The Door to Tomorrow

The Door to Tomorrow
Brandon Aaron

          Most people look back on their younger years and try to piece together the events that shaped and changed them into the person they are. Some say the things you choose to remember says more about you than anything else. There are many events in my life that come to mind when I think of this, graduation from college, the birth of my son, and the day I proposed to my wife, to name a few. There is one thing, not so much an event but an experience all the same, that would rank up there with all the others. It was my fifteenth year, the summer of 1972.
          I moved to Mississippi from the west coast with my mother after she and my stepfather divorced. She was from Ripley, a small town southwest of Tupelo, and all of our family lived there. It was two weeks before the start of school, ninth grade at Blue Mountain High School at that, and I didn’t know a single person. Looking back, that year doesn’t seem real now, as if I was in a daze. I didn’t make any real friends that year, being quite shy. I recall the crushes I had on classmates, and my fantasies of asking girls for their phone numbers or a date. The one thing that saved me was discovering the town library. I had always been an avid reader, but in California my friends and activities kept me too busy to read as much as I would have liked. I didn’t have that problem here; I had nothing to do in my spare time except help my grandmother do yard work and the like. My mother took me to school in the mornings, and I walked home every afternoon. My trip home took me through downtown Ripley and by the Library, which became my regular stop. It was there I discovered the wonderful books, mostly science fiction and adventure novels, which became my sanctuary.
          I fell in love with the worlds of Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke. I was fascinated by the thought of interstellar travel, and visitors from outer space. I enjoyed reading any Sci-Fi I could get my hands on, and I liked the classics a great deal. As I devoured my way through these books, I began to notice the older editions I enjoyed so much had been written on. There were notations in the margins and some passages had been underlined with a distinct red ink. I also noticed on these a name under the dustcover or on the first page. Someone had signed the books with the name Horace Purdy. Like most other towns in the south, Ripley operated on limited resources, and many of the books were donations. The names began to be such a common occurrence that I started to wonder about the man who once owned all of these wonderful books. He became my silent partner in fiction, a friend if you will, and together we read and commented on the amazing tales we encountered. I mentioned to the librarian, Mrs. Ketcher, about how Horace Purdy’s name was in so many of the books I read.
          “How do I say this?” she said. “Mr. Purdy was a special kind of person. He was handicapped. He gave us all those books years ago, and never came back. I remember the day he brought them, hauled them up here in that old car of his and had us get them out for him. They were piled up in his backseat and filled the trunk. He said he didn’t need them any more because he knew the truth, or some such nonsense as that. He was a very strange man.”
          “What did he mean, by knowing the truth?”
          “I don’t even think he knew what he meant. He was out there, you know, kind of loopy. He was always talking about UFOs. He told anyone who would listen that he had been contacted, and they were coming back for him.”
“Is he still around, I mean living around here?” I said.
          “Well, now that you mention it, I don’t really know. I do know his momma passed on several years ago, and I don’t recall his daddy ever being around. He was an only child, and to my knowledge never married. He was a very strange man.”
          I remembered thinking that this was perhaps the most colorful character I had heard of, and her description intrigued me. How could someone give up a collection like this? Later that night I checked the phone book, but found no listing for him. Although a little disappointed, I soon forgot about the whole affair.

