The Chief, The Doctor, and a Doorway Down

Police Chief Donnel saw the squad car headlights approaching on the rural road leading to his station at 3 am.  Two hours ago he sent an officer to rouse his small town’s psychologist from her sleep.  As he waited for the car, he rolled a cigarette around in his fingers, debating if he should light it and break his 20 years smoke free. Until now, he had never encountered evil. In all his years of service, never. It was mostly parking tickets and the occasional underage party.

A light rain started falling as the squad car pulled up to the front door where the chief was waiting.  He lit up.  The young psychologist, Dr. Janet Parker, got out and jogged under the covered entryway.

“What’s so important it couldn’t wait until tomorrow, chief?” She asked as she escaped the rain.  Needing a moment to consider his answer, the chief took a drag, and exhaled a plume of smoke.  Looking at the cigarette, he spoke very carefully.  “The State Sheriff told me to get a psychologist in to interview this guy as soon as possible.  Doc, I’ve never once had to call the State Sheriff and tell him I’m out of my depth.  I’ve got Twelve bodies burned to a crisp, and no idea who they are.”  

“Twelve bodies?  Chief, I’m a therapist.  I handle issues like; high-school, the struggles of society, depression, marital struggles, stuff like that.  I’m not equipped to interview a suspect.  I took a class during my undergraduate degree, but that--”

“--makes you the most qualified person in town.  Look, the State is gonna take over soon, bring in their own shrink, but they want you to do a preliminary interview before they get here.  They want, ah, I don’t know.  A local’s eyes on this.”

The chief tossed his cigarette, opened the door for Dr. Parker, and showed her the way to interrogation.  On the way, he briefed her.

“Raymond Cooper, 39.  Bought the house two months ago. Planned on fixing it up, working from home.  Does one of them jobs he can work remotely most of the time.  Fire got a call at 20:53, report of an explosion, arrived eight minutes later.  The house was gone.  Just a pile of smoldering wreckage.  Fire department guys said he opened all the gas valves and set a fire.”

“What did he tell you about tonight?”

“The way he tells it, he was doing some plumbing work, trying to find a shutoff valve in the basement.  Says he found a padlocked door in the floor of the basement.  He opened it, and whatever he found down there caused him to blow up the house.”

“Did he say what he found down there?”

“Doc, he said it was the doorway to hell. The guy is clearly crazy.  I’ll be in there the whole time.  Ask your questions, get your answers, and the State Sheriff will take over.”

Chief Donnel let that sink in, before he reached for the knob on a door labeled ‘Interrogation Room 1’ where Ray Cooper was chained to the table.  The door swung open, and Dr. Parker laid eyes on Cooper for the first time.  His clothes were torn and covered in soot, but otherwise looked fairly normal.  All cleaned up, he might even have looked handsome, in a nerdy kind of way.  She followed the chief into the small, harshly lit room. Cautiously, and without taking her eyes off the suspected killer, she took a seat opposite Cooper.  The chief stayed standing for a moment while he made introductions, and told Cooper to answer all her questions honestly and to the best his memory would allow.

After an awkward pause, Cooper looked at the chief and said, “Dr. Parker? A psychologist? I told you I found a doorway to hell and you think I’m crazy.”

”We don’t like to use that term,” Dr. Parker interrupted.  “Think about it logically, if someone told you they found a doorway to hell in their basement, would you have a couple follow up questions?”

“I...I...I don’t know.  Maybe?  Maybe yesterday, I might have?”

“Ray, can I call you Ray?”

“People call me Coop.”

“Coop, have you ever experienced any dissociative events?  Hallucinations? Out of body sensations?”

“No, other than that one time I tried LSD in college.” Coop said, looking nervously at the chief.  “I didn’t like it though.”

“Okay, take a deep breath.  Could you tell me everything?  The chief tells me you were looking for a shut off valve in the basement?”

“Yeah, the house is old, old pipes.  I was going to update them, but I needed to shut them off first.  I was following the pipes, looking up, when I tripped over something on the floor.  It was a heavy steel door with a padlock.”

“And you opened it?”

“Yeah, I cut off the padlock with a multi-tool.  Went through a few blades.  I thought it might have been a safe or something.  Maybe have some money in it or something.  You know, something the old owner forgot about.  There was a stairway leading down, carved out of dirt and rock.  I looked down and couldn’t see and end.  I found a flashlight, shined it down, still couldn’t see an end.”

“Don’t tell me you went down?”

