Sturdy Doors Repulse Demons
Written By: Justin Nicholes
“Relax.” Chuck spoke from outside the cabin, where red pines skied evergreen, mangy. He was affixing a tarp against Northwoods Wisconsin winter.
“Relax?” I asked, doing the opposite in the lightless foyer, feeling a little like Fortunato in that Poe story about being sealed in a wall. “There’s no door.”
A silence. Were we both holding our breath? A woodpecker tapped a tree with heartrot.
“Can’t control everything,” he said.
Ouch. “I can sure as hell try though.”
“And I’m sure you will,” Chuck said, sounding tired.
I wanted him to sound not tired. I wanted conciliatory.
I wanted him to sound like he wanted to come inside, forget about the last two weeks, about having to kick that door down when I’d threatened to ingest the medicine cabinet. Instead, he added, “Frame’s rotten.”
I kicked a crowbar forgotten in the foyer. Duct tape screamed off a roll as Chuck completed the seal.
“Be here tomorrow,” he tossed over his shoulder, from farther away now. Stones crunched in the drive, but I heard him mutter, to my horror, “Maybe.”
I slumped in the couch as Chuck’s truck rattled down the country road and away.
The wake of diesel seeped through the tarp. It was porous, then. I trembled, felt myself zooming out in fugue dizziness, scattering in the star-pricked sky. I reached a hand out for the furry rear end of my cat. My last bulwark. Montpelier, regal cabin lounger. Sure, the tarp had gaps, but I had methods. After the mouse-turd trail in the bathroom, I’d turned the cabin into a rat trap. Bait stations packed with bromethalin chunks fortified the foundation. From attic to basement crawlspace, traps shimmered with decapitating potential energy.
Monty cat-loafed to conserve body heat, paws and tail tucked. On the coffee table, beside two syrup-cold cups of dark brew, Chuck’s handyman business card lay wrinkled on divorce paperwork served last week.
Chuck the Woodchuck: You Fux It, We Fix It.
“Guess that woodchuck can’t chuck wood.” I meant myself, our fumbled run at marriage, the legal system now deliberating our split.
“What,” he’d said in the dark that night, the last night that mattered, “only you can initiate?”
I’d frozen, shallow breathing.
It sounded like he’d rolled onto his back. I imagined him staring at the ceiling, shaking hands shaped to claws. “What do you even want?” he’d asked.
I hadn’t answered. I didn’t know. Sadness in these walls you built, perhaps? To be alone, but not?
“You can’t control me,” he’d said.
As I ran through it again (wondering, Could I change? Wondering, Couldn’t he?) a sound at the tarp startled me.
Squeak.
Monty’s eyes shot open.
***
That night, I slept with an ear to the fluttering entryway. Frame’s rotten, I heard in dream while wind howled snow through pines. A barred owl hooted. I imagined it skimming the forest floor, jabbing hooked claws, spiriting away mice death-panicked by first snowfall.
Then, closer, inside, I heard it again.
A squeaking.
I moved my hand to locate Monty. He had decamped from the pillow impression.
“Some friend you are.”
Out of bed, my feet almost freezing to the floorboards, I navigated full black to the living room.
Squeak.
In the foyer, with a steel door still balanced on sawhorses in the yard, I lifted the crowbar. Wind swirled against the cabin. It shook the walls and billowed the tarp like a sail.
I leaned closer to the plastic. I felt wind and heard a rustling, like dry leaves scooting across concrete. I realized what the sound was and couldn’t breathe.
Low, churning. Entreating paws.
A cat-howl bladed from the kitchen, and the blizzard blew the tarp loose.
With it, a swarm of vermin swirled in.
They scurried up my legs. I lost the crowbar, raked my arms, knocked away incisors. My hand splashed away blood-warm. I scrambled into the kitchen, where Monty arched by the back door in a demon hiss. More mice squeezed up from the basement, one of them dragging a mousetrap that had guillotined across its back. They oozed from floorboards, plopped with gorged stomach sacks on my head from kitchen cabinets.
I scooped Monty up, battering-rammed the back door halfway off its hinges, incisors pinching my legs.
Wind and time, and habit and fear, worked against me, pushing me back inside with chittering jaws at my ears.
Outside, flailing to knock the riders loose, I escaped in snow. Monty struggled up a pine.
Without walls, with mouthfuls of myself digesting in the marriage cabin, my gaze stabbed skyward against taloned stars.
Justin Nicholes never thought it wise to skydive nekked from an aeroplane. His thriller, Kill Suit, is forthcoming (New Pulp Press). Read him in Dread Literary Review, Cleaver Magazine, The Argyle Literary Magazine, *82 Review, and elsewhere.