Behind the Door

"How can you tell there's anything out there? The door's closed."
--Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

"But remember that from my perspective behind my eyelids is out there."
--Troll, sitting on the couch a few weeks ago.

Have you ever stopped, your hand on the doorknob, and wondered for a moment if you really knew what was on the other side of the door? It's a door in your own home. You've walked through it uncountable times before. On the other side is just the hallway, nothing more. Nothing less?

Or perhaps a blighted unearthly sandscape of endless windswept isolation, filled with ghastly, sourceless light, where the silence tears your ears apart and your heart is burnt still by the impossible cold?

Of course not. You just open the door and all that's there is your hallway. The same hallway as ever, with the soothing wallpaper, the fuzzy carpet, and the Devil. Oh, the Devil won't be standing there eight feet tall staring down at you with a hungry grin dripping with the tattered remnants of broken souls. He'll just Be There, and you'll know it. You might wish he was there in a way you could see, a physical form you could scream out against the impossibility of, a looming, terrible monster you could at least run away from. But no, the Devil will just be there. With You.

I don't check under my bed for monsters.
There's a reason.
When I was in high school I used to suspect I'd been abducted by aliens. This was before X-Files and the like were around to put the image of alien abductors in a more prominent part of the popular consciousness. When the idea would get you laughed at for somewhat different reasons than it does now. I used to see things. But that's an other story, or possibly several.
One night however, I was awakened by a horrible scratching sound outside my window. It was very late, my room was dark, the curtains were closed, and some thing was trying to get into my room from the outside. The scratching could have been a badger or some other animal, and quite probably was. But the urgency of the sound filled me with dread, and in the darkness of that night the sound coming from below my window seemed like confirmation of all my fearful imaginings. I managed to leap across my room to turn on the light, to at least provide some comfort about what was inside the bedroom before attempting to cope with what could be outside of it. The scratching continued. It had been going on for several minutes now. It was so frantic and so loud I began to wonder if it could tear through the wall entirely.
There was a simple solution, naturally. The rational belief in the reliability of the normal world that civilization had tried to teach me reassured me that I that all I'd have to do was open the curtain, look down to confirm that it was only a small animal, and maybe bang on the glass to scare it away. Simple.
I'd managed to walk to the window, but my hand stopped an inch away from the curtain. Something had occured to me. I was going to lift the curtain to calm myself by confirming that there wasn't an alien standing outside my window. That was the reassurance that I needed. But what would I do if I didn't get it? What would I actually do if I peeled away the curtain and there was something there? How could I react if I looked into eyes that were not human, if I stood face to face with one of those faces that had haunted my imagination and kept me awake so many nights? How do you stare into the void knowing that the void may be staring back? I had no idea. Standing there that night, my arm outstretched, fingers almost brushing against the curtain that separated me from the unknown night, I realized that I had absolutely no clue what would happen to me if there was something staring at me through the window.
I lowered my hand. I backed away. I couldn't look.
There's a reason
I don't check under my bed for monsters.

So the next time your hand is on the doorknob, pause for a moment. Remember that certainty is anything but. Let yourself imagine the unthinkable, and wonder if your entire idea of reality is about to be stripped away by sights that could throw you into madness, never again able to trust in the veil of the real world that you thought you'd lived up until now.
And then just open the door. Because on the other side is just the hallway, right?

Right?

Right?