Through a Door, Darkly
by Arran Calvert
And then Death left, leaving the door ajar as it went.
A genetic heart defect was the official cause of death. I still think of Mary Westerfeld. She would have known nothing of her end. She’d have slipped into an ever-deeper sleep. Eventually, slipping so deep that she would never awake again. Or so it was explained to me.
It didn’t help the inquisitive, imaginative eight-year-old that I was to find that Death might arrive while you slept. Of course, I knew that it could but hearing it out loud didn’t help. We had gone over the point again and again: a genetic heart defect. It could have happened at any time.
“But what about Death?” I had argued.
“What about it?”
“Where does it come from? Where does it go? Why won’t it close doors after it? If at least it closed doors after it, people would know not to enter or knock, at least!”
As I think back to these repetitive conversations, I see that it was my persistence on these points that had landed me in the green leather chair of Susan Gunfrey, my therapist. How ridiculous it is, an eight-year-old sitting in the office of a therapist.
I never wanted to be the cliched, broken child, and I refuse to believe that I was or am broken. But then why didn’t I just shut up about Death sooner? I’ll never know.
When I was thirteen, I was told that I questioned things too deeply and dwelled too long on big questions that had no immediate impact on my life. But when you’ve been consistently asked, “And how does that make you feel?” since you were eight, the question becomes hard-wired into you, a reflex.
The bananas are over-ripe, “And how does that make you feel?”
Nell Simpson is an ass, “And how does that make you feel?”
You were one minute late for our appointment, “And how does that make you feel?”
I don’t know, Susan, how does it make you feel that the universe exploded from nothing, and is expanding into nothing? How does it make you feel that we’re killing the planet, and yet I still take a yellow cab everywhere because I’m worried I’ll catch germs from strangers—and yet, I make you take notes on a white legal pad because I can’t stand the idea of you writing on the yellow ones?
I dunno.
Susan thinks that my mind made sense of Mary’s death by creating the classic “Hollywood” representation of Death—the one you see in the movies with the big, hooded cloak. That way, I could make sense of what, for an eight-year-old, was an almost unimaginable event.
“But why?” I would ask every time we arrived back to that particular chestnut. “Why would my brain do that before I knew she was dead?” The statement seemed final to me. How could I possibly have seen Death before I knew Mary was dead or dying?
“It didn’t,” she would reply. “It did so only once you knew she was dead.”
“But does that mean I can’t trust my mind?”
“Well,” at this point, she would push her glasses up her nose and place her pen down onto the white legal pad, “it’s just that sometimes our minds can trick us into thinking we know things that we don’t actually know.”
I didn’t like thinking about this much as an eight-year-old, and I still don’t now. I feel like I can trust my mind. I know how death feels in my memory, and I know that it feels different to the actual event. I dunno.
Eventually, I stopped trying to explain myself and kept schtum. But I still had to visit Susan every Tuesday at 4:30 every week. Except for the first two weeks in September when she would be in Key West, apparently “extending the summer and celebrating Labor Day Weekend.”
I know Death. I have seen it. I have felt. And it left me different, tarnished like the black soot a candle leaves on glass, unable to see clearly. I hate it; I hate its cold, painful loneliness. Once you have stood in the presence of Death, it doesn’t leave you; it just lingers cold and unforgotten, lurking between your thoughts.
I know Death. And I know that it comes in the night because I was a curious child who didn’t know any better. And I know its smell.
It was the smell that woke me. I had been dreaming of hot pokers being stuffed up my nose as everybody laughed at me. I woke with a start, staring up into the darkness, lost in my unfamiliar surroundings. Fumbling for the night light, I found its cord and pulled. The weak bulb beat the night back only enough to give me a small island of light, its integrity threatened by the weight of darkness.
It took me a moment to realise that what had instigated my dream was a stench so pungent that I needed to find out where it was coming from. At that time, I hadn’t been living in the boarding school long enough to realise that smells as strong as this were not uncommon. They were more common than you might imagine.
And so, I climbed out of bed, pushed my feet into my Bert and Ernie slippers and crossed from the fragile glow of the night light, and out into the dark corridor of St Magdalena’s School for Girls Boarding House.