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          School was out soon enough, and I allotted a few hours each day to reading. One day in the library, Mrs. Ketcher offered me a part time job there. She needed help going through older editions and damaged books that weren’t on the shelf. Some were duplicates, and some were in too poor a condition to use. There was a room full of these books, piled up for who knows how long. I had to sort the books into different piles, some to be sent to another library, some to be destroyed, and some to be sold. It was beneath these dusty piles I found a thin volume that had never been stamped. It was a plain cover sci-fi book from a small publishing house called Mastery Publishers. The title was The Door to Tomorrow, and the author was Horace Purdy. I remember reading his name over and over and the excitement I felt. I hid the book in the waistband of my jeans, under my shirt. I went to the front desk and asked off for the afternoon, and ran home.
          Behind my grandmothers house there was an old cemetery from the 1800s. I read many a book out there under the shade of a great oak. It was the only place that afforded any privacy in a house full of people. She kept several grandchildren during the summer, including my sister Beth, and they were all under the age of ten. There is nothing more bothersome to a fifteen year old trying to read a book than a houseful of kids. The one place they would never bother me was the cemetery, which scared them to no end. I headed to the top of the rise and sat down against the oak. The book was plain, a yellow fabric cover with black writing. It was 139 pages, with no foreword or mention of the author, save for his name on the cover page.
          I read the book in one sitting that afternoon. I was amazed and excited by what I read; it was truly a moving experience for me. The book was written in first person, almost like a diary, with Horace Purdy as the main character. It wasn’t stylistically smooth, and his writing was almost amateurish, but the events he described floored me.
          The book was about his supposed abduction by a UFO in 1963. I was completely riveted by his descriptions of the craft and how he was taken. The most incredible thing about the whole story was the UFO contained not aliens, but people. According to Purdy, UFOs didn’t contain aliens from outer space, but humans from the distant future visiting us. These weren’t spacecraft; they were time-traveling machines.
          I guess I was so into the story for a number of reasons, namely that it was set in Ripley and I almost believed it was real. As I finished it, I had to literally catch my breath and shake off the feeling that this was somehow an account of actual events. I knew it couldn’t be, but in all the books I visited, I had never had a feeling like this. I went back to my Grandmothers house and waited with my sister for our Mom to get off work, and tried to hide my excitement. Whatever thoughts I had before of finding out about Mr. Horace Purdy, the discovery of this book took them to a new level. I vowed to myself that night that I would discover more about this strange and imaginative man.
          That night in bed, I read the book again. I knew the places he described, even the old wooden bridge where he made contact. I though it would be neat to go out and there and look around, following his tracks. I still wanted to find out if Mr. Purdy was still around, and how I could contact him. The next day I went to work, and asked Mrs. Ketcher how to find someone. I told her I was looking for an old friend of my Moms. She told me where to go to in the courthouse and who to see there. On my lunch break, I did just that.
          The lady at the courthouse did help me, as Mrs. Ketcher had promised. Within a few minutes I had an address to the old Purdy homestead. It was a rural route, and she told me the general area it would be in. I thanked her and left, barely containing my excitement. For the rest of the workday, I thought about the letter I would write, and what I could say without sounding like a lunatic. Mostly I just wondered who would receive it, and if they would write back.
          I decided the best and safest approach would be to keep it simple, almost like a code that only Horace Purdy would recognize. I found a passage from his book that I liked, and typed it on the library typewriter. I put it in an envelope with another envelope addressed to my house. I always picked up the mail from the box when we got home at night, and thought this would be safer than sending it to Grandmas. Grandma was a nosy woman, not necessarily a bad thing, and I had to work for any privacy there. A letter addressed to me arriving there would be opened and read to the world before I could blink.
          The passage I chose was from chapter 4, and was one of my favorites. I had centered it on the page, and took great care typing it. It went like this: “I was in a vacuum, floating, floating, floating. My legs, my feet, were no hindrance to me here. For a beautiful moment, I was an equal, a king, and a man.”
          The letter went in the mail the next day. I walked it down to the post office myself instead of putting it in our box to save a day. All I knew about Horace Purdy three days before was what he wrote in the margins of my favorite books. I read “The Door to Tomorrow” thinking I might discover more about him. It turned out it only raised new questions, and only he could answer them.
          I checked the mail every night for a week, and still saw no response. I was beginning to lose hope, when it finally happened. It was a Thursday night, some ten days after I sent the letter out, when I received a response. It was hard to control my feelings as I snuck it into my room under my shirt. I studied the envelope; it was my handwriting from the one I had enclosed. I opened it, retrieved the single piece of bond paper, and read it. To my surprise, it contained a two-part response. The first simply said The Door to Tomorrow. The second one I didn’t understand at first. It was in quotations, so I knew it must be from a book. The passage was as follows: “The stars were thinning out; the glare of the Milky Way was dimming into a pale ghost of the glory he had known—and, when he was ready, would know again. He was back, precisely where he wished to be, in the space that men called real.” That was the entire letter. It was typed and neatly folded. I had no doubts that it came from Horace Purdy.
          I took the letter with me to type my reply at the library the next day. I was finished with the great room of books, and found myself again just a patron there. I still used the typewriter in the back, and Mrs. Ketcher didn’t say a word. I typed my response letter, and centered it like before. It was another short letter, but a lot of thought had gone into it. I decided to give the book title from the quote in his reply, and ask one question. I wrote “2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke” in the center of the page. Under it I typed two sentences; “What is your phone number? I would like to talk with you sometime.” I signed my name below that, Jonathon Lane. Like before I enclosed an envelope for his reply. I mailed it that very day.
          This reply came faster than the first. I got it on Wednesday, and carried it inside the same as I had the first one. I locked my bedroom door and quickly opened the envelope. The letter was short and to the point:

