© 2003, 2012 James Dashner

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form whatsoever, whether by graphic, visual, electronic, film, microfilm, tape recording, or any other means, without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief passages embodied in critical reviews and articles.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, places, and dialogue are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. The views expressed within this work are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Cedar Fort, Inc., or any other entity.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-55517-697-6

  Published by Sweetwater Books, an imprint of Cedar Fort, Inc.

  2373 W. 700 S., Springville, UT 84663

  Distributed by Cedar Fort, Inc., www.cedarfort.com

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Dashner, James, 1972-

  A door in the woods / by James Dashner

  p. cm. -- (The Jimmy Fincher saga ; bk. 1)

  Summer: From Duluth, Georgia, fourteen-year-old Jimmy Fincher sets off on a quest

  that takes him across the country and to other, sometimes terrifying, worlds, armed with

  a powerful gift and a mission: to prevent the evil Stompers from destroying the Earth.

  ISBN 978-1-55517-697-6

  [1. Science fiction.] I. Title. II. Series.

  PZ7.D2587Do 2003

  [Fic]--dc21

  2003004511

  Cover design by Rebecca Jensen

  Cover design © 2012 by Lyle Mortimer

  Printed in the United States of America

  1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Printed on acid-free paper

  This book is dedicated to my mom.

  Everything I have in life, I have because of her.

  BOOKS IN THIS SERIES

  BY JAMES DASHNER

  A Door in the Woods

  Book One of the Jimmy Fincher Saga

  Gift of Ice

  Book Two of the Jimmy Fincher Saga

  The Tower of Air

  Book Three of the Jimmy Fincher Saga

  War of the Black Curtain

  Book Four of the Jimmy Fincher Saga

  There are too many people to thank. I want to thank the people at Cedar Fort for believing in this story, mainly Chad Daybell and Lee Nelson. I also want to thank all those people who took the time to read and reread my manuscript, and weren't afraid to tell me when I'd goofed.

  I'm especially thankful to my family. My wife Lynette was a believer from the very beginning, and wouldn't let me give up. I'm also thankful to my kids, just for being my kids, and such good ones, too.

  And finally, I want to give a big thanks to Chad Lichliter. Although many people had told me that they liked my book, I didn't truly believe it until Chad convinced me. He was fourteen at the time, and it's for people like him that I created Jimmy Fincher.

  Prologue

  1. Ole Betsy

  2. Nightmare

  3. The Mansion

  4. Nothing

  5. Escape to Nowhere

  6. Stinky Old Car

  7. Far Away

  8. Bald Guy

  9. Strange Photos

  10. Short Friendship

  11. Hairy

  12. Psycho

  13. The Cruise

  14. The Blackness

  15. Driving

  16. The Enemy

  17. Geezer

  18. Looking for a Tree

  19. Old Willow

  20. Into the Forest

  21. A Door in the Woods

  22. The Hole

  23. Farmer

  24. Wall of Darkness

  25. The First Gift

  26. Hello and Good-bye

  27. A Silvery Sea

  28. Iron Rings

  29. Him … Again

  30. Shadow Ka

  31. Cold

  32. Catching Up

  33. Trouble

  34. The Blocking of the Curtain

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  About the Illustrator

  Before I begin the story that will change your life forever, I guess I should introduce myself. My name is Jimmy Fincher and I was born and raised in Georgia. I'm fourteen years old and I love anything to do with sports. I hate cooked peas. And oh, yeah—I absolutely, positively cannot be destroyed.

  Well, hearing that last part, if you didn't think I was crazy, then I'd think you were crazy.

  I'll be the first to admit what a ridiculous statement it is—it sounds like something from a bad comic book. If someone ever told me that they couldn't be destroyed, I wouldn't think they were crazy because I'd just assume they were kidding. But—whether fortunately or unfortunately, I haven't quite figured out yet—that little statement is as true as saying that cooked peas taste like sewage and smelly feet.