As I quietly shut my door, the corridor closed around me. My mind was filled with wild images of beasts, demons, beetles, and insects, all scurrying from my sight, watching me closely, inspecting their temporary surroundings. Fleeting visitors pressing in on closed doors, listening to the dreams of the little girls sleeping soundly in their beds. Because that is what they were, fleeting visitors following Death as though it were the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
The smell was stronger in the corridor, a sweetness mixed with that stink of raw chicken that had passed its expiration date. I walked past the many doors of the third floor, the sound of the scurrying creatures loud in my ear, though not filling me with fear. As I think back, I see that there was no fear to be spared out there in the corridor. At the staircase, I went up. As I reached the next landing, I was sure I had seen a small crouching thing move through the pale green light of an emergency exit sign. Still, I felt no fear, only a slight unease that this thing had allowed itself to be seen.
My eyes began to water as I stepped into the fourth-floor corridor. I took short, shallow breaths, trying not to inhale the overbearing stink. I followed the smell to Mary Westerfeld’s room, an eighth grader. I’ll always feel a close affinity with Mary, not just because of what I saw but also because she would smile at me whenever she caught me staring, help me find my way around the school buildings, and give me advice on how to survive life in an all-girls boarding school.
Mary’s door—the fourth door on the right—stood ajar. I stepped up to it, reached out a hand and slowly pushed it open.
There it stood, huge, black and terrifying, hunched over Mary’s bed, lit by the same weak glow of the bedside night light.
I was instantly locked in a vice-like terror; my body and wits had abandoned me. I was trapped, unable to scream, to move, to breathe. Here was where the fear was concentrated; it hung from death like a thin veil drifting in a warm breeze.
Locked as I was, I watched Death examining Mary closely, the night light casting long, faint shadows across the wall and ceiling. Death was still, but the shadows moved, slow and threatening, reaching, grasping, clawing. When I saw them, I knew they were detached from this world, drifting in another time.
Then Death moved beneath its long black cloak. Slowly, a long, gnarled, arthritic finger reached out and came to rest on the centre of Mary’s forehead. My eyes fell on her face. Her beautiful, youthful face. She looked like Sleeping Beauty. A picture of serenity. The bed sheets were perfectly placed as though she had been laid out in preparation for her prince. Only the prince was not who she thought he was. The prince wanted to keep her locked away. A shadow in another time. A part of his growing collection.
Death stood for an age, its finger resting gently on her porcelain-like skin. As it lifted its finger away, it paused. Its hand moved back toward her face and delicately pushed a stray lock of golden hair from her face.
Straightening to its full height, it turned to face me, the fabric of its cloak shifting loudly in the silence of the room. It turned, knowing that I was there, and for a moment, we stared at one another. I, into the black abyss of a faceless hood, and it into my soul, into my deepest thoughts, searching. I often wonder what it was searching for. Was it watching the passage of my life, wondering if or when it was my time?
Its faceless gaze fell away, and with a heavy, sorrowful sigh, it left, leaving the door ajar as it went. The darkness lifted, leaving a cold, hostile light lingering between night and morning. The turning of the tide, they call it. You can’t see it, but if you still yourself, close your eyes, and slow your breathing, you can feel it approach and pass through your body, sending a shiver down your spine.
The vice-like grip that had held me tight dropped me faster than I could catch myself. The fear that had hung from Death as a concentrated veil washed over me and was released as a scream that began deep in the darkest corners of my mind and bubbled to the surface like hot bile, tearing at my throat. I fell to my knees and vomited down my front. My breath caught in my throat, and I began to cough and retch. Miss Franks burst into the room and pounded a fist against my back as I choked on the stinging, burning contents of my stomach, my whole body gripped now by thunderous shudders that I couldn’t control.
Pushing her away, I managed to jab a finger towards the bed, and Sleeping Beauty laid serenely upon it. Miss Franks called her name as she crossed the room, but reaching out to Mary, she pulled away at the last minute, not daring to disturb her sleep—not that it mattered. Sleeping Beauty would not wake. Not even a kiss from a prince would wake a sleeping princess if she was already dead.