         
          Jonathon,
I have no phone. You may visit me on Sunday the 5th at 3:30 pm. Drive due east on Blackwell Farm road approximately 8.4 miles. Mine is the white farmhouse on the left, with the green barn out back. Please knock and enter, as I will have difficulty meeting you at the door.
Best Regards,
H. Purdy

          Blackwell Farm road was where the old dairy was. I knew how to get there, but couldn’t place the house. The prospect of meeting with Mr. Purdy was an interesting one for me, but posed problems I hadn’t thought of. During the week, or from eight to twelve on Saturdays, I could always escape to the Library. It would be harder on a Sunday to get away. I faced with the possibility of explaining all this to my Mother, and have her drive me, but banished that thought quickly.
          I decided in the end to borrow a bicycle from the neighbor’s twelve-year-old boy, and tell my Grandma I was going to a friend’s house for the day. Although this seemed out of the ordinary to me, she was tired from church and ready for a nap, so she didn’t question it. I left her house around 12:30 and pedaled the ten miles or so to Blackwell Farm road.
          The trip was long, but I was happy to have the bicycle. My long, lanky frame was too big for the 20” bike, but it sure beat walking. I found myself rolling into the driveway a few minutes early. The house was once white, that much was true, and the barn may have been green at one time. There were a few limbs on the roof, and newspapers and boxes stacked on the long porch. The place didn’t look deserted, only lived in by a man who couldn’t take care of it. There was no car out front, and I found myself walking up a wooden wheelchair ramp to the porch. A wide trail was cleared from there to the door. I could hear the faint sound of music from inside. I went to the front door, knocked twice, and entered.
          The room was dim and I couldn’t see much in there. An old glass lamp with no shade, sitting on a table, lighted the next room. I walked toward the glare of that light, and heard a voice calling me into the room. Inside the room, which was undoubtedly a dining room at one time, there was an old man sitting in a wheelchair by a window.
          “Welcome, Jonathon Lane, I am Horace Purdy.”
          Horace Purdy had been confined to a wheelchair for most of his life due to a bout of polio he contracted at age 4. He could still move his legs and feet, but the crippling disease left him without the strength in them to stand. He sat there by that window, dressed in a tee shirt and pajama pants, a flock of brown hair pulled back behind his ears. I estimated that he was in his mid forties. I entered the room, and he motioned for me to sit in a wooden chair. I felt very nervous, and remember not being able to swallow.
          “How old are you, Mr. Lane?” he said.
          “I’m fifteen, sir,” I squeaked out.
          “Fifteen. I guess I was about your age when I started reading about Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes. I was much older when I moved on to Science Fiction. That was my true love, you know, Sci-Fi books and pulp magazines. I spent many a dollar on books through mail order. A man spends his life in a chair, and he has to find something to bide the time.”
          “But you gave up your books. You gave them all to the library, didn’t you?”
          “Yes I did. All my Science Fiction books, anyway. I kept my non-Fiction collection.” He moved his chair and positioned himself closer to me, looking directly at me now. “So Mr. Lane, now that the formalities are out of the way, why don’t you tell me why you came here? What are you looking for?”
          “I’m not looking for anything,” I said. “I just wanted to talk to you.”
          “And what is it we have to discuss here? Do your parents know you’re here?”
          “Yes they know,” I lied. “I found your name in so many of my favorite books, and I liked the notes you wrote. Later I found The Door to Tomorrow and I liked it. I wanted to talk to you about books, especially about your book.”
          “What is there to talk about? It’s just a book. It was a long time ago.”
          “When did you write it?” I said.
          “I started it about two weeks after I got out of the hospital, after I got back. I finished it ten days later. I would have finished it sooner, but I type slower than I talk.”
          “Did you sell a lot of copies?”
          “No, I didn’t sell any. I paid to have it printed. I never tried to sell any of them. I donated five copies to the library. I guess that’s where you found it, right?”
          “Yes. It wasn’t on the shelf, though. They had it in a pile of old books in the back.”
          “Of course it wasn’t on the shelf. They didn’t want anyone knowing what happened to me. I wasn’t the only one from around here they took. I was just the most vocal. That’s why they sent me away.”
          “Who sent you away?”
          “Doctors told my Momma I needed help, and should be put in a hospital for the mentally ill out in Broward. She sent me, and I spent six years in there. She passed on while I was in there. Anyway, they let me out two years ago and here I’ve been ever since.”
          “Six years? That’s a long time.”
          “Would have been longer but I knew what they wanted to hear, so I changed my story and behaved myself, and they let me out.”
