The Things Behind the Door

My mom always said I should go to medical school and be a doctor. I just didn’t want all that hassle. I’m not a complicated guy. I just want to do a job get paid and go home. I don’t care about the details. I don’t need to complicate things. I didn’t know much about my job. I showed up at the small boxy gray building and unlock the door with my key. There was never anyone else there. I got the meat from the freezer. I’m not sure what kind. I would defrost it while smoking a few cigarettes. Then I went to the back room and slid open a hatch in this thick rusted metal door. I would throw the meat in and then close the hatch back. It was pretty simple. At some point every week an envelope containing eight thousand dollars showed up on my doorstep. I didn’t ask questions and it just went on like that from day to day and week to week.

I got the job a few years back. I got into some trouble with the laws and ended up spending a year in prison. When I got out no one wanted to hire me and I was in a pretty desperate situation. I applied pretty much everywhere. I just didn’t have any luck. That was until one day around five in the morning  I got woken up by a text. It was from one of those anonymous text apps. The message read “You’re hired.” It then listed an address and told me to be there by six thirty AM. I tried to text back but all I could get was en error message. I considered not going but I was desperate for money. I put in a pair of blue jeans, some works boots and my blue button up and headed to the location.

When I got to the building I found a note nailed to the front entrance. There was a list of instructions. 1. Unlock Door. 2. Get  single meat from freezer. 3. Open hatch in back room and feed it. 4. Close the hatch back. 5. Lock back up and leave immediately. Furthermore it made clear that I was  under no circumstances to look in the room which contained the “it” previously mentioned and that there would be cameras monitoring me at all times. The key was attached to the back of the paper. I used it to let myself in. I then did as I was instructed. I grabbed the meat, let it defrost and then headed back to the hatch and threw it in. I will admit I was tempted to look but I’ve done a lot of things for money and by that point in my life I knew curiosity could be very dangerous when doing some kinds of work.

I never know much about my job. Every day I showed up at the small boxy gray building and unlocked the door with my key. There was never anyone else there. I got the meat from the freezer. I’m still not sure what kind. I would defrost it while smoking a few cigarettes. Then I would go to the back room and slide open the hatch. I would throw the meat in and then close the hatch back. It was pretty simple. At some point every week an envelope containing eight thousand dollars showed up on my doorstep. It went on like that from day to day and week to week.

Life was pretty good for awhile. The work was easy and undemanding and the money was the best I’d ever made doing anything. I really wish it could have stayed. It was almost a year later when it all went to shit. It was a Tuesday. Nothing good happens on a Tuesday. I showed up at work. I went inside. The lights weren’t working. I could barely see the floor was slick with something. I activated my phone’s flashlight, made my way to the freezer and grabbed a package of meat to defrost. It was then that I heard the hissing. I say hissing but it wasn’t like a cat. It was more like the sound searing flesh makes sometimes only louder. I wrote it off as just being a problem with the pipes or something. When the meat was ready I took it to the back room. There I found the door which had always been closed standing ajar. I thought about leaving but I had a job to do. I slowly approached the small dark room. As I did so a wave of pungent odor washed over me.

I stepped through the doorway dimly. In the light produced by my phone I saw something I couldn’t even have imagined before that day. There was hairy revolting figure leaning against the wall. Blood was pooling around it. I could hear it breathing heavily but I have no idea how. Its head or what I took to be its head was a featureless gray ball. It sat on a body consisting  of loose flabby and scaly skin, covered in patches of curly white hair. The creature  had shorty stubby little chicken leg. Most notable were its arms or rather its hands. They were normal enough for the most part. Except when you got to its fingers. There were sharp claws coated in what must have been mud. The index fingers were longer than a person’s. A lot longer. Each one was as long and as this as my legs. As I watched it struggled to pull itself up with them but ultimately collapsed in apparent agony from numerous deep gashes which covered its lower body.

More disturbing than anything were those little monstrosities surrounding the animal. It took me a second to recognize what they were. They were very premature look human fetuses like what you see on prolifer signs and shit sometimes. Except they didn’t look quite right. Some of them had what looked like little or bony spider legs. One was covered in gigantic ears and had something resembling a scorpion’s tail protruding from its behind. There were a little over a dozen total, each the size of your average pine cone and coated in slime. Some of them were very clearly dead. Others squirmed like worms left out on a hot sidewalk. I stood there for  a long time looking at that awful scene. By the time I left the big thing had got completely limp. Its remaining young were making that horrible hissing sound. I left, locked the door and I decided to consign the whole experience to the past and move on. The money stopped showing up. I figured it was all over. I hoped it was over.

One night last week I heard something moving around outside my window. I looked outside but I couldn’t see anything. I figured it was some druggy trying to use my backyard to shoot up or worse break into my house. I grabbed the baseball bat from under my bed and headed outside to look around. What I found was worse than a desperate addict. Sitting ten feet from my trash cans was a small creature. I thought it was a sick kitten at first. No it was a motionless surrounded by a swarm of large black flies. Its shape was normal enough but it only had one small black eye on the back its skull and its small undeveloped hands had peculiarly long index fingers. I threw it away and went back to bed. The next morning I checked to make sure it had been real. It was. I’m not sure what kind of bullshit I stumbled into but I just need to tell someone. This shouldn’t have happened to me. I just wanted to do a job get paid. Now I think things have become more complicated than I know. I knew I should have gone to medical school.