Door to Door
by Guy DeAngelis
Copyright© 2026 by Guy DeAngelis
Horror Story: When a mysterious salesman visits, Nora's husband begins behaving like a stranger. Their pets flee, impossible things happen behind locked doors, and Nora suspects something inhuman has taken his place. Pregnant and desperate to protect her child, she must uncover the truth—but what if no one believes her? A chilling classic of alien infiltration and psychological terror.
The footsteps upstairs went back and forth, and Nora knew he would be coming down soon. She felt herself beginning to shiver again, and one arm slanted down across the front of her body, blindly protecting the life which had begun to grow inside her.
Everything was ready on the breakfast table. Suddenly, still listening to the footsteps, she tore a crust from her piece of toast and left it on her plate, to make it look as though she had eaten.
Hurrying quietly into the kitchen, she hid the rest of her toast in the little covered can there and emptied her cup of coffee in the sink. The footsteps began to come downstairs, and she let herself out, quickly, into the back yard.
After what had happened the night before, she couldn’t sit across the table from him. Not even once more, she decided.
Something cold and damp brushed against her ankles, and she gasped, stepping back. It was merely a coil of garden hose, but she was shaken by an absurd fear that its serpent length would come alive, to wind itself up about her.
She was a pretty girl, not very tall, with an almost fragile sort of face and a compact little body. Now she stood in the garden, not knowing what to do next. I must be going completely insane, she thought.
But I’m not crazy—I’m not! If Stan can turn into someone else without warning then it’s only natural to distrust everything. And, whoever he is, that isn’t my husband!
Nora went around to the front of the house. She saw her neighbor, Constance Willis, there in the next yard. Connie’s friendliness was as much a part of her as her freckles and her wide, happy mouth. The two women drifted toward each other until a picket fence stopped them.
“Say, what happened to your menagerie?” Connie asked. Nora knew she meant Rhubarb, the big orange tomcat, and Smokey, Stan’s black spaniel. “I haven’t seen either of them around in days.”
“They went,” Nora said dully.
“Just simply went, just like that?” Connie wondered. Nora nodded.
Then she heard a door open behind her and she whispered: “Be careful! Here he is now!”
He came out and got in the car. Connie waved to him. “Hi, tall-enough, dark and handsome!” He smiled briefly at them, backed the car out, and drove away. “What goes on with you two?” Connie asked. “He scarcely noticed me. He’s so different lately, Nora!”
Nora took hold of the fence with both hands. It was going to come out now and she couldn’t stop it. “He is different. Connie, he isn’t Stan at all!”
“I know. Sometimes Shep gets so wound up in business worries he has no time for me and I begin to feel as if he was just a guest in the house. An absent-minded professor, at that.”
“That isn’t what I mean. Connie, that isn’t the man I married!”
Her neighbor grinned. “I wonder how many women have said that. The honeymoon has to end sometime, you know, and you and Stan have been married two years now.”
“Connie, you’ve simply got to believe me. It happened the night the stranger came. Since then the man I’ve been living with is not Stan Broderick. I don’t mean that he’s changed. He’s actually some other— I don’t even know whether you could call him a man!”
Connie stared. “But I just saw him, darling! If that wasn’t Stan, who was it? And if he isn’t a man, what in heaven’s name is he?”
Nora stared back at her. “I don’t know,” she whispered finally. She turned and went toward her house, trying not to run. It’s like having a door slammed in your face, Nora thought, as she stood aimlessly in her living room. Connie hadn’t understood a word. She felt that all the doors in the world were suddenly closed to her, shutting her away from everyone.
Everyone except her father, now that Stan was gone. And while her father would do his best to believe her, she would have no answer to give him except the one she had given Connie.
I don’t know.
“Nora—” Connie said from the porch. She came in. “I don’t know what this is all about but I do want to help. Tell me, dear.”
Nora shook her head. Yet now that she had begun to talk about it, she couldn’t stop, and she heard herself saying: “Stan went away. That’s all I know. Then Smokey and Rhubarb went away too.” Her voice began to get out of control. “I suppose I could get my pets back if I searched for them and offered a reward. But somehow I know that nothing will ever bring Stan back again.”
“Good grief!” Connie said. “No wonder he’s been going around looking like grim death. Nora, just because you’re going to have a baby—I’m going to telephone your father.”
