​Have you ever tried to open up a door no one else even knows is there? That’s what I’ve been doing on and off for the past twenty odd years. I tried all kinds of things to get the door to open, but none of them ever worked until I gave up. I spent a lot of time and money trying to get through that door, but in the end the price I paid was just a penny compared to what I gained.
Working downtown at the main library for as long as I have you start to notice certain things. It’s a big building and if you are into exploring at all, you start finding yourself in forgotten corners. The place has seen a lot of construction and remodeling over the years. There are some places up in the stacks where work projects have been started but never finished.

One morning not long after I started the job I managed to come in early. With some time to kill before my shift began I went up to the browse the stacks. I’ve never gotten tired of picking through the old books there is always a new discovery. Just when I happened to stumble across an ornate volume of Giordano Bruno’s Art of Memory I saw someone move out of the corner of my eye in the row next to me. I peeked through the shelf and saw the back of what looked like a middle aged homeless man. He slipped off around the corner along the wall.

The public aren’t allowed up in the stacks yet at the same time I didn’t want to narc on the guy. Street people had been known to sneak into them before closing time to sleep somewhere warm and dry. To me that’s blameless. I did want to see where he was going, so I followed him down the hall until he turned a corner. When I turned the corner he was gone.

I walked along the edge of the wall looking for him until I came to a place where a heavy canvas drop cloth splattered with gray, white and beige paint was hung. It flapped in the wind as I arrived and the air seemed warmer. I could smell hot dust. With it came the memory of the desert, of the time my Mom and I had flown out to visit family in California.  My aunt and cousins took us back home after a few weeks and we drove through the Mojave. I still remember seeing the cattle skull on the side of the road. Then the wind and smell disappeared. As I stood   another memory welled up inside me, a half grazed recollection which lingered on the edge of an impossible threshold. When I reached out to touch it the memory faded.

I pulled back the canvas drop cloth to reveal the door. My jaw dropped at the sight. It was a solid piece of oak so polished I could make out my own reflection inside the mesmerizing grain. The hinges were solid cast iron with bronze bolts. Carved into the door itself were words written in an ancient alphabet reminiscent of both Hebrew and Greek but belonging to neither. It was no script I recognized. The handle and the keyhole were made of silver. Embossed on the knob was an octagon star. When I turned the handle and pushed and pulled the door stayed firm, stolid, in its place. I crouched down and tried to peer through the keyhole. Squinting and looking inside all I could see was a field of black, but then a star glittered and then a field of stars exploded into view, a milky splash glowing against the night until these too faded back to black. Perhaps I had just strained my eyes.

I looked at my watch and was stunned to see I was fifteen minutes late. Where had the time gone? I scrambled down the nearest stairwell to Book Distribution and punched the clock.

“You’re gonna have to stay after a bit Justin, to make that up.”
My manager Rich had a haircut straight out of the ‘70s. He kept it dyed too, the same dark reddish brown as the tie clipped to his neck.

“No problem,” I said. For a boss Rich was cool. He collected Arkham House first editions and had a vast knowledge of Weird fiction. We’d chat about the adventures of Conan, and the intricacies of Lovecraft’s mythos.

I grabbed a cup of coffee from the percolator and started scanning a box of material perplexed and disoriented by what I had seen. 

“So Rich, I was up on D stack this morning and I saw this homeless looking guy up there in the religion section, and I followed him and then I saw this door. It looked like something straight out of a fantasy novel, all gilded and carved and stuff, except it was under this hanging piece of canvas. Have you ever seen that?”

Rich laughed, “You making stuff up again Justin? This would be good in one of your stories.”

“No, I’m not making anything up. When I saw it I became transfixed and lost track of time. That’s why I was late.”

“I’ve never seen that,” he said. “But hey, it’s a big building. Maybe it’s one of those unfinished renovations.”

“Okay,” I said. It was hard for me to believe he hadn’t ever seen the door. Rich was in his sixties and had started working at the library when he was eighteen. He knew the building back and forth.

Yet his dismissal only served to make me more curious. Anytime I had to go fetch a book that was shelved near the door I’d make a pit stop and try to turn the handle, see if it would open. Getting to the other side of it became a slow burning obsession.

