Demon's Door by Graham Masterton

of the furniture. There was a heavy armchair, upholstered in worn brown velveteen; a grubby yellow couch with heaps of old newspapers on it; and a cheap upright dining chair with a red vinyl seat.
    The carpet was filthy and threadbare, and there were stacks of magazines and newspapers everywhere, as well as brown paper grocery sacks from Ralph’s, dozens and dozens of them, all neatly folded.
    Jim went across to the window and pulled back the drapes. Outside, on the balcony, there were five or six terracotta pots with dead plants in them, including a ghost-like yucca, and an ivy that trailed across the floor like the tentacles of a stranded squid.
    He tried to switch on the air-conditioning, but the knob dropped off on to the floor, and when he looked closer he could see that the unit’s connecting wires were frayed and hanging adrift. He left the knob where it was. His back was too stiff for him to bend over and pick it up.
    He limped slowly around the room. He knew where he was. He was still in his third-floor apartment on Briarcliff Road, although it looked as if he hadn’t redecorated it in twenty years or more. The walls were streaked with grimy gray condensation, and the chandelier was thickly furred with dust. It looked as though he hadn’t thrown anything away for twenty years, either. Not just newspapers and magazines and grocery sacks, but empty boxes of painkillers and indigestion tablets, as well as carefully creased candy wrappers and envelopes and flyers from local pizza restaurants.
    He knew where this was, but he didn’t know when . It appeared to be sometime in his own future, but there was no way for him to tell if he was dreaming, or hallucinating, or if he was suffering from amnesia, and had lived through the past half-century day by day and year by year but had simply forgotten it all.
    He turned around. He was wheezing with effort, and he made his way over to the heavy brown armchair. He was just about to sit down, however, when he realized that there was a white plastic cushion-cover on the seat, stained with yellow. So not only had he lost most of his hair, and not only was he suffering from anxiety attacks, and arthritis, and a half-dozen other complaints, but he was incontinent, too.
    He stood swaying in the middle of the living room and he thought: If this is real, if I really have arrived at the age of eighty-plus and this is what my life is like, then I’m going to go back into that bathroom and take every single tablet on that shelf.
    He started back toward the bathroom, but then he stopped, holding on to the back of the couch for support. He couldn’t count on it, but there might be a bottle of Fat Tire in the fridge to wash the tablets down his throat, if they were still brewing Fat Tire after all these years. If not, he would have to make do with soda or a glass of water, or whatever he could find.
    He was halfway to the kitchen when he saw a dark gray blur crossing the kitchen doorway, as if somebody had flashed past it, so quickly that they were almost invisible. He heard the front door open, and for a moment he felt the briefest of warm drafts. Then he heard it close again.
    â€˜Who’s that?’ he shouted, in that thin, reedy voice. God, he sounded like his own grandfather, George. ‘You come back here, whoever you are! You just come back here!’
    He hurried as fast as he could manage into the hallway. The security chain beside the front door was hanging loose, and still swinging. He tugged open the door, which was stiff for lack of oil. Right next to it stood an umbrella stand with four or five walking sticks in it. He lifted one of them out, a heavy ebony cane with an elephant’s head carved on the top of it, and stepped out on to the landing.
    â€˜Who’s there?’ he called out. ‘You come right back here and show yourself!’
    The light at the far end of the landing was broken, so the steps that led down to the second story