He never made it back to the crate. The men in the Cadillac caught up with him a half-hour later. Although refusing to divulge to them the location of the crate was admirable, it proved fatal. His body was found floating in the Charles River the next day.
It was mid-October, 1958.

The crate remained hidden. The house was completed, and the crawlspace was covered with siding. In the years that followed a succession of families and individuals occupied the house. Ownership changed hands several times. In 1982 carpenters making repairs discovered the crate and pulled it from beneath the floorboards. They placed it un-opened in the garage where it was soon forgotten.

It is now present day.
It is springtime on a cool and crisp Sunday morning. Patrick and Polly Simak have just spent their first night in the house as its new owners. With all four of their children grown and moved away, the former family home was just too big to deal with. When their realtor told them that this quaint little two bedroom home was available, they jumped on it.
Retired from a fifty-year career as a furniture salesman, Patrick retained his quick smile and friendly face from habit. It was a year ago that Patrick had been forced to retire. Being forced to spend all his time with his wife Polly, had recently led to a depression that he tried valiantly to hide.
Patrick was a very average fellow. Average height, weight, build, and the average gray hair of a sixty-six year old man. He missed working. He was somebody at work. He liked that.
After fifty years of helping his employer's small business grow into a large corporation, they took away his keys, gave him a pat on the back, and a gold watch.
“Why in the hell do they give you a watch when you retire? They should give you a watch while you’re still working and have reason to track time. A retired person with nothing to do doesn’t give a rat’s ass what time it is!”
For over forty years his days were full of meeting new people, conversing and joking with his friends and co-workers, and being recognized for his good work. Now he stays home all day and is forced to listen to his wife bitch at him.
Polly Simak, also sixty-six, was a disgruntled and bitter woman who chose to live her life as a housewife. Now that her life was almost over, she felt cheated. She thought Patrick would eventually become rich or at least someone important. She married him because she just knew he would one day afford her the comfortable lifestyle she knew she deserved. It never happened.
Patrick got up with the excitement of a kid on Christmas morning. He planned to spend most of his day exploring his new home. Downstairs in the unfamiliar kitchen, he put a pot of coffee on to brew. Then he snatched a couple of cookies from the jar, grabbed his sweater and ventured out the door from the kitchen to the attached garage.
Beneath the light bulb and pull-chain dangling from the center of the ceiling was the only empty floor space in the room. The structure was just big enough for the realtor to tout it as a two-car garage. Even empty, Patrick couldn’t see fitting two cars inside it. Presently it was loaded with their stuff from the old house. There were stacks of furniture, assorted household items, and many waist–high stacks of boxes full of that useless, miscellaneous stuff that you never need, but can’t bring yourself to throw away.
He nibbled on a cookie as he casually inspected the water heater. It appeared to be operating properly. Next he attempted to read the faded labels to the switches in the electrical box on the wall. Patrick knew nothing of either plumbing or electricity, but had the best of intentions, and a whole day of creative puttering to do.
While venturing way back in the corner, he discovered the crate. He pulled the sheet of dust and cobweb covered plywood away that had hidden it for many years.
The crate was very old and weathered with faded shipping labels here and there. He could also see what he decided were bullet holes in the wood. Except for large black arrows directing to stand it on end, the only print still legible was in a foreign language. “Arabic maybe.” he thought.
His curiosity was peaked. After clearing a path through the piles of stuff, he managed to drag it to the middle of the room, where he stood it upright as the arrows directed. This was quite an effort for a man his age, considering the crate was much larger than he was, but he was hooked and determined to check out the contents of this mysterious box.
After pulling nails and splitting boards with a pry bar, he managed to reveal a dark, beautifully carved, wooden doorframe. “Marvelous!” he said.
It was way too ornate and grand for his modest home. He thought it might fit a parlor or formal dining room in a mansion. The more he examined it, the more mysterious it became. He concluded it wasn’t a conventional doorframe- designed to support a hinged door; it was a doorway- meant to be freestanding. The eight-inch round, cylindrical legs and header piece were covered with bands of intricate, carved patterns and geometric shapes. From his furniture experience, he knew a bit about woods but couldn’t say what the doorway was made of.
