One Door From Heaven

bottle and enough time, or by compacting her Camaro against a bridge abutment at high speed if she'd been in a hurry to check out.
        When she had regained consciousness, she'd first thought that she was dead. Strange walls enclosed her, like nothing she'd ever seen either waking or in nightmares: structures neither plumb nor plaster-smooth, curving to enfold the space, appearing organic to her blurred vision, as if she were Jonah in the belly of the whale, already beyond the stomach of the leviathan and trapped now within a turn of its intestine. The foul air smelled of mold and mildew, of rodent urine, vaguely of vomit, of floorboards cured with layers of spilled beer dating back beyond Micky's birth, of cigarette smoke condensed into a sour residue, and underlying all that-and more-was the faint but acidic scent of decomposition. For a breath, for five or six rapid heartbeats, she thought she might be dead because this was what Hell could be like if it turned out not to be as operatic as always portrayed in books and movies, if instead Hell were less about fire than about futility, less about brimstone than about isolation, less about physical torture than about despair.
        Then her vision cleared in her left eye. Realizing that these walls were formed of trash and bundled publications, she knew where she must be. Not Hell. Inside the Teelroy house.
        She couldn't have intuited this interior when earlier she'd been standing on the front porch, talking to Leonard Teelroy, but now she could infer the identity of the inhabitant from the evidence.
        In addition to all the other aromas in this rich stew of odors, she smelled blood. Tasted it, too, when she licked her lips.
        She was having difficulty opening her right eye, because the lashes were stuck together by a wad of congealed blood.
        When she tried to wipe the blood away, she discovered that her hands were bound tightly at the wrists, in front of her.
        She was lying on her side, on a matted musty brocade-upholstered sofa. Crowded in front of the sofa were a TV and an armchair.
        A pulse of tolerable pain beat, beat, beat along the right side of her skull, but when she raised her head, the pulse became a throb, the pain became an agony, and she thought for a moment that she would pass out. Then the torment subsided to a level she could endure.
        When she tried to sit up, she discovered that her ankles were bound as securely as her wrists and that a yard-long tether, which connected the wrist and ankle restraints, would not permit her either to stretch out or stand to full height. She swung both legs as one, planted her feet on the floor, and perched on the edge of the sofa.
        This maneuver triggered another paroxysm of head pain that made her feel as though one side of her skull were repeatedly swelling and deflating like a balloon. This was familiar to her; call it party head, morning-after head, just worse than she'd ever experienced it before, not accompanied by the usual remorse, but by cold anger. And this wasn't the irrational anger she'd so long nurtured as an excuse to isolate herself, but was a rage tightly focused on Preston Maddoc.
        He had become for her the devil incarnate, and perhaps not for her alone, and maybe not merely metaphorically speaking, but in fact. In the past few days, a new perception of evil had settled on Micky, and it seemed to her that the evil of men and women was-as she would once have ardently denied-a reflection of a greater and purer Evil that walked the world and worked upon it in ways devious and subtle.
        When the pain subsided once more, she leaned forward and wiped her blood-plastered right eye against her right knee, swabbing the glutinous clots from lashes to blue jeans. Her vision proved to be fine, the blood hadn’t come from the eye but from a gash on her head, which might still be oozing but was no longer bleeding freely.
        She listened to the house. The silence seemed to grow deeper the longer that she waited for it to be broken.
        Logic suggested that Leonard Teelroy had been killed. That he had lived here alone. And that now the house was Maddoc's playpen.
        She didn't cry out for help. The farmhouse sat on a lot of open land and far back from the county road. There were no neighbors to hear a scream.
        The doctor of doom had gone somewhere. He would be back. And sooner rather than later.
        She