We See Through You

I Am the Doorway: Parasites, possession and alien civilization

If you’re new here, welcome to The Barrens, the section of Kindling where we talk Stephen King. Currently we’re reading through Night Shift, King’s first short story collection. If you’re interested, grab a copy and join us for The Mangler next week.

Today we talk about I Am the Doorway, a science fiction piece that was published in Cavalier magazine in 1971. This was a strange one, so strange in fact that I wrote a little bit about parasites. I didn’t get gross, but fair warning for those who don’t want to know that your cute little cat can give you life altering brain cooties.

I hope you enjoy.

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Becoming the doorway.

Around six years ago, I was listening to an interview on NPR in my car. The man speaking had traveled to the Amazon and come back with a rare parasite Western doctors had never encountered. I can’t recall what it was now, only that it made me grateful not to live in the jungle. 

I grew up in the foothills, raised in high desert where you might see ten spiders a year, an ant hill on a hike, a few flies and bees in the middle of summer. But that about does it. In the dark humid places of jungle forests, life thrives. All of it. 

When I think of a parasite, I think of a worm, but they can be more than that. They can do more. They might burrow in your skin and lay eggs, but some can highjack your mind. Have you ever heard that pregnant women aren’t supposed to clean cat litter? I have too. I gladly gave that duty up to my husband when I was pregnant myself, but I never really understood why.

It turns out that there is a parasite common in cats, called Toxoplasmosis. This parasite famously thrives in cat bodies, where it does very little harm and can proliferate without consequence. So how does it get into the cat, you ask?

Let me tell you one way. It enters through mice, invading their neurons, high-jacking their sense of danger and making them fearless risk takers. Rodents infected with toxo are more likely to roam into an open field, or try novel foods. Not only that, but this little parasite makes them attracted to cat pee, which means that mice are more likely to go where cats are. Which…means they get eaten. At which point the parasite is free to procreate and live happily ever after in a cat body.¹

You and I can get this too. And we are prone to some of the same behaviors if we do. Risk taking, driving motorcycles, and playing soccer (football to everyone but my fellow Americans) are some of the common behaviors highly correlated with having this parasite. It changes the way you think.

The first time I heard that, and in the times when I’ve since learned of prion diseases that reside in the brains of animals that we humans like to eat—like cows and deer—I’ve had a heightened awareness and fear at what is possible if we become the doorway.

King does sci-fi

Sure, it’s a kind of cosmic horror version of science fiction, but I Am the Doorway is about space travel. When we meet the main character, Arthur, he is disabled, his hands bandaged and itching. A man named Richard sits with him on his porch, asking if he is sure he killed the boy.

“I didn’t dream it. And I didn’t kill him, either—I told you that. They did. I am the doorway.”

Our narrator was a former astronaut, part of a NASA mission to explore deep space, looking for minerals and life on other planets. Arthur went to Venus, a last ditch effort after the moon and Mars turned up nothing but sparse landscape and worthless rock. Man had gone out into his little corner of the universe, and found it empty.

Venus was no different. Arthur and his colleague Cory orbited the yellow planet, sending probes down to the surface that saw nothing but desolate canyons, wind blown and empty.

It was like circling a haunted house in the middle of deep space. I know how unscientific that sounds, but I was scared gutless until we got out of there. I think if our rockets hadn’t gone off, I would have cut my throat on the way down. It’s not like the moon. The moon is desolate but somehow antiseptic. That world we saw was unlike anything that anyone has ever seen. Maybe it’s a good thing that cloud cover is there. It was like a skull that’s been picked clean…

On returning to Earth, Cory is killed and Arthur is crippled when their parachute fails. He earns a Medal of Honor and tries to pick up the pieces of his life. Until his hands start itching. At first he thinks it’s poison ivy, but by nightfall it becomes clear that he has an infection. Little red dots appear on his fingertips, perfect circles, red and soft.

What emerges is no ordinary infection, but an alien mutagen. Tiny eyes and eyelids form on his fingertips and hands, yellow and watching. Not only do they see through his hands, but he is able to see as they do. Earth and the human world around them is as terrifying and alien as Venus was to Arthur.

I raised my hands slowly to my face, catching an eerie vision of my living room turned into a horror house.

I screamed.

There were eyes peering up at me through splits in the flesh of my fingers. And even as I watched the flesh was dilating, retreating, as they pushed their mindless way up to the surface.

But that was not what made me scream. I had looked into my own face and seen a monster.

We fear what we don’t know.

Why would aliens be any different? What exists as a perfectly normal experience for Arthur—reading a book in his living room—is a totally other-worldly and terrifying experience for the creatures that see through his hands. But soon Arthur not only sees as they see. He can feel what they feel.

And little by little I felt them. Them. An anonymous intelligence. I never really wondered what they looked like or where they had come from. It was moot. I was their doorway, and their window on the world. I got enough feedback from them to feel their revulsion and horror, to know that our world was very different form theirs.

The aliens slowly take over his body and mind, manipulating him, even using his physically broken form to do their bidding. When he waves an unbandaged hand absentmindedly to a boy who often passes his house, the eyes watch silently.

I felt my mind side-slip. A moment later my control was gone. The door was open.

Arthur watches helplessly as the alien life form kills the boy, waving his arms about until the boy’s head bursts. In their eyes, they had killed a monster.

Richard’s End.

Richard, the man Arthur has been telling his story to, has been asking to see his hands. Arthur repeatedly tells him no, not unless he has to. After searching in vain for the boy’s body in the sandy dunes where the creatures buried him, Arthur finally begins to unwrap the bandages, warning Richard to run if he tries to hurt him.

The last of the bandages fell away.

I looked at Richard and they looked at Richard. I saw a face I had known for five years and come to love. They saw a distorted, living monolith.

Richard tries to run, but it is too late. The aliens kill him in fear, seeing a monster where Arthur sees a friend. And then the world goes black. Arthur comes to sitting on his porch, the eyes in his hand glazed over, tired from their work. In a desperate attempt to close the doorway, Arthur makes a fire, douses his hands in kerosene, and burns them off.

But fire can’t cure him. The story ends seven years later, where we learn that in spite of the hooks he wears for hands, Arthur is still a doorway.

I get along just fine with these hooks…I shave with them and even tie my own shoelaces. As you can see, my typing is nice and even. I don’t expect to have any trouble putting the shotgun into my mouth and pulling the trigger. It started again three weeks ago, you see.

There is a perfect circle of twelve golden eyes on my chest.

As with all good fiction, there is truth in this tale.

After all, what is a parasite if not an alien life form, invading our bodies without permission, using our cells for its own life? Doesn’t cancer feel the same? What about a virus? Or psychosis? I often think of these material, parallel lines—a body taken over by an unseen force—when I read possession stories.

There is a real fear in losing control of ourselves to another being, another consciousness. Of experiencing our world contrary to reality. Opening a door that can never be shut. Becoming a doorway.

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And now to you.

This is the second week where we have covered an utterly depressing King tale. What did you think? Do you like Nihilist King?

I have to say, I’m not sure I like King as a science fiction writer. Maybe it’s because I have a certain expectation when I read his stories, but it seems like whenever he touches sci-fi, his endings are totally devoid of the hope I find in his other works. Is it just me?

Last but not least, I loved the gooey descriptions of the yellow eyes. My fingers feel itchy just thinking about that strange, soft flesh where the eyes emerge. Was it effective? Were you disgusted?

1. For the curious. This, this, and this article are fascinating reads. I’m pretty much science illiterate, but what I did understand thoroughly wowed and disgusted me.