The Portal in the Forest (2 page)

Ryan and I froze, not daring to move. What
was
this thing? Could it see? Could it think? Was it aware
of us at all?

Time wore on, and every muscle in my still
body began to burn to its limit. If we made no sound, if we made no
move, would we survive?

As I felt myself about to break, light
flashed by our windows.

"Police!" someone shouted. "If there's
anybody back here, identify yourselves and step out!"

A few moments later, the void was gone from
our basement, and bloodcurdling screams echoed outside. A loud
gunshot followed.

Ryan and I plugged up all the windows with
blankets and pillows as best we could, then huddled in the
basement.

I thought to peer out with just my eye
exposed and watch the thing leap from light to light in search of
more victims. Forty-five seconds. It never jumps sooner than
forty-five seconds since the last. It barely missed Mr. Jeffers,
our neighbor, who I can see hiding in the basement next to ours. If
it could have jumped sooner and
gotten
him, it would
have…

It revels in the play of light and dark
outside. That is its strength: it needs light, but, without
darkness, it has no place to hide.

We just have to get to morning, and
everything will be alright…

The half of David that was outside the cone
of blackness… is starting to smell…

5 AM

6 AM

Almost sunrise

come on

No… no, it couldn't

I can see the sky lightening, but… it
couldn't…

It couldn't jump to
the Sun,
could
it?

oh God

We're going to try to get it to jump to a
cellphone again, then trap it in the laundry room - no windows, no
escape

I'm so sorry

***

Sorry for what? I would never know. I dropped
the journal, as the rest of it was blank.

Moving further into the house, wary of
unwarranted darkness, I quietly descended the steps into the
basement. All the high and narrow windows within sat plugged by
pillows and blankets, except for one.

Half of a rotting corpse lay decaying in one
corner. Covering my mouth and nose with my shirt, I moved further
in.

There it was: a single door, shut, with no
other means of access. That must have been the laundry room.

I opened the door carefully, even though I
knew the entity was already gone. A single rotting hand lay within,
holding a dead cellphone. Grey cinder blocks formed the walls - a
small beam of light filtered through a crack in the foundation.
That was how the thing had escaped.

"Ah, you never really had a chance…"

I took a towel from the dryer and threw it
over the remaining hand, the best burial these people would ever
get.

I left the house without another word, and
proceeded back toward the rift. Had the darkness entity somehow
bored through the wall and opened the portal? Perhaps that was how
it had arrived here in the first place… but if it had come to our
world, it'd only entered straight into a cloud-covered forest at
night, found itself without a light source, and evaporated on the
spot. A miscalculation in the most ironic degree…

Or so I assumed, since neighborhood children
were playing with the rift instead of being annihilated.

Or, perhaps, the rift on this side had gone
somewhere else at the time. It was impossible to say, at least
until tomorrow.

I didn't normally entertain such grim
thoughts, but I couldn't help but wonder, as I stepped back into my
own universe, what it must have been like for the people on this
world to look up and see their Sun turning black… only to find
themselves disintegrating a moment later. Friends, family,
neighbors, all screaming in terror and confusion…

And the rest of the world, slowly rotating
into a lethal sunrise with nothing but silence to warn them…

Curious. I thought I'd dropped this journal
back at the house… shrugging, I tucked it under one arm and began
walking home, my thoughts bitter and brooding. Hopefully, tomorrow,
the portal will go somewhere new… and I'll have something to occupy
my time.

Chapter Two

After carefully applying my thumb to the red
glass surface to leave several natural smudges, I carefully pressed
the panel into the metal frame I'd devised. Once the transparent
crimson rectangle was firmly in place, I tapped the center.

Tap.

Tap.

Tap.

That one did it: the glass cracked right up
the middle, offsetting each half by a barely perceptible degree. It
was a very slight malformation, but that was the point. I attached
the framed glass to a metal rod and positioned it just so…
measuring the placement of the nearby mirror and camera, I made
sure everything was in place.

I stepped out of the room and closed the door
behind me. The string attached to the door pulled the covering
away, revealing my object of study only once I'd left the room.

A lanky and bespectacled boy of about
thirteen stood in the next room, clearly surprised to see me. "What
are you doing here?"

"What are
you
doing here?" I asked
back, glancing around at the empty and dust-filled chambers of the
abandoned house I'd slipped into.

"Is this your house?" he asked.

"Absolutely not. That wouldn't be safe at
all." I moved to a single rickety table I'd salvaged as a place to
put my laptop and reader device. I gave the system one more
run-through before I turned on the camera in the next room.

He stepped a little closer, looking at my
laptop screen from afar. "What's that?"

"It's a journal I found in another universe,"
I replied, carefully directing the makeshift page-turner I'd
created. "But I suspect it's a cognitive hazard. I dropped it, but
then still had it with me later. I even brought it back here to our
world… very stupid move."

"You're weird." After a small nervous laugh,
he took one step closer. "Why's it red like that?"

"Don't read it directly," I warned him. "The
book is in the next room. I've reflected its image off of a mirror,
through a smudged and offset spectrum filter, into a camera, which
sends the image to this computer upside down… remember, it's
backwards, too, because of the mirror, so what we see here has many
obfuscations and errors to protect our minds. Finally, I built a
custom OCR program to translate the malformed text to this
device."

Eyes wide, he came fully forward and touched
the rather battered device directly. "What's it do?"

"It's a Braille reader."

He laughed for real this time. "That's an
awful lot to read some book, right?"

"You can never be too safe. I suggest you
tell the other kids in the neighborhood about this technique, given
their habit of stealing things from other universes."

He took a step back. "I don't really talk to
the other kids much…"

"But you've been through that portal in the
woods?"

