“The Eros Door”
By Will Hose
Copyright 2011 by Will Hose at Smashwords
On my campus the English building (Yarl’s Hall, or just the Yarl) has a door in the side that no one ever opens. The door’s not an impressive one but it’s kind of a local legend. It has no handle on the outside, and tiny creepers grow all over it. Under the creepers, across the wood, you can read “Eros.” Like a lot of other undergrads I had spent a little time inside that building trying to find the other side of the door, and like a lot of others I failed. It was most likely on the other side of one of several locked offices that hadn’t seen occupants in years. Most people just shrugged and gave up, moving on to other things.
I couldn’t let it go. I was an architecture major, and the placement of the door simply made no sense at all. If my measurements were correct (I had spent some time carefully pacing off the distances) then the door would actually open into the downstairs bathrooms. There was no sign of it, nor of any work that had been done to seal it off from the inside. That was enough of a mystery to keep me going and I spent a lot of time in the basement of the library and city hall looking over blueprints.
The door wasn’t mentioned on any of them. That wasn’t the only strange thing about the Yarl, though. The rest of the university had been laid out according to a strict pattern and Yarl’s Hall violated it on several points. It offended my sensibilities to see it, placed too close to its neighbor and tilted out of the pattern.
The newspaper archives weren’t much better. There were stories dealing with Yarl’s Hall, but only a few of them drew any attention to the Eros door (as I was coming to think of it). Those were lurid stories, several involving suicides found at the foot of the door. There were more that showed the remains of rituals and sacrifices recovered by the police.
My next step was to find any officials who might have been involved with the building project. Unfortunately, the Yarl had stood for a little over fifty years and most of the people who’d helped bring it about were dead. My grades started to slip a little as the obsession to understand the door grew within me.