Nightmare Fuel, Day the Twentieth - At the Forbidden Door

Day the twentieth! One score of little flash pieces.

This image was an interesting one: both Kary Gaul and Samantha Dunaway Bryant saw ghost stories, of sorts.

As for me? I love old folktales. They live at the heart of our cultural heritage.

At The Forbidden Door

It was always his house. From the day I moved in, through our wedding day, until we moved out, it was always his.

He wasn't bad about it, wasn't cruel about it. It was just a fact. I'd moved in to his house. Not even that it was all that special. A nondescript split-level, exactly matching its neighbors. Even the name of the style is dull. Split-level. It's to yawn.

Anyway, as I said, it was his. And he was really OK about it. It's not like he held it over me, or threatened to kick me out when we got into big fights.

At least not much.

But really, he was fine about it. Except that one spare room upstairs. The one we said we'd turn into a nursery for the kids we both knew we'd never have. The one with the locked door, that he told me never to open. THat was his space. Yes, I know the stories. Everyone does. I sniffed at the door sometimes and never smelled blood or decaying flesh, so there was that. It was probably just an extra computer where he kept the weird porn he didn't want me to know he watched. The thought kinda grossed you out, but that's really just part of life. Guys'll have weird secrets. It's what makes them guys.

Anyway, you lasted until moving day. You'd joked once that you'd have to go into the forbidden room to pack it up, but only once. You'd said it lightly, but that look in his eyes...

"How DARE you? You'll not use the move as an excuse. That is THE. FORBIDDEN. DOOR."

Yes, it should have sounded absurd, but the look on his face was anything but funny. You quickly looked down and muttered, "sorry. Joking".

I hadn't been, and he knew it.

SO now it was moving day at last.

He's off now to the new place in his truck, loaded with the things that he didn't want to trust to the movers. I'm alone with the cat, upstairs.

She's looking at the forbidden door.

It would be easy. I lived alone for years before moving in to his house, and I had the kind of mother who believed in teaching daughters how to fix things around the house. How to replace a kitchen faucet. How to install a toilet.

How to take a door off its hinges.

I'd not remembered unpacking the hammer, but here it was next to me. The hammer wasn't his, wasn't ours. It was mine, as was the cat. As were too few things.

I stood in the hallway a long time, watching the cat watching the forbidden door. She mewed once, plaintively, sadly, then trotted towards me, looked up at me. The hammer was in my hand.

My hammer.

A hammer is a tool. It felt comfortable in my hand.


I'd always known.

She didn't even fight when I guided her into her carrier, and only meowed once when I picked it up in my left hand and headed for the door.

A hammer is a tool, but also a weapon. I didn't loose my grip on my
hammer until I reached the car. I set it in the passenger seat, in reach as I drove off, in the opposite direction of his new home, one eye always on the rear-view mirror.