          “They thought you were crazy because of what you wrote in The Door to Tomorrow?”
          “Yes. They didn’t believe me, of course. I mean, would you? Do you believe me, Mr. Lane? Is that why you’re here?”
          “I’m here because I want to know more. I don’t know what to believe,” I said. It was the truth. I wanted to believe this man’s story, and wanted more details. That was why I wrote him. That’s why I went to see him.
          “You’re here because you want to believe. I have spent the last ten years trying not to believe it, telling myself it was a dream, a fantasy. But I can’t do it; I can’t make myself give in. I know what I saw, and I know it was as real as you are. They came here in 1963 and took me. If you read that book you know they are coming back this summer. They said they come in ten year intervals as a follow-up. He said it was ten years for me, but only seconds pass for them. Don’t you think for a minute they aren’t real; they are real and they are coming.”
          I knew from the book the details of his capture, and what happened on the craft. The Sheriff found his car, still running, with one headlight glowing on the overturned wheelchair. That was when the search started. He was kept for almost two days, and left for dead in a field near Phillips Dairy Road. He crawled using his arms for hundreds of yards before being found. He was taken to County Hospital, where doctors discovered strange markings and bruises they could not explain. Everyone wondered how he got from his chair to that field, a distance of some 8 miles.
          According to Purdy, he was taken because of his affliction. The people in the future are genetic collectors, and took samples and ran tests on him because he had polio. By 1972 the poliovirus was no longer a threat, and Horace Purdy was the only person I knew that had it. Purdy said there were no traces of it in the future, and they collected samples from him and others.
          “What are you going to do if they come back?” I asked.
          “I think you mean when they come back, not if. I guess I will go with them. The girl I met there, you read about Xenni, we hit it off. She was a very nice person. She said they could fix my legs, alter my DNA and repair it, and I could walk. If they could have taken me on with them then, I would have gone. But they couldn’t let me stay on that trip, and I had Momma here, so it didn’t work out. But it’s almost ten years now, and I am tired of waiting. I am ready for them. I’ve grown tired of this chair, Jonathon.”
          I remembered what he wrote about Xenni; his description of her, how she looked in her uniform, and her smell. Too a boy of fifteen, she sounded mesmerizing. As I read it, I always pictured a girl from my classes, Tracy Camp. I sat near her in seventh period Biology, and tried to catch her eye when she walked by. I never did get much more than a hello from her, but I lived for that hello. She would always go the front where there was a mirror and fix her hair when class let out. I would wait in my desk, as everyone else filed out, so that I could be around when she left. There is nothing like the smell of perfume floating by at three in the afternoon. We talked for hours about books and authors, and real life events like Wallace getting shot, nuclear energy, and the July 20, 1969 lunar landing.
          “Its late, and you need to be getting home soon. How did you get here?” Purdy said.
          “I rode a bike,” I said. I looked at the setting sun through the window, and thought about the long bike ride home. I wouldn’t make it before dark.
          “I can give you a ride in my car. Your bike should fit in the trunk.” He handed me his keys. “Go out in the barn and crank my car, and bring it to the front here. Can you drive a car, Mr. Lane?”
          “Yes,” I said, taking the keys. I did know how to drive a car; it’s just that this was the first time I would do it.
          I swung the barn doors wide and went inside. There was an old blue Oldsmobile parked there, covered in dust and some rust. I was sure it was the car from the book, the same one he drove to the library when he dropped his books off. It cranked on the first try. I worked the transmission into drive and pulled out. The brakes were touchy, and the car lurched through the yard. I didn’t care; I was driving.
          I pulled near the porch and put the car in park. Horace Purdy was easing his chair down the ramp. He told me to load the bicycle in the trunk, which I did. There was ample room in the big Olds. I walked to his door to help him with the wheelchair. He told me to roll it to the barn so he could park the car and get to it when he returned. As I walked out of the barn, I looked at the car, a blue dinosaur of dust and chrome, creeping through the grass with one headlight shining on me. Horace Purdy was real, the car was real, and I was beginning to think his story was, too.
          I visited Horace Purdy three more times that month. Each time we sat around talking and quizzing each other on books and such. He was a voracious reader and loved science books. He probably read everything that had been written about NASA and the space program, so we talked about that a lot. I could tell he enjoyed the company, and had few or no visitors.

