The Door Within tdw-1

  The Door Within

  ( The Door Within - 1 )

  Wayne Thomas Batson

  Wayne Thomas Batson

  The Door Within

  1

  FROM NIGHTMARE TO NIGHTMARE

  T he first sword missed Aidan’s head by an inch. It slammed into the massive catapult’s wheel, stuck for a moment, and jerked free. In that breath of time, Aidan batted away the second sword and threw himself down the hill.

  This foe was beyond Aidan’s skill. His only chance was to get away, to escape with… Aidan looked down at the torn parchment in his hand. It was something important, this parchment, something of infinite value, the key to it all-only Aidan could not remember why it was so precious. He only knew that it was and that he must not let the enemy get it.

  As he ran, Aidan glanced over his shoulder. The knight in dark armor crashed down the hill, gaining rapidly. His cloak trailed behind him like a gray wing, and he swung his two swords in wide arcs, carving the wind. The blades came closer… and closer.

  Before Aidan could run another yard, the knight in dark armor fell upon him. Aidan turned, fended off a blow, then ran a few steps; turned again, sidestepped one blade, and barely blocked the other.

  “Where will you go?” rasped a voice that seemed to reach for Aidan. “Your kingdom is in ruin. Even your King has fled. All is lost!”

  The enemy’s taunts threatened to strangle the small hope that lingered in Aidan’s heart. But Aidan would not give in.

  Aidan blocked another savage blow from the enemy and slashed away his second blade. Again, Aidan lunged away from his foe.

  Suddenly, he saw his chance. Beyond the next hill a horse struggled, its reins tangled around its dead rider’s arm. Drawing from his final reserve of strength, Aidan charged up the hill and dove for the horse. It shrieked and staggered under the sudden weight but did not fall. Aidan swept his sword up and cut the tangled reins. He thrust the parchment under his breastplate and slapped the horse hard on its hindquarters.

  “Go!” Aidan screamed.

  The beast reared briefly but then surged ahead with such force that Aidan nearly fell. He could not reach what was left of the reins with his free hand, so he clutched the horse’s neck with all his might.

  Aidan looked back. The knight in dark armor was now far behind and had given up pursuit. Just as Aidan allowed himself a grim smile, something hit him-hard-in the back, knocking him off the horse. He heard a sharp snap and felt the air forced out of his lungs.

  He lay in a heap, his face to the ground. A dull pain throbbed in his right wrist. Dizzy, he spit dust and debris from his mouth, and looked up weakly from the ground. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw an enormous black wing in the gray sky.

  Suddenly, Aidan was kneeling on a high stone platform. His sword was gone, and his hands were bound behind him. A pale warrior stood tall before him. His long gray hair was drawn back, and a thin black circlet-like a thin crown-rested above his strong brow and penetrating hazel eyes.

  When he spoke, a shrill ringing came to Aidan’s ears. The sound faded and he heard the warrior’s words. He was saying, “… make you the same offer I made your companions.” His voice sounded rich and kingly-above all else to be trusted. “In spite of my generosity, they chose the weaker path.”

  Aidan turned and saw two knights facedown beside him. They somehow seemed familiar, but they lay unnaturally still. And looming proudly over the bodies was the dark knight brandishing his twin blades.

  Aidan looked questioningly back to the warrior before him.

  “They have lost,” he said, clasping his hands before his chest. “But their loss is your gain. You will have all that was to be theirs and so much more.”

  The warrior seemed to grow. His presence intensified. And when he spread apart his hands, Aidan saw visions of grand towers, high thrones, and vaults of gold. It was all there for the asking, Aidan knew.

  “Look about you,” the warrior continued. “All that you have defended is lost. There is nothing left.”

  Aidan turned and saw desolation. Everywhere were fallen towers, rent walls, charred debris, and broken bodies. The sky was black, roiling with dark clouds and smoke from a thousand fires.

  “All you must do,” said the warrior, “is deny the one who abandoned you.”

  A profound wave of peace washed over Aidan, and he looked steadily into the eyes of the warrior. He spoke calmly. “I will never deny my King!”

