Bent at the waist at a forty-five-degree angle, her body looks crooked. Not wholly human. Her head is tilted down, toward my feet. She stretches out her arms. Lurches and lurches toward me.
Her fingers twitch as she reaches out, trying to grab or scratch or gouge me. She’s so close, I can almost feel her nails piercing my skin.
But now, hunched over, she stops. Lifts her head—slowly, agonizingly—toward mine. And as I stare at her, bracing myself for that grotesque mask of skin, I open my mouth to scream.
I shoot upward in bed, gulping for air in the dark. My hair is stuck to my neck, my lips trembling, the sheets bunched in my fists.
The nightmare is back. The same one I’ve been having since I was a kid, once every few months.
I look over at Eric, who hasn’t stirred. Sometimes he sleeps right through it, especially when the whir of the AC drowns out the sharpest of my gasps.
My heart knocks hard, and I slip out of bed, head to the bathroom. I’ve learned how to drag myself from the powerful suction of that dream: splash water on my face, stand beneath the light, stare into the sink until reality clicks into place.
But something is different this time. Water drips from my chin, I see it swirl away, but my heart is still pounding.
What is it? What is it?
I go against instinct, allow myself to reel the nightmare back in. I play it again, starting at the tips of her fingers as they come so close. Her hands are the same, trying to grasp me. Her arms are the same, extending with urgency. Her body is bent as it always is. But now as the face tilts up—I have to cover my mouth so I don’t cry out.
Where there was skin, there are eyes, green as summer leaves. A nose dotted with freckles. A mouth forming words I can’t hear. And her hair, always dim and unremarkable, is suddenly bright as fire.
Moments pass. Maybe minutes. After the initial shock of it, I relax. I’m only dreaming of Astrid Sullivan because I saw her on TV, because my thoughts were tangled up with her right before bed. That’s what Eric would say. Dr. Lockwood, too.
But I look at my fingers. They’re gripping the lip of the sink, knuckles white. My arm is taut, the bandage on my wrist peeled back. As if I’ve been scratching in my sleep. As if my body knows something my mind hasn’t caught up to yet.
I force myself to picture it again. And again and again, until I’m sure of what I’m seeing. Those hands—empty. Beseeching. Open as wide as a mouth gasping for air. That face—Astrid’s. And with her features filled in, I see her actions differently, too. She wasn’t trying to hurt me, like I’ve always thought. She was asking—no, begging—for help. Because as I play back the images in my head, recall her moon-wide eyes, I see it so clearly: the girl isn’t terrifying; she’s terrified.
My jaw falls slack. The itch on my wrist flares.
I watch the questions solidify on my face, reflected in the mirror in front of me. The nightmare that’s haunted me for so many years—what if it hasn’t been a nightmare at all? Hasn’t even been a dream?
What if, all this time, all these nights, it’s actually been a memory?
Excerpt from Prologue of Behind the Red Door: A Memoir by Astrid Sullivan
You think you know the story. You’ve seen the news coverage, the magazine articles, the true crime episodes dedicated to the Astrid Sullivan Case. You’ve read about the man in the mask, the weeks I spent locked in a basement—gray and dim but for its bright red door. You’ve heard about the curb I was left on, two blocks from my family’s home in Foster, New Hampshire.
There are many things you don’t know, details the police didn’t release and urged me not to speak of. “We always withhold some key information,” they explained. Something about it being easier to find and interrogate suspects. Something about maintaining the integrity of the investigation. For a long time, I played by those rules, trusting what they told me, that justice is slow but inevitable.
But now, it’s been two decades, more than half my life. I’ve stopped believing that the man who took me will ever be caught. In a way, I’ve stopped believing in the police altogether. So this is my story now, the way it always should have been.
Here are some things you don’t know: the type of mask he wore, his clothes, the words we spoke. I know these things matter to you. Reporters have been asking me about them for years. But here’s what matters to me: what I did to make myself vulnerable; what I did in that basement to survive; what I still want to say to the girl who saw the man who took me.
Because, yes, there was such a girl. I know the police have told you there weren’t any witnesses. But there was one. She was ten, maybe eleven years old.
When the police came to question me, I begged them to find her, search every house in America if that’s what it took. She knew what happened. She saw a feature of the man that I never did. But they returned a few days later shaking their heads. They claimed there was no one who’d come forward fitting the description I gave them.
Not long after, I began seeing a therapist, who ended our first session by suggesting that I had imagined the girl, that I’d invented her as a way to cope with the trauma, a way to find some hope to hold on to while I endured my basement nightmare.
When I pleaded with my parents to take me seriously, to help me look for her, to help me get the answers that only she could provide, they stared at me, a skeptical sadness in their eyes that still hurts to remember.
The police wouldn’t let me talk about her. “If she’s real,” they said, “it could jeopardize the investigation to let this go public. Think of all the crazies who would crawl out of the woodwork, claiming this girl is their daughter.”
I didn’t buy their reasons. If she’s real told me everything I needed to know.
But she was there. I’d bet my life on it. My future children’s lives.
She was not a coping strategy. She was not a dream. She was real: the girl who saw everything but never said a word.
Only sometimes, in my darkest hours, do I momentarily doubt this. Only sometimes, for a sliver of a second, do I think she might have been someone else the whole time—me. A ghost of my former self. A girl I still believed should be spared.
two
In the daylight, things are different. They always are.
Now that it’s morning, I’m less convinced that the dream was really a memory, that it wasn’t just the news story laid like a transparency over my usual nightmare, fanning the flames of my anxieties. I don’t even tell Eric about it when I say good-bye to him, hugging him especially tightly before he leaves for the hospital. I already know how it will sound. I can picture him struggling to think of a word that’s one step up from spiraling.
Even so, it’s like I’ve walked into a spiderweb I can’t wipe off, the silk of that dream sticking to my skin. As soon as Eric’s gone, I curl up on the couch, stare at my suitcase by the door, allow Astrid’s face and bent body and outstretched arms to muddle the space between me and the way back home to Cedar.
Sinking deeper into the cushions, I want to dismiss my thoughts as absurd. I want to believe that I can shrug them off to Dr. Lockwood at my next appointment. But my heart bangs in my chest, and suddenly I can’t stop thinking about one of my students—Jackson Price—the day his little sister was taken.