“I should have stopped after the third step down.  It was weird.  Like I was stepping into a warm pool, but without the water.  Heat rises, but this just sort of stayed below the door jamb.  For some reason, I just keep going down.  5 minutes, 10 minutes, an hour, I didn’t have my phone on me.  Couldn’t see light from the basement anymore, but still kept going down.  After a while, there was a dim flickering light below me.”

“Flickering?” asked Dr. Parker.

“Yeah, I got to a landing, off to the left was a short tunnel. There was a torch on the wall.  I followed the tunnel, and started hearing noises.  I couldn’t really hear it at first.  The tunnel eventually split, I went right.  The sounds became more clear.  Screams, it was screams.”

“Who was screaming, Coop?”

“I don’t know who they were.”  He paused, the screams replaying in his mind.  When he continued, his voice was a little more unsteady.  “The tunnel opened up into a massive cavern.  I was standing on a ledge overlooking… madness.”

“Coop, who was screaming?”

“There were hundreds of them.  They were being roasted over fire, stretched with chains, stabbed, whipped, but that wasn’t… it wasn’t… There were beasts… Demons.  They looked like men wearing furry pants, but I don’t think they were pants.  And their skin was red.  A deep red.”

Dr. Parker shifted her eyes to the chief, trying to decide if this was some sort of joke, then said, “Coop, this sounds like every depiction of hell.  The torture, the flames, the demons.  It’s all a little too… cliche.”

Coop leaned forward, and shrugged a little.  “Maybe people have been there before.  I mean, it was at the end of a stairway below my basement.  That giant cavern had hundreds of tunnels leading off of it. Maybe they lead to other doors in other people’s basements.”

“Okay, so you are standing on a ledge, overlooking this hellscape. What happened next?”

“I ran.  I didn’t want to be roasted over hellfire.  When I got to the split in the tunnel, I tripped and dropped my flashlight.  I picked it up, got to my feet, had a feeling I wasn’t alone.  In the tunnel I didn’t go down was one of the demons.  Big.  Its horns were scraping the roof of the tunnel as it menacingly strode toward me.  They sparked every time they touched. He spoke, and he knew my name. He said, ‘Welcome home, Coop.’  How did he know my name?”

“How’d you get away from him?”

“I don’t know.  I grabbed one of those torches, threw it at him and ran.  I was a good way up the stairs before I couldn’t go one.  I had to stop, catch my breath.  Out of the darkness below I heard laughing.  Deep, dark, joyful, sardonic laughter.  And someone coming up the stairs below me.  Not just one someone either.  It sounded like a pack of demon’s eager and motivated to run me down.  I don’t know how, but I was able to run again, and faster.  I kept tripping on the stairs, I was going so fast.  It didn’t slow me down.  Before I knew it the darkness gave way to the light of my basement and I started to think, maybe, just maybe I might make it.  When I closed the door, the hatch to the stairway, I remembered cutting the lock earlier.”

“You couldn’t close the door.”

“Exactly!  They were coming, but I couldn’t seal the door.  I looked around for anything I could use.  There wasn’t anything I could use to lock it, nothing heavy I could move onto of it.  Then I saw it.  The gas pipe.  Grabbed a wrench, unscrewed a union, and the basement started filling with gas.  Doesn’t take long before all you need is a spark.  Figured a couple hundred tons of house might have a chance of sealing it.  I lit a pile of rags, left them on the stairs leading to the house, and on my way out, I tripped over the cans of oil based stain.  Well, that could help burn the house down.  So I spread that around, and I left.  A few minutes later, the house blew up.”  He snapped his fingers, and flashed a victorious half smile.    

Two knocks on the door broke the silence. It opened, and a uniformed officer came in with a file folder. He whispered something in the chief's ear, handed him the file, and left.  The chief flipped through the file, closed his eyes and hung his head.  “Tell me something Coop.  If you were being chased by demons, and you blew up your house to prevent demons from getting out -- then why did we pull at least a dozen human bodies from the wreck?  Who were they?”

He gently placed the open folder on the table.  Inside were the crime scene photos, twelve of them.  Each photo of different charred remains.  The chief carefully spread the photos on the table so Coop could take a good look at each grotesquely burned corpse.  Coop carefully scanned each photo.  He saw no horns, no red skin, no furry legs.  People.  These were people.

Coop, horrified, managed to stammer, “They were chasing me up the stairs… from hell… that laugh... they were demons!”

“No, Coop,” replied the chief. “The firefighters worked all night, but they managed to clear the wreckage.  There was no door in your basement.  No stairway down.  Coop, they were just people.  Talk to me, why don’t we start with the truth this time?  Help us ID these bodies. Who are they?”