outside of my flipping through the air death mobile.
It appears that when my car tyre exploded, although the police said it popped but to me it sounded like an explosion, my car skewed sideways and was unable to continue forward motion without over balancing the car which is why it started flipping through the air, my car rolled 5 times before coming to a rest up against a wall three houses down from the building merchants, unfortunately resting between my car and the wall was a thin line of four dead teenagers, crushed to death instantly.
I sat stunned thinking of the news I'd just heard, four teenagers killed through my stupidity, I was going to prison for a long time for my stupidity.
The Door had somehow managed to make my car kill four teens in the process of protecting itself, I knew that instantly and could almost imagine it having a voice with which it was laughing at me.
"We are aware that you were not in full control of your car and it is most likely the Cps will not be pressing charges" the officer who stood in front of me said bringing me back to my senses.
What? I asked him, totally stunned, how could I have not been responsible, I was driving in excess of 100 mph on a busy road.
"Road traffic accident investigators said that it was a freak accident but totally unavoidable, its doubtful you'll be prosecuted but you'll still have to attend and inquest at the courts at a later date." he said and he was right.
I attended the inquest at the courts and sat in stunned disbelief as the evidence was given that sounded like it totally absolved me of responsibility for the "accident" and was even told by the parents of one of the dead teens that it was not my fault and it was out of my control and in their eyes I saw the same blankness that I saw in the eyes of Adams mum and dad, as if they knew it as The Door.
It took me a year to get over what happened, it really tortured me and I had burned into my memory the pictures of the four teens, 2 boys & 2 girls, and I used to wake in sweats screaming a scream that followed me up from my nightmare, from the mouth of one of the young girls I killed and the scream finished from my own lips.
In fact I would have probably killed my self if not for Louisa, when I met her my life changed and three weeks after we first kissed I need ed to get it off my chest about the accident, I needed to tell the authorities what had happened.
I went to the police station and asked to speak to the officer in charge of the accident who I talked to hospital, 5 minutes later he came down to me and showed me to a room.
When I told him my story of everything, my speeding, my craziness of trying to kill The Door, the loss of Adam he just looked at me for a minute then he walked behind me and said,
"Do you know your not the first to try and kill that damned Door!"
I was stunned, this was the first person who'd said anything in regards to The Door since Mr. Somnething, who died 4 years previously from cancer, and I jumped on the chance to ask him about The Door but he stopped me by putting his hand up and telling me "Leave it alone, just forget it, Go home and forget it!"
I sat at home that night and my mind was racing with the little bit of information I had heard, I wasn't the first to try, a police officer knew of The Door, the door had some kind of sick hold over this town and it was making people ignorant to it, then why didn't I ignore it, if I hadn't ignored it from the beginning Adam wouldn't be dead and neither would the four teens, I started to feel bad again but then Louisa came around and I started to feel much better and soon it was at the back of my mind, still there though, always still there plaguing my thoughts.