ETCHINGS: THAT DOOR
(French of Lermina: E. C. Waggener: For Short Stories.)
More nervous than drunk, he closed and locked the door, and by the light of a taper went to bed. Profound silence! Then, on his ear-drums tinkled a sound, crystalline, swelling to a vibration, like the notes of a hautboy interspersed with trumpet calls. The pillow, too, rose and fell under his head, sucking the brain like an exhauster, to eject it like a pump.
He opened his eyes. The light hushed the symphony; constrained the pillow to immobility. The taper flickered and leaped. Then, in the aureole of light, something black appeared, big, sprawling, with great antennæ. Ugh! he hated beasts! A beast? No. His arm hung from the bed; it was the shadow of his hand he saw, thrown by the taper. He turned on his back, seeing and not seeing; a misty film stretching across the sclerotic like the nyctoloptic membrane of birds. Fiery atoms danced in the darkness; his palate like a stopper closed his throat and gummed it with saliva. Then, in that obscurity, he was conscious of a slow gliding. It was the door, which he had locked, opening with wing-like sweeps, uncovering a hole long, narrow, always broader, never longer, showing black and always blacker.
He stared, lips puffed, parched and parted. But from that hole, that abyss of nothingness, nothing issued. He waited; a locked door would never thus open without something coming! He waited; still nothing; more and more feebly the taper danced; soon it would fall, splutter, drown in oil. He quickly decided. That something that did not comeshould not come! Doubling like a serpent he slipped to the floor, threw himself forward, seized, slammed the door, braced it with one hand, turned the key with the other. It was done! Breathless, panting, he returned to bed; not to sleep. His hot skin pricked and stung him; that devilish symphony, with the roar of a torrent, had recommenced. And that door, which a second time he had closed, was a second time reopening, swinging itself back like a vertical sepulchre. The wing-like sweeps began anew; the black hole widened, blacker always blacker, then—the taper fell, flashed, died to ember....
He was dead when they found him. The door? Both locked and bolted; but neither lock nor bolt had caught the socket.