Thread by @SamSykesSwears

@MykeCole Back when I was growing up, there was a fellow named Eddie. "Rad" Eddie, we used to call him. He was the guy who always seemed to know things adults know--swear words, what oral sex was, how to smoke cigarettes. I guess every neighborhood had someone like that.

When he stopped hanging out with the rest of us, no one took it personally. We all knew Rad Eddie was born for bigger and better things than just a bunch of kids playing knights and pretending their sticks were swords. We just figured he'd met a girl or something like that.

I remember thinking how strange it was when he came running up to us one day as we were all throwing a ball back and forth in a field. He was breathless, in that talking-while-wheezing thing kids do when they're impatient. It was weird, because he always seemed too cool for that.

Anyway, he told us he'd found something in the woods and we all needed to come and see. It was incredible, he said, we wouldn't believe it. So naturally, when he ran back toward the woods, we ran with him. Anything that could make Rad Eddie this excited had to be amazing.

And, no shit, it WAS pretty amazing. There, in the part of the woods across the creek, we found a door. Not, like, on the ground or something. It was a door, with a frame, a knob, everything, like someone had just plucked it out of a house and set it down in the woods.

It was amazing to a bunch of kids without a Nintendo, anyway. We all wondered aloud where it came from, looked in it and around it, joked that it must have fallen off a truck. But even this couldn't keep our attention for long and we soon started to wander off.

"Wait!" Rad Eddie called after us, hoarse. "Aren't you even going to look inside?"
He had a point. What sense was there in finding a weird door and not opening it? But it felt like a bad idea, in the way you know going into your parents' room is a bad idea, you know?

Eventually, though, they decided I should open it. The reasoning being that I was tallest--this made a lot of sense to us as kids. I won't lie, I was nervous. I must have had my hand on the doorknob for ten minutes before I mustered the courage to push it open and...

Nothing. I couldn't believe it. I don't know what I was expecting--thunder, maybe, or a monster--but it didn't happen. The door just opened into more woods. Rad Eddie, who once touched a boob last year, had gotten us all excited over nothing. Was he pranking us?

When we asked him what he saw, he looked at us like we were crazy. He shut the door and opened it again. His eyes went wide, unblinking. A look of sheer ecstasy painted itself across his face. "Look," he whispered, though not to us, "god damn, just LOOK, man."

And I did. I tried. I knew Rad Eddie better than anyone, so I stayed there, long after the others got bored and left, trying to see whatever he saw. I walked around the door, tried looking over his shoulder, but he didn't move. And when I finally left, I don't think he noticed.

I didn't see Rad Eddie for the rest of the summer. None of us did, actually. People said you could sometimes find him at the door, but he stood so still it was kind of easy to miss him. Jake got a Nintendo, anyway, so most of us didn't go into the woods after that.

We didn't see Rad Eddie again until school started. And I didn't even recognize him at first. He was thin, pale, with dark circles under his eyes, like he hadn't slept since the door. He always wore the coolest clothes, but now he was in stinky sweats that hadn't been washed.

People started avoiding Rad Eddie. And he didn't seem to mind. Or care. He would show up--sometimes having be to be pushed out the car door by his mom--sullenly sit through class, flunking quizzes and eating one or two bites from his lunch, before running out after 5th bell.

It wasn't until we were almost to winter break that Rad Eddie spoke to me.
"Hey," he was meek, almost whiny, "can I show you something?"
I sighed. The few times anyone spoke to him, all he talked about was the door. And sure enough, that was it. But I thought I owed it to him.

"I don't get it," he said when we reached the door--still clean, pristine, despite being outside all summer and fall. "When I first opened it, it was full of light. Like when my dad took me to Disneyland and let me stay until it closed and...and..." His face fell. "But now..."

He pushed the door open.
Again, nothing but woods. I sighed, turned to tell it to him straight, that he needed to cut this out. But he wasn't listening. His eyes were dull as glass, his mouth hanging open like he was asleep. Only...he was barely breathing. I turned to leave.

Do you remember the first time you saw a big dog as a little kid? That moment when you're aware that there's something that could easily hurt you, maybe really bad, and it sees you. It's like that moment has a sound. And you can't hear anything else.
That's what I heard.

And when I turned around, I just saw...black. No more woods in the door, just...black. It was getting dark, but there was still plenty of light out, but on the other side of the door was just this big, empty darkness and Rad Eddie was just staring into it.

I started to run, the sound of that silence in my ears, and I had gotten maybe ten feet when I had a sudden twinge. I'd known Rad Eddie for six years. I couldn't just leave him. So I turned back and tried to grab him, to pull him away, and then I saw something in there...moving.

It was...I don't know. It was tall. Its limbs were spindly, crooked, like a dead tree's branches that had grown in funny, with too many joints and too many twists. But its head was huge, bulbous, and as it shuffled forward, it swiveled around, like it was barely on its neck.

I couldn't move. Neither of us could. It felt like it must have been hours of watching that thing get steadily bigger until it was right on the edge of the door. But I couldn't run. Not as it came to a stop. Not as it extended a long hand in invitation. Not as Rad Eddie took it.

I don't know why he did that. I wanted to ask. I wanted to stop him, to take him back home, to go back to summer. But by the time I could actually speak, it came out as this garbled scream. He didn't even look behind him when he walked in. And the door slammed shut.

I just stared at it for awhile. And when I finally thought to move, it was already dark. I opened the door again--I didn't think I could go after him, but I had to see. But when I did, it was gone. It was the woods again. Nothing else. And so I turned and ran home.

My dad was pissed. I had missed dinner AND it was too late to do my homework. But before he could yell at me, I told him about the door, about the woods. He called up Eddie's mom. I heard her crying on the other end. I talked to my first police officer 30 minutes later.

A kid--let alone a hysterical kid--isn't the best witness, so when they didn't find him or the door in the woods, they didn't blame me. The search for Rad Eddie continued for the next month. But slowly, people stopped volunteering, police stopped coming, things slowed down.

People talked about Rad Eddie less and less. Kids stopped wondering what had happened to him. We stopped leaving his desk empty at school. Now and again, I'd mention him, some joke he had made back then, and the kids would look at me, puzzled, and say "who?"

And then one day, I went to see his mom, like I had been doing every Friday since he disappeared, to see how she was doing. And when I asked if I could take Eddie's hat to show the other kids, she blinked at me, furrowed her brow, and asked: "Who's Eddie?"

I wanted to scream at her until she remembered. But I just...ran. I ran down to the woods. I ran to where the door was. I ran there to get him back. But when I arrived at the spot where he had first shown us the door...I honestly couldn't remember why I'd come there.

Anyway, I just mention this because I recently realized that I never leave a door closed in my house. Kind of funny, huh?