  The dark knight came forward with his two swords, but his master held up a hand. “I’ll do it myself,” the warrior said. The warrior’s hazel eyes flickered red as he drew a long, dark sword and drove the blade through Aidan’s breastplate.

  “Uhnnn! Ah, ahhhhh!” Aidan screamed. He writhed on his bed and knocked his lamp off the table. It crashed to the ground and shattered, awakening Aidan. He shook violently, and his stomach churned. Something heaved inside him. Barely avoiding broken glass, he bolted to the hall bathroom and threw up. He collapsed and rested his head on the toilet seat.

  “Aidan?” came Grampin’s voice from the study downstairs. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes!” Aidan lifted his head and managed a hoarse yell. “I’m fine!”

  Aidan shook his head despondently and let it thud down on the seat. The dream had been horrible, but waking up to find that his family had actually moved across the country-to Aidan, that was the real nightmare.

  2

  THE UNEXPECTED

  G rampin told me you had another one of those dreams,” Aidan’s dad said. He tentatively put his hand on his son’s shoulder and gave a firm, reassuring squeeze. Aidan shrugged it off as if it were a wasp.

  Mr. Thomas grimaced, exhaled, and ran a hand through his gray-streaked hair. Silence hung like a cloud between father and son.

  Nearby, Aidan’s mom stood with her head at a slight tilt and her hands on her hips as if to say, I told you so.

  Mr. Thomas looked away and sighed. He started to leave the dining room, but spun around and quickly pulled up a chair next to his teenage son, who was sitting stiffly at the table.

  “How long are you going to keep this up?” he asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Aidan replied. He looked away.

  “Look, it’s been two weeks, son, and-”

  “Yeah, two weeks and I still hate it here.”

  “I know it was kind of sudden-”

  “Kind of?” Aidan interrupted. “One week into summer vacation and you say, ‘Oh, uh…, by the way, Aidan, we’re moving halfway across the country in two weeks.’ That’s more than a little sudden. You didn’t even ask if I cared.”

  “We’ve been through this before,” Aidan’s dad said, his face reddening. “You know we didn’t have a choice. Grampin needs our help. This is where he spent his whole life, and we can’t just force him into an assisted living facility.”

  Aidan shrugged. He’d heard this song before.

  “Besides,” his father continued, “Riddick and Dunn has an office out here, and it was easy for Mom to get a teaching position, with her credentials.”

  “So it was convenient for everyone but me.”

  Mr. Thomas turned his head and frowned. “Listen, we left friends behind in Maryland too, you know.”

  That was it. Aidan sprang up and rushed from the dining room. He banged up the stairs in an angry fog, slammed the door to his room, and dove onto his bed.

  Aidan faced his bedside table. The twelve medieval figurines- the pewter knights, dragons, and unicorns-were, as always, still, quiet, and ready to listen.

  “Y’know what?” he said to them. “They don’t have a clue what it’s like leaving a friend behind. I bet they won’t have any trouble at all finding people to pla
y Bridge with.”

  None of the small medieval beings replied. They were good that way. They didn’t offer advice. They didn’t lecture. They simply listened.

  “I mean, how am I supposed to survive high school when my only real friend is a thousand miles from here?” Aidan glowered at the fantasy figures and shook his head. There was no way he’d ever find a friend like Robby again.

  Robby Pierson and his family had moved from Florida to a house in Maryland a block away from Aidan. The two boys had met in school, had homeroom together and lockers side by side, and everything changed for Aidan. Until that time, Aidan had been known to the kids in the neighborhood and at school as the overweight weirdo who sat around all day drawing castles and spacecraft. Then Robby showed up. He was tall and muscular and had huge green eyes, long blond hair, and an earring. And given his good looks and ability to play every sport better than everyone else, he was instantly crowned “so cool” by everyone-even the juniors and seniors!

  For reasons Aidan still didn’t understand, Robby had decided to become his best friend. They hung out between classes, after school, and sometimes had PlayStation sleepovers on the weekends.

