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.
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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 ba
ck 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.
The Portal in the Forest Page 4