Grotesque encounter · 4 min read · Set in Kestrel Road ·
The Man Who Is Also a Door on Kestrel Road
A tenant at a Kestrel Road lodging house opens his bedroom door in the night and finds the lodger in the next room standing in his chest, where a doorway opens onto a corridor of rooms, each one furnished with the belongings of a former tenant.
Ray Dunmore had rented the back room at number 40 Kestrel Road for three years. It was a small square room with a sash window and a narrow bed, and the landlord, a grumpy old man named Stanley Pike, had told him on the first day that he could have it as long as he paid on time and did not bring women back. Ray paid on time. He did not bring anyone back. He had been quite content.
The man in the room next door was called Abe. He had lodged there longer than anyone could remember. He was a thin, stooped figure with a wary face, who went out at dawn and came back after dark and spoke to nobody on the stairs. Ray had only ever seen him from a distance, and had assumed he was shy.
On a cold night in January Ray woke to a draught on his face and a soft light in the room. He sat up. The door to the landing was open, and through it, from the next room, a warm yellow glow was spilling out across the boards. There was a sound too, a low murmur of voices, a laugh, the scrape of a chair.
He got up and went to look.
Abe's bedroom door was standing wide. The room beyond it was not Abe's room. It was a long, high hallway, with a patterned carpet and tall doors on either side, and each door had a brass number, and each was ajar, and each showed a different furnished room. A kitchen with a kettle on the stove. A child's bedroom with a rocking horse. A parlour with a piano and a fire. A study full of books. A bathroom with a bath half filled with water, steam rising. The voices came from all of them at once, faint and cheerful, as though a party were going on in every room.
Ray stepped closer. The carpet was soft under his feet. He turned to look back at the landing, and saw that the landing was gone, and his own room behind him, and the stairs down to the street. He was standing in the corridor.
Abe stood at the far end, by the last door. He was not wearing a shirt. His chest was open, a neat rectangular frame of pale wood set into the skin, and through the frame Ray could see the rooms of the house, one after another, curving away down a dim passage. Abe looked at him with a gentle, apologetic expression.
"It's all right," Abe said. "You're not in trouble. You just came through."
"Through what?"
"The door," Abe said, and smiled. He touched the frame of his chest, very lightly. "I'm the one that opens. Everybody who lodges here comes through me at some point, when they're ready. It's where the rooms go."
Ray looked at the rooms again. In each of them, he could see a person standing by the window or sitting at the table or lying on the bed, quietly waiting. A woman with grey hair. A young man in a soldier's uniform. A girl in a school blazer. Each of them had their face turned toward the corridor, toward Ray, and each of them looked, very faintly, familiar.
"Who are they?"
"Former lodgers," Abe said. "The ones who came through and stayed. They don't mind the company. They like to hear the new ones settling in."
Ray understood then what the voices were. They were the lodgers, talking to one another across the rooms, making the sounds of a house that had always been full, and always welcomed the next person who knocked.
He woke in his own bed in the grey morning, with the draught still cold on his face and his door standing open to the landing. Next door, Abe's door was closed. When Ray knocked, there was no answer. But a card had been slipped under the frame, neatly written, in an old-fashioned hand: *Room 40B, first floor, back. Ready when you are.*
Ray has moved out. He has taken a room in a new block on the other side of the city, with a modern lock and a solid oak door. He keeps the card in his wallet. Some nights, when the building settles, he hears a faint voice calling softly from a long way off, through the wall, and he knocks on the door of the spare room, very gently, the way you would knock on a friend's house after dark, and waits to see who will answer.