The Doorway

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  _A discerning critic once pointed out that Edgar Allen Poe possessed not so much a distinctive style as a distinctive _manner_. So startlingly original was his approach to the dark castles and haunted woodlands of his own somber creation that he transcended the literary by the sheer magic of his prose. Something of that same magic gleams in the darkly-tapestried little fantasy presented here, beneath Evelyn Smith's eerily enchanted wand._

  the doorway

  _by ... Evelyn E. Smith_

  A man may wish he'd married his first love and not really mean it. But an insincere wish may turn ugly in dimensions unknown.

  "It is my theory," Professor Falabella said, helping himself to acookie, "that no one ever really makes a decision. What really happensis that whenever alternative courses of action are called for, theindividuality splits up and continues on two or more divergent planes,very much like the parthenogenesis of a unicellular animal ... Deliciouscookies these, Mrs. Hughes."

  "Thank you, Professor," Gloria simpered. "I made them myself."

  "You must give us the recipe," said one of the ladies--and the othersmurmured agreement, glad to get their individualities on a plane theycould understand.

  "Since most decisions are hardly as momentous as the individualimagines," Professor Falabella continued, "and since the imagination ofthe average individual is very limited, many of these differentplanes--or, as they are colloquially known, space-time continuums--mayexist in close, even tangential relationship."

  Gloria rose unobtrusively and took the teapot to the kitchen for arefill. Her husband stood by the sink moodily drinking whiskey out ofthe bottle so as to avoid having to wash a glass afterward.

  "Bill, you're not being polite to our guests. Why don't you go out andlisten to Professor Falabella?"

  "I can hear him perfectly well from here," Bill muttered--and indeed theprofessor's mellifluous tones pervaded every nook and cranny of thethin-walled house. "Long-winded cultist! What is he a professor of, I'dlike to know."

  "Professor Falabella is _not_ a cultist!" affirmed Gloria angrily. "He'sa great philosopher."

  Bill Hughes said something unprintable. "If I'd married Lucy Allison,"he continued unkindly, "she'd never have filled the house withlong-haired cultists on my so-called day of rest."

  Gloria's soft chin trembled, and her blue eyes filled with tears. Shewas beginning to put on weight, he noticed. "I've been hearing nothingbut Lucy Allison, Lucy Allison, Lucy Allison for the past year. Y-yousaid yourself she looked like a horse."

  "Horses," he observed, "have sense."

  He was being brutal, but he couldn't help it and didn't want to.Professor Falabella was only the most long-winded of a long series ofmystics Gloria was forever dragging into the house. _The trouble withthe half-educated_, he thought bitterly, _is that they seek culture inthe most peculiar places_.

  "I'll bet she would have let me have peace on Sunday," he said. "It justgoes to show what happens when you marry a woman solely for her looks."He drained the bottle; then hurled it into the garbage pail with aresounding crash.

  Gloria's shoulders shook as she filled the kettle. "I wish I'd decidedto be an old maid," she sobbed.

  A very unlikely possibility, he thought. Even now, shopworn as she was,Gloria could have a fairly wide range of suitors should something happento him. She looked sexy, but how deceiving appearances could be!

  Professor Falabella was still talking as Bill and Gloria emerged fromthe kitchen. "I believe that it is possible for an individual who existson a limited plane of imagination to transpose from one plane to anadjacent one without difficulty ... Great Heavens, what was that?"

  Something had whisked past the archway leading into the foyer.

  "Don't pay any attention," Gloria smiled nervously. "The house ishaunted."

  "My dear," one of the ladies offered, "I know of the most marvelousexterminator--"

  "The house," Gloria assured her coldly, "really _is_ haunted. We've beenseeing things ever since we moved in."

  And she really believed it, Bill thought. Believed that the house washaunted, that is. Of course he had seen things too--but he wasenlightened enough to know that ghosts don't exist, even if you do seethem.

  Professor Falabella cleared his throat. "As I was saying, it is possibleto send the individual through another--well, dimension, as some popularwriters would have it, to one of his other spatial existences on thesame temporal plane. It is merely necessary for him to find the Door."

  "Nonsense!" Bill interrupted. "Holy, unmitigated nonsense!"

  Every head swivelled to look at him. Gloria restrained tears with aneffort.

  "Brute," someone muttered.

  But ridicule apparently only stimulated the professor. He beamed. "Youdon't believe me. Your imagination cannot extend to the comprehension ofthe multifariousness of space."

  "Nonsense," Bill said again, but less confidently.