  It is very true, and because of it, my life has been taken away from me.

  I grew up in a happy home. I probably sound like an adult saying that, but it's the only way to put it because my growing-up years in that home are very over. I have a mom and a dad and an older brother named Rusty. There's no doubt about the happiness of my life growing up in that very humble two-story house in Duluth, Georgia. The whole house was made of wood, and despite the constant pecking of those dang woodpeckers, I couldn't have asked for a better place to be raised. To me, the definition of warmth and safety will always be that home.

  My mom's name is Helen, and she was raised on a farm, like all good mothers should be. She has curly, dark hair, and Dad has always said that she was the prettiest girl to ever walk the fields of South Carolina, and I believe him. My dad's name is J.M., which I've always thought a little funny. Of course, to me, he's Dad, but to others he's always been known as two letters of the alphabet. We do things a little differently in the South.

  Dad is tall and has straight, black hair—he wasn't raised on a farm, but he used to race cars, and I think that's pretty cool. Like me, Dad was born and raised in the same sweet southern town that the wooden house still stands in today. Duluth is our home, and there ain't a better town in the good ole U.S. of A.

  My brother, Rusty—a nickname he got from the color of his hair—is three years older than me, and his idea of fun is coming up with a new way to torture me. From putting my hand in warm water to make me tinkle in the bed—which never works—to threatening to put me in the oven, Rusty's delight has always been the torture of one Jimmy Fincher, a.k.a. his stinky little brother. But we're friends—always have been and always will be. Except maybe when he's had peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Rusty Fincher, the only human alive who gets the toots from a P. B. and J.

  Then, of course, there's me. I'm the skinniest kid to ever walk the streets of Duluth—a trait which I got from my dad, although he's lost more and more of that trait as the years have gone by. I got my body and face from Dad, but I definitely got my hair from Mom. It's brown and curly, and I don't even bother combing it. That's why Mom likes to keep my hair so short. It doesn't really matter in the end, though, because unless you catch me in the shower or asleep, I've got my Braves hat on.

  That's my family, and they're the only possession that's ever mattered to me. I'm a young little cuss, but my parents taught me well, and I appreciate what's important in life.

  Now.

  I wish I could just go on talking about the good things in life. I wish I could take my time and tell you about the summer vacations to Grandma's house in the middle of nowhere on a farm in South Carolina. About the neighborhood swimming pool and how I was always the best buddy of the lifeguard. About school field trips and being in the gifted class, which brought both embarrassment at being a nerd and joy at being able to challenge the little noggin on top of my skin and bones body.

  I'd love to tell you about playing basketball in my neighbor's backyard and playing football in the street that ran by my house.

  But there isn't time for all that nice stuff.

  It's time to tell my story.

  Before I begin, there are things to say. You must prepare yourself. The world is not what you think it is, and the nightmares that sometimes wake you in the middle of a storm may be truer than you think. Every novel you've ever read may not be as fictional as you thought. If I have learned anything, it is that nothing is beyond possible or belief. The world as I once knew it has turned upside down, and I've finally realized that the phrase “truth is stranger than fiction” is not just a stupid cliché.

  Now, this is not some silly story about Martians or unicorns or elves or vampires or guys named Doctor Potty.

  But it is just as strange, and just as mystical, and just as other-worldly, and because it is true, it is far more wondrous. And terrifying.

  My story is far from over, but it has a beginning, and it's time to tell it.

  All of it is true.

  I promise.

  It started with tree

  The nightmare started on a really nice day at the beginning of summer vacation.

  My mom's azaleas were still flowery, the dogwoods blossoming all white and pretty, and the backyard smelled like heaven with the honeysuckle. Like I said, I know I'm a young guy, but I appreciate a beautiful day. The air was warm, but not too hot, and the humidity hadn't started suffocating us yet. It was, simply, the kind of day in which a fourteen-year-old boy must climb a tree. Birds were chirping, the sun was shining, and I had just had tomato soup and peanut bu
tter toast for lunch.