"Yeah…"

"Can you tell me anything about it?" I asked,
running my hands along the Braille reader as I did so.

Christ.

menace butler outvoice
snubbiest pigsticker unallayed nephrectomising reappropriation
nefarious peninsularism commence psychedelia osmeteria
guthrie

Even through all the safeguards, errors, and
translation into Braille - which was normally the holy grail of
hazard filters - the book was insane gibberish. I'd first seen it
as a journal filled with diary-like musings and random doodles… it
was only pure luck that I hadn't read anything but the last entry.
That account had made sense of the empty world I'd visited, and its
apocalypse by hungry darkness entity. Had that part of the book
been fake, too? What, then, had killed everyone?

But I'd seen the half-disintegrated corpses.
That much, at least, had to have been true. Had the unknown girl
who'd written those things somehow added to the end of the book
without realizing what it was? Or had it acquired cognitohazardous
properties after she was already dead?

"The portal was just
there
one day,"
the boy explained. "I was walking and ran into a bunch of younger
and older kids throwing things into it. Guys dared each other,
sure, but nobody was that stupid. We threw stuff into it, even made
a big rope and let a stray dog run around in there. It seemed safe
after a while. Only thing, though. It goes somewhere new every
morning. We don't know what would happen if we were still inside at
night."

So, it was as I'd suspected.

Holding a box, my eyes closed, I crept into
the next room and closed the cardboard flaps around the book. I
only opened my eyes once it was safely sealed within.

"Is it safe now?" the boy asked.

"As safe as it can be, with barebones tools,"
I told him, heading for the front door with the box under my arm.
"Well, are you coming along?"

He was, apparently. He followed maybe ten or
twenty feet behind me as I headed through the old Dodson lot and
back into the old-growth forests beyond the last row of suburban
houses. The Blue Ridge Mountains towered on the horizon as I
crested the abrupt hill just shy of the portal. For a moment, I
could see above the treescape, and I scanned the distance out of
habit - but noticed nothing anomalous.

Several children, ranging from young to upper
teens, sat around the portal. They all froze as I approached,
clearly fearing that their secret had finally been discovered by
the adults, but I ignored their apprehension. "What do we have
today?"

The oldest boy, probably seventeen or
eighteen years of age, stood slowly. "It's a bad one."
Instinctively responding to my implicit authority, he waited.

I peered through the vast oval rift.

This time, the portal had opened into an area
too small to contain it. Before me, I saw three spaces: a
gloom-filled and empty restaurant, a rain-filled alley filled with
strewn trash, and the back section of some sort of office - also
dark and empty. The sky, visible only above the alley in the middle
portion, sat opaque and stormy. The entire scene was eerily quiet,
and I realized that sound did not travel back through the rift.
"What's so bad about this one?"

"Wait for it."

I did wait. A moment later, lightning
flickered quietly, revealing the terrible secret of this new world.
"I see." I looked down at the box under my arm. This thing needed
to go before it had a chance to do… whatever it was capable of. I
began running through scenarios in my head, judging the likelihood
of an active threat this long after every human on that planet had
died horribly.

Grimly, I stepped through the rift.

I looked back and saw the forest and the
assorted kids. Their images ran hazy from the rain pouring down the
front of the portal. It wasn't lost on me: matter and energy native
to this world seemed to have a passive inability to cross to
ours.

Staying close to the alley wall to dodge the
worst of the rain, I stepped gingerly over the places the lightning
had shown me to avoid. I paused once I reached the street, and
peered both directions for a few moments.

Another flash of lightning struck, this time
followed by tremendous thunder that shook my very bones. Under this
second round of flashing, I saw them again: corpses, strewn all
about the alley and street. Huddled masses had fled this direction
and been cut down without mercy. Tragic enough, certainly, but odd
for another reason… their rotting remains were invisible when not
under direct illumination.

I crept into the restaurant with a pounding
heart. An ancient and decayed smell filled the humid gloom. I moved
through an empty dining area and searched through several cabinets
in the back until I found a flashlight. Knocking and turning it
until it finally came on, I shined the light around.

Under the beam of my flashlight, almost every
seat in the empty dining area held a corpse, either hunched or
yawning depending on the direction it had fallen. I had only
managed to avoid touching them by sheer luck. Little twisting
blackened strings of fungus and rot were all that remained on their
plates, a fitting feast for the dead.

Almost every position had been served a plate
of delicacies now long past identifiable. I chose a chair that had
not been served and carefully placed my box down. The box had grown
warm the moment I'd entered this world, and I was curious.

Scooting the cardboard aside, I laid the book
out on the table and flipped it open from the back to avoid any
hazardous contents in the front. I sought only the last entry,
which I knew from experience to be reasonably safe to read. I'd had
a suspicion that its contents would be different here… and I was
right.

***

I was on a date at my favorite restaurant. I
was even having a good time. I… don't know what happened… she and I
ran into Jen. Now, she'd never liked Jen, but she put on a good
face for the conversation. If I hadn't been so oblivious, I would
have guessed she didn't really want to change our plans and go to
that stupid party with Jen.

I've never
really
liked parties. Not
really
. I always get self-conscious, and my brain gets all
tired trying to keep up with all the things I keep imagining other
people are thinking or saying or expecting. Pretty soon, I always
just want to go home. I can't go home, though, because I need a
good
excuse
to leave… a believable one, so that people won't
secretly judge me.

I got my excuse, I guess, when Jen died.

I wasn't sure what happened. Nobody was sure.
She was always a party girl - had she overdosed? She was bleeding
pretty profusely from the nose, and she'd fallen and gotten
terrible slashes up her back… but she'd been locked in the
bathroom, and nobody had found her until it was too late.