The Space Between (4 page)

He opened his eyes and it was still there. A real door, right next to the one he'd just exited. Right there in front of him.

He reached out, his body twitching at the cold snap of static electricity leaping toward his fingers before they closed around the knob and turned.

Pushing the door open, Isaac stepped into the darkness beyond.

When Isaac was a child growing up in rural Knoxville, there had been a cattle auction facility that doubled as a slaughterhouse not far from his home. It was a sprawling complex of metal and concrete buildings (built at various times as the business had grown throughout the years) and sat in the middle of a large area of cleared land. Off to one side was a dirt lot where he and his father would park the old Ford pickup on the occasional Saturday afternoon. Isaac's family had a small farm, so a visit to the auction only rarely involved the purchase of an animal. It was mostly an excuse for he and his father to spend some time together while his sister and mother did the same.

One summer there had been some trouble at the site. From what little Isaac could gather from the hushed tones of his parents, two men had gotten into an argument over a woman. One of the men had then gone to his car, brought back a gun, and chased the other man down, cornering the runner in an empty cattle stall where he shot him three times, killing him. The facility was shut down for two weeks during the investigation while the police examined the crime scene and gathered testimony. Two weeks was actually considered a short amount of time for the local authorities to handle such a tragedy, but it was plenty enough for a pair of ten-year olds to muster the courage required to explore the scene of the crime one hot August afternoon.

Isaac and his cousin, Eddie, had met up in the woods that separated their family farms. Instead of racing their bikes over the well-worn trail down to the creek and into the pasture their families shared, they'd decided it would be much more interesting to take a look around the auction house. The two boys cut through the woods on foot, wrestling their bicycles through thick bramble and over fallen trees until they came out on the northern edge of the facility property. They could have taken the road, even though it was a longer route, and gotten there faster. But ten was old enough to know that if they were seen approaching the buildings by a passing vehicle, word would undoubtedly get back to their parents.

Leaving their bikes at the edge of the woods, Isaac and Eddie hunched over in the high wheat grass and jogged across the field until they reached the rear of the main building. There were three doors, all locked. There were also two windows which opened into a small office area at one end of the structure. As Isaac tried one, he heard Eddie's exclamation of success and the rusty scrape of metal against metal as the other window slid open. In no time the two boys had scrambled through the opening, finding themselves inside.

The air conditioning had apparently been shut off to save on expenses while the place was closed down. The heat was so bad Isaac almost suggested it wasn't worth the effort, but he didn't want Eddie to think he was a sissy. Eddie could be quite harsh when it came to teasing him, already enjoying the occasional field day with Isaac's affinity for music. So Isaac kept his mouth shut and tried to breathe in the hot, sluggish air while resisting the urge to complain.

"Damn if it
ain't
hot!" Eddie hissed, pulling up the hem of his shirt to wipe the sweat that had already beaded up across his face. Isaac just nodded and followed him through the office door.

The smell was faint at first. Neither of the boys said anything about it until after they'd examined the small stall blocked off with yellow tape.

"You smell that?" Eddie asked, not taking his eyes from the rustred stains on the dirt inside the stall.

"Yeah. Smells like road kill," Isaac answered and glanced over at his cousin in time to see that troublesome little spark in the boy's eye.

"Come on," Eddie said, starting off in the direction the scent seemed to be coming from.

It wasn't hard to find, and following the smell reminded Isaac of those cartoons where the dog would float along, its nose lifted and inhaling a smoky trail of something delicious. Of course, there was nothing tasty about the noxious odor he and Eddie were tracking. And when they opened the door to the slaughterhouse floor — which hadn't been cleaned in two weeks during the hottest part of the year — Isaac stumbled backward, barraged by the worst combination of smells he could have imagined.

A bloated possum, rotting in a stagnant, mosquito-infested puddle near the creek.

The slice of cantaloupe that had somehow ended up tucked in the back of his closet for three weeks until his mother, insane with disgust and on a mission, had tracked it down.

The condition of the hallway bathroom last Independence Day when Uncle Butch had made his bean and cabbage stew using chicken stock that had gone bad.

It's all of those smells and worse
, thought Isaac, gagging against his hand and backing further away from the door.

"Holy shit," Eddie choked out, covering his mouth. Isaac could still see the demented smile between his cousin's fingers. "Look at this."

Isaac, slow with apprehension, moved up next to Eddie and looked through the doorway. The floor of the room beyond seemed to be alive with the noxious fumes, shifting and writhing in pain. Both boys tensed up, ready to run until they realized the floor was covered with flies. What little bit they could make out underneath the living carpet was dark with old blood and gore. Here and there were bits of carnage, no doubt whittled down over the past several days by the buzzing horde. The steamy air rolling around them and out the door was sticky with the stench, and Isaac had to turn away. Before he could, he caught a glimpse of the hooks hanging along a runner system, and the large stainless steel table upon which various implements of death lay scattered, black with more blood.

Isaac introduced his breakfast to the floor a few feet from the door. He could barely hear Eddie's nervous chuckling as he spat out the last stray bits from his mouth. The relentless smell from behind him and the doughy scent of half-digested biscuits and gravy were too much, and Isaac sprinted back the way they had come. Eddie had not been far behind, and Isaac was grateful when his pasty-faced cousin said nothing about him losing the contents of his stomach.

§

That summer day long ago was the first thing to swim up from Isaac's dazed consciousness after he stepped through the door that wasn't there. More specifically, it was the smell of that slaughterhouse room, which he could still conjure a lingering sense of if he tried. Not that he'd want to.

As he passed through the door, his face submerging in that deep black nothing beyond the threshold, Isaac experienced a terrifying moment that could only be described as being
absorbed
. He felt as if his whole body was being broken down and distributed throughout the darkness, and that he would be lost there forever, diluted in the void.

