The Portal in the Forest

by Matt Dymerski

  Chapter Four

  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 sixt
een 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 |

  one ocular organ from any source |

  three liters of Xenon

  The hell? I kept my face straight and calm, not wanting to betray any information to this… entity. Could the questions be an attempt to determine which universe I came from? If I expressed confusion over the Battle of Long Island, or the rarity of Xenon… would that give something away? I could just barely recall that Xenon was present at about 1 parts per million in the atmosphere, meaning that collecting three liters of it would require… 3 million liters of air… was that actually doable? I wasn't sure.

  "May I return after I have gathered payment?" I asked.

  "You may."

  I paused halfway across the room. "Does my time of safety run down while I am gone?"

  The woman watched me with a neutral expression. "Yes."

  I took that as a cue to run the next twenty feet. Once back through the portal, I took only enough time to give an order to my second. He frowned, but ran off at top speed.

  A few moments of sprinting later, I was back in the chair, the two offers still before me. Alright, what next? What else could I do in the time allotted?

  Of course!

  I lifted the book, and moved to open it.

  The woman made a noise, and her face reflected a very subtle fear - the first emotion I'd seen at all. "A piece of free advice: if you open that device here, it will be seen as an act of hostility, violating our truce."

  I froze, my fingers on the cusp of the cover… but I hadn't missed her use of the word device rather than book. "Why?" I sat a little taller. "Wait, rather: what does the book do?"

  Taking a moment to regain her composure, the bespectacled woman adjusted her sweater, pushed up her glasses, and then slid another paper toward me, resting it next to the other two.

  |

  |

  one human soul

  Growing agitated, I leaned forward. "Why are two of the options blank?"

  "If you knew what the options were," the woman answered calmly. "It would give you vital information you haven't paid for."

  "So I'm just supposed to guess what my payment options are?"

  "You can guess, or you can pay to know what the payment options are."

  "Alright, what's the price to know the first payment option?"

  She slid a fourth piece of paper forward. It had only one option.

  your ability to love

  I wavered in place for a moment, stunned to my very core. "You can take that?" I whispered.

  "Yes, if offered as payment."

  "Does it… extend to existing emotions, or just new ones?"

  "All emotions of love would be included, and any consequent emotions you have as a result of those emotions."

  I could, I could… it would be so easy…

  Footsteps clattered across the smooth marble floor behind me, and my second approached at speed, his goal in hand and wrapped in a thick layer of leaves. "Got it!" he cried, plopping down the dead bird we'd seen on our run. It squished onto the surface of the clean white desk under its own weight.

  The woman did not seem amused, but she took the relevant offer paper, the corpse, and its ocular organ - and placed them in a drawer. "Payment accepted. The question was: why are your shoes valuable? The answer is: because something of value is stuck to them. To be exact, dirt from a very specific reality."

  Shoes, plural. That was extremely valuable information. Did the entity behind this marionette realize what it'd just given away?

  I slipped off both shoes, intent on trading away one and keeping the other. I lifted the left shoe, but the woman did not react; I lifted the right shoe, and she still did not react. It seemed either shoe would do. Gently, I sat one shoe on the first offer paper, and she took the paper and the shoe both and placed them in a drawer.

  "The question was: Can I destroy this book? The answer is: no."

  I stood at that. "You'd have taken my hand for that answer?"

  She did not seem threatened by my sudden anger. "Offers are offers. The game is the game. Your time is half gone, and little profitable trading has been done. I suggest you make wiser choices."

  Muttering epithets, I sat again.

  My second stood behind me, watching in confusion and concern. "What does she want?"

  My frustration suddenly cleared. Of course! I'd been going about this all wrong. I'd been asking questions about the book, and not about the woman, or the entity behind her. "Yes," I echoed. "What do you want?"

  Another paper slid forward, coming up adjacent to the two remaining but untenable offers. This one had four options for payment, but all were blank. "Of course…"

  "The game is the game," she offered, unprompted.

  I switched tact. "How do we neutralize the threat this book poses?"

  The resulting offered page contained no payment options at all. She bowed her head slightly.

  That wasn't a promising sign.

  Feeling my time diminishing to vanishing slimness, I struggled for something… anything… what wasn't I seeing?

  I looked up. "What does this device look like objectively?" I asked, holding up the book.

  "That one is free," the woman answered with a light smile. "As it serves both our interests for you to know."

  The final paper slid across her desk.

