Doors to Temptation

by Tim Waggoner

There’s something almost impossible to resist about a door. Just ask Bluebeard’s wife, or the children who stumble upon the entrance to Narnia. Closed, locked, forbidden . . . Possibilities lie behind those doors, secrets both dark and wonderful. Will we have the courage to reach out, turn the knob, pull the door open, and step across the threshold? And if we do – once we’re on the other side and the door swings shut behind us with a soft snick of a lock being engaged – will we regret what we find there? Will we turn around, suddenly afraid, grip the knob and twist, only to find it locked, only to realize that a door, once it’s closed on us, can never truly be opened again?

It’s summertime, several years ago. My car needs to go into the shop for one reason or other. I can’t recall, but I’m sure whatever it was, it was expensive. My wife and daughters are going to come pick me up in the van after I drop off the other vehicle, but they can’t get there right away. No problem, I say. I’ll just walk over to the strip mall across the street and browse in the video store. They can pick me up there.

Southwestern Ohio can be stifling in the summer, and lines of sweat are rolling down the sides of my face by the time I enter the video store. I push the glass door open with a bell-tinkle, and a wave of air-conditioned cool slams into me like a sledgehammer carved out of ice. I nod “hello” to the indifferent clerk behind the counter and try to ignore the faint odor of mold and must as I begin checking out the display of previously used videos for sale. I make it a point to take my time browsing, knowing that it’s going to be a while before my wife and kids get here. (My wife runs on her own internal clock that never seems to be in sync with the rest of the world.) Eventually, tired of putzing around, I select a couple films – horror movies, probably, but I can’t remember – pay for them, and head back outside.

Now the sledgehammer that hits me feels as if it’s been

Tim Waggoner

forged from molten steel, but I ignore it. After all, I’ll just hop into our air-conditioned van and . . . Except, of course, the van’s not there. Wife-Time hasn’t caught up with Real-Time yet. Mildly irritated, but not really surprised, I decide to walk up and down the sidewalk in front of the strip mall. While I come here to rent videos all the time, I realize I have no idea what other businesses are housed on the premises. I’ve seen them, sure, but I’ve never really paid attention to them. And as a writer, I’m supposed to pay attention – to everything.

Time to rectify this, I decide, and start walking.

I travel less than ten yards from the entrance to the video store – past a row of vending machines distributing newspapers and freebie publications of various sorts – before I find myself standing in front of a gray metal door. I stop and stare at it. There’s no business name on the door or above it, no windows on either side displaying wares. Nothing but brown brick surrounding it, flaking gray paint, rust nibbling at the chrome knob, the word FUCL scratched onto the surface, as if someone with a mild learning disability tried to leave their mark by etching an obscenity. I feel a thrill of adrenaline just below my sternum, a tingly-itchy sensation at the base of my skull. Here I am, maybe a dozen steps from the video store, and I’m standing in front of a door I have never noticed before. That, perhaps, never had been here before.

My imagination, always hyperactive at the best of times, kicks into overdrive.

The family van – a Ford Sierra displaying a license plate reading WAGGVAN – pulls up to the sidewalk some time later (how long, I’m not sure). I climb into its air-conditioned comfort, and my wife starts apologizing for being so late. I barely hear her, mumble something along the lines of “That’s okay, honey.” I’m still thinking about that door . . .

Several days later, I’ve finished a short story titled “When God Opens a Door.” I’m pleased with it (which is saying something since, like a lot of writers, I worry that everything I produce is crap) and send it off to Robert Morrish at Cemetery Dance magazine. Robert accepts the tale, and it eventually appears in CD 46. (You can read the story at my website here: http://www.timwaggoner.com/whengod.htm.) I imagine the kudos and award nominations rolling in, the requests to reprint the story in every Year’s Best Of anthology. (Remember what I said earlier about my hyperactive imagination?) That doesn’t happen, of course, but the story is received well enough, and I move on other projects.

A few years pass. I’ve published two horror novels with Leisure Books – Like Death and Pandora Drive – and I’m casting about for an idea to build a third book on. Let me amend that: I’m searching for a great idea. I have ideas all the time; the problem is sorting through the commonplace ones to find the gems, those worth developing into fully realized stories and novels.

Once more I find myself thinking about the FUCL door, and Darkness Wakes is born. The title was inspired by a fragment from the song “Music of the Night” in Andrew Lloyd Weber’s Phantom of the Opera: “Darkness wakes and stirs imagination.” That door certainly stirred my imagination.

I hope it does the same for yours.

Click here to read an excerpt
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