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Goodbye, New Mexico had many urban legends. Too many, if me and other paranormal researchers had anything to say. Something about the Route 66 ghost town drew people and the supernatural to it in the same way it did for Area 51, Stonehenge, and the Bermuda Triangle.

Laurie and I were in the throes of one of the town’s more intriguing mysteries. On any normal week, Dean would be assisting us with research, given his expertise, but the Mexican wolf somehow got a cold in the middle of July. It was a serious kind of cold too, the kind that could transform into pneumonia if he wasn’t careful. So, it left us and Samantha to comb through old newspaper articles, make phone calls, and compile evidence that would be neatly filed into our ongoing dossier. We made some progress in areas, but in others…well…

“I think we should call it ‘The Nowhere Door’,” Laurie argued with me. “It’s snappier and much easier to say without being off a word or sounding like we’re belting it out quickly.”

“It’s misleading though!” I sighed exasperatedly, pulling on my long ears. “It implies that the door opens up to a void, but it doesn’t.”

“Not that we know of,” she pointed out.

“How do we not know already? It’s a frame!” I also pointed out. “It’s a metal door frame, with an attached metal door, standing up in the center of a derelict property. It ain’t exactly embedded into a building, is it?”

“Why don’t you like ‘Nowhere Door’, anyway?” she asked without answering to my logic.

“It’s misleading,” I stressed. “Besides, those I talked to also called it ‘The Door That Leads to Nowhere’.”

“It’s a mouthful to say though.” Laurie groaned, letting out an annoyed hiss. “You’re making me pull out my whiskers on this. ‘Nowhere Door’ is snappier!”

“You’re the one making a big deal out of this, Laurie,” I let out another exasperated sigh, then perked up when Samantha started to leave to grab us some lunch from the diner around the corner. “Hey, Sam. Which sounds better? ‘The Nowhere Door’ or ‘The Door That Leads to Nowhere’? I hope you pick the correct answ—Ow! Alright, I’m sorry!”

I rubbed my bruised shoulder as Lori leaned back into her chair and turned to Samantha.

“Well?” she asked with a satisfied smile. “Be honest, Sam. His suggestion is a mouthful, isn’t it?”

Our timid yet brilliant squirrel technician nodded her meek head. “Sorry, Bram. I agree with Laurie…”

“Ha! Two to one. I win!” the smug cougar said.

“Rules are rules…” I started reluctantly changing the name of the file. “Don’t worry, Samantha, I won’t get my sweet, tasty revenge on you during our next ghost hunt outing. No, sir-ee. I promise.”

“W-Would me getting us lunch help s-sate your need for revenge?” she tried, and frankly succeeded, to sound nonchalant while asking. We exchanged grins, which relaxed Samantha’s shoulders. “Bram wants the usual steak and cheese quesadilla with a cola. I remember that, but what about you, Laurie? The usual?”

“I’m in the mood for tomato soup,” she choked in. “If they’re out, I’ll go for the chicken broccoli. Thank you, Sam.”

“Do you think I should get some chicken noodle soup to s-send to Dean?” Samantha inquired.

“Sounds good to me!” I reached into my pocket and pulled out an extra twenty, handing it to Laurie who handed it straight to Samantha. “Just please don’t mention it to him that I’m paying for him out of my pocket. He’ll be all ‘I didn’t know you cared so much, ‘conejo’ or, ‘Conejo, did your latest hookup give you the money?’ Why’re you both looking at me like that?”

Samantha and Laurie traded knowing smirks.

“I’ll try not to mention it, boss,” the squirrel said, then left our small office space.

“Okay?” I raised an eyebrow at the cougar, still giving me a smirk. “What?”

“I didn’t know you missed Dean that much, Bram,” she teased me. “Should I be jealous? Are you suddenly going to start checking up on him?”

“Whatever,” I scoffed, but didn’t hide my embarrassed smile. “If anything, I miss Mr. Skeptic’s expertise. I don’t miss his snide, condescending comments about my sex life.”

“Are you gonna stop by his house to do his laundry next?”

“Not with straight guys,” I explained, and Laurie laughed. Besides, I felt certain that the Mexican wolf would kick my ass from New Mexico all the way to Cuba if I ever stepped foot in front of his house without permission. “By the way, it doesn’t matter if I got overruled. ‘Nowhere Door’ is still a dumb title to designate it with. And I have a feeling that Dean will agree with me the moment he’s feeling better.”

“Even more of a reason to check up on your future boyfriend,” she snickered. “I promise you I won’t get jealous.”

“We’re friends-with-benefits,” I reminded her, “not boyfriend-and-girlfriend…”

“I still won’t get jealous,” she said, then began to peruse through the articles and documents again. “Now, that’s enough joking around. We’ve got shit to do, so let’s keep finding more stuff on the NOWHERE DOOR. Shall we?”

Grumbling incoherently to myself while burying my nose in paperwork, Laurie let out another amused and triumphant laugh. We returned to our research. Though not before giving each other the middle finger as we did so.

