Chapter 15 The Doctrine of the Open Mind

Frank brought the pamphlet the next morning, wrapped in newspaper like a piece of meat. It was old, its pages soft as cloth, and its title was printed in letters that had almost faded away: The Doctrine of the Open Mind. Cole read it twice, sitting at the motel room's small table with the curtains drawn. The pamphlet was careful and strange. It taught that the mind was a membrane, a thinness between the world of the living and a deeper place it called the Deep, where all minds ran together after death. It taught that a mind quiet enough, empty enough, could hold that membrane open, and that such minds were rare. It called them keys. It called them, in one passage that made Cole's skin prickle, hollow. The symbols on the doorway, he realized, were the same shape as the spiral marks on the wrists of the missing. The Society did not brand its volunteers with a decoration. It marked them with the door's own glyph, so the door would know them, would reach for them, would take them when they came close enough. Every mark was an invitation that had already been accepted. He laid the five photographs out on the bed and looked at them for a long time, the way he had looked at a hundred crime scenes, waiting for the shape to finish forming. The shape, when it came, was not the one he had expected. The five had not been abducted. Lena Marsh, grieving and adrift, had walked in to escape the weight of being alone. Pete Sutter, widower, had walked in to find his wife. Grace Owusu, who had lost a brother young, had walked in to know what he knew. Samuel Pike, dying of the lungs, had walked in to go cleanly. Only Alma Reyes, the dentist, was wrong. She had not wanted to go anywhere. She had been tested with the mark, and the door had taken her, and she had gotten stuck, her face left hanging in the doorway like a curtain no one had drawn. That was the Society's one crime, the thing it did not want known: not that it took the willing, but that it had tried to make one of its own, and failed. The pamphlet's last pages described the doorway itself. A pale stone set in the arch, the keystone, the nail that kept the door in the wall. The door could be unmade, the pamphlet said, only from the inside, by breaking the nail. And it could be broken, the pamphlet said, only by the one the door had accepted. Only the key may turn the lock. Only the key may break it. Cole read that sentence aloud, twice, and then he laughed, a single dry sound. He had touched the door, and the door had opened for him in a way it had not opened for anyone in decades. He was the key. The Society had spent a century looking for a mind it could not hollow, and he had walked into its clearing and laid his palm on its door, and the door had recognized him. He had not been looking for it. It had been looking for him, and it had found him, and now the pamphlet was telling him that he was the only one who could end it. There was a kind of joke in that, he thought, the kind the universe told when it was feeling cruel. None of it fit the way he wanted it to fit. He had spent thirty years believing that every mystery had a human face behind it, a name, a motive, a bank account, and the pamphlet was telling him the face behind this one was older than money. He closed the pamphlet and sat with his hands flat on it, and he made himself say it out loud, the way he had made himself say harder things: there is a door, and I am the key, and I am going to walk through it and break it from the inside. Saying it did not make it easier. It made it real, which was worse. Frank and Cole made the plan that night at Frank's kitchen table, and the plan was simple the way all desperate plans are simple. Cole would go to the gathering at the full moon. He would go in through the door, find Anna and whoever else was in there, and break the keystone. Frank would stay at the circle's edge, and when the rite began, he would break it open, scatter the Society, give Cole the seconds he needed. Cole would wear a wire, a small recorder taped under his shirt, and he would get Mara on it saying enough to bury the Society and every name it had ever taken. They argued about the rest of it for an hour, the way partners argue, because that was the part of the job neither of them had ever been good at. Frank wanted Cole to take a gun. Cole pointed out that he had retired, and that a gun would not help him against a room that breathed, and Frank had no answer to that except the stubborn look of a man who had carried a gun for forty years and could not imagine a problem it did not solve. "There's one more thing," Frank said, and he slid a photograph across the table. A woman, younger than Cole would have guessed, laughing at a picnic, the sun in her hair. "Sandra. If you see her in there. If it's really her." He stopped. "Tell her I'm sorry I stopped looking. And tell her I never stopped." Cole took the photograph and folded it into his wallet, next to the note he did not remember writing. He did not tell Frank that he planned to leave Ellen's photograph in the car, because he knew what the door did with faces, and he was not going to hand it the one weapon that could still hurt him. Back at the motel he packed the recorder, the camera, the pamphlet. He tested the recorder three times. He sat on the edge of the bed with the lights off and watched the full moon rise over the ridge, pale and patient, and he thought about keys, and locks, and all the doors a man carries inside him without knowing they are doors. He did not sleep. When he finally stood, his reflection in the dark window was smiling at him, patiently, the way Mara smiled. He did not look at it. He picked up his coat and walked out into the night, and the town of Millhaven was silent around him, waiting, the way it had been waiting for him all along. ---