“No—don’t!”
“I don’t know what to do for you. And he’s not only your father. He’s your doctor too.”
“No!” Nora said again, but all at once she wanted her father very much.
She dropped down on the couch and hid her face, making a comforting darkness for herself. And remembering...
The stranger had come out of the night a week ago. When Nora snapped on the porch light, he said, “Good evening. Is your husband in?”
He was very well dressed, and his hair shone white at the temples, so that she said, without thinking, “Why, yes, he is. Won’t you come in?”
“Thank you.” He stooped to pick up a big leather case. He had put it against the front wall of the house just out of her line of sight, and she realized, a moment too late, that she had let in another door-to-door salesman. He held out his hand as Stan came up to him.
“Hello, Mr. Broderick. This is something of a neighborhood matter, and we’d like to get your opinion on it.”
Nora had heard that approach many times before, and sometimes it led to insurance or books or cutlery or other things they wanted to buy anyway, so that she didn’t mind too much. Then the man with the little silver wings on his head gave his name. Looking back, she knew everything had begun to go wrong at that instant.
He had a simple name, but it was instantly forgotten; it seemed to wipe across part of her mind, leaving a little blank space there.
She and Stan sat together on the couch, and the stranger opened his case and spread a map on the floor. It was a familiar one—a map of their own city—but there was a maze of luminous lines overlaid on it. The stranger pointed to the end of one luminous line, and she began to follow it through the maze intently. Suddenly, she was reminded of a childhood incident.
A boy who kept chickens had shown her how to hypnotize a hen. He had held it on a table and stroked its beak, carrying the line out across the tabletop each time. When he let go of the hen, it stayed there, helplessly staring at an imaginary line.
She had been frightened and a little nauseated. She began to feel the same way again. I’m not a silly hen being dominated by a superior mind, she thought. This is my home, and this man is just another salesman. I’m going to stand up and tell him we’re not interested, and that will be that.
As her head lifted, she saw that Stan was staring wordlessly at the map.
Then the stranger’s hand moved again, pointing down at its luminous lines.
Her gaze followed obediently, and her mind was recaptured by the maze, going deeper and deeper as she hunted for a way out.
None of us are saying anything, she thought desperately. But that’s ridiculous! People just don’t sit and stare when they’re buying and selling.
Stan and this man must be saying something, she decided, but it doesn’t mean any more to me than human speech would mean to a chicken.
At last, the stranger was through with them. She saw Stan leading him to the door and out to the porch. She had the oddly inverted impression that it was her husband, and not the stranger, who was being sent away.
“Stan—”
He came back in. “Yes, Nora?”
“Nothing. I just had the strangest feeling. Silly.” She turned away and saw the big leather case. “He left his bag here! And that map.”
“Naturally.” Stan folded the map and put it in the case. “I thought you understood that. You do, don’t you?”
Nora nodded, ashamed to admit she didn’t understand at all. Stan picked up the case and began to carry it toward his study. She tried to laugh as she said, shakily, “He was quite a character, wasn’t he?”
Stan had hesitated thoughtfully before he said, “Out of this world...”
And he had closed the study door on her.
Now, lying on the couch and waiting, Nora searched for something definite to tell her father. There was the vivid memory of a time when she had been sitting half-dressed at her vanity, brushing her hair. All at once Stan’s images were there in the triple mirror, looking at her as though they had never seen her body before, so that she felt gooseflesh puckering coldly up her spine. He said, “When will the child begin to distort you?”
After a moment she turned to face him. “What a lovely clinical attitude! All along we’ve been calling it ‘our baby,’ but now I find you’ve just been waiting for me to look distorted with child. Stan!”
“It was a rather thoughtless question,” he had admitted then. “I suppose it’s only natural for the whole period of gestation to become a sentimental matter when such a primitive method of insemination has been used.”
Two nights were particularly clear in Nora’s memory. One was the night their spaniel had gone away.
Something had wakened her suddenly that night. A sound, she had thought at first, but everything was still. Yet the sensation continued, an irritation as nerve-racking as the shrilling of an alarm clock. Stan had not come up to bed. She got up restlessly and went to a window.
