She walked over to the pile of tools in the corner and picked up the large flashlight the contractor had used earlier when he’d shown her the interior of the wall. She clicked it on as she walked back over to Jim.
He took the flashlight, turned, and placed it within the confines of the hole. He immediately saw he’d been right. The interior of the wall was much larger than the few inches in most houses between one wall and the next. This one spanned at least four feet from one wall to the next. He also saw what Kelly must have been referring to.
Within the confines of the wall was what resembled a large bay window. It stretched from floor to ceiling. There was rich burnished wood at the top and bottom, and looked seamless from his vantage point. Even from this distance he could make out markings in the wood. Letters and numbers as well as weird esoteric shapes. The only thing that seemed out of place, other than the fact that the whole structure was hidden within a wall, was there wasn’t a proper window for the size of it. He moved the beam across it, trying to peer into the gloom. Where the glass should be was a four foot wide gray oval set in the middle.
“What the hell is it? Looks like a large window, or a mirror. It looks like glass in the middle, but whatever it may have been, it’s been painted over.” He pulled his head outside the hole.
Kelly shrugged her shoulders. “Beats me, and Chris had no clue. Whoever made it did so after the house was built he said.”
“Weird.”
“Yeah,” Kelly agreed.
“Well, the realtor did tell us the Brannigans were weirdos when we bought the place.” Jim said, referring to the previous owners of the house.
“She didn’t say they were weirdos, Jim. You said they were weirdos. She said they were eccentric.”
“Yeah, that’s what I said. Weirdos.”
“You’re bad,” she said, smiling at him.
He was glad to see her smile. The house had been a thorn in their sides these past few months and there had been little to laugh about. They’d purchased the large home from the son of one of the Brannigan’s live-in domestic help after the old woman passed away. The son had let the house go for far below the value of the surrounding homes due to the state of disrepair, and Jim had wanted to live in this neighborhood badly. They’d signed the papers and moved out of their small apartment in the city and immediately started the renovations.
Jim stuck his head back in the hole and regarded the interior, lost in thought.
“What are you thinking about?” Kelly asked from behind him. He turned to look at her and smiled.
“Just thinking about what the realtor told us about the Brannigans. About how they were eccentric as well as wealthy.” He accentuated the word wealthy, smiling at Kelly. “I was also thinking maybe we should take a closer look at the inside of that window in there.”
“You think they stashed money inside of it?”
“I don’t know, but it sure won’t hurt to take a look.”
He’d heard of stranger things happening . . . old flaky people stashing money in their mattresses and refrigerators. Why not inside a window? It would sure help the financial predicament he and Kelly were in if there was money there. He walked over to the assortment of tools in the corner and chose a sledgehammer as he eyed the wall.
Smiling at him, Kelly asked, “What are you going to do, tear the wall down?”
“Well, not like I’m going to ruin anything. They’re going to take it down regardless, so we may as well have a look.”
He handed her the flashlight and hefted the large mallet in his hands, trying to get a feel for the weight of it. He stuck his head inside the hole once more to gain a better location of where the window was, then walked over to the wall and swung the mallet, opening a large hole in the drywall. After a few minutes with the sledgehammer and with the help of Kelly, he had made a much larger hole than the workmen had made just to the left of the window.
They pulled back the last few large pieces of drywall. Jim took the flashlight from Kelly and flicked it on, pointing it into the gloom of the hole and the window structure within as he entered.
“It might be a mirror, but whatever it is they painted over the glass.”
He moved the beam over the window. Someone had brush painted the entire piece of glass in dark gray paint. The light also showed the deep luster of the wood frame, and he could see the intricate carvings much better at this close range. There were indeed letters carved into the wood, but they were unlike anything he ever saw. They were large, and spaced symmetrically around the interior. There were mother-of-pearl inlays with etchings in gold underneath the middle in patterns that was beautifully rendered, but resembled nothing he was familiar with. The hardware used to house the glass was wrought of real silver, and he was surprised the previous owners wouldn’t have taken it with them if for no other reason than the value of the materials. He moved the light around the interior, trying to gauge the reason behind the window.
“Okay, I’m going to open this wall up the rest of the way so we can go in.” He grabbed the sledgehammer from the floor and handed the flashlight to Kelly.
“Maybe you’re right, maybe it’s hidden money,” she said.
He smiled and started to bang away at the bottom of the wall. “Maybe I’m going to have a cardiac doing all Chris’s work.” Kelly grinned at him as she began to move away the pieces of drywall he tore off.
When they’d opened the wall up enough to enter, he walked back to the corner with Chris’s tools. He found an extension cord with a light at the end and plugged it in, clicking it on. With the brighter light he stepped inside the opening and held it in front of him as Kelly followed. He stopped in front of the small structure and held the light up, peering at it closely. The whole thing was set in the adjacent wall.
“This is definitely a window. Kind of like a bay window, but not like one I’ve ever seen.”
“What’s that?” Kelly asked, pointing to his right.
