Threshold by Deirdre L. Kugelmeyer

Mist rose from the river and crept over the retaining walls. It went up and down the streets and avenues along the river and cut down other roads until, silently, it had covered the entire city.

It was a huge maze with only the tracing of the river to follow as a clear-cut path. What little afternoon light there was began to grow dimmer and fade out the city. Night and mist mixed together and became one. Up one avenue by the river this mixture crawled until it became darkness.

Rain bathed the darkness. Very gently it soothed everything the city was made of and animated a very unusual door on the avenue. The darkness went on, leaving the rain to its work.

Quietly, the rain awoke each object of the carved stone and ironshod wood. No longer were they cold and hard, but smooth and warm. On three human figures hair grew, skin felt the rush of blood, muscle adhered to bone. Vines that crawled around and up the stone sprouted green, shiny leaves. Scales emerged on the sleek body of the salamander doorhandle. Each fine detail attained life, including the oval, slanted glass eyes that were directly above the lintel.

The major feature of the wooden door and its stone frame was the head of a young woman. Her slender neck supported the same kind of face. Wrapped around her neck was the head and snapping jaws of a wolf.

The companions of the lady were two statuettes perched on either side of her in the stone corners. They were nymphlike - one male and the other female, both clothed in the leaves that grew around them; they were servants of the bodiless woman-wolf.

A man walked down the street. From her place above the doorway the woman saw him. The rain had taken the blindness from her glass eyes, and she saw for the first time. She watched him grope his way through the darkness and rain, and her newly acquired hearing listened to his undecipherable mumbling. He wore no jacket to protect him from the wetness, and he saw nothing but his shoes.

Being unfamiliar with his surroundings, he glanced up to look around. The door immediately caught his eye. He stopped in front of it and stood looking at all its living qualities. It gave him the feeling of being all alone and very tired and tense. She watched him from above, rain tears streaming down her face. The two figures on either side of her called down in mimicking voices, saying she could never have anything human.

He stood looking at the wooden door and its frame. The two oval panes of glass above the door stared at him from their coffin. Looking back into those eyes, he saw haunting images of his life, and scenes of what made him wander this night. He turned away and whispered to himself, "Who would live in a place with a door like that?"

Both cherubs were looking down at him and laughing. She wanted him, the first human being she had ever seen. But then she was only stone, a head without a body.

No, she thought, she had a body, although it was not made from the same substance as his. Her body was the building, and she had muscle and bone and tissue, also. And that was the difference between them - stone and flesh.

Everything about the door fascinated him. Its figures, its leaves, its hinges, the whole and each individual part. If he looked at it long enough, it became another creature - living, taking its existence from the innards of the structure. She smiled at him when he looked up at her, but the rain distorted his vision. Water dripped from his hair onto his nose, then down his chin. He laughed because it tickled the inside of his ear.

She had no voice to call to him or laugh with him. It began to rain harder, and a tearful wind forced the door open. It swung inward, revealing a narrow hallway and a stone-paved courtyard beyond. Before going inside, it occurred to him briefly that it looked very much like a mouth that would swallow him when he entered. He scampered inside and closed the door, and she could feel him stepping across the stone, wet shoes leaving puddles as he moved along. The courtyard was just as wet as outside, so he stayed in the hallway, walking back and forth to get dry.

Each footstep made her shiver. The weather had never bothered her before, for her stone mask had kept her from it. This time was different. She was afraid - of the rain, the wind, and the strange man who was inside her. The two statuettes were quiet, for they too felt it. She did not like him standing there inside the hallway.

There was an indignant show of lightning, which lit up her eyes. Below her, the startled man jumped to the window. Glass and rain spattered over him before he was thrown back by a lunge at his throat. Stone-sharp teeth bit deep.

When the rain stopped, the man was gone. Only the broken glass from the door remained. There was a little red fringe around the wolf's mouth, and the eyes seemed solemnly human.