Dark Rivers of the Heart

I don't recall having taken a single step in that direction. I seem to have walked those twenty feet in a sudden spell of sleep. called forward by something, someone. As if respondin to a powerful hypnotic command.
        To a wordless, silent summons.
        I am standing in front of a knotty-pine cabinet that extends from floor to ceiling and from corner to corner of the thirteen-foot-wide room. The cabinet features three pairs of tall, narrow doors.
        The center pair stand open.
        Behind those doors, there should be nothing but shelves. On the shelves should be boxes of old tax records, correspondence, and dead files no longer kept in the metal cabinets along the other wall.
        This night, the shelves and their contents, along with the back wall of the pine cabinet, have been pushed backward four or five feet into a secret space behind the file room, into a hidden chamber I've never seen before. The sour yellow light comes from a place beyond the closet.
        Before me is the essence of all boyish fantasies: the secret passage to a world of danger and adventure, to far stars, to stars-farther still, to the very center of the earth, to lands of trolls or pirates or intelligent apes or robots, to the distant ture or to the age of dinosaurs. Here is a stairway to mystery, a tunnel through which I might set out upon heroic quests, or a way station on a strange highway to dimensions unknown.
        Briefly, I thrill to the thought of what exotic travels and magical discoveries might lay ahead. But instinct quickly tells me that on the far side of this secret Passage, there is something stranger and deadlier than an alien world or a Morlock dungeon. I want to return to the house, to my bedroo, to the protection of' my sheets, immediately, as fast as I can run. The perverse allure of terror and the unknown disturbs me, and I'm suddenly eager to leave this waking drea for the new threatening lands to be found on the dark side of sleep.
        Although I can't recall crossing the threshold, I find myself inside the tall cabinet instead of hurrying to the house, through the night, the moonlight, and the owl shadows. I hunk, and then I find that I've gone further still, not back one step but forward into the secret space beyond.
        It's a vestibule ofsorts, six feet by six feet. Concrete floor Concrete-block walls.
        Bare yellow bulb in a ceiling socket.
        A cursory investigation reveals that the back wall of the pine cabinet, complete with the attached and laden shelves, is fitted with small concealed wheels.
        It's been shoved inward on a pair of sliding-door tracks.
        To the right is a door out of the vestibule. An ordinary door in many ways.
        Heavy, judging by the look of it. Solid wood. Brass hardware.
        It is painted white, and in places the paint is yellowed with age.
        However, though it's more white and grimy yellow than it is anything else, tonight this is neither a white nor a yellow door A series of bloody handprints arcs from the area around the brass knob across the upper portion of the door, and their bright patterns render the color of the background unimportant. Eight, ten, twelve, or more impressions of a woman's hands. Palms and spread fingers. Each hand partially overlapping the one before it. Some smeared, some as clear as police-file prints. All glistening, wet. All fresh.
        Those scarlet images bring to mind the spread wings of a bird leaping into flight, fleeing to the sky, in a flutter of fear Staring at them, I am mesmerized, unable to get my breath, my heart storming, because the handprints convey an unbearable sense of the woman terror, desperation, andfrantic resistance to the prospect of beingforced beyond the gray concrete vestibule of this secret world.
        I can't go forward. Can't. Won't. I'm just a boy, barefoot, unarmed, afraid, not ready for the death.
        I don't remember moving my right hand, but now it's on the brass knob. I open the red door Now On the road that I have taken, one day, walking, I awaken, amazed to see where I have come, where I'm going, where I'm from.
        This is not the path I thought.
        This is not the place I sought.
        This is not the dream I bought, just a fever of fate I've caught.
        I'll change highways in a while, at the crossroads, one more mile.
        My path is lit by my own fire.
        I'm going only where I