Work Text:
The Door
The two detectives ran up to the vacant building, the older sergeant yelling at a pair of uniformed cops climbing out of their patrol car, “Go around the back and come up the stairs! I don’t want him getting away, again!” The two patrolmen nodded and ran off. The two detectives continued into the building. Detective Martinez yelled back at his partner,
“He’s on the fourth floor!” Detective Sergeant Bennett nodded and called the two uniforms on his radio. The policemen entered the fourth floor. Martinez shouted for the suspect to stop, to no avail. They chased him down a corridor and around a corner into an outer hallway. At this point they lost sight of him, but heard a door slam. Martinez and Bennett ran down the hallway, meeting the uniformed cops as they came through the emergency exit.
Bennett swore, “Were the hell did he go? He couldn’t have gotten past us! All the doors are chained shut!”
“All but that one on the right. We did hear a door slam.” As he said this, Martinez got a puzzled look on his face. Bennett, with a look of extreme concern, ran back down the hallway. He stopped at a door, on the opposite wall from the others. The door would open onto a four story drop. The four policemen gathered around the door. Bennett slowly opened it.
The captain motioned the trauma councilor to sit. After she had taken the chair facing his, he sat behind his desk.
“So, Doctor Andersen, what the hell happened to my men? Don Smith tried to shoot himself, Rod Martinez hides in church all day and night, Doug Bennett had a heart attack, and Floyd Whitcomb is catatonic! Mumbles something about a damned door! His wife is so stressed that she had to be given a shot to stop her from going into premature labor!” Captain Warren stopped to draw breath.
Doctor Andersen sighed, “Captain, I’m afraid that your men received a terrible shock. You remember that incident last year at the collage? The one with the incinerated body? Oh, good, you do. I’m afraid that this is like that case. We won’t find your suspect, or the door. Thank god.” She shuddered and crossed herself. Warren was startled.
“Be that as it may, did you find out anything about what happened to them?”
“Yes, I’m afraid I did. When Bennett opened that door, he and the rest of them expected to see a grotesque, but ordinary scene. What they saw was an ordinary scene; a flight of stone steps winding down into darkness. Then they heard a horrible scream that was cut off. That’s when they slammed the door and fled.”
Captain Warren stared at her, “But that doesn’t explain the aberrant behavior!”
The doctor sighed again, “That’s because there was soil and roots above the stairs.”