  Life was good.

  I set out across the street from my house that fine day, wearing my Braves hat, with nothing in my head but wanting to climb a tree. Ever since I'd had legs and arms—which was from the very beginning mind you—I'd been a climber of things, and I figured it was a good day to climb the beast of all trees in Duluth—Ole Betsy. Only crazy people name trees—I'm guilty. She was a good tree, and she deserved a name, even if it was a cow name. Ole Betsy was back in the woods behind Mrs. Jones’ place, and speaking of cows … that poor woman. She looked as big as a barn, and not nearly as pretty. We always used to joke that she'd have to stand in the shower one leg at a time.

  Anyway, by the time I got to Ole Betsy, I tingled with excitement. As I hopped up on the first limb, I took a second to sit there and enjoy the surroundings for a minute—the smell of the woods and the sounds of the birds. It seemed a cruel trick of nature to make me so happy right before I would become so miserable.

  I started up the tree. As each limb passed, I grew a little more tired and a little more excited to see the top. Little flecks of this and that jumped in my eyes every now and then, making them burn like fire, but nothing could stop me from climbing. I was a man—or kid—on a mission. I twisted my hat around backward, like a catcher, and eventually, all those limbs and green leaves started showing signs of blue sky, and my heart pumped like gangbusters.

  I had almost reached the top of Ole Betsy, about forty feet above the ground, when things kind of went topsy-turvy. Life for this guy was about to take a turn for the worst.

  I remember one time when I was about ten, I rode my bike down a steep road close to my house, going a hundred miles an hour, wind flapping in my face and roaring in my ears, trees and houses and people flying by like hummingbirds, just as happy as a junebug, when all of a sudden I was lying on the ground, hurting all over, bleeding like a slaughtered hog. It turned out someone had thrown a stick at me, and beating the best odds in history, landed it right in my front tire's spokes, flipping me like a bad NASCAR wreck. I went from happy to dazed-silly in a split instant.

  That same sort of thing was about to happen to me on that early summer day.

  As I reached for the next limb, I heard some rustling in the woods below me, and then the piercing scream of a lady. The horrible sound from her throat filled the woods like a bombing raid siren in an old World War II movie. I looked down, scared to death, trying to be quiet and see what was down there. A man in a dark, old-guy suit dragged a woman through the leaves, fighting her constant struggles. I couldn't make out much through the branches and leaves. All I knew for sure was that below me stood the worst man I had ever seen. There he was, right below me, just dragging and hurting this poor lady for no good reason. I had the sudden fear that maybe he was going to kill her.

  I was scared like I had never been scared before. I started crying. I tried to keep to myself, sobbing with fright, but I must've looked like one of those freakies at the Lawrenceville Carnival. I was so suddenly and unexpectedly terrified, my efforts to stay quiet must've been quite a sight.

  Things got worse. I did the dumbest thing you can do when you have yourself a murderer under you. I sneezed. I let out a sneeze that would've made that Snow White dwarf retire. I don't know where it came from, but lucky for me, Mr. Killer didn't hear me. But I did get a nasty little something on my finger, which I proceeded to wipe on my pants like any good, upstanding young man would do.

  Mr. Killer continued his struggle with the woman. After another few seconds of fighting, the poor lady collapsed like a drunk skunk. I figured then and there that her life had just been cruelly and unjustly extinguished, with all the feeling of putting out a fire after a campout, and that there would be some awfully sad people come evening. I felt an immediate dagger of pain in my heart for that woman's family, imagined the life-changing hurt that her husband and kids would feel. Death had always scared me, and I had just seen it face to face, and my insides filled with sadness.

  But then it turned right into something else. Hatred. I hated that nasty man more than I hated the devil himself. I never knew a person could be that evil before then, and it would prove to be the first in a never-ending series of hard lessons in my life. Every part of my scrawny body filled with anger and hatred toward that beast of a man, and I almost fell out of the tree on account of it.