It was a mild night and on such nights Smokey liked to sleep on the front porch. Now she saw him trying to back down the porch steps. His jaw hung open and she sensed that he was in agony. She felt, too, that some compulsion held him leashed to the house. Loyalty, Nora thought. Love. She leaned out and whispered to him.
“Smokey—” He looked up, begging with his eyes. She pointed down the street. “Go on, little doggie. Go on!”
She went on watching long after the small black shape had scuttled away into the darkness. Then she went noiselessly along the upstairs hall. She began to see spots before her eyes.
No, not spots, she decided, as she neared the stairs. They were cryptic patterns of light ghosting upward across her vision. No two were alike, yet all were as definitely related as magnified snowflakes. Leaning over the banister, she saw that they were materializing in front of the closed door to Stan’s study, and drifting up toward her.
Now the irritation which had wakened her was so maddening she felt as if every bone in her body was vibrating—buzzing, almost—within her flesh. Her whole skull seemed to be coming apart, and she had to fight down the impulse to rip her nails through the thin flesh at her temples and dig out the pain.
It can’t be the lights, she thought, because they’re not bright enough to hurt. It must be a sound. Dogs can hear sounds we can’t, and deaf people can hear by bone conduction.
She remembered an article she had read about television, explaining the ultra-high frequencies which would soon add many more channels. The author had gotten a little off the subject, and she tried to remember what else he had written. It was something about certain rays—gamma rays?—which, if they were boosted up to immeasurable megacycles, might even have the power to create matter. It seemed oddly important now, but her head hurt so much she couldn’t concentrate.
The study door began to open. A dazzling flight of bolder patterns came up from below, and the pain was so bad she ran back to the bedroom. She got into bed and squeezed her palms against her ears. At last, the pain stopped. Nora felt herself beginning to sweat, clammily, as she fell into an unconsciousness which was deeper than sleep.
Nora had not found her big orange tomcat at the door the next morning, complaining imperiously for food and affection. Neither he nor Smokey had ever come home again. And that, she felt, was some sort of proof too.
That first night, Nora decided now, was nothing compared to the second.
The unbearable, unbearable sound had come again just last night.
Last night it had wakened her so cruelly she had jolted upright in bed as though someone had touched her with a high-voltage wire. Every nerve as well as every bone seemed to be jangling in unison. She was afraid to leave the bedroom, but the pain was so frightful something had to be done about it. Nora went into the upstairs hall, her fingernails clawing at her scalp, and peered over the banister.
This time there were no kaleidoscopic star bursts. Perhaps they had been some sort of static, she thought, and now that they had been eliminated, the soundless screaming in the air was more intense. She was about to call her husband’s name when the study door opened below her.
It was the salesman with the silver hair at his temples, and the big leather case. He turned toward the steps leading to the basement. She decided that he was not the same man after all, although the difference was a subtle one.
She heard the side door of the house open and close quietly, and she knew he was gone.
Stan had kept the study locked, lately, but now she could see in. The leather case the stranger had brought was standing in the center of the room. The outline of still another man was coming into sight, in midair, above it. The silver frosting above his ears and all the other details evolved swiftly, like the negative of a photograph in its poisonous bath. Complete now, he marched down through empty space to the floor, and began to follow the other.
Nora screamed.
Stan came out and looked up at her, his eyes bulging wide and white-rimmed. A black wave of giddiness drenched her mind then, drowning everything.
Without knowing how she had gotten there nor how long she had been there, Nora found herself lying awake in bed again. She sat up, gasping.
The table light between her bed and Stan’s clicked on, and he said: “Is anything wrong?”
“No. I don’t think so. I must have had a nightmare.”
“I want you to tell me what your dream was.”
“I can’t,” she lied. “I thought I was wide awake—that’s the worst kind of nightmare—and that impossible things were happening. But I can’t remember what they were, now.”
“Are you sure you can’t remember anything?”
“Yes. I’ll be all right now.” She saw that he was staring at her in that peculiar way again. A speculative way, she thought—even a morbid one.
Her sheer nightgown seemed completely transparent all at once. “Turn out the light, please.”
He waited until she had fallen back and pulled the covers over her breasts before he turned off the light. Then he said a strange thing in the dark.
“They’re merely secondary sexual characteristics, of course, but I’m beginning to understand why they’re emphasized so in entertainment and advertising. Odd, how quickly propaganda can condition even the most objective mind.”
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