Years passed. Life happened. I met a girl named Audrey and she became my girlfriend and a year later we shacked up. My curiosity about the door remained. A few years after we moved in together death happened. My mother’s passing was sudden and unexpected. Yet even after death life kept happening and Audrey and I got married the year I turned thirty. All through this time I still wondered about the door and stopped up to take a look at it every now and again, to see if I’d ever be able to crack it ajar. 

On the weekends the lady and I would go antiquing trips to northern Ohio, or down into Kentucky, or Indiana. I’d buy skeleton keys on these jaunts and try them on the door. We had lots of fun and my collection of keys had become quite impressive but none of them ever worked.

I was beginning to lose hope when I saw an ad in the back of Citybeat for a lock-picking class at the local hacker-space Hive 13.  It was real nifty. You get these little pieces of thin metal to put into the mechanism so you can trip the bolt. Not to toot my own horn but with practice I became skilled at picking locks. One time I got my cousin Chris out of a tough bind. His ex-girlfriend called me up in a panic to help unchain him from the bed. It was kind of awkward for everyone. But on the door this skill didn’t do diddley-squat.

 I started spending loads of time in the lock-picking forum on reddit because someone in the world must know how to trip the mechanism. I chatted with folks who were as bedeviled as I was about doors, locks, bolts, keys. Still nothing worked.  

Then I saw the homeless man wondering in the stacks again. I was fetching a copy of The Jerusalem Bible for a patron and there he was. When I yelled “Hey,” he turned to look at me and I saw him. Marvin. The crazy hobo squatter punk. He ran down the aisle ahead of me and turned the same corner he had all those years before. The canvas drape flapped in the desert scented wind as he shut the door in my face.

I pounded on the door with my fists, but he didn’t come back. No one answered. He might be able to tell me what was behind the door, but maybe he didn’t want me to know. My mind despaired. In all likelihood it was probably just a storage closet for the janitors or an access point to the HVAC system and Marvin slept there when he could. Yet if that were the case why was the door made of fine oak and carved with ancient letters in detailed filigree? Maybe it all was just my fevered imagination.

Shaking my head I tried to let the whole thing go. I grabbed the book I’d come up for and took it down to the customer, full of seething resentment and defeat.

I couldn’t believe it was Marvin. I’d seen him around town and knew him by reputation. I’d run in to him at noise music shows over the years. My wife and I saw him milling about at the annual Northside Rock and Roll carnival on the Fourth of July. All the cities hot freaks came out for that. But mostly I’d seen him at the library, looking at books on mysticism, magic, and meditation. My co-workers thought he was weird. I was intrigued by him, but now I was just peeved that he could go in the door, and I was stuck out. He didn’t even work at the library for Christ’s sakes.

My good friend Syd knew him a bit; he even lived with him in a punker’s squat for a few months and relayed Marvin’s crazy stories to me, stuff about being a time traveler. No one believed a word.

 A week later I was still in a stew about it all when I left work. Waiting for the bus, my mind spun in a billion different directions. I paid my fare and noticed the 17 was extra crowded. There was only one seat left and it was next to Marvin who looked at me wild eyed as if he was about to reel in the biggest catch of his life.
 “Don’t worry, I don’t bite,” he said, as I sat down next to him. He had an earthy smell. It wasn’t the kind of bathroom funk you get with a wino though he did have a brown paper bag sitting on his lap. His smell was of strong tobacco, soil, and a dry cracked aroma reminiscent of the desert.

 “Seen any good bands lately?” he asked as I tried to get comfortable.

            “No, I haven’t,” I said.

 He looked to his side with a nervous twitch then whispered, “Will you hear me out? I’ve got something to tell you. I know you’ve seen me up in the stacks and I know you know about the door.”
I nodded my head.  

 He grinned, revealing his nicotine stained teeth. In the sparkle of his eyes I could see hints of far off places. This man had been stretched thin. Despite his rugged muscularity from a life in the elements a burning mystical gulf existed within him, a void filled with silence and stillness.

 “My friend Syd told me you hop trains?”

            “It’s not common knowledge but if you hop a freighter under the glow of a blue moon while shaking a bag of old possum bones and singing Cannonball Blues you can ride the line to another time. If you sing the words backwards you go into the past and if you sing them side-a-ways you step into the future.”
I had just learned my first piece of hobo magic.