A genetic heart defect was the official cause of death. I still think of Mary Westerfeld. She would have known nothing of her end. She’d have slipped into an ever-deeper sleep. Eventually, slipping so deep that she would never awake again. Or so it was explained to me.
It didn’t help the inquisitive, imaginative eight-year-old that I was to find that Death might arrive while you slept. Of course, I knew that it could but hearing it out loud didn’t help. We had gone over the point again and again: a genetic heart defect. It could have happened at any time.
“But what about Death?” I had argued.
“What about it?”
“Where does it come from? Where does it go? Why won’t it close doors after it? If at least it closed doors after it, people would know not to enter or knock, at least!”
As I think back to these repetitive conversations, I see that it was my persistence on these points that had landed me in the green leather chair of Susan Gunfrey, my therapist. How ridiculous it is, an eight-year-old sitting in the office of a therapist.
I never wanted to be the cliched, broken child, and I refuse to believe that I was or am broken. But then why didn’t I just shut up about Death sooner? I’ll never know.
When I was thirteen, I was told that I questioned things too deeply and dwelled too long on big questions that had no immediate impact on my life. But when you’ve been consistently asked, “And how does that make you feel?” since you were eight, the question becomes hard-wired into you, a reflex.
The bananas are over-ripe, “And how does that make you feel?”
Nell Simpson is an ass, “And how does that make you feel?”
You were one minute late for our appointment, “And how does that make you feel?”
I don’t know, Susan, how does it make you feel that the universe exploded from nothing, and is expanding into nothing? How does it make you feel that we’re killing the planet, and yet I still take a yellow cab everywhere because I’m worried I’ll catch germs from strangers—and yet, I make you take notes on a white legal pad because I can’t stand the idea of you writing on the yellow ones?
I dunno.
Susan thinks that my mind made sense of Mary’s death by creating the classic “Hollywood” representation of Death—the one you see in the movies with the big, hooded cloak. That way, I could make sense of what, for an eight-year-old, was an almost unimaginable event.
“But why?” I would ask every time we arrived back to that particular chestnut. “Why would my brain do that before I knew she was dead?” The statement seemed final to me. How could I possibly have seen Death before I knew Mary was dead or dying?
“It didn’t,” she would reply. “It did so only once you knew she was dead.”
“But does that mean I can’t trust my mind?”
“Well,” at this point, she would push her glasses up her nose and place her pen down onto the white legal pad, “it’s just that sometimes our minds can trick us into thinking we know things that we don’t actually know.”
I didn’t like thinking about this much as an eight-year-old, and I still don’t now. I feel like I can trust my mind. I know how death feels in my memory, and I know that it feels different to the actual event. I dunno.
Eventually, I stopped trying to explain myself and kept schtum. But I still had to visit Susan every Tuesday at 4:30 every week. Except for the first two weeks in September when she would be in Key West, apparently “extending the summer and celebrating Labor Day Weekend.”
I know Death. I have seen it. I have felt. And it left me different, tarnished like the black soot a candle leaves on glass, unable to see clearly. I hate it; I hate its cold, painful loneliness. Once you have stood in the presence of Death, it doesn’t leave you; it just lingers cold and unforgotten, lurking between your thoughts.
I know Death. And I know that it comes in the night because I was a curious child who didn’t know any better. And I know its smell.
It was the smell that woke me. I had been dreaming of hot pokers being stuffed up my nose as everybody laughed at me. I woke with a start, staring up into the darkness, lost in my unfamiliar surroundings. Fumbling for the night light, I found its cord and pulled. The weak bulb beat the night back only enough to give me a small island of light, its integrity threatened by the weight of darkness.
It took me a moment to realise that what had instigated my dream was a stench so pungent that I needed to find out where it was coming from. At that time, I hadn’t been living in the boarding school long enough to realise that smells as strong as this were not uncommon. They were more common than you might imagine.
And so, I climbed out of bed, pushed my feet into my Bert and Ernie slippers and crossed from the fragile glow of the night light, and out into the dark corridor of St Magdalena’s School for Girls Boarding House.
