The Portal

by Charles Sterling

  “We’re here,” the jet began descending. When it landed, I only saw forest trees around us through the window. The ceiling disintegrated into golden light, and the rest of the jet followed shortly. The floor upon which we stood lowered down until we were on the ground, and disappeared as well. Light made no sound usually, but this one had a pleasant soft bass to it.

  “Here meaning, in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Quite in the middle of nowhere indeed,” Wilmort spun around and looked everywhere. He picked a comfortable spot, and with a few motions of his hands created a really modern glass house with a sleek roof. There were dim yellow lights, a fireplace and modern couches on the inside with some fluffy rugs.

  “You’re really good at this, aren’t you? The most I’ve seen was a spoon turning to golden dust but you… you’re making like, anything you want. Can Violet do the same?”

  “To some degree,” said Wilmort, “the larger the things you imagine the more mental power it takes, that is all. You too, will be quite powerful when we’re done with you.”

  “This is my camping spot then?”

  Wilmort stepped forward towards me, and handed me a gun. I felt its solid weight in my hand immediately.

  “For bears?”

  “For yourself,” said Wilmort. “You are no prisoner here – should at any time you wish to go home, you can do so freely.”

  “You are morbid,” I said. “Here’s a gun, you can go home anytime you want.”

  “It doesn’t sound rather ludicrous doesn’t it?” he smiled.

  I turned to look at the house, then looked down at my gun.

  I heard a little static behind me. As I turned back, Wilmort was gone – all I saw was his closing portal.

  I got into the house and sat upon the couch. This place needed a cat to truly make it feel like at home. If I had the power to create one, I think I would have.

  I looked at the jet black gun again – then I placed it against the side of my head. I got a really uneasy feeling, and immediately put it away. Ending your life is one of the heaviest decisions you can make, I would imagine. And here it’s just like, ‘oh, you want to go home? Here you go.’

  Yeah, thanks.

  I must have waited for several hours, and she still did not appear. Did she hate me that much?

  Wilmort could have put some interesting things in this house for me at least – like a pool table, or a TV with a gaming console, anything.

  I basically lay upon the couch with my legs kicked up and my arms folded behind my head and stared at the ceiling. Only later did it come to me to practice creating things a little bit more – but I had bad luck this time. Disintegrating a candle wasn’t going so well. I wasn’t focused enough, or maybe I had forgotten how to do it overnight. Just when I thought I was starting to get it, a noise from outside distracted me.

  I thought to myself, ‘finally.’

  That noise was not what I was hoping to hear though. Stepping outside, it was evidently sounds of choppers coming at us.

  “Hello US Army?” I stared into the dimly lit sky. Then it dawned upon me that they were probably here for Wilmort and I for killing the super hero mannequin man.

  I panicked a little as I ran back into the house. “Uhh…!” I was looking left and right, planning my escape, thinking of hiding into the walls or under the floor. Wilmort’s jet was parked right outside the house so it was only a matter of time before they found me. And if they found me – I’d be in some sort of confinement where killing myself would definitely be impossible.

  Killing myself! I just had to do it now. I apologized to Violet out loud and picked up the gun that Wilmort crafted for me. The roar of the choppers was right outside the house. The glass windows broke as smoke bombs erupted in the place. In a panicked moment, I pulled the trigger and shut my eyes tightly, everything turned to black with a stinging feeling and a loud ringing sound in my right ear.

  Chapter 7

  Pulling the trigger in a place like that – basically in the real world, super heroes or not, felt more unsettling than jumping off a cliff in a kingdom or having Proto blast my head off. Because that was home, that was the real world. I had to be sure I wasn’t in the real world before shooting my real self. That would be an insane accident.

  “Raymond dear,” I heard a voice above me. “Your door was open, you didn’t answer for a couple of days.”

  It was Mrs. White. I tried replying but my mouth wouldn’t move. I was paralyzed on the floor next to the TV. There was a ringing sound in my head and my body felt like sacks of sand were piled on top of it.

  “Did you drink too much?” she opened the curtains, blinding my poor eyes with sunlight. “You young ones party way too much. I mean I used to party back in my days, nineteen sixty nine was the year to go wild, ya know what I’m saying?” she chuckled like a granny. Then she sat on my couch in front of me and began reminiscing her old days while speaking her thoughts out loud.

  Minutes later I could slowly move my body. It felt like I was mummified for a hundred years and moving my limbs might make them fall off. I had this same feeling initially in the past few trips, but it felt like it was getting worse and taking me longer to get off the floor.

  In about half an hour, I was sitting on the couch with Mrs. White bringing me a cup of coffee.

  “Look, you and Emily were a great pair, but you know, sometimes things just go different ways and that’s kind of how it is,” she tried to give me some sympathy.

  “No Mrs. White,” I mumbled. “It’s not about Emily. I’ve just been working too much.”

  “Last time I checked mashing buttons on your computer for a few hours doesn’t make you fall on the floor like that!”