Fortunately, the moment passed so quickly he believed he had started to blink when it began, and was just opening his eyes as it passed. It went through his bones like a flash freeze. Had he opened his eyes and seen only the darkness, his fear might have been subdued after a few moments of rational thought —
Hey, you're just asleep and dreaming
. However, the sight before him was not of that solid black he'd stepped into, nor was it of the room that should logically be there, furnished with the bed and other items.

Isaac did recognize that he was, in fact, in a room. And there was furniture, the most obvious item being a bed against the far right wall, though it was not the bed he expected. And the room was smaller, having only one boarded-over window instead of two. The remaining furniture wasn't what he expected either; there was a vanity with a large oval mirror and an armoire, both of which matched the basic design of the bed.

But these details, easily ascertained with a glance around the room, were overshadowed by one very undeniable trait that tied itself to Isaac's memory of that day in the slaughterhouse.

Jesus, that's a lot of blood!

It was as if someone had given a small child a large paintbrush and a gallon of dark red paint, then left him unattended for an hour or so. Wide swaths arced across one wall. A chair lay overturned near the vanity, a spattering of blood across the slats of its high back. The floor was a gooey, slippery mess, small puddles of congealing blood here and there where a trail seemed to end or start. There were stains on the bed: a tangled, tie-dyed nightmare that led his eyes to what could only be the spot where whatever happened here had ended. To the right of the bed and touching the wall was a large, crimson pool. It looked like a dark liquid mirror lying on the floor, but for the thin, irregular band through the middle where Isaac guessed someone had been lying.

And there were the flies. Not nearly as many as what he and Eddie had seen that day, but enough to indicate it had been several hours since the events in this particular room had taken place. The smell — less intense than his memory, but with a sweet undertone that started Isaac's stomach churning — draped itself around him like a cloak of death. He winced at the cloying odor, stumbling backward until his heels met with the resistance of the threshold behind him.

Isaac fell back into the darkness that swallowed him whole.

§

A flash of light behind Isaac's closed eyelids accompanied a burst of pain that started in his skull and shot down through his neck, fizzling out at the base of his spine. His first instinct was to scramble backwards upon his hands and feet; anything to get away from that morbid scene he'd just witnessed. He only succeeded in smacking his head against the hallway wall again, and another jolt of pain roared through his body.

He fell into unconsciousness.

§

Isaac must have dreamed about the blood-soaked room as he slept. He awoke with the smell dominating his senses, but it faded like an exorcised specter when he opened his eyes to find the hallway ceiling looming above him.

When he tried to sit up he was quickly reminded of why he was lying there in the hall. A searing, electric pulse sizzled up his spine, awaking a heavy throb in his head. He reached up to feel the goose egg there, wincing as his fingers probed that tender lump under his hair. Clenching his teeth against the pain, he placed his palms on the floor and scooted backward so that he could rest against the wall. The exertion brought on a momentary bout of vertigo, and he rested his face in his hands until it passed.

As he sat there, Isaac began to remember exactly what had brought him to this point. The door, the room, the blood. He looked up at the wall, wincing from the ache in his neck. The door wasn't there, of course, but then he remembered how he'd only seen it when approaching that area
just so
. With that recollection, he knew he could verify his sanity by simply trying to find it again. But when he imagined doing so, the feeling of dread that welled up from his gut was enough to deter him.

Instead, Isaac took a deep breath and forced himself up. The agony was almost enough to send him back to the floor, and his legs trembled beneath him. He gritted his teeth through the pain once again, then turned to prop himself against the wall a little longer to get his breath and strength back. Once he felt confident he could make it to the handrail next to the stairs, he shuffled in that direction, keeping both palms against the wall in the event he passed out again.

It took him a long time to reach the foyer; fifteen minutes by his estimate as he sat at the bottom of the stairs, panting and wishing like hell he had some aspirin. As he waited again to gather the energy and determination, Isaac noticed that the house was lit with sunlight. He had slept through the night.

The thought of that — lying there unconscious just a few feet from the scene of something so horrific — sent tiny shivers through his arms and legs, aggravating his pain. But then he considered the possibility he had dreamed the whole thing. Maybe he was ill and, upon passing out and knocking himself silly, he had fallen into a feverish sleep that had caused the horrible event to unfold in his imaginative subconscious. Or, being that it was an old house in which no one had lived for quite a while, perhaps the place was full of carbon monoxide fumes.

That's it
, he thought.
Those fumes rise, don't they? That's why it hit me when I went upstairs. And that damn door was some kind of double-vision hallucination.

Isaac sighed from deep within his chest, relieved. He sat a moment longer, resolving to call the fire department from his cell phone, still in the Mustang. He could sit outside and wait, keeping clear of the fumes. When they arrived, he would have them take a look at his head. A concussion was not the best welcoming gift, so hopefully he had only given himself a good bump.

After another ten minutes of cautious struggling, Isaac made it to his car. He collapsed down in the seat, muffling a small yelp as the pain flared. The cell phone was on the passenger side, though Isaac found little relief in the single bar indicating poor signal strength.

"Damn," he hissed, then dialed 411. It took him three tries to get connected to the Holden City Fire Department. The young woman on the line had trouble hearing him, and just when Isaac thought he'd lost signal, her voice would pipe back up. After five minutes on the phone with her, it seemed she had gotten all she needed. He heard something that sounded like We're sending someone out now" before the phone beeped, indicating the call was over.

The sun was out, rising up from behind the house and casting him in shadow. He cranked the car to get the heat going. He hadn't noticed the cold until the sweat from his exertion had started to cool. Fortunately, the old car took no time at all to warm up, and soon he was wiping condensation from the windows to get a better look at the house and yard while he waited.