"Opening the Door" (1931)

In the anthology My Favorite Horror Story, “Opening the Door” is the pick of Peter Atkins, another writer I don’t know well. As Atkins points out in his lengthy introduction, the story is subtle but deeply mysterious and a little unsettling. As it happens, it involves one of the true-crime types of stories that most intrigue me: disappearances. In “Opening the Door,” a clergyman disappears for six weeks and then reappears again with no sense he’s been away. The flower he picked the day he went missing is still fresh when he’s back. The story is told by a newspaper reporter remembering strange stories he has covered. The clergyman had won some notoriety at the turn of the 20th century for newspaper pieces he wrote. They warned of the inadequacy of roadways in the transition away from horse-drawn vehicles. Strangely banal insight but there it is. Then the disappearance and reappearance happen and the newspaper reporter drops by to speak with him. They become friendly and meet again, trying to sort out what happened or what it might mean. The clergyman knows it happened when he exited the garden door at the back of his lot, which is generally unused (and which, early in the story, he cautions the reporter against using). He doesn’t know how six weeks passed. They kick around a few more things, some of them in Latin. It’s not a long story. In the end the clergyman disappears again and is never heard from after that. This is the detail that hits hardest for me, right at the end. He didn’t use the garden door this time as he was elsewhere. Wikipedia describes the story as involving “some outer faery realm,” which sounds right for the Welshman Machen and for the British Isles more generally. The versatile comedian Patton Oswalt likes this story a lot too, including it in a fancy anthology he edited, The Ghost Box, and focusing on some of the details in the story on either side of the garden door (which I’m glad he brought to my attention). “Opening the Door” is very good at being both low-key and disquieting and that’s what I like about it. Like Algernon Blackwood, M.R. James, and Sherdian Le Fanu, Machen balances the rational world with the potentiality for a world or worlds beyond that can’t be explained. His characters are sober and worried by their experiences. Not much happens here—mostly a matter of assembling the facts. We’re the ones left to make sense of them. In many cases, as here, the characters admit they can’t. So this is a bit like depth-charge horror. It hits later, harder. I may not like it as much as “The White People” but that’s a high bar to clear.

My Favorite Horror Story, ed. Mike Baker & Martin H. Greenberg (out of print)

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