The surrounding crate now removed, there were still wooden supports crisscrossing the middle of the doorway. As he attempted to remove them, he found a small book marked “Journal” between the boards. Old and weathered, the handwritten sixty or so discolored pages were filled front and back with writing. Inside the cover was written, R.L.Pickford, PhD. Patrick thumbed through the notebook and became so engrossed he pulled up a box of stuff, sat down and read it from cover to cover.
From the journal he learned Dr. R. L. Pickford taught Archeology and World History at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA. In 1956 he married his young research assistant, Lanetta Crawford. The next year they traveled to Egypt where he purchased many historical artifacts and antiquities for the University. He happened upon the doorway in a back-alley antique shop in Cairo. Pickford hadn’t considered it to be an exceptional find but the shopkeeper cut the price drastically and threw it in with the other items being purchased just to get it out of his store. It made the boat trip back to the states along with several dozen items.
After returning from abroad Pickford was swiftly engulfed in University duties and a heavy teaching schedule. The doorway was partially un-crated, tagged and placed in a corner of his library. For the next ten months it stood a few feet from his desk where his time was spent wading through bureaucratic paperwork, grant applications, and grading student papers.
One night something fateful happened; a pencil fell from his desk.
Pickford wrote:
The pencil hit the floor and rolled away from me. Before I could bend and reach it, I watched it roll directly through the legs of the upright doorway and disappear. I froze bent over for a long moment trying to make sense of what I had just witnessed. I could see the floor and baseboard through the doorway but the pencil had vanished. The rest of the journal consisted of documented experiments, notes, mathematical equations, diagrams and drawings.
Nearing the end of the journal, Pickford showed how much of a man of science he really was as he struggled to document an unfortunate accident with the doorway. Late one evening his young wife Lanetta came to his study to call him to bed for the evening. Not knowing Pickford had moved the doorway from one side of the poorly lit room to the other, she casually entered the familiar room and strolled right through the doorway. Pickford looked up from writing just in time to see her go through. She was never to be seen again. The next several entries in the journal were sketchy at best, and at times, understandably incoherent.
The last few entries told of a Turkish antiques dealer named Habhil who’d heard of the doorway and offered repeatedly to buy it from Pickford. Habhil said he’d been looking for the doorway for years and became very insistent. Pickford seemed to have the impression that the man would do anything to acquire it.
Of course, Patrick had to remove the cross-members from the doorway and check it out for himself. How could he not?
Working now with a heightened excitement, and taking great care, he pulled the nails that secured the middle supports. With the doorway now completely un-crated and standing free, he hesitantly reached for the space in the center with his fingers. “This is silly!” He said, trying to steady his nerve. Then he held his breath, pushed his fingers through and watched them disappear. Suddenly frightened, he gasped and yanked his hand back quickly to find nothing missing. It was such a bizarre experience, he couldn’t help but look around the room, checking for witnesses.
He was about to try again when he heard his wife coming from the house. From the direction of her voice, she had come out the front door and was approaching the garage from outside. Panicked, he looked around the room for a quick way to hide the doorway.
“Patrick, where the hell are you?” she called in that demanding, irritating voice he was so sick of. He heard her steps outside in the driveway. She pulled up the lightweight, aluminum garage door with an unceremonious yank. The door swung up and over Patrick’s head causing him to flinch and duck his head. The big door hit its stops with a bang making the springs rattle loudly for a long, irritating time.
“Damn it Polly!” he frowned from the noise and harsh sunlight. Now illuminated, a shower of fine dust fell from the rarely opened door. He brushed off his shoulders and the top of his balding head.
“What the hell are you doing out here?” She demanded. “You said you’d bring me my coffee and pills over an hour ago!”
“Damn.” He had become so engrossed in his discovery, he had forgotten.
