The Eighth Gate

10 | At Death's Door (ii)

Mary didn’t wait to see how Noah and Tamara would react to her statement. Instead she burst into action, body humming with adrenaline. She ran in the direction in which she saw the brief ghostly image of a boy disappear into the master bedroom, going straight through the closed door. She had just placed a sweaty palm upon the knob’s cold surface when Tamara’s voice, loud and demanding, stopped her short.

“Stop!”

Mary whipped around to face her friend. “But I just saw—“

“I’m getting crazy readings back in the hallway,” Tamara interjected. Her voice was strained, pitch raised in an effort to compete against the incessant wailing emanating from her EMF meter. A blinking red light flashed its bloody color every time the beep sounded off; the sound bounced between the empty confines of the house like a series of ghostly screams. “Quick, let’s go check it out.”

Mary blinked. She hadn’t caught a trace of the sounds in her frantic haze; the pounding of her heart in her ears obliterated any other noise that attempted to make its way through.

She thought about arguing Tamara’s suggestion. Her burning desire to enter that room was practically unbearable now. But then the single red little eye of Tamara’s blinking device floated away from sight, its glow slowly becoming eaten up by darkness as Tamara went further into the house, towards the hallway they had previously been standing in. Mary wished Tamara had passed out the night vision goggles before all of this had started.

Noah stood somewhat positioned between the two girls, in the center of the house’s living room. His head twisted back and forth, alternating between the opposite directions Tamara and Mary were situated before permanently fixating on Mary. His brown eyes gleamed like shiny copper pennies beneath the light of his flashlight.

“Mary,” Noah began, “come on. We’ll get to that room in a minute. I don’t want to leave Tamara or you alone; we should stick together.”

Mary knew he was right, and for split second she found herself hating him for being so irritatingly responsible. But then, just like that, that brief moment of deep distaste flitted away, leaving Mary feeling apologetic. She didn’t want to be such a pain in the butt, but that room was making her act up, augmenting her stubbornness to an all-time high. She had been so close to opening that door. So close.

It took every ounce of Mary’s willpower to turn away from the master bedroom door and trudge over to Tamara. Her legs protested with every step she took to add distance between herself and the door, as if she were wading against the rough waves of the beach: the way they slammed into her legs relentlessly, making her knees quiver with the threat of sending her tumbling backwards. She threw one last wistful glance at the door before quickening her pace.

When she and Noah rounded the corner of the hall, they saw Tamara standing there, attention focused on the crying device in her hand. She was muttering to herself in that nonsensical way she always did when she was trying to figure something out that was mentally challenging, drawing upon the plethora of knowledge crammed into that brain of hers.

But she wasn’t alone. Noah and Mary screeched to an abrupt halt the moment they registered the tall man looming over her from behind, a wicked, spine-chilling grin laid out over his ghostly mouth.

                                                           †††

1 hour earlier…

As it turned out, Mary didn’t have to spend much time waiting in a nicely decorated spare room for Tamara. She passed the brief time with Noah and Avery, reminiscing with her best friend over past experiences, like when Tamara dropped her expensive calculator into the toilet by accident and cried about it for three days straight, or when Noah fell off a kiddie chair and broke his leg in the sixth grade, or when Mary got locked in the local library after falling asleep while reading. She was in a hidden corner that nobody had bothered to check, and they had closed the building for the night.