  “Well, when you realize that Platura was on the brink of destruction because the Queen chose her son over saving the nation knowing that Leroy will one day rise to become King and save the entire empire because Lady Witch predicted so and lied to the Queen about it so that Palifia can overthrow Platura that much easier, then it gets intense enough to pass out on the floor!” I said exaggeratedly.

  “What?” I narrowed her eyebrows confused.

  “Exactly!” I closed my case.

  “I watched one of those fantasy movies the other week, I didn’t get a god damn thing that was going on,” said Mrs. White.

  “A lot of them have pretty bad plot holes, it’s understandable.” I sipped on my coffee.

  “Pot holes?”

  “Nevermind.”

  Mrs. White left another half an hour later. As soon as the door closed, I opened the TV and went to page minus one. There it was – the glorified red timer that ensured that I keep going back or else I would die. Would I buy that? I don’t know. Everything else has been pretty realistic so far. And I mean, as much as I didn’t trust Wilmort, I felt like trusting Violet, and she trusted him. Right? I closed the TV, memorizing that I have forty nine hours left.

  That day, I went to the doctor to make sure that everything was fine with me. They did all sorts of checkups and scans, noticed high levels in blood pressure and told me to stop stressing so much. I subtly asked if there was anything peculiar in my chest area. You know, like pixels attached to my heart?

  If Cyl and Proto, with all their mighty sci-fi tech couldn’t see any pixels, then why would a twenty first century MRI scan see any pixels?

  I ate in a restaurant alone that evening. I needed to be alone – I needed to think.

  So I’ve died like, four times now. This whole death thing was no joke. I still got nightmares about the clicker monster eating me, and I still felt uneasy about leaving the android place the way I did. Jumping off a cliff and pulling the trigger seemed way more forgiving than anything else honestly.

  Now, this was where I rethink my life’s choices. We all live for the sake of having a good life. To earn a good life, we work for it first. These nine books that I have on the internet and book stores right now are constantly paying off which is keeping my bills at a comfortably affordabl
e level. However! In a few years, if I keep doing nothing in the real world, that will dwindle real quick.

  A few years is a lot of time though, right? I should be done with Wilmort in maybe a month! And then whatever reward I get will pay off. It wasn’t so bad, I was overthinking things. In fact, after I was done with my steak here, I’d go back to my house and write some more. I haven’t done that in a while.

  I motioned my hand for the waiter to ask him for the bill, but as soon as I turned my head out to scan the place, my eyes locked on a blond haired woman sitting with her back facing me on the other side of the restaurant.

  Without hesitation, I stood up and went straight for her. She was with her family but that thought didn’t even cross my head. That hair was too similar – was I still in the TV world? No, right? I was with Mrs. White earlier today, that couldn’t have been the TV world.

  I grabbed the shoulder of the woman, and she looked back at me. It wasn’t her.

  “Sorry,” I immediately apologized. My intense face diminished into an innocent one. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, super sorry. I thought she was a colleague of mine.”

  The husband didn’t seem pleased but nodded firmly.

  The next time I see Violet or Wilmort, I am one hundred percent asking them who the girl was that kept appearing and disappearing out of nowhere, if I don’t forget.

  Following the pace of the timer, I could sleep comfortably as much as I needed to and then go back into the TV world for another round of crazy events and getting punched in the face.

  That television was quite intriguing though, wasn’t it? For the first time that day I had the urge to plug it out of the chord, place it facing down and inspect it. I used a few reference images through my phone to make sure the parts I was looking at wasn’t some alien technology conducting experiments from above. And with my little to no knowledge of what the inside of a TV even looked like, I deducted that there was no strange portal activating device to be found inside.

  Reality is often misleading depending on how you approach things. People find solace in sweet lies than bitter truths. Is this new phenomenon a sweet lie that supplements my thirst to escape the mind-boggling reality, or is it a bitter truth that I’m actually forced into a quest I did not opt into?

  According to how Wilmort puts it, it’s a sweet truth that will endow me with rewards and fortunes at the end. Easy to buy into.

  Two days later my morning started with a cup of coffee and a phone call from my editor.

  “Raymond! How are you doing? Listen, you’ve got a great chance at landing the first five pages of the Prime Publishing Magazine with a short story, and I’m directly hooking you up for it.”

  “First five pages?!” I nearly spilt my coffee.

  “Well the month’s theme is fantasy, so I immediately recommended you. Think you can do it?”

  “When’s the deadline?”

  “In two days. If you give it to me in one day I’ll be able to arrange the artwork for you.”

  “Oh, uh…”

  “Yes?”

  I turned on the TV and went to page minus one. I had less than a handful of hours before the timer reached zero.

  “Yeah, um, two days?”

  “One day.”

  “Oh, one day. Okay, you got it. I’ll get you that short story.”

  “You’ve been inactive as of late, this would be a great way to pull you back into the game.”

  “Yeah, no, I agree. Thanks, you’re always looking out for me.”

  “I’ve emailed you the details.”

  That phone call was a reminder of the real things I need to be doing as well. Not routinely – it’s not school or work where you get up, you go, you come back, you get paid. This was a self-imposed life that gives back as much as you give to it.