            “It works with a harmonica too,” he said.

Marvin pulled a scratched up harmonica from the front pocket of his beat up overalls. To the surprise of everyone on the bus he honked off several bars from Cannonball. It was so captivating everyone shut up. Even the bus driver stopped until a horn blared from a car behind us. Marvin slipped the harmonica back in his pocket and we were on our way.  Conversations continued like nothing had happened.

“I’ve been all across this country,” he said “riding the rails. I’ve walked the streets of San Francisco, Chicago and New York. I’ve done odd jobs in the small towns too, in Springfield, in Ypsilante, in places you never heard of. And on all those trips I wasn’t just travelling across the country. I was travelling across time, out on collecting trips.”

It sounded crazy, but so was the door, so maybe it was true. “Collecting what?”

              “Books. For the secret wing of the library.”

            Something clicked. “Did you ever get caught smuggling books into the building?” I asked.  Steve in security had told me a story about a man they caught sneaking antiquarian books the library didn’t own up into the stacks.

            “That was me,” he said. “For a half-Irish, half-Lebanese madman I’ve wised up a bit since then. Now I use an invisibility orb when I make deliveries.”

             “Then how come I’ve seen you?”

            “People gifted with the sight can see past the glamour of the orb.”

            I was able to see things other people didn’t. “Is that how I saw the door in the first place?” Marvin nodded.

            “But how come you ran...and how come you’re talking to me now?”

            “I ran because I was on a mission. I’m talking now because you’re persistent,” he said. “And because you knocked. Knocking is the first step.”

“I’ve been trying to open the door since I started at the library. I’ve tried everything and it won’t budge!”

            “Next time you’re there it will” he said, “because something in you changed.”

            “I don’t even remember knocking.”

            “Well, you kind of pounded on it a week ago.” I had. I’d been desperate.

             “So what are you doing now?” I asked.

            “I’m gonna hitch a train up to the Cleveland. I gotta pick up a book from another member of the League, maybe check out this band Terpsichore while I’m there.”

            The League. The name was vague, familiar, a half grazed memory.

            I looked outside the bus window and couldn’t see a thing. A heavy fog had settled in. Had I missed my stop? It felt like I’d been sitting there forever. Then I looked around the bus itself and saw that Marvin and I were the only passengers left. The driver got up and said, “Layover boys.”

            “I’m gonna have a smoke, man” Marvin said, so I got up with him and stood outside the bus as he rolled a cigarette from his pouch of bugler. He offered me one and I accepted.

We were parked next to an old gas station. It was the only thing I could see. Everything else was covered in a swirling haze of mist and fog. Gas stations like this only existed in the movies or in the small towns you pass through on a country drive. It had two antique pumps, solid metal, bright red and green. An attendant was pumping gas in a white ’59 Ford Galaxy with the top rolled down. The driver took a swig from a bottle of Coke, and had his arm around a brunette sporting a flipped bob. 

            “I don’t remember there ever being a layover on the 17 between Downtown and Northside,” I said after taking a drag.

            Marvin exhaled and I exhaled. His gray smoke mingled with my gray smoke and both mixed into the penetrating fog. The man in the Galaxy paid the attendant and the car chugged into life exhaling thick smog from the tailpipe before driving off into the misty haze.

“This whole world is a layover. Your trip here on this planet is just a stop at a way station. You come down here and the threads of your life interweave with the threads of other folks who’ve made the same stop. Some get back on the same bus or train as you, and others walk off down the road, go a different way. Some folks you get to know real well, others just intersect your path. A few you may have met during your last stop at the way station. Some you keep on meeting again and again. You and me are like that because I swear we’ve met before, and not just up in the parlor at the Southgate House.  Anyhow, after a time you open your eyes and start seeing how you’re just another passerby. You don’t become wrapped up in the world so much. You start wearing it like a loose robe knowing it’s all just part of the weave. The painful things that go on here, and the joyful things that go on here only end up touching you in a few places, and there lightly. With your eyes opened to what lies beyond this brief layover, you’ll be able to open the door."

            As he spoke a kernel of light passed from him and into me. It was a floating golden book with tiny wings no larger than a firefly. It crawled out the crumpled paper bag he held and flew into the shirt pocket over my heart.  