As I quietly shut my door, the corridor closed around me. My mind was filled with wild images of beasts, demons, beetles, and insects, all scurrying from my sight, watching me closely, inspecting their temporary surroundings. Fleeting visitors pressing in on closed doors, listening to the dreams of the little girls sleeping soundly in their beds. Because that is what they were, fleeting visitors following Death as though it were the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
The smell was stronger in the corridor, a sweetness mixed with that stink of raw chicken that had passed its expiration date. I walked past the many doors of the third floor, the sound of the scurrying creatures loud in my ear, though not filling me with fear. As I think back, I see that there was no fear to be spared out there in the corridor. At the staircase, I went up. As I reached the next landing, I was sure I had seen a small crouching thing move through the pale green light of an emergency exit sign. Still, I felt no fear, only a slight unease that this thing had allowed itself to be seen.
My eyes began to water as I stepped into the fourth-floor corridor. I took short, shallow breaths, trying not to inhale the overbearing stink. I followed the smell to Mary Westerfeld’s room, an eighth grader. I’ll always feel a close affinity with Mary, not just because of what I saw but also because she would smile at me whenever she caught me staring, help me find my way around the school buildings, and give me advice on how to survive life in an all-girls boarding school.
Mary’s door—the fourth door on the right—stood ajar. I stepped up to it, reached out a hand and slowly pushed it open.
There it stood, huge, black and terrifying, hunched over Mary’s bed, lit by the same weak glow of the bedside night light.
I was instantly locked in a vice-like terror; my body and wits had abandoned me. I was trapped, unable to scream, to move, to breathe. Here was where the fear was concentrated; it hung from death like a thin veil drifting in a warm breeze.
Locked as I was, I watched Death examining Mary closely, the night light casting long, faint shadows across the wall and ceiling. Death was still, but the shadows moved, slow and threatening, reaching, grasping, clawing. When I saw them, I knew they were detached from this world, drifting in another time.
Then Death moved beneath its long black cloak. Slowly, a long, gnarled, arthritic finger reached out and came to rest on the centre of Mary’s forehead. My eyes fell on her face. Her beautiful, youthful face. She looked like Sleeping Beauty. A picture of serenity. The bed sheets were perfectly placed as though she had been laid out in preparation for her prince. Only the prince was not who she thought he was. The prince wanted to keep her locked away. A shadow in another time. A part of his growing collection.
Death stood for an age, its finger resting gently on her porcelain-like skin. As it lifted its finger away, it paused. Its hand moved back toward her face and delicately pushed a stray lock of golden hair from her face.
Straightening to its full height, it turned to face me, the fabric of its cloak shifting loudly in the silence of the room. It turned, knowing that I was there, and for a moment, we stared at one another. I, into the black abyss of a faceless hood, and it into my soul, into my deepest thoughts, searching. I often wonder what it was searching for. Was it watching the passage of my life, wondering if or when it was my time?
Its faceless gaze fell away, and with a heavy, sorrowful sigh, it left, leaving the door ajar as it went. The darkness lifted, leaving a cold, hostile light lingering between night and morning. The turning of the tide, they call it. You can’t see it, but if you still yourself, close your eyes, and slow your breathing, you can feel it approach and pass through your body, sending a shiver down your spine.
The vice-like grip that had held me tight dropped me faster than I could catch myself. The fear that had hung from Death as a concentrated veil washed over me and was released as a scream that began deep in the darkest corners of my mind and bubbled to the surface like hot bile, tearing at my throat. I fell to my knees and vomited down my front. My breath caught in my throat, and I began to cough and retch. Miss Franks burst into the room and pounded a fist against my back as I choked on the stinging, burning contents of my stomach, my whole body gripped now by thunderous shudders that I couldn’t control.
Pushing her away, I managed to jab a finger towards the bed, and Sleeping Beauty laid serenely upon it. Miss Franks called her name as she crossed the room, but reaching out to Mary, she pulled away at the last minute, not daring to disturb her sleep—not that it mattered. Sleeping Beauty would not wake. Not even a kiss from a prince would wake a sleeping princess if she was already dead.
Arran Calvert is a writer and Social Anthropologist from County Durham on the blustery, windswept northeast coast of England. His writing often explores the hazy lines between fantasy and reality, examining where one ends and the other begins, questioning whether it is all simply a matter of perspective. His recent nonfiction book, Life with Durham Cathedral, was published with Berghahn in 2023.