Truth be told, I didn’t really care about the name. It didn’t matter if we called it ‘Nowhere Door’ or not. What I cared about most was how frustratingly inconsistent the case happened to be compared to the others in our dossier. Then again, with Goodbye being a notorious ghost town, and very few of its residents remaining either there or throughout the country, it made sense that details in the paranormal would be…muddy, at best. A mysterious door leading to nowhere happened to be one of those things.

To be more specific, the haunted locations/item happened to be a steel rectangular frame with a metallic door still attached. It existed a couple blocks away from the building that used to be Goodbye’s modest post office, on the other side of the derelict Route 66 that bisected the town, on a piece of property surrounded by houses. The metal was extremely rusted and, despite it seemingly belonging to a house that once stood there, what made the door further stand out revolved around its strange dimensions. The non-standard door frame stood eight feet tall, six inches tall, and four feet, four inches wide. Meanwhile, a standard door frame in any home would be six feet, eight inches tall and forty inches wide. Ever since the town came to be, so many different stories for crafted to explain the massive size of the door and why it existed.

According to public records, an old 1930s home did once exist on the property, and there did exist housing designs that included the massive door frame. Such a design would be included if the owner of the house happened to be a large mammal like an elephant or a rhinoceros. Some bears could be too large for regular doors, but it wouldn’t explain why the width had to be more than four feet. To make it even stranger, the plans mentioned it being a door leading into the downstairs basement, but The property itself was nothing but sand and overgrown cactuses. No evidence of a basement was visible underneath.

With that said, plenty of urban legends and hearsay surrounded that mysterious door. A newspaper article from 1947 claimed that the house’s owner, a man of unknown species named Silas Gerald, disappeared without a trace after it was reported that loud noises from inside the house could be heard from neighbors the previous night. They described it as a ‘drunken struggle’ and, ‘like Mr. Gerald was fighting with the television set at high volume’. A different article a couple of months later described the police investigation gathering up nothing. However, A few phone calls with former residents had them mentioning that their parents or grandparents did mention once seeing strange black vans parked in the driveway the morning after Silas Gerald was reported missing.

One former resident claimed it was men in black suits. Another said they were dressed like policemen in town, but didn’t look familiar. One other resident made the bold assertion that the strange drivers in the car didn’t look like any species ever seen, but nobody dared to approach out of both fear and not wanting to be rude. Whatever the case, the house remained vacant for decades. Anybody who did try to purchase the property quickly lost interest, especially as Goodbye’s population and standard of living started to decline.

Here-say stories and tall tales spraying up with children who grew up in the dying ghost town. One rumor claimed that the house burned down one morning after a freak lightning storm. Another rumor insisted that during a workday, a little vixen across the street sick with pneumonia witnessed those same black vans appear one day, and one of the doors to it opened to reveal a strange bear in a hazmat suit, wielding a flamethrower. The house lit up like a tinderbox within seconds, disappearing in the blink of an eye. So did the hazmat figure with the flamethrower and the van. A few other interviews claimed that the fire likely started with punk teenagers wanting to set something on fire and used homemade Molotov cocktails. A report from 1962 did suggest that three local teens were arrested for selling a house on fire with Molotov cocktails, the listed address was wrong.

However the house burned down, the only thing that remained was the large metal door frame. It’s stood there for over half a century, gathering rust and desert dust.

The freakiness didn’t stop there. Almost like clockwork, at midnight on the first day of every month, somebody passing by the strange metal door would suddenly hear a loud knock. Almost like somebody was asking to be let in on the other side.

“Or maybe let out?” Laurie suggested, and I shrugged. “If I were the neighbors, I’d move the fuck outta there…”

“They all did,” I reminded her. “Only one remains though: Mrs. Kimberly Mendoza. She tells me that every so often, she’ll have a bad case of insomnia and stay up late at night watching television reruns. If she pays attention to the wind outside, around midnight during those times, she’ll hear a loud clanging noise coming from the empty lot.”

“From the Nowhere Door?” Laurie asked.

I nodded gravely. “The Nowhere Door—shit!”

The door to our office suddenly burst open.

Instead of MIB or random otherworldly monsters, it was a squirrel carrying doggy bags.

Laurie cackled in amusement. She didn’t stop even as a confused Samantha handed us our lunches.

“Don’t act like you haven’t been jump-scared before, Laurie!” I muttered.

“No, no, not that!” She wiped a couple of tears from her eyes. One of her paws clapped Samantha’s, who had extended her arm while putting Dean’s cup of chicken noodle soup in the fridge for later. “You said the name, Bram. I got you to say the name!”

“What? All I did was confirm that it came from the Nowhere—oh, goddammit!” I hung my head back, pulling on both my ears. Even defeated, I still bothered giving Samantha a thankful nod as she sat down beside us and handed me my quesadilla. “I refuse to call it that. I refuse!”

“You just did, Bram,” Samantha commented.

“I guess it's stuck now, haha!” Laurie punched a fist in the air and started to pour crackers into her uncapped tomato soup. “Mmm, that smells like victory.”

“Whatever.” I exhaled as our squirrel coworker giggled. “It’s still a dumb name.”