  It was as if coolness were a magical golden powder that could rub off on Aidan just by standing in Robby’s shadow. Because of Robby, the most popular kids in the school paid attention to Aidan. They all seemed to think, If Robby Pierson thinks he’s cool, then he must be cool. It was, after all, a large shadow, and Aidan liked it there. He didn’t have to worry about being picked on, and better still, he never had to think about what to do in certain situations-Robby always knew what to do.

  “Looks like it’s back to being the oddball again!” Aidan’s anger surged to the point that he was tempted to smack the little medieval figurines right off the table, but he’d already destroyed a lamp. So he hit his pillow as hard as he could and then threw it at his bedroom door.

  Aidan suddenly sat very still on the edge of his bed. He had the most intense feeling that someone was outside his bedroom window watching him. He felt frozen in time, unable at first to summon the courage to turn around.

  This is stupid, he thought. I mean, who could be at my window? I’m on the second floor, and there’s nothing out there to stand on… except, maybe one of the pines.

  Aidan spun around and looked out the window. The front yard was full of tall evergreens, but the biggest one was rocking severely back and forth.

  … like something was in there! The thought leaped into Aidan’s mind, and he pressed his face up against the glass.

  Aidan looked left, right, up, down. At first he didn’t see anything. But then, up the road that ran in front of his house, there was a shadow. It was wide, spanning the road at times, and it was moving fast. That’s what caught Aidan’s eye. And even through the glass, Aidan heard a peculiar swooshing sound. Aidan looked up in the sky. Nothing there.

  The swooshes continued. And the shadow rocketed back toward Aidan’s house. Aidan strained to see what could be casting such a shadow, but there was no passing cloud or low-flying plane. The shadow swooped over the house, and for a split second the sun was eclipsed by

  … something.

  Aidan bounced off his bed, took the stairs two at a time, arriving with a horrendous thud at the bottom.

  “Hey, watch the thumping!” Aidan’s father bellowed from the kitchen.

  “Sorry!” Aidan yelled over his shoulder as he ran out the front door to search the skies.

  3

  TREASURES IN EARTHEN VESSELS

  I ’m serious, Mom, it was this huge shadow,” Aidan mumbled earnestly, his mouth half full of pizza.

  “I’m sure you saw something, Aidan,” she replied. “Maybe it was an airplane?”

  “Mom, airplanes don’t sound like that. It was like, swoosh, swoosh!”

  “I didn’t see-or hear-anything,” offered Aidan’s dad.

  “Maybe it was a helicopter?”

  “Mommm!”

  “Sorry,” she said, holding up her hands. “But helicopters do go swoosh, swoosh.”

  Aidan scowled.

  “Besides, it couldn’t have been anything like that because it was in the big pine tree out front…”

  “It was in the pine tree?” his parents echoed. They both had raised eyebrows.

  Grampin wheeled into the kitchen and parked at the table. Aidan got up immediately and said, “Oh, never mind!”

  The next morning, Aidan sat at his computer, staring at the last email Robby had sent. In it, Robby had explained that he was going away for two weeks to a special soccer camp being held at Camp Ramblewood or Redwater or Rattleweed or something like that- Robby couldn’t remember. Pro soccer players were coming to train promising junior players.

  The bad part was that Robby said he wouldn’t have access to the Internet. That meant no emails would come until Robby came home in August. “Great,” Aidan moaned. “Some summer vacation.”

  In the three weeks since they’d arrived in Colorado, Aidan had run out of good books and had mastered every PS2 game he owned. Aidan’s father was at the firm all day. His mom went to her new school two or three days a week to create lesson plans from the new math curriculum. And Grampin, well, he just wasn’t an option as far as Aidan was concerned.

  But the biggest problem was that there didn’t seem to be any kids Aidan’s age in his new neighborhood. He didn’t even see any at the local shopping center. But at least he’d had Robby’s emails to look forward to-and now he didn’t even have that anymore.