  And then, for the first time in the short history of my life, cutting my thoughts short, I saw something that was completely irrational and unexplainable. Nothing in my life had prepared me to see things that were strange or beyond belief. I was a simple kid in a simple town in a simple family. But what I saw then, right after the collapse of the woman, ripped the “simple” out of my understanding of the rules of the world, and changed my life forever.

  A sudden crackle filled the air that sounded like a mixture of static electricity and ripping paper. Below me, although it was impossible to see everything perfectly clear, I saw a strange darkness pass over the area where the man stood, like a plane had just flown over us with the noon sun right above it. Except this shadow was much darker, and it didn't pass on by. I had a hard time seeing it, but it looked like there was suddenly an area below me that had forgotten what time it was and had become the middle of the night, with the light of the day around it doing nothing to its darkness. The branches of the tree below me were silhouetted by blackness.

  And then, as soon as it had come, it was gone. All was light again, and I could see the man still standing there.

  But the woman had disappeared

  I stretched and craned my neck and shifted this way and that on the branch holding me at the time, but I couldn't see her anywhere. With the coming and going of the strange darkness, the lady had vanished from sight.

  Unless Mr. Killer had just performed the fastest burial in the history of mankind, that lady had just up and disappeared. My fear and sadness and anger turned into bewilderment and shock. I wondered in vain at what I could have possibly just witnessed. I started to shake, and the tears came back without me knowing that they had ever gone away. I felt alone and scared and hopeless, and panic began to swell inside of me. What I had just seen could not possibly be possible.

  Then two things happened, and my day-gone-bad got even worse.

  The first is that I finally realized who the killer man was. I didn't know him at all personally, but it finally registered in my brain that I had seen this guy many times. He was none other than the mayor of my little town of Duluth, Georgia. The second thing that happened was worse. All of a sudden that devil in a dark suit looked up, straight into my watery eyes.

  As mine met with his, I had the strangest thought that this would be a good time to be one of those flying monkeys from The Wizard of Oz.

  Due to several deficiencies in my heritage, I'm not a flying monkey, nor am I Superman, so I was in one heck of a bind. Here I had myself in a tree above the latest murderer of Duluth, Georgia, with no where to go but down. And down just happened to be the only and quickest route to where Mayor Borbus T. Duck Jr. was standing, looking up at me.

  Yeah, no doubt about it, it's an unfortunate name, even for a killer mayor. And to make matters worse, the man is a junior, meaning his parents were cruel enough to pass the name on to him. If they'd had an ounce of decency in their bones, they would have at least given him a respectable first name to offset the joke-waiting-to-happen awfulness of his last name. And despite his murdering ways, this man had a wife, and her name was Bobette. Borbus and Bobette Duck. Unbelievable. Might as well be called Stinky and Butt-Ugly.

  Anyway, there I was, skinny little good-for-nothing, looking down on Borbus T. Duck, city-mayor and woman-killer. I was so scared, I thought I was going to heave up tomato soup all over the place. But I didn't. I wet my pants instead. The shame and embarrassment of knowing that a fourteen-year-old was still capable of doing such a thing filled me. But I promised to tell the truth about my strange journey, and there it is.

  Mayor Duck began to climb the tree.

  Before I knew it, he climbed up those branches like there was no tomorrow. (Which, by the way, is a phrase that I've never understood. If there was no tomorrow, I guess it'd just be the day after tomorrow. Would a man really climb branches differently if he knew that tomorrow would really be the day after tomorrow? Well, I guess it doesn't matter much, and I better quit straying from this story or it'll never get done. The point is I had a killer named Borbus T. Duck climbing a tree to get me. I sure didn't care if tomorrow was really next week or if yesterday was the week before last Monday. I was a mouse stuck in a cat litter.)