  "I believe that I have discovered the Doorway," Professor Falabellacontinued, "and the Way is Open. However, most people fear to penetratethe unknown, even though it is to enter another phase of their ownexistence. I do admit that the shock of spatial transference, no matterhow slight, combined with the concrete awareness of a previous spatialrelationship would be perhaps too much for the keenly sensitiveindividualism ..."

  Bill opened his mouth.

  "I know what you're about to say, young man!"

  "You don't have to be a mind reader to know that," Bill assured him. Hisconsonants were already a little slurred and he knew Gloria was ashamedof him. It served her right. He'd been ashamed of her for years.

  Professor Falabella smiled. His teeth were very sharp and white. "Verywell, Mr. Hughes, since you are a skeptic, perhaps you will not objectto being the subject of our experiment yourself?"

  "What kind of an experiment?" Bill asked suspiciously.

  "Merely to go through the Door. Any door can become the Doorway, if itis transposed into the proper spatial dimension. That door, forinstance." Professor Falabella waved his hand toward the doorway of whatGloria liked to call "Bill's study."

  "You mean you just want me to open the door and go into that room?" Billasked incredulously. "That's all?"

  "That is all. Of course, you go with the awareness that it is thethreshold of another plane and that you step voluntarily from thisexistence to an adjacent one."

  "Sure," Bill said. He had just remembered there was a nearly full bottleof Calvert in the bottom drawer of the desk. "Sure. Anything to oblige."

  "Very well. Go to the door, and keep remembering that of your own freewill you are passing from this plane to the next."

  "Look out, everybody!" Bill called raucously, as he pulled open thedoor. "I'm coming in on the next plane!"

  No one laughed.

  He stepped over the threshold, shutting the door firmly behind him. Awonderful excuse to get away from those blasted women. He'd climb out ofthe window as soon as he'd collected the whiskey and give them a nervousmoment thinking he'd really passed into another existence. It wouldserve Gloria right.

  For a moment, as he crossed, he had a queer sensation. Maybe there wassomething in what Professor Falabella said. But no, there he was in thestudy. All that mumbo jumbo was getting him down, that was all. He was anervous man--only nobody appreciated the fact.

  Taking a cigarette out of the pack in his pocket, he reached for thelighter on his desk. It wasn't there. Time and time again he'd toldGloria not to touch his things, and always she'd disobeyed him. Companywas coming and she must tidy up. Cooking and cleaning--that was all shewas good for. But this was carrying tidiness too far; she'd even removedthe ashtrays.

 
And where did that glass block paperweight come from? He'd had a penguinin a snowstorm and he'd been happy with it. This was too much. He'd tellGloria off. Stealing a man's penguin!

  He opened the door into the living room and bumped into Lucy Allison."Don't you think you've been in there long enough, Bill?" she askedacridly. "I'm sure your guests would appreciate catching a glimpse ofyou."

  "Why, hello, Lucy," he said, surprised. "I didn't know Gloria hadinvited you--"

  "Gloria, Gloria, Gloria!" Lucy cut across his sentence. "You've beentalking about nothing but that dumb little blonde for months." Becauseof the people in the room beyond, her voice was pitched low, but herpale eyes glittered unpleasantly behind her spectacles. "I wish you hadmarried her. You'd have made a fine pair."

  Gently, caressingly, the short hairs on the back of Bill's neck rose.

  "Come back in here," Lucy said, hauling him back into the living roomwhere a number of people who had been enjoying the domestic fracassuddenly broke into loud and animated chatter. "Dr. Hildebrand wastelling us all about nuclear fission."

  "Can't find an ashtray," Bill muttered, seizing on something tangible."Can't find an ashtray in the whole darn place."

  "We've been over this millions of times, Bill. You know--" she smiled atthe guests, a smile that carefully excluded Bill. "--I'm allergic tosmoke, but I never can get my husband to remember he isn't to smokeinside the house."

  "Now take the neutron, for example," Dr. Hildebrand said through amouthful of pate. "What is the neutron? It is only ... What was that?"

  The wraith of Gloria crossed the foyer and disappeared. Bill took a stepforward; then stood still.

  Lucy smiled self-consciously. "That's nothing at all. The house ismerely haunted."

  Everyone laughed.

  "Forgot something," Bill muttered, and dashed back into the study. Heyanked open the bottom drawer of the desk. Sure enough, there was abottle of Schenley, nearly a third full. "There are some advantages," hethought as he tilted it to his lips, "in having a limited imagination."

  Transcriber's Note:

  This etext was produced from _Fantastic Universe_ September 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and typographical errors have been corrected without note.