Chapter 1 – Chap 1

“Who’s what?” I dabbed at my mouth with a corner of napkin and watched my husband curiously from across the dinner table.

“I—uh—there was a new patient in today. Older guy. Spent the whole session talking about this game he played as a kid. He has these delusions tied up in it that—but, well, he seems so sure. It’s almost fascinating.”

I made a noncommittal noise and swirled the last dregs of wine in the bottom of my glass.

After fifteen years, I’d learned when my husband—clinical psychologist Dr. Donald Weir, PhD—really wanted my considered input versus when he just needed an audience.

“So, have you?” he asked again. “Heard of it, I mean.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so. Try your quinoa, dear.”

He picked absently at his food without taking a bite.

“It’s fascinating, really. This patient—his grandfather—I guess was some big-time physicist out at MIT back in the sixties and he, uh, apparently he invented this game as part of some thought experiment or something.”

“Hmm,” I said, lightly brushing some crumbs from the tablecloth.

“I’ve never had a patient this bad. Poor guys clearly had some kind of psychotic break. The things he told me—this intricate fantasy world he’s created around a silly childhood game with all these quasi-scientific rules it’s all so, so—”

“Fascinating?” I guessed as I reached to refill my glass.

He waved me away in annoyance.

“It’s all based in physics—Schrödinger’s cat; theoretical stuff like that. Anyway, I’m going to try and explore the topic more in-depth at next week’s session. We’re talking a massive potential case-study, here.”

I’m only half listening at this point as I start to clear the dishes and load them in the sink. Indulging him. “Mhmm. And how do you win?”

He shrugged as he handed me his plate. “He didn’t say. I don’t think it’s that kind of game.”

After dinner, Donald seemed distracted. I tried to coax him into our nightly routine of watching the news or whatever NCIS re-runs were on but, by the second commercial break, he excused himself to his upstairs office—crossing that unseen and off-limits Maginot Line that ran unacknowledged through our marriage—and shut the door.

He was still in there three hours later when I went up to bed.

A few nights later I was awakened by someone whispering to me in the dark.

“Julia. Jules—hey, you awake?”

I opened my eyes to find my husband leaning over me, the too bright glow from his phone screen the only illumination in the bedroom.

“Don? Wha—what’s wrong?”

“It’s okay,” he soothed. “Nothing’s wrong. Just couldn’t sleep.”

“What time is it?” I asked, groping for my phone on the bedside table.

“Uh, I’m not sure,” he whispered. “Late, I think. But, so, what do you think? Want to play?”

“Play?”

“Maxwell’s Demon Door. Want to give it a try?”

“Donald, it’s four in the morning. What’s wrong with you? Go to sleep.”

He ignored me, tugging gently at my pajama sleeve. “Come on, sweetie. Just—I’ve talked with my patient about it and, well, been doing my own research too and, uh, I think I can work it out.”

“Enough,” I said firmly. “Don’t you have work in the morning?”

“It could be fun,” he wheedled. “Everything he’s told me—I just—let’s just try, okay?”

“Go to bed.” I rolled irritably onto my side, pulling the sheets with me.

“Jules,” he tried again softly. “Jules?”

I lay still facing the wall, listening to his heavy breathing against my back and quietly resenting him. After a while, I felt the blankets eased back. The familiar creak and groan of bedsprings shifting as Donald rose and padded silently out of the room.

Probably, I’d hurt his feelings or something and he’d gone to sleep it off in his office.

Probably, I’d have to spend the whole day apologizing and propping up his bruised ego.

That’s what a good wife would do, anyway.

Tomorrow I decided, as I drifted back toward sleep. I’ll be a good wife in the morning.

But Donald wouldn’t be there in the morning.

Donald was already gone.

**

“Yes, hi. Is this, um,” I glanced surreptitiously at the notecard in my hand, “Henry Buchdahl?”

“Most days, unfortunately. Unless you’re a bill collector.” The chuckle from the other end of the line was raspy and tired. I could almost smell the cigarettes on his breath.

“I’m sorry to be calling at this hour. My name’s Julia Weir. My husband Donald’s been, uh, treating you. I got your name and number from his files. I’m sorry but I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Oh?” The voice lost its jovial edge.

“He’s with you, right? Donald? You’ve talked to him?”

The old man cleared his throat. “Not since our last appointment.”

I sagged against the kitchen counter, grinding the heel of one hand against my temple.

