Arthur B. Waltermire 20 min read

A heavy stillness hangs over Judson McMasters' great house as his servant Biggs glides about the sick-chamber, casting furtive glances at the flushed, dying figure beneath the white sheets.

Arthur B. Waltermire's 1936 story is an atmospheric hard-SF and horror tale of death and what lies beyond it. Eerie, brooding, well-turned. Read it for a moody period story where a dying man's obsession with cheating death opens onto the strange, forbidding doors the title promises.

In its time

Published in 1936, during the 1930s, space opera soars.

Reading it

20 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).