The Dark Door

A Constance and Charlie mystery by Kate Wilhelm

Jul 18, 2007 Colin Harvey

Constance and Charlie from A Flush of Shadows had already in appeared in The Hamlet Trap and Crazy Time before they became involved with an alien probe in The Dark Door.

Constance Leidl and Charlie Meiklejohn, the husband and wife investigators of A Flush of Shadows, had already in appeared in the novels The Hamlet Trap and Crazy Time, as well as three of the novellas from the collection, before they became involved with a malfunctioning alien probe in The Dark Door.

This is no plot spoiler; the opening section deals with the launch of the probe and the shame of its creators.

The action cuts to Virginia, June 1979. Insurance underwriter John Loesser and the Dalton family are looking around a deserted hotel with the intention of converting it into a five-star restaurant, when seventeen year-old Gary takes a rifle from the trunk of their car and massacres the rest of the party, before vanishing with his mother.

However, there is a survivor. Carson, the father of the house somehow lives, though so horribly disfigured that he is unrecognizable. He has picked up Loesser’s wallet, and the authorities understandably believe that he is the other man.

Traumatized, when he is released, Danvers becomes Loesser, but for his own purposes now. He has a mission, to find whatever it was – alien, or as he believes, Satan – and to destroy it.

It is not until page twenty-six that Constance and Charlie enter the story, and their return is like the visit of a pair of old, long-absent friends.

This is deliberate on Wilhelm’s part; the first six hundred words of Constance and Charlie’s presence is a rural and domestic idyll, in stark contrast to the darkness that is to follow.

That idyll is shattered when, perhaps distracted by Constance’s preoccupation with a forthcoming conference on psychology, Charlie agrees to investigate a series of unexplained fires that have burned down abandoned buildings across the USA. There appears to be no connection other than that they are abandoned, for they are scattered across the country, and seem to fit no pattern.

On further examination, Charlie finds that there is no pattern to the fires, but there is a connection, in that every case, the fires seem to have been set soon after an outbreak of random, apparently motiveless violence; often previously happy, stable people have turned on those around them and either attacked them with their fists, or worse to have gunned people down.

The investigation takes Constance and Charlie to the California – Nevada border, and Charlie steps into danger.

The Dark Door is a truly tense read; the passage when Constance is racing to get back from her meeting, and Charlie and Loesser are apprehended by the police is as taut and as tense as any suspense passage written. And Constance and Charlie’s humanity grounds what could otherwise be a far-fetched read very much in the here and now. Highly recommended for all Wilhelm fans, or anyone who has never read this excellent writer.

The copyright of the article The Dark Door in American Fiction is owned by Colin Harvey. Permission to republish The Dark Door in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.