“Jesus. No, I didn’t really think—I’m sorry to call you like this just—Donald’s missing. Two days now. He left the car he left everything, and the police aren’t helping, and Don was so intrigued by you and your—well, and I just thought—”

“He talked about our sessions?”

“No. Well, he told me about—he, he mentioned your game but—”

“Fuck.” The man let the word drop with a thudding finality that rang in the air. “If he played the game, he’s probably dead. I’m sorry. Please don’t call here again.”

“Wait, wait,” I was almost shouting, knuckles white around the phone. “What do you mean he’s probably dead?”

“Look lady, that game is dangerous. I tried to tell Doctor Weir. It made my granddaddy crazy. It made me crazy. Shit fire but I didn’t actually think he’d try.”

“You know where Don is?”

“He’s gone,” said the man on the other end. “I can’t help you.”

“Mr. Buchdahl, please don’t hang up. Where is my husband?”

“Somewhere else.”

“Tell me where.”

“I—I can’t. If he played the game. If he went through the door I can’t.”

“Then show me.” I could feel my panic rising. “I’ll pay. Whatever you want. Ten thousand. Ten thousand dollars to tell me what you know. Where he is—how to get to him. Please.”

Silence long and loud echoed down the line. One minute. Two. I thought he might have hung up.

“Text me your address. I’ll be there in an hour. Have the money ready.”

The line disconnected.

Henry Buchdahl was a grey and stoop-shouldered man of about seventy with a neatly trimmed moustache and sensible black shoes. The type of man who might be a retired banker or college professor. Someone well put together. Still, there was something small and dark and feral about his eyes behind those too thick spectacles—something in the slight tremors in his hand when we shook.

I invited him in and offered him a drink, but he demurred, fishing instead for a cigarette in one jacket pocket. He asked about the last time I’d seen Don and I showed him upstairs.

Donald’s office was just like I’d found it the other morning. The usually neat desk strewn with print outs and scraps of paper covered in Don’s familiar spidery scrawl. Most of it was indecipherable though I recognized words like quantum mechanics and Wigner’s paradox here and there.

“Sorry about the poor light,” I apologized. “But Donald—well, I thought it best not to touch anything. Just in case.”

Henry Buchdahl nodded absently, rheumy eyes moving listlessly around the room, taking in the bulb-less ceiling fixture and shiny bits of black tarpaulin crudely taped over the windows and around the gaps in the door frame.

Uninvited, he lowered himself with a grunt into my husband’s chair.

“Part of me was sort of hoping that he’d just run out on you. Found some pretty little college thing and booked it for Vegas. But seeing this—” he nudged a sheaf of papers with the tip of one nicotine stained finger and trailed off.

“What is it?”

“A tutorial. Someone teaching themselves a game they don’t quite know the rules to.”

“I don’t follow,” I said, approaching the desk.

Henry Buchdahl leaned back and sighed. A weary protracted rush of air. “They say my Opa was a genius. That he invented it. But that’d be like Newton claiming credit for the invention of gravity. He just took the scraps of other men’s work—all the theorems and interpretations and forces that were already there—and cobbled them together to make a pastiche. Maxwell’s Demon Door he called it. You know anything about quantum superposition? The MWI?”

I shook my head.

“See, superposition is this theory about matter and force—at the atomic level—that well, basically says that as long as we don’t know what state particles are in, they can—theoretically—exist in all places and states at the same time. It’s only the measuring—actually looking at the particles—that forces them into a single state. Understand?”

“Not really,” I shrugged. “This is a long way from Mr. Klemp’s Chemistry 101.”

Henry Buchdahl’s mouth twitched beneath his moustache. “My granddaddy figured that at the quantum realm reality could be, uh, shifted a little bit. And if we don’t look, as long as we can’t see, then a door could lead anywhere. Your house or mine. Paris or Fairbanks, Alaska. Even other worlds, granddaddy thought.”

“But why did he share this with you?”

“When I was a kid, he said it was a game. A bastardized form of science is what it was. Opening a doorway to the places that hide behind this one. An experiment. And every experiment needs a guinea pig.”

“He taught you the game to study how it worked?”

The older man nodded. “At twelve years old you think it’s great fun. Standing in a pitch-black room, bumping into walls giggling and being told you’ll go traveling like Lucy and Edmund through the wardrobe. You think it’s all pretend. Until one day the game ends and you come back through the Demon Door alone. And Opa’s screaming at you Where’s Angie Schatzi! Where’s Angie! and you have to try and explain that your little sister’s gone—that she’s not coming back.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “What happened to her?”

