The Portal in the Forest

by Matt Dymerski

  ***

  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.