The Portal in the Forest (5 page)
I've been wandering the streets ever since.
I've got a job I do twenty-four hours a day now. I do what I'm good
at; what I did before. I'm just me, I'm just homeless, and I find
other loose minds like my own and NO!
It didn't work. Not entirely. The old spinal
injury kept me half-immune, and they don't know I know. I'm a
horrible liar half the time, and a free mind the other half. Never
listen to anything I say. My thoughts aren't my own. I sense it out
there, a gigantic mind behind the control, with a plan beyond
insidious and evil, and I can use its eloquent words sometimes. But
that's not true, and the sad thing is, it's just humans who did
this to ourselves. Efficiency, efficiency…
I wandered the streets for five years like
that, so alone, so alone… so alone… I met someone who seemed free
on the street today, and I was free for just a little bit, and I
shouted -
***
I looked up at her.
Her jaw trembled, and her eyes ran misty.
This wasn't the tale of someone dead at all.
I listened to the noises of the busy city street outside our alley,
and, for the first time, I noted the complete lack of human voices.
There was only the sound of machines and walking… a rhythm I now
found to be completely lifeless and hollow. I stared at her for a
long moment, unsure what to do. "Can I trust you?"
She tilted her head down a few degrees,
screwed up her face, and let a few tears run free. "No."
"So it's probably not a good idea if I let
you come with me."
She clenched her fists, and I saw a single
drop of blood eke out from her excessive grip. "I'd try to build
one," she gasped. "Eventually. The plans are… in my head… it wants
me to…"
There was nothing else I could say… unless…
"You can still help me," I said quietly, noting her intense strain
to hold onto her own will. "I need a first generation iWorker
device. The absolute most basic, no mind control, no
networking."
She nodded, eager to be helpful in any way
possible to any entity that was not the
it
that controlled
everyone else. She ran to a nearby dumpster and pulled at a rusty
panel. "Here, here …" She pulled out several circular devices and
picked at them until the least damaged remained. "You stick it
behind your ear, right here, and just… do… and it'll pick up on
it."
"Thank you," I told her, studying the device.
If this thing could control a body without the mind interfering,
perhaps it could help us leave the perception-altering book in
another universe. I pocketed it, and then faced her. Never make
promises, I knew. Never make promises. I couldn't tell her she
would be alright. "I'm sorry…"
Blood poured from her clenched fists as she
squeezed her long nails harder and harder into her palms,
momentarily clearing her thoughts. "It's alright. I'm glad there
are still free people."
I nodded, and then departed.
"Come back," she called, just as I rounded
the corner. "I was lying. There's nothing weird about the lights at
all."
Goddamnit.
"You still have the book?" my second asked as
I stepped back into the forest. "Damn."
"Watch your language," I told him. I drew the
iWorker out of my pocket and brought it up for the kids to see. "I
couldn't leave the book, but - this just might be our ticket." I
looked back and saw the homeless girl lurking at the other side of
the portal, watching us with a neutral half-smile. I wished that
I'd had the courage to kill her and free her from her invisible
prison. If it had been anyone else, maybe...
Thomas, the younger boy who'd once followed
me into another world, was also present. He was old enough to pick
up on my momentarily visible sadness. "Who's that girl?"
I turned away, unable to watch her any
longer. "Nobody…"
It began when I found the neighborhood
children still hanging around the portal on Thanksgiving.
Apparently, no, they didn't have any place to be. Their parents
were all working. The parents of every single child were holding
down two or three jobs each.
It was small wonder the kids had such free
reign over the suburb and Virginia backwoods, and why nobody else
had found out about the portal. There simply weren't any adults
around to watch or warn.
And, apparently, I filled that void. Repeated
questions had led to the best answers I could give, and then to
proposed preventative measures, and then… to more.
I crested Dead Man's Hill, so called by the
local children for its cliffside rise. One wrong move meant a nasty
fall into one of the large ravines that so plagued the foothills.
For the last several days, while waiting for another habitable
destination in the portal, I'd been using it to show the kids that
horror and risk were
real factors
in life, and that the fear
they brought meant paralysis and death for the uninitiated. "Come
on!" I shouted, waiting at the top.
In the lead, as usual, was my
eighteen-year-old second. He ran up the steep and leaf-slippery
incline with a dramatically red face, releasing torrents of sweat
with each movement. "We've already run three miles," he huffed.
"They're not going to be up for this."
I watched exhausted kids of various ages
appearing behind him on the trail, and then I checked my watch.
"Today's hypothetical gas creature moves at four miles an hour and
doesn't get exhausted," I reminded him. "Everyone who doesn't reach
the top here in the next three minutes just got killed because they
couldn't run the same distance as the portal back to the
suburb
." As the sweat-drenched children came in one by one, I
recited: "You're dead. And you're dead. And you."
They groaned and complained, of course.
"No fair!"
"Does this monster even exist?"
I watched them with a stern glare.
"Absolutely anything could come out of those portals. The better
shape you're in, and the sharper your decisions, the better chance
you all have of surviving."
They quieted, and followed me through the
woods in drained silence. I had no authority other than that they
gave me, but the portals scared them, and they sensed a certain
capability about me.
We came to the first of the new portals in
short order. I approached several younger boys who were shoveling
dirt ever higher underneath it in order to eventually bury it. "How
wide is it now?"
"About a foot," a thirteen-year-old girl
answered, one of the smarter ones I was aware of.
"About?"
"Thirteen point four inches," she said,
patting the ruler in her pocket.
I nodded. Slightly larger than a basketball,
and roughly oval in shape, the shimmering rift hovered in the air
around waist height. It had been the first new expanding hole we'd
noticed, but it had not been the last. Space around the main portal
seemed to be fracturing in an increasingly wider radius.