            I looked inside my shirt pocket and the book bug was gone. The faint neon residue it had left behind glowed in the shape of an archaic letter. The fog started to dissipate. The gas station sign flickered on and off, and it seemed like a pink United Dairy Farmer sign emerged from beneath it. A sharp whistle from the bus driver came for us to get back on and snapped me out of my reverie.

Marvin said, “If you want to live a life of service as a member of the League take this.” He offered me the paper bag. With trembling hands I received the gift. It wasn’t a bottle of cheap dime store wine. I could feel a book inside, but it had the heft and weight of a stone tablet.  

            In the distance I heard another whistle blowing, and saw huge tufts of hot white steam in the shape of a stallion billowing into what was left of the fog. The sound of iron wheels against iron tracks rifled through the air making a sonorous drone. As the train came into view I saw it was the magnificent Mercury streamliner that used to serve the Midwest. There had been a display about the Art Deco commuter in the rare book room last month.

            “Come on,” I said. “The bus is about to leave.”

            “No. I’ve got to catch the Mercury,” he said. He tipped his hat to me, turned, and sprinted into the copse of honeysuckle and weeds in the junked out green space behind the gas station to the train tracks beyond.

​            I climbed on the bus and sat down. As we drove the fog cleared. When I reached my stop I walked home in a daze. The book was heavy in my hands, a burden and a weight, but one I accepted. Audrey was at her tap dancing class when I got home so after I fed the dog I opened up the bag to look at the book. I found a note written in exquisite cursive on a scrap of yellow notebook paper.

Justin,

 Stamped below this was the octagon symbol from the doorknob embossed with the letter L in the center.

            My first job for the League.

            The next day I managed to get to work early. I got off the bus, went inside and ran up the steps to the stacks.  As I walked to the door I heard the faint echo of a harmonica playing Cannonball Blues.
 Standing at the threshold I pulled back the canvas and knocked on the door with a tenderness I had not known before. A dry desert wind emerged and combed through my tangled hair. I turned the handle and pushed it open. The smell of old books, dry with the dust of ages, greeted me.

            My heart skipped as I stepped into the secret library. I ran my hand along a row of books, but their spines did not feel like leather or cloth or paper but like the rock wall of an ancient cave. The cave walls were painted with images of antelope and lions.

            I crept to the end of the passage and came to find an alabaster jar. The perfume of the desert emerged from it in a spiral of dust that glittered like the stars. I reached down into the mouth of the jar and my fingers touched a scroll. The paper crumbled as I grabbed it, yet even in the dim light I saw the ancient hieroglyphic text. Afraid the knowledge would be lost forever I licked the little bits of paper from off of my hands and the words dissolved in my mouth. Thousands of little tiny golden books with wings flowed into my bloodstream and a hot red flame, bright as the fire of a welder’s torch ignited in my heart.

            Past the jar I saw the passage curve around a tight corner I had mistaken for a wall. Faint flickering lamplight beckoned to me. I followed the light further until I was standing before a spiraling staircase that climbed up into the stars and down into deep caverns below. I stood in the secret wing of the library where there were many more doors, rooms and mansions to explore.

             Now I have the key.

​​             All I have to do is knock.  

This story was originally written for a reading at a mixed media group show at the Contemporary Dance Theatre in March of 2019 and first appeared in print for Issue # 12 of Mythic Magazine in 2020.