  I moved to roll it up without looking at it, but I wasn't quick enough. My second glanced down from his higher standing vantage point. I heard him gurgling painfully before I could react.

  Blood spattered across my face, and across the desk before me. I leapt up and caught him as he fell, and gently lowered him to the ground as crimson leaked from his open eyes and mouth. He began seizing and thrashing violently, and I held him down as best I could while I turned my head to glare daggers at the woman. "Fix him!"

  She began to reach for another paper.

  "No bullshit!" I shouted. "If you can fix him, do it -" I hesitated. If the entity here had wanted to give me information that was beneficial to both of us, why hadn't it simply done so? Was it far more strictly bound by our game than it let on? "- or I won't leave."

  "Your time is almost up," she replied flatly.

  "The truce isn't for my safety," I shot back, gambling the boy's life on a guess. "It's for yours. And this…" I looked down at him as his seizing began to slowly fade into dying. "You'll offer me a choice to heal him, and one of the payment options will be leave. Then we'll go our separate ways. That
's your last resort, isn't it? No matter. If you don't give me that deal, I'll stay here, with that device and all its danger, consequences be damned."

  The woman stopped completely for a full four seconds, all blinking, breathing, and shifting completely stilled. When she resumed moving, she slid a paper forward. As I'd thought, all of the choices offered had been premeditated, and this one, for healing the boy, had leave as the only payment option.

  Rolling up the objective image of the book without looking at it, and dragging my second by his shoulders, I pulled him quickly across the room as the sixteen minutes and eight seconds reached its end and the white walls began to dissolve into… seething masses of what looked like brain tissue.

  I kept going until I could lay him out on forest leaves, but his blood was already receding back into his body. A light green glow hovered around his head, probably purging the memories of what he'd seen. A tide of children poured down from the safety of the hill, now eager to hear what had happened.

  I looked up as the portal began to flicker back toward the day's original destination - the corpse-filled sky and its deadly inexplicable filaments that had choked an entire world of people and drawn them up into the clouds to die together.

  The woman at the other end of the disappearing room screamed silently and struggled against chains of neural tissue… and, then, the image was gone. It hadn't occurred to me that the entity's puppet might really have been a human being. That could explain why subtle phrasings she'd used had given away so much vital information. She might have been trying to help me the only way she could. Had I had a chance to save her, and missed it?

  But, of course, that was what it wanted: regret. The entire encounter had been designed to fill me with hurt and regret, or at least enhance what was already there. I'd heard a tale, just once, of a Regret Demon that offered trades for which every option, including doing nothing, would lead to remorse. It was called a Demon because it was bound by very strict behavior, not because it was necessarily related to religion… but the Regret part I now knew was exactingly true.

  The ability to love… and all consequent emotions and pains…

  "What happened?" he asked, waking with bleary eyes.

  I held the book in one hand, and the rolled up paper in the other. "We got something very valuable," I told him.

  He sat up weakly, his face full of concern. "What did you trade for it?"

  "Peace," I replied quietly, unwilling to elaborate further. Another innocent had almost died because of me, and the risk was only going to grow. I looked past the children crowded 'round and saw Thomas still training his iWorker. What right did I have to risk the lives of these kids? Was I training them just to foolishly face the unknown and die, just like before?

  At that thought, the ground trembled slightly underfoot - and the left side of the portal began to rip further out into the woods. I watched, stunned, as several trunks ruptured, exploded, and collapsed as the trees above fell. The wound in space unzipped the very air for another twenty feet - the portal had grown to three times its previous size.

  "What do we do?" my second asked, terrified.

  I had no orders to give. The Regret Demon had taken something very valuable from me; I found myself uncertain and wavering. Against forces like these, uncertainty and hesitation meant death. I knew something had to be done, but I was forced to admit to someone else, for the first time, that I was lost. "I… don't know…"

  That answer was not the one the children wanted to hear. They didn't scream, or cry. They remained absolutely quiet, waiting for someone to take away their fear.

  But I couldn't. Not in that moment. I could only walk away, book and paper in hand. Maybe if I just had some time to think…

  "Where are you going?" my second - no, just an eighteen-year-old boy - shouted.

  I had no answer for him. Instead, I departed, stumbling mentally if not physically. Where am I going, indeed?

  Besides the trade I could have made, might have made, there was the astounding information implicit in one of the payment option's I'd been given. One human soul. That meant... souls were real. Humans had souls, and souls were real things. I had a sick, black suspicion that I knew what the book had been doing all this time.

  But, first, it was time to see what it really looked like...