I led my troop through the next bit of thick
forest, where two boys hammered bits of junk wood around an
inch-wide rift we'd found slowly cutting into the trunk of a tree.
"How's this one?"
"It doesn't seem to be getting bigger," one
replied nervously. "Yet."
"Good."
We moved on.
The ten-kid crew at the main portal had
accomplished an impressive amount in just a few days. The pile of
dirt, rocks, and boulders now rose slightly higher than the
ten-foot-wide main portal adjacent to it. Carefully layered tree
trunks we'd felled kept the static avalanche at bay. Soon, we would
be able to release the earthen flood and bury the portal if we so
needed.
I'd thought that would be enough, if we could
get rid of the book, but I now considered the burying trap a last
resort. Tiny rifts were appearing inside boulders, trees, and
hills, only visible once they grew to a sufficient size, so I
doubted burying the main hub would stop the tide.
All the portals, big or small, showed onto
the same destination each day. The situation was becoming less like
a punched hole in the dimensional barrier, and more like a
dissolving curtain between realities. I had no way of knowing
whether the breaches would grow exponentially, but I had to assume
we only had a few days left before crisis.
And most of those few days were spent in
stressed frustration, watching as each new daily destination became
worse than the last. The week before the iWorker world, we'd seen
burning and bloody nightmarescapes, but these worlds… these worlds
ran incomprehensible at best, and mentally scarring at worst. I was
considering taking the risky step of ordering the children not to
look into the portals - risky because my authority over them only
extended as far as this strange phenomenon. If they felt cut out of
the process, they'd have no reason to listen to me, and I feared
that might get them all killed.
In a small clearing near the bury-trap build,
Thomas practiced with a normal book. I watched him place the
iWorker on his neck, stiffen, then pick up the book, carry it
twenty feet forward, drop the book, and then return to his original
location. He took the iWorker off, waited a few moments, then did
it all again, trying to get the needed time down to as few seconds
as possible.
That was it. That was all he had to do -
assuming we found a world safe enough that twenty feet of travel
wouldn't mean instant death.
Rather than bother him, I turned back to my
troop. "Go home, rest up. You all did great today. Tomorrow, our
hypothetical monster is a sight-stealer, and we'll have to do the
run blindfolded -"
A choir of groans and whines rang out, but I
ignored them.
The portal was changing.
All tiredness forgotten, two dozen heads
turned and stared.
Where once had been a vast aerial cloudscape
filled with thousands of close and distant corpses hung by thin
glimmering strands around their necks - an endless hellish wind
chime - there now sat blank whiteness. The whiteness sharpened into
a chamber; a long rectangular room eerily akin to a doctor's
waiting room.
At the end, maybe forty feet away, sat a
middle-aged woman. Her smooth ivory desk faced us across the blank
white gap of empty floor, and she busied herself with several
stacks of papers. After tapping a few collections into a neat pile,
she placed them carefully down in one corner of her desk, adjusted
her light wire-rimmed glasses, and looked up at us.
She waited.
"The portal's never changed in the middle of
the day," my second commented. "Everybody get back!"
The kids wasted no time in listening. We'd
already arranged a series of fallback positions; the first was in
the lee of the large hill behind me, from which the nearby tops of
the forest and the distant uneven horizon formed by the Blue Ridge
Mountains could be seen. It was to this location that the children
moved in an orderly stampede.
I remained, with one other.
The woman continued waiting, her gaze on
me.
"Do I have the book?" I asked my second.
He looked down at my arm. "Yes."
And so I did. Lifting it up, I set my jaw.
"Did I have it the whole run?"
"… yes."
"Well, then." I stepped toward the portal.
"It looks like I have an appointment…"
"Be careful. It could be a trap!"
I peered into the portal. The woman did not
seem overly excited or eager; she merely waited. "What does logic
tell you?"
He gulped, his stance nervous. "I… I guess
this isn't a trap. We are not interesting enough or important
enough for someone - or some
thing
- to go through all the
trouble of connecting to our portal just to kill us. I think they
want something."
I nodded. "I agree."
"Still, be careful," he offered.
The genuine warmth and worry in his voice
gave me slight pause, but I took a breath and carried forward.
Beyond the subtle vibration of the portal,
the white room felt exactly neutral in temperature and character. I
remained near my egress for a moment.
The woman spoke loudly enough to be heard
from forty feet away, although that wasn't difficult in the deathly
quiet chamber. "Truce is offered for sixteen minutes and eight
seconds as a free courtesy. Please, sit."
Slowly, I moved forward, my eyes scanning
every inch of the high ceilings and smooth walls. The rectangular
room appeared to have no entrance or exit. Eventually, I found my
way to a basic white chair waiting in front of her desk, and I sat,
book in hand. "Can you destroy this book?"
She regarded it, and then me. "That
information will cost you."
"Cost me what?" I asked, wondering at her
motives. I had the distinct impression, from little pauses in her
motions, that she was simply a front for something else.
She took a piece of paper from the corner of
her desk and slid it forward.
one of the shoes you are
currently wearing |
one of the hands you are
currently employing
From the clues I'd gleaned, and this price
choice, I had a vague idea of what was going on, but that meant
only bad things… "May I ask clarification?"
She gave a restrained but appreciative smile,
as if I'd done something correct. "You may."
"By hand, do you mean the biological
structure attached to my arm, or one of the people working for me
back beyond the portal?"
"The former."
"Oh, great," I replied, not liking either
answer, but wary of another. "Why do you want my shoe?"
She tilted her head for a moment, as if
listening. Her response came after a few seconds' delay. "That
information will also cost you." She slid another piece of paper
out next to the first.
the name of the army
victorious in the Battle of Long Island |
