Author notes

Welcome!

michaelallanleonard

on June 6, 2013

Hello, and on behalf of myself, and co-creator / illustrator James E. 'Doodle' Lyle, welcome to the beginning of DoorMan.

Since this is the opening salvo of our saga, I’ll tell you a little about DoorMan to hopefully whet your appetite and entice you to follow along.

DoorMan is Janus de Nile, an enigmatic time-traveller with the ability to turn any type of doorway into a portal back and forth between the present and the past.

Janus has, for centuries, taken the responsibility of using this power to help victims of strange, malevolent psychic parasites, which Janus calls the Arcanum.

The Arcanum manifest themselves in the minds of those who hold deep reservoirs of guilt, remorse, and regret connected to secrets from their past they have attempted to hide away from their loved ones and the world at large.

In short, they are the skeletons in the closet we all have that come to a semblance of life.

The Arcanum are invisible to everyone save for their hosts, who perceive them as distorted images of those from the past connected with the secrets they hold dear. They can speak, but only the host can hear them.

The creatures' solitary goal is torment and chaos. While the symbiotic relationship the Arcanum have with their host prevents them from directly harming the host, an Arcanum’s endgame is to cause enough disruption and distress to their host and push the host into the final state of despair where taking their own lives seems to be the only escape.

The only way to destroy an Arcanum and free its host is for the host to directly confront the negative emotions welled deep in their psyche and to begin to come to terms with it, which almost always comes in the form of a confession of the secret to others, although the Arcanum tend to carefully choose their hosts and seek out those deepest in denial, who are unlikely to confront their own past, even when faced with their own extermination.

DoorMan attempts to come to the aid of these unfortunate souls by taking them with him back through time and space to witness the events that led to the secret in a Dickensean fashion not unlike like what Ebenezer Scrooge experiences in ‘A Christmas Carol’.

Janus hopes by directly observing the chain of events that led to them repressing the truth, it will jar the host into realizing that they no longer have to be held prisoner by things that may have happened decades ago, and that once they are free of the burden, their lives may be bettered wholesale as a result.

It can be a dangerous, and often thankless, gambit. Often the people DoorMan tries to help become combative and hysterical, trying to cling onto denial with all of their might. There is always the risk of reinforcing the negative emotions surrounding the secret, making the Arcanum even more difficult to dislodge and accelerating the host's downslide.

While Janus does have the ability to navigate through time, it does not stand still while he and those he hopes to cure are in the past. The Arcanum cannot follow them to the past, but left in the present, will escalate its attempts to do as much damage as it possibly can, and rig the outcome to make the possibility of a confession even more traumatizing and painful.

Janus cannot be in two places at once, and cannot leave his ‘patient’ in the past to deal with the creature’s actions in the present.

The clock is always ticking . . . even with the ability to navigate the timestream, DoorMan only gets one chance to get it right, as he staunchly refuses to abuse his abilities to rewrite history and correct his mistakes.

You can write to us at doormanonline@gmail.com and let us know what you think of DoorMan. Thanks for reading!

– Michael Allan Leonard