  Now my only dilemma was, do I write the short story now, or go into the TV before the timer runs out?

  I committed to writing it now. I wrote it on the couch while the timer was ticking in front of me. That was a bad idea, as I couldn’t exactly focus.

  I was staring at a blank page for about half an hour, and before I finished writing a single page the timer on the TV had already reached down to forty minutes.

  I couldn’t exactly finish everything in that amount of time, so obviously I dropped it and got ready to enter the TV.

  When the timer had reached below thirty minutes, a message smoothly appeared below, ‘Warning, Light levels critical.’

  Alright, TV! I’m going, I’m going.

  I picked up the remote… and then dropped it. My body dropped on my knees as well. I couldn’t carry my own weight. I had a sudden rush of weakness envelope me whole. My breathing became shallow, and my vision blurred for a moment.

  I looked back at the TV again. Twenty eight minutes and counting. So I really do die if I stay out for too long? This was all real?

  The sensation was definitely reminiscent of death, in some weird way. The edges around my vision was darkening, and my heart rate was going crazy. It felt like I was poisoned and had several minutes left to live. I began hyperventilating and sweating. This was not from bad coffee, no way in hell.

  With a shaky hand, I grabbed the remote again and dialed the four numbers. The screen of the TV turned to void, and even in a day lit room, the photons of light began shimmering their way out.

  I crawled closer, swaying left and right with each motion, and stuck my hand straight into the abyss. The rest was a blackout.

  Like a long hallucination trip, my body fell through a portal of imagery and sounds, some familiar, others not so much. The one word I would keep using to describe this was vague. Nothing was truly clear, everything was almost shown to me in concepts and faint hints.

  Then all that imagery was washed away into black, and with a terribly groggy headache, I opened my eyes. My face was buried in dry dirt next to a tree, that’s as much as I could make out.

  After a minute passed, the next thing I discovered was that it was night time. And the next thing that I discovered was that I was in a forest. And the next thing that I discovered was the forest was haunted. And the next thing I discovered was that I was utterly screwed.

  Okay, I didn’t know outright that the forest was haunted. But it definitely had an extra layer of eeriness to it that a normal dark forest wouldn’t have.

  My trauma of being eaten by the clicker monster was creeping back up my neck, making me feel really uneasy.

  I leaned back against the tree and waited. My body stabilized in a few minutes, but my stress levels went haywire. I held my knees, then held my head, then pulled my hair and clutched my fists and was absolutely regretting going in.

  Bringing back my long lost friend, logic and reasoning, I decided it was best to sit and do nothing. Violet might find me, right? I’ll just hear her comforting voice say, ‘Raymond, come with me’, and she’ll take me to a well-lit cabin and we’ll practice disintegrating forks and everything will be alright.

  The forest was dark, but the moonlight made certain things just barely visible to me. The nightlife wasn’t so loud, which is unnatural in a forest. That was one of the most unsettling things – how quiet it was. Any little sound of a twig moving or a leaf turning made me flinch.

  God, the worst thing that could happen is some crazy old woman starts screaming and running at me right now. I don’t know what I would do. That kind of stuff triggers the worst kinds of panic in you.

  It must have been about thirty minutes now. When I stopped thinking, it actually felt rather peaceful. I just closed my eyes for some time, and prayed that someone would find me.

  Another twenty minutes later, while my face was still buried in my knees, I heard footsteps in the distance. They were small, human-like footsteps. I wish I had kept my head down, but instinctively looked up.

  There was a little girl standing in the distance. I could barely make out her face, but she was clearly staring at me.

  The amount of chills I had going through my body made me itchy. I
clenched my fists together and stared back at her, not moving at all.

  I was terrified. I kept repeating in my head, ‘this isn’t real’, but without the level of control that Wilmort had, there was close to nothing I could do about it.

  About five minutes passed, and the girl got bored, turned to the side and walked off. I lost sight of her in a second, and couldn’t hear her footsteps either.

  After another ten seconds, my shoulders relaxed, and I felt a little less tense than when she was there.

  In my peripheral vision, to my right, there was a face staring at me a single meter away. The same little girl was standing right where I was sitting, and she began screaming!

  I screamed back in horror and crawled back away from her.

  She screamed till her vocal chords reached their limit.

  “It was him! It was him! It was him! It was him! It was him! It was him! It was him!”

  She pointed her finger at me and kept screaming.

  “What?! WHAT DID I DO?!” I yelled back at her.

  From behind all the trees surrounding me, thirteen men in black hooded cloaks came out. I was surrounded, grabbed by force, and dragged across the forest. I couldn’t see their faces at all – it was too dark. The only screams I heard now were my own.

  They dragged me for about twenty seconds before I felt my body get tossed into a deep dug up hole.

  All thirteen of them now had shovels in their hands as they began throwing hefty piles of dirt down over me. I yelled to them to stop, and tried clawing out, only to get hit on the head with a shovel and fall straight back down. At some point, the amount of dirt that I was in was too much to move. With only half my face being out in the open, I yelled out “Violet!! Wilmort!!”

  And the last big patch of dirt covered me whole.