  With Robby, every day had been an adventure. Whether it was building forts in the woods, catching crayfish, or riding bikes on the winding trails behind the local high school-Robby found ways to make it exciting.

  “That’s what I need,” Aidan said to himself, “an adventure!”

  And there was one place in the house Aidan hadn’t checked out yet: the basement. But he didn’t like the thought of being underground, cold, and closed in. Still, he’d need to go in sometime, might as well be today.

  Walking through the kitchen, Aidan passed by Grampin, who was asleep, snoring like a chorus of whoopee cushions, the coffee in his mug long since cold.

  Then he spotted it-the basement door. It had a deadbolt, a chain latch, and a regular knob lock. Aidan had often wondered why Grampin needed three locks on the basement door. He’d wondered about it when he’d visited as a little boy, but not enough to ask… and certainly not enough to go down there. Aidan didn’t like basements. They were uncomfortable, damp, and full of shadows. Robby’s basement back in Maryland had always given Aidan the creeps.

  Aidan had a feeling that Grampin’s basement would be worse. Could this be the adventure he was searching for?

  Quietly, Aidan slipped into the basement and shut the door behind him. He found himself smothered in darkness. He groped about, flicked the light switch-nothing.

  After wrestling with second thoughts, he tried to tiptoe down the stairs. But each step Aidan took made a different creak or groan, like playing a wildly-out-of-tune piano. If there was something sinister lurking in the basement shadows, it surely knew Aidan was coming.

  Aidan reached the bottom step and realized with great relief that the basement wasn’t completely dark. There were three windows that, while painted a peculiar shade of green, at least let in enough light to make out shapes.

  Eyes wide and straining, Aidan stepped down onto the basement floor. He half expected ghoulish, rotting hands to reach up from the ground to grab at his ankles, but none did. There were, however, other reasons for him to feel uncomfortable. It was cold-a kind of chill that seeped through clothing and made Aidan cringe. There was also a damp, mildewed smell. On top of that, it was unnaturally silent. No crickets, no rattling water heater… nothing. The only sound Aidan heard was his own heart pulsing away while he walked.

  He saw a large cardboard box. It was overflowing with toys, but in the ghastly green shades cast from the windows, these toys were not a cheery sight. A wooden sailboat, a bro
ken drum, and a doll that stared back with one eye-Aidan cringed as he passed them.

  Aidan scuttled over to a workbench up against the far wall where, to his great relief, he found a small lamp that still worked. In the new light he made many discoveries: an old radio with large wooden knobs, a stack of newspapers from the 1950s, and half of an old baseball card of a player named Gil somebody. Thinking that there might be more old baseball cards, hopefully intact, Aidan began to search meticulously through other boxes nearby. No luck. The boxes were filled with musty smells, wads of tissue paper, or other smaller boxes. No ’52 Mantle, no ’81 Ripken.

  Aidan sighed and furrowed his eyebrows. He marched over to the far corner of the basement but stopped abruptly when he heard something. It was faint and might ordinarily have gone unnoticed, but because of Aidan’s nerves and the unearthly quiet of the basement, it was as bone jarring as an explosion.

  Aidan stood still as a tombstone, but his eyes strained in wide arcs. The noise clearly came from the angular nook beneath the steps, but there was nothing there. No bike with a rotting, leaking tire. No box with a mouse family within. No tipped paper cup with a roach clicking about in search of food. There was just bare cement floor. The sound continued, a raspy, whispering sound like wind disturbing a pile of dead leaves. It was getting louder. Aidan thought suddenly of the thing watching him from the pine outside his window.

  His heart now lodged somewhere in his throat, Aidan lunged toward the stairs-for there was no other way out of the basement. Just a few more steps, and he’d be… But on Aidan’s very next step, the lamp on the workbench flickered, dimmed, and with an audible pfffft, died.

  The darkness was almost total. Even the green light from the basement windows had been blotted out. Aidan stood frozen again, his eyes darting. He opened his mouth to scream, but his voice chose not to cooperate. He thought humorously that even if he had screamed, the only one in the house was Grampin. What could the old guy do?