He followed her gaze to the floor, seeing what she’d been referring to. It was a small cardboard box, like the ones used by clothing stores to put shirts and sweaters in. He handed the light to her and bent to pick it up. He felt something shift inside it as he stood back up.
“What’d I say? Stashing money in the walls. This has to be something. Let’s look at this in the other room.”
Kelly nodded as she hung the work light from one of the rafters over their head as they stepped back out into the room.
He grabbed one of the five gallon buckets to sit on, while Kelly chose one of the larger toolboxes. He opened the small box, revealing a red ledger and a white envelope within. Jim handed the ledger to Kelly as he ripped opened the envelope. He frowned in disappointment as he pulled out the envelope’s only contents: two sheets of paper with handwriting on them. He unfolded the paper and began to read.
“What is it?”
Jim paused and looked up at his wife. “Well, it’s not a treasure map,” he said. “Listen to this.”
I leave this letter in hopes that someone might one day be able to help the Brannigans, for my health has denied me the ability to watch vigil over what Mrs. Brannigan asked of me. She has followed Mr. Brannigan into the place he discovered many years ago even though he had made her swear she never would. She waited a year to the day and told me she would wait no longer. She has left me in charge of the house as well as the journal concerning the window, but I cannot understand what is written there. I fear Mrs. Brannigan has met with whatever fate the Master of the house did. I could no longer bear the things that I saw within the glass so I have had my son paint over the accursed thing. Now that my health has failed, I have also had him wall up the window, for it is unnatural and blasphemous and yet I cannot destroy it for it is the only way back for the Brannigans.
May God have mercy upon them both.
Jim looked up. “That’s it, other than a small paragraph stating that she was the Brannigan’s housekeeper with her signature and the date. I imagine right before they took her away to
a nice rest home for the chronically delusional. No wonder her son sold it so cheap.”
Kelly nodded and opened the red ledger and flipped through a few pages. “This is mostly in Latin if I recall it right from college. Take a look.” She handed the book to Jim, who took it while handing her the letter to read. He glanced inside, flipping through pages. She was right; Latin filled the pages in neat, smooth characters. Some pages had small diagrams drawn on them, weird symbols and quotations. There were mathematical equations on others.
“Strange people for sure,” Kelly said after reading the letter. “What do you think?”
“Well, I think we should take a closer look at that window. You never know, there still might be something valuable inside.” He stood and motioned for Kelly to stand with him. “Look in that tool chest for a razor blade.”
“Maybe we should leave it alone, Jim. You read what that woman wrote.”
“You don’t really believe that, do you?”
“No, but we should still leave it alone. It’s spooky.”
“It’s kind of weird, but we got nothing to lose by checking it out.”
“I suppose.” She handed him back the letter, which he replaced in the envelope while she rooted around in the tool chest for a razor. She located a box opener knife and held it up for him to inspect.
“This?”
“That’s perfect. Come on, let’s go see this window of theirs.”
When they were back within the wall, he unscrewed the box opener’s handle and removed one of the extra blades from within, handing the rest back to Kelly, who placed it on the floor. Jim walked up to the window and began to scrape on the glass with the razor. When he’d removed a small space clean of paint roughly the size of a quarter, Kelly, who stood behind him, gasped in surprise and startled Jim.
“What?” he asked.
“Turn the light off.”
“Huh?”
“The light above your head, turn it off. Hurry.”
Jim groped above his head until he found the switch and clicked it off, darkening the interior of the wall.
He immediately saw what had excited her. Light was spilling out of the spot he had scraped free of paint.
“My God,” Kelly whispered. “What the hell is it?”
The light shone pale blue in the gloom of the wall’s interior. It fell on the floor in an oval shape between them both. The dust motes from their earlier work with the drywall danced slowly in the beam of light as they descended towards the floor.
“I don’t know,” Jim said as he bent to the window and began scraping off more paint. “But we’re going to find out. Turn that light back on.” When he’d widened the spot to roughly double its size, he reached up and clicked the light off again. This time there was little doubt; there was an ambient light shining through. Jim placed his face close to the glass and peered in. Grayish-blue mist swirled around on the other side of the glass. He tried to peer past the mist to distinguish any details, but it was far too thick. He stood up, peering at his wife in the gloom of the enclosed space.
“That’s damn weird.”
“Let me see,” she said, squeezing into the space he’d vacated.
Jim stood up and turned the light back on as he inspected the frame of the window structure where it joined the far wall trying to figure out where the light came from. The wall, however, met the casement in a tight seal.
Kelly stood up. “What do you think?” she asked, but he barely heard her.
“Stay here,” he said, stepping through the hole. He left the room heading down the hallway to the far room that the window was up against.
Kelly stared at the glass as if it might offer the answer to the puzzle it presented. The light still shone out, and the more she looked at it the more convinced she became that it was daylight and not some form of electrical bulb. Jim made a rapping sound on the other side of the wall suddenly, startling her.
“Hey,” he said from the other side of the wall, his voice muffled. “You there?”
“Yes, you are to the left of it, or I should say it’s to your left.”
