The Door
By CJ Knight
Story created for Day 7 of Bradley Ramsey’s The Halls of Pandemonium Challenge for May. For the challenge so far I’ve created one continuous story featuring three siblings, Rose, James, and Lily. The truth is, those characters represent my three children using their middle names, and the story has been a metaphor for the various challenges they’ve faced living with a father suffering with PTSD. After much deliberation I concluded that the story needs to include their father. Today’s story features that character, and provides an answer, at least in this tale, as to what the Halls of Pandemonium actually are. In the coming days I will create a directory for those interested where they can find all parts in order of this story. Thanks for the idea Verdant Butterfly.
CJ
Screaming echoed with the deafening roar of crashing waves. Not a single voice, but three. CJ sprinted through the darkness of shadows, which shifted in his periphery to stay out of focus. His boots striking unseen ground as he ran, desperate to reach the voices he recognised.
“Dad!” James’s voice trembled with fear.
Then Rose, strength even in darkness. “Run!”
“Please!” The youngest voice, but also the strongest, Lily.
Darkness parted like a curtain. He saw them, separated, his children. James stumbled around a chamber, waving his hands in front of his body, blind. Blades of swinging pendulums shifted rhythmically ahead of him. Rose stood inside the diner of a washed out, abandoned town. Eyeless ravens crashed against the locked door with the force of a hurricane. Lily screamed from the top of a hill as a tidal wave of black water swallowed an entire village at its base. Around them all, figures of shadow writhed around them, desperately reaching for them. This was the Halls of Pandemonium. CJ knew the name of the place before he woke. He was familiar with it because it was once his tormentor a decade earlier, when he first purchased the house.
***
CJ sat up with his bedclothes slick with sweat. His chest heaved with the familiar feeling of a PTSD nightmare. His phone beside the bed read 3:33am. The house was in silence, other than his heavy breathing. For a moment he did nothing but listen to the racing pulse of his heartbeat in his ears. His eyes drifted to the bedroom doorway, and his thoughts to the wall at the end of the hallway. The wall that covered the door. “No,” CJ shook his head, but deep down he knew that was no ordinary PTSD nightmare. It was equal parts memory and warning. He rubbed his eyes and leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. His children hadn’t arrived. None of them were answering their phones. Police were searching, but so far neither they nor their car had been found. Now he knew why. The Halls of Pandemonium held them. The thought caused an old memory to stir. Something he’d spent years trying to forget. But force its way forward it did.
***
Ten years ago, the house smelt of dust and fresh paint. Rose was seven, James five, and Lily four. CJ carried boxes through the front door while the children ran through the empty rooms, laughing. Their footsteps echoed on the polished floorboards. “Lily, we can have this room!” Rose opened the mirrored sliding doors of the built in wardrobe. Their joy brought the empty rooms to life. CJ set the boxes down in the kitchen. “Are you ok, Daddy?” James studied his father, always perceptive.
“Yeah, buddy.” CJ answered automatically. Even in youth, he knew his son saw through the lie, an automatic response. The tired eyes, and the way he rarely paid attention to the world around him.
CJ kept it from them all. The way work changed him, rewired his brain. It came in flashes of memory, or shadows in the corner of his vision. Sometimes echoes of sounds that weren’t really there. Some days he was the best father in the world. Patient, loving, and gentle. But other days…The slam of a cupboard door, arguing children drilling his skull like artillery fire. CJ never struck them. Never came close. But words, they could cut, he knew that well. PTSD didn’t just cause intrusive memories, it created them too. He remembered snapping at his children for spilling a cup of juice on the floor. The looks on their faces haunt him to this day. It wasn’t fear or confusion, more like they were looking at a stranger, wondering why their father was acting like a stranger. That was the worst part, the two halves. A father they deserved, and the damaged man. At night, ghosts of the past entered his nightmares. Sometimes he woke in tears, other times screaming. Some nights he remembered the dream, others he didn’t. CJ knew the faces of the dead, screams of anguish and suffering. He knew the point some people lost their humanity. That shadow of darkness grew inside him beneath the surface. That was when he found the door.
***
It wasn’t there when he bought the home, he knew that much. The wall at the end of the hallway had always been bare. Until one morning at 3:33am. He woke to knocking behind the wall. The wall stood bare and unchanged. To his surprise, the feeling that swept through his body wasn’t fear, it was recognition. A sense he already knew what was there. His fingers found the seam first, hidden in the plaster. It was a door. CJ opened it and found what he knew was already there. A doorway to hell. This wasn’t fire and brimstone, or a cauldron of sin. It was something created just for him. Endless hallways lined with open doors. Each leading to some twisted version of his worst memories. Each room filled with shifting shadows of suffering, reenacting the worst things he’d witnessed. Shadows crying over cribs, other shadows screaming inside wrecked cars. Each one a new tragedy. The figures were faceless, nothing but hollow eyes. Every guilt, every nightmare, here waiting for him. And deep within the halls, something stared back at him, something wearing his face. A shadow of fear, hate, and rage, wearing a twisted version of his face. It was everything CJ worked to suppress. His shadow half. The thing that whispered cruel words when he lost control, the thing his children didn’t recognise. It smiled at him deep within this pandemonium of pain and suffering. CJ knew. The house didn’t create this place, it had found him. He slammed the door.
***
CJ spent the next three days sealing the doorway behind timber, nails and shelving. He told no one about the Halls of Pandemonium. Over time, his darkness quieted. Never gone, but never in control. Contained and managed. Therapy helped, as did fatherhood. Every bedtime story told, soccer game, theatre performance, and gymnastics competition. Every hug and kind word, another reason to keep the shadows buried. CJ convinced himself that the door wasn’t real, just another nightmare…
***
That was until tonight, and this new nightmare. CJ recognised those hallways and rooms. His children were trapped in his personal hell. He stood up from the bed and followed the hallway. He passed by the smiling faces of his children hanging from frames along the walls. They pose with trophies from their victories. A way to forever remember the good times and pretend the bad times didn’t exist.
CJ stopped at the end of the hallway, in front of the boards and shelves hiding the doorway he sealed closed all those years ago. For a time, he just stared. “I’m sorry.” The apology wasn’t for himself. It was for his children. He understood now. The darkness wasn’t buried. It had been waiting for a chance to take his light, his reason for living.
He fetched his crowbar and hammer from the garage and returned to the wall. His hands trembled, not from fear, that was an emotion lost to him long ago. This was anger directed at him and the lies he convinced himself of. Deep down, he’d always known this day would come. The darkness never left, the shadow remained. His first swing took the shelves, and his second pierced the boards. His senses flared all at once. Smells of death, screams of agony, and a cold that pierced his skin and touched his soul. The Halls of Pandemonium waited. His darker half smiling somewhere inside.
With the door revealed, CJ opened it. “Rose, James, Lily.” For the first time, he stepped inside. “I’m coming, guys.”