“She lost,” he said, a soft catch in his throat.

“And—and you think my husband opened this—this Demon Door?”

It sounded ridiculous hearing it out loud. A lonely old man’s sad delusion.

Yet where was Donald?

“Say, say I believe you,” I began, wrapping my arms around my waist. “Could you prove it? Could you go and get him?”

Henry Buchdahl shook his head fiercely. “No. Not me. No not again. I told you I can’t. But,” he said after a pause, “I can show you how to get there. And lucky you, price of admission is only ten grand.”

**

It’s after sundown now and I’m half-reclining on the small settee by the door feeling ridiculous with one of Don’s old paisley ties done up over my eyes. The sofa feels hard and unfamiliar beneath me; the slightly scratchy fabric against my palms the only thing anchoring me as I float in the vast emptiness of the blindfold.

Henry Buchdahl’s disembodied voice is somewhere to my left.

“I’ve closed the only door in or out. Now we wait.”

“What are we waiting for?” My voice sounded muffled in the dark.

“For Maxwell’s hypothetical demon on the other side. It controls the door at the branch point.”

“Branch point?” I was starting to feel slightly claustrophobic.

“Don’t touch the blindfold. Yes. This is a branch point and that doorway now leads to your upstairs hallway and somewhere else. Simultaneously.”

“Where?”

“Granddaddy always called it Das Unbekannte Reich but I don’t think—”

His voice trailed off as the familiar soft click of an old brass doorlatch disengaging filled the air, followed by the squeal of rusty hinges; the office door creeping imperceptibly inward as if the frame had warped out of true.

“What was that?” I gasped, jerking to my feet and scrabbling at the blindfold. “Is someone else here?”

“Don’t touch your blindfold,” barked Henry Buchdahl again in his smokers’ rumble. “The game’s started. If we look now, you’ll only see where that doorway always should lead instead of where it might. Understand? You can’t look till you’re on the other side.”

I dropped my hand to my side.

“So, what now?”

“You’ve been invited,” he said simply. “Open the door.”

Groping blindly along the wall, I found the rooms nearest corner and worked my fingers carefully over the doors frame and moulding before my fingers closed uncertainly around the familiarity of the handle.

I guess—as I pulled the door toward me—I expected to hear the hum of the A/C going and smell my lavender scented Glade plug-ins from down the hall. Maybe I was hoping for the tie over my face to be yanked free to find Don standing there, howling at this bizarre practical joke. Instead, the air that wafted through the doorway to meet me was cloyingly humid. Like a Florida heatwave carrying a septic foul-breath kind of smell.

With one hand on either side of the jamb, I stuck my leg out into the breach; the toe of one shoe nosing like a tentative dog across the threshold. Where I should have encountered freshly swept rosewood, the sole of my shoe scraped unevenly over what felt like rough wet stones.

“Jesus Christ!” I snatched my foot back to the safety of the carpet. “What is that?”

“Das Unbekannte,” said Henry Buchdahl.

“Where’s it go?”

“I don’t know. It’s a dark country full of things that are and aren’t. That were and will be.”

“And—and Donald’s in there?” I could feel the courage and desperation of an hour before draining out of me.

“If he’s still alive.”

“Come with me,” I begged, turning toward the sound of his voice. “Please.”

The older man was silent. I could picture him at Don’s desk weighing his options behind his own blindfold.

“I can’t,” he said. “There are things in there—well, I’d just slow you down. But I’ll wait here for fifteen minutes.”

“Fifteen minutes? What happens after fifteen minutes?”

“Time works different on the other side. Over there days can go by and it’s only been a few seconds here. So, if you’re not back by quarter till—well—you probably won’t be back.”

I touched the dull scuffed gold of my wedding band and tried to conjure up Donald’s face in the dark. Drew a couple deep steadying breaths. In through the nose out through the mouth. God, my legs were shaking.

“Once you’re on the other side with the door shut you can take off the blindfold. Just make sure you can find your way back, huh? And, uh remember don’t uh, don’t listen to anything they tell you and don’t take anything they offer. It isn’t real. And yet it is. That’s what makes it dangerous.”

I turned back to the doorway with a nod. “It’s just a game, right? Fifteen minutes.”

“I’ll be here. Good luck Mrs. Weir.”

I stepped into the unknown, slamming the door behind me with a resounding thud.