The hollow knocking sound he made as he rapped his knuckles on the drywall filled the small space Kelly stood in. She bent once again to peer into the small hole in the paint. He mumbled something, but Kelly wasn’t paying attention. She was absorbed with the swirling mist through the glass. It was serene, almost hypnotic. She reached her hand out towards the glass, letting her fingertips lightly touch it.
It soothed.
She felt a humming coming from the cool glass beneath her fingers, as if some great and terrible machine pulsed deep in the earth beneath her. It was an almost audible throbbing. The mist danced just on the other side of the glass, beckoning to her. She felt the cool glass against the pads of her fingertips, but she also felt something more. Something that danced just beyond the sense of perception; not feeling nor sound. Something deeper within her being that spoke to her of shadow and despair. Something not quite right, something nameless and foul—and yet it still evoked in her a feeling of . . .
What?
She didn’t know.
“Well, that’s the damndest thing I ever saw,” Jim said, startling her from behind. It seemed that no more than a moment had passed, and yet she hadn’t heard Jim leave the other room nor enter this one.
“I can’t find anything. Though I don’t know what I’d be looking for anyway. I’m going to have another look in that journal.”
Kelly nodded but barely heard him. The mist still whispered to her, the window still beckoned as if offering sanctuary. The light seemed to pulse and move as if a living thing, and she wondered what lay beyond the glass. She raised her hand to her forehead and rubbed at her temples. The light from the small hole Jim had scraped in the glass shone brighter in the gloom of the interior, seeming to overpower the bulb they’d hung above. It would be nice to enter the window and slip amongst the mist. All she’d have to do is open the window and climb inside, and she could . . .
Jim called to her louder, his voice breaking the feeling she had. She blinked her eyes rapidly and looked around in the gloom. She felt suddenly claustrophobic and left the darkness of the interior.
“Yeah?”
“I said, he seems to have written some in English. In the back of the book he has some notes. Listen to this.”
I have obtained, through my contacts in the east, certain manuscripts that claim to hold the key to opening portals to other planes of existence. Whether or not they are physical worlds, or some form of alternate reality, I do not know. The manuscripts are ancient, and difficult to decipher due to the advanced state of decay of the pages, but I believe I can translate them. I have spent most of my inheritance in obtaining these books. I hope they are worth it.
I have always maintained that alternate, parallel worlds existed, and now I hope to prove it. We exist not in a universe, but within a multiverse and there must exist doorways between those worlds and ours. The fools at the University who found it so easy to dismiss me from my position might think differently with hard facts.
Only time will tell.
Jim looked up at his wife and shrugged. “What do you make of it?”
“I don’t know. Strange for sure. Wasn’t he a physicist at the college?”
“Yeah,” Jim replied as he continued looking through the ledger. “Theoretical Physics and Cosmology, although this doesn’t really sound like science. Sounds more like supernatural crap to me.”
He flipped a few pages and began reading from a different section.
I finally received the second manuscript last week, although it cost me dearly. The book is written in a form of code which I have deciphered, and translated. I have built the portal as a window, housing the opening in wood and applying the wards around the center as instructed. There are many destinations outlined in the book, yet I cannot tell by the names given where they may lead. I will try each, exploring the realms beyond the window in turn. With the application of the final
ward, the glass in the center filled with light. I believe I have been successful. If only my colleagues could share in my discovery.
Jim looked up from his reading. “Jesus, this guy was really into this stuff. He mentions those books he bought. You didn’t notice them in the wall, did you?” Kelly shook her head. “We should look around for them. He might’ve been nuts, but they sound valuable.” He started flipping through the pages again.
Kelly was troubled by what Jim was reading. The previous owner might have been disturbed, but she couldn’t deny the feeling she had when she was in the room with the window, or the light and the mist beyond the glass. She was about to voice her concerns when Jim stopped flipping through pages.
“There’s more.”
Sounds come through the window when I open it. Wind, perhaps; but it reminds me of voices. Voices calling. I dare not leave the window open for too long, for I feel to do so might invite whatever is on that side to enter here. I cannot help but wonder what they are, or perhaps, who they are. It must certainly be only the wind, but it vexes me. The mist clears periodically but I cannot discern much through the opening. Only a journey through the gateway will yield the answers to the many questions the portal poses.
Jim stopped reading aloud and looked up at his wife. “This guy was really out in left field.”
“Gives me the creeps,” she said.
He continued thumbing through the pages. Now that they had found entries in English, he was eager to find out more. He began reading aloud again.
I have decided the only way to ascertain what lies on the other side is to journey within. The window calls to me in a way that I cannot describe. I sit for hours, listening to the voices, and while I am convinced no harm will come to me, I am still apprehensive.
Jim scanned over more of the text, then stopped on the following page and once again read aloud.
My wife fears the window. She too hears the strange voices when I have it open; and though I assure her not to worry, her dread grows. She has begged me to destroy the portal, but I do not think I can. I cannot locate the procedure in the book. To dismantle it in the wrong manner would be disastrous. The window acts as a conduit between this world and the other, and to destroy it would result in a catastrophe beyond what I can imagine.
Darkness Ad Infinitum Page 15
