Beyond the Door

Beyond the Door is a short story by Philip K. Dick, first published in Fantastic Universe in 1954. Blending fantasy with dark humor, it turns an ordinary household object into the source of an increasingly strange and disturbing conflict.

Larry Thomas buys his wife Doris a cuckoo clock, and she quickly becomes fascinated by it. She begins to suspect that the mechanical bird has feelings of its own and, more particularly, that it likes her while strongly disliking her husband.

As Larry's marriage deteriorates and Doris becomes involved with another man, Larry is left alone with the clock. What begins as irritation develops into a bizarre confrontation in which the boundary between machinery and something inexplicably alive becomes uncertain.

Short, unsettling, and sharply ironic, Beyond the Door is an early example of Philip K. Dick's fascination with ordinary reality suddenly becoming unreliable. It offers a quick introduction to the strange ideas and dark twists that would later become characteristic of his fiction.

"That night at the dinner table he brought it out and set it down beside her plate. Doris stared at it, her hand to her mouth. "My God, what is it?" She looked up at him, bright-eyed."

Beyond the Door is in the public domain in the United States because it was legally published there before 1964 and its copyright was not renewed.