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          In July, there were some changes in my life that kept me from visiting Horace anymore. It was around this time my uncle hired me at the Piggly Wiggly as a sack boy, and that took up most of my afternoons. It was there I met two people that have shaped my life, my best friend Donnie and my wife Claire. I went though a lot of changes that summer, both social and emotional, and grew closer to the man I would be.
          I still thought about Horace Purdy from time to time, but never visited him. A sack boy from Piggly Wiggly delivered groceries to him every Thursday, always the same order. I didn’t drive so I knew they wouldn’t ask me to deliver them. I guess I felt guilty for not writing or visiting him, but I didn’t want to see him again.
It’s strange how a person’s whole outlook on life can change in a month. It was the first time I ever returned books at the library without carrying an armload out with me. Between work and hanging out with Donnie and Claire, I didn’t have time to read. The memories of my visit with Horace Purdy and the book he wrote all but vanished from my thoughts as I started school that fall. I wouldn’t hear from him again for a year. The following summer, in August, I received a letter from him. I was surprised to see it, and even more so when I read it. It was a short letter telling me goodbye and thanking me for visiting him. It went as follows:

          Jonathon,
Thank you kindly for sharing your thoughts on my book with me. You are the only true visitor in this house in many years. As I am sure you are aware, the 22nd of this month is the ten-year anniversary of my trip, and I am expecting to make another one that day. As I stated before, I do not plan on returning this time. I am leaving my all of my belongings to you, as I have no living family. You can find my will in the kitchen. Please take care, and believe.
Yours,
Horace J. Purdy

          I didn’t know what to make of this letter at first. I hadn’t thought of him in months, but felt a sudden sadness creep over me. It was the same feeling I had on the way home from his house. I folded the letter and put it under the cover of The Door to Tomorrow.
          It was the 22nd when I received the letter, and I think he planned it that way. I couldn’t sleep that night, so I read The Door to Tomorrow again. The story didn’t have the same impact on me as it had a year before; this time I wasn’t excited me with the possibility that it could be a true story. I now knew the man who wrote it, and felt sad. I had left that world; I was no longer a lonely boy wrapped in a fantasy world on paper. I had Donnie and Claire, and through them other friends. I had moved on, while Horace Purdy sat in that house alone.
          I have no idea why I called Donnie that night, asking him to come pick me up in his truck. Being the kind of person he is, he didn’t ask any questions, he just did it. He killed his lights as he pulled in my drive, and I slipped out of the house. It was around 11:00. I told him to drive to Blackwell Farm road, and we pulled into the drive at the old house. There were no lights on, and the barn doors were open. We pulled around there and could see that the Oldsmobile was gone.
          “What now?” Donnie said.
          “I know where he is. Lets go to the wooden bridge out near Fellows Crossings.”
          We drove back past the dairy, and headed due east on county road 11. It was dark that night, so Donnie drove slowly and the ten miles seemed like a hundred. We came to the crossroads and turned left, driving the final mile before the old bridge. I saw a light and knew it was the single glowing headlight from the Olds. As we drove onto the bridge, we saw that it was Horace Purdy’s car, still running, with an empty wheelchair silhouetted in the glow.
          We looked for Horace for a while, calling him, and honking the horn, but I knew he was gone. I told Donnie to not ask any questions, and had him help me put his chair in the trunk of the Olds. I drove the car back to Horace’s house, and parked it in the barn. Donnie had followed me in his truck, and took me home. We didn’t say anything on the ride back, but at my house, he said, “Where did he go, Jon? Did something bad happen to him?”
          My head was swimming, and I didn’t have the energy to tell him anything more than, “I don’t think so, Donnie. I think he fine, wherever he is.”
          I did sleep when I went to bed, and I never spoke of that night again. Donnie never mentioned it, and I tried to let it go. I guess the thing that bothered me more than anything was feeling like I had let Horace Purdy down somehow. Over that year I had moved on, stopped thinking about him, and stopped believing his story.
          His body was never found, and there was no explanation for his disappearance. I guess no one was looking for him either, though. Before long people forgot about Horace Purdy. He left me all his possessions, the car and a rotting house that was ready to collapse. I decided it was easier to forget about the whole thing than trying to explain it to my Mom, so I let the place go. A year or two later it burned down. The only thing I kept was the car and some books of his I saved. I kept it parked at Donnie’s for years; the tag on it expired over 30 years ago.
I still don’t know what happened to Horace Purdy, or what I think of his disappearance. I don’t know if I am ready to face that answer just yet. I do know that as I write this, I am sitting in the rusted out Oldsmobile that was his, with one headlight shining on the remains of a wooden bridge, a few miles from my adopted hometown. I come here every ten years, on August 22nd, and spend a few hours watching the sky, looking for a sign of him in the stars above.

THE END