We found it while searching for Emily Dansforth. She was the third child that had gone missing in the last 6 months. We were expecting to find shallow graves, but instead we found this: a door to nowhere, looking like something out of Grimm’s fairy tales, just out of sight of but still within earshot of the highway.
Ms. Farnsworth, the social worker we had brought along because we thought we might have found one or more of the girls alive, said, “The wall isn’t deep enough for a door. What’s beyond it?”
I wanted to scoff. I wanted to tell her she was overreacting and that she should go back to her comfy office couches and leave us, the real cops, to our work. But I couldn’t. I just looked at it. Ancient stairs, tread by uncounted feet, led up to a gaping maw of an arch. Maybe it was ceremonial, my mind said. Light some candles and incense and everything would make sense. But it didn’t. That thing was a door. No doubt about it. But it didn’t go anywhere. It just sat there, a hungry darkness, inviting and terrifying all at once.
Dr. Byram from forensics spent three days at the site. He took samples of everything. He took shoe impressions in the soft ground leading to the… portal, I guess. He took lichen scrapings and found some blood droplets and even what looked to be human vomit near the ”door.” After a week of analysis he pulled me aside and said, “I don’t know what it is, but if I were you, I would let it go. They’re missing. End of story.”
I wish I could. I wish I could imagine them abducted, strangled, raped by some sick fuck who was, at the end of the day, just another broken human being. But here I am, staring into the blackness. I know there is something more. I know there are answers on the other side. I know that it isn’t just a sculpture. I know it is, in all the senses of the word, a Door.
And, fuck it. I am going through. I have to know what happened to them.
I.E. 