She squinted and strained to see his face in the darker interior of the garage. With her unruly, gray, fresh-out-of-bed hair blowing in the breeze, she closed her robe around her nightgown and shuffled her fuzzy slippers inside for her first glimpse of their new garage. “What the hell is that?” She asked pointing to the doorway.
“Oh, this?” He flashed his practiced, salesman smile and replied nervously, “It’s just some old doorframe they’d stuck back in the corner.”
While she gazed around the rest of the room he grabbed a bed-sheet from a box of old linens and tried his best to nonchalantly drape it over the doorway. He was hoping to conceal the most interesting thing he’d ever seen, from his wife of forty-two years. She was an expert at making him feel stupid, foolish, and irresponsible. He knew somehow-someway, she would suck the life out of this bright spot in his existence like she had done everything else in his life.
Wanting to take her attention with him, he walked away from the doorway and tried to sound concerned. “I’m sorry Polly, I’d set up the coffee maker and stepped out here while it finished. I forgot all about bringing you your pills.”
She didn’t go for it. “Wait, let me see that thing again.” She sidestepped him and walked right up to it.
He reluctantly turned back to the doorway, closed his eyes, and cursed his luck. “It’s really nothing, just some old doorframe that was left over…”
Before he could finish, she’d pulled the sheet off and was checking it out with that skeptical, sour look on her face. “So I guess you’re going to want to spend money trying to restore it or some such nonsense!”
Her foot tangled in the sheet she’d let fall to the floor. She stumbled, fell straight through the doorway, and silently disappeared. The sheet was still being dragged through with her. It wrapped around one leg of the doorway, yanked it backwards, and caused it to fall forward. Eyes wide in disbelief, mouth agape, Patrick took one short step forward, raised his hands over his head and easily caught it.
There he stood in shock for a long moment, holding the tipped doorway and staring at the space in the middle. “Polly?” he said in a fearful whisper. He could not believe what had just happened. His mind convulsed with many different thoughts, as he stood frozen, afraid to move. He slowly stepped forward and stood the doorway upright. He felt the urge to go through after her, but fear stopped him, “What if I can’t come back?” He put his fingers up to the space where she went through and closed his eyes amidst his mental dilemma.
He stared down at a bizarre sight. The sheet appeared cut in half at the door-line as if with a pair of shears. He carefully tugged on it with his toe and found he could pull it all the way back- unscathed. She didn’t come back with it.
He stood in front of the doorway and slowly, bravely stuck his whole face through. He could see nothing but total darkness. “Polly!” He heard only a loud, eerie silence.
He stepped back and stood there for a long moment, staring at the emptiness like an obedient puppy, waiting for his master to return. She did not.
He then thought of Lanetta Pickford. She’d stepped through and never came back. Although at first he was concerned for his wife’s safety, he couldn’t shake the potentially interesting result of this tragic event.
“What if she doesn’t come back?”
This was a very interesting thought indeed. He shook his head and felt a twinge of embarrassment at such a selfish thought. He knew he shouldn’t just assume that she wouldn't come back, but the thought did tickle his mind.
After a long while of nervously standing and waiting at the doorway, he stepped into the house and poured himself a cup of coffee. He then brought it back to the garage, sat down, and resumed waiting for Polly to return.
He wondered what he should do. Should he call the police? What would he tell them? He knew the way life worked and pictured the whole situation turning on him. He imagined telling them the truth, which of course, they wouldn’t believe. They’d arrest him for his wife’s demise and confiscate the doorway.
He decided he should just wait a while. He would give her every opportunity to step back through. He felt an uncomfortable parallel between his situation and Professor Pickford’s. There was an obvious difference displayed in the sad, almost intelligible account, written by a man who’d lost a dear love, and Patrick’s own response. He stepped a little lighter with ever hour Polly failed to return.
Patrick wasn’t a monster, he would never have wished any harm to come to her. But ever since he’d retired and was forced to spend all his time with her, he was miserable.
He knew eventually he would have to call the police. Few people can just disappear in this society without the authorities asking questions. He vowed to make the call on Tuesday morning.

(This is a work in progress.)