         Abbey veered her sedan to the right to avoid making roadkill of the skunk as they zoomed along the potholed Indiana back-road, causing branches from the hanging trees to scrape side of her ride, and her friend Sara to drop her cigarette on the floor.
            “What the hell, Abbey!” Sara yelled.
            Peggy griped from the back, “Chill out. We’re okay.”
            “Sorry, all this ghost talk is working me up.”
            “We all just need to simmer down,” Abbey said, as she re-centered on the narrow road.
             “Well, slow down first. It’s not like we have to punch in when we get there.”
             Peggy videotaped it all with a small camera. Later she’d edit the footage for their Midwest Psychic Quest channel on Witchtok.
            Sara relit her smoke. They’d been in the car over two hours after a crappy day at the salon. Her boss had flaked out again, made her go pick up product on her own dime. As general manager the only perk seemed to be extra hassle and coworkers who talked behind her back. Maybe one day their channel would take off, they’d get some sponsors, ghost hunt and legend trip full-time. It was a dream, but it kept the encroaching winter blues at bay on the dull days of drudgery.
            The legend tripping videos got the most likes and comments of all their content, and the episode on schedule was a visit to the site of the brutal circus slayings in Euterpe, Indiana, where the Wallbanger Big Top had kept its winter camp and quarters; those quarters now moldered in ruins on an abandoned property behind a strip mall whose last denizens barely stayed in business. They parked their car between Indie CBD and Dollar Discounts, got out, checked flashlights, checked pepper spray, and crept behind the building to look for the hole in the fence that led into the abandoned property.
          Many others had been there before them. It was easy to follow the trail of beer cans, condom and candy wrappers to the husks of empty outbuildings whose only coats of paint were decades of graffiti.
         “Let’s get the story on camera.” Peggy set up her light, and prodded Abbey and Sara into place, standing in front of a fading mural of a calliope sprayed on wall that slanted with  decay.
        Sara began. “Before the killings, Ringmaster George Wallbanger often complained he was being driven insane by the sound of the steam calliope. It’s piercing high pitched whistle haunted his dreams. Some researchers have wondered if it was just tinnitus, the gradual loss of his hearing as he aged. Maybe. But when authorities found his journal, a darker picture unfolded.
      “Wallbanger wrote page after page about the calliope being possessed. He said it’s player Alan Dennison was a servant of hell and whenever he played, the infernal instrument reverberated with the shrieks of the dead and the damned.”
      “Of course the police dismissed the paranormal connection,” Abbey said, taking her turn. “But the troupe didn’t have to be convinced. The fortune teller Madame Mori had seen the tragedy in her cards. Death. The Hanged Man. The Eight of Swords. Soon this land, next to Indiana’s cornfields, was all splattered with blood.”
            “Alan didn’t see it coming, despite the arguments he’d had with George over the noise. Then the ice pick was in his neck. Alan’s lover Dolores the Clown tried to stop him. All she got for her trouble was an instant lobotomy when he stabbed her in the eye.”
          “George poured kerosene over the bodies slumped against the tractor tow that pulled and powered the calliope then flicked the smoldering nub of his cigar to set it all ablaze. Next he pulled out his .22 pistol.” Abbey made a gun shape with her hand, “and blammo, he blew his fucking brains out.”
        Sara finished it up. “Soon the whole camp was gathered around the fire. The tattooed lady and the merman pulled Dolores to safety. She was alive, but burned, and never recovered her faculties. She spent the rest of her life at the Fort Wayne Sanitarium.”
        She let out her breath. “Legend has it, that if you come here and circle these ruins three times while reciting this chant, you can still hear Alan playing his calliope.”
            Sara and Abbey walked around, chanted, hands held.

“See the freaks in a snow-white tent,
See the tiger and elephant,
See the monkey jump the rope,
Listen to the Kally-ope!
Hail, all hail, the cotton candy stand
Hail, all hail, the steam whistle band.
Music from the Earth am I!
Circus days tremendous cry!
My steam may be gone,
But my sound will never die!”

            They chanted as they walked, and the late fall leaves crunched beneath their sneakers.
            Peggy saw a flicker of red and blue through the camera lens, then a painted face smeared with tears in the haze of moonlight and billows of steam. She smelled sulfur as an acrid taste crept into her mouth, and felt a weakness in the knees, as if she’d seen a guy she had crushed on, but now knew he was a creep, a sociopath hiding behind a charmed smile.
            She glanced at the ghostmeter clipped to the belt of her jeans and the numbers on its LED display jumped up and down. As they finished a third revolution around the circle, the ether blue outline of a faded canvas tent appeared with a whoosh of scorching vapor as the calliope released its high-pitched cry.
           A whirling gyre of phantasmal and miasmic shades slithered into being, spinning, as if on a carousel of sound, whose piercing tones splintered the air in a babble of laughter.           
           Then it was gone, and only the smell of popcorn and sawdust remained.
           Sara felt sick to her stomach, and wished she hadn’t ordered the fried pickles at Diane’s Diner. As they walked back to the car, she couldn’t shake the high-pitched buzzing that rang and rang and rang in her ears, following her the whole way home.