by Amber Stuart
Still rubbing my own chest.
“Seriously,” I said, hearing the stall in my own voice. “What are you talking about?”
“You cannot be here!”
I looked around the moonlit lawn. "I can’t be where, man? I don't think you're supposed to be here, either, if you want to get technical on––"
"You will get hurt. The light... it is not for you. For your kind." That regret returned to his voice. “I am sorry. I do not know how it happened... with the lock. The connection. I am sorry for that... but there is nothing I can do.”
My mind whirled around his words, finally settling on one thing.
"My kind?" I said.
"The gates led to the same world,” he said, shaking his head. “That has never happened. The gates... they never cross. One gate leads only to its own worlds. The other gate leads to its own worlds. They never go to the same one. Never. I must go and report this, and you cannot come. I know you want to, and I know why... but you cannot. Do you understand?"
"No," I said.
I fought with the part of me that wanted to cross that line.
As if he felt it, he held up his hand again.
Again, it was like someone shoved me in the middle of the chest.
“No!” he said. “Do not! I am morph... do you understand? I go through the shift, but you cannot. We are not the same... do you understand?”
“No!”
“I only work for them,” he said, obviously agitated. “I only work for them... I belong to them. Do you see? I cannot stay! Even if I wanted! They would come for me. They would come for me here... they own the lock!”
“Who do you work for?” I said, fighting to keep up. “The government? Which government?”
“Yes,” he said.
There was a silence.
In it, I could see that he was still upset, but he didn’t speak.
“Yes?” I said, feeling my jaw harden. “Yes, what? You work for the government? Which government?”
But he was already shaking his head.
He still looked as frustrated as I felt.
“They are not from here. There are two... tribes...” he said, as if forcing out the word. “Two tribes in the place from where I come. One is Pharei. The other is Malek... those you just saw.” He paused, as if seeing something in my facial expression. “We do not come to the same worlds. They are not friends to me. You and I... we are not the same. Do you see this?”
“I don’t see shit,” I said. “What the hell are you talking about, man?”
He didn't answer me that time, not really.
I saw him rubbing his chest again, though. That pain look slid back over his expression, and when he looked at me that time, I saw more of that regret, almost a longing.
“There is no time...” he muttered. “I cannot stay. I cannot.”
I saw a small, whitish-gray device in his hand when he next lifted it.
I couldn’t tell what it was, or even see it clearly in the near-dark of the grassy lawn, but it appeared to be made of metal. I wondered if it was an oddly-shaped phone, or maybe a remote control of some kind, when he started doing something to it, his eyes and focus concentrated there, instead of on me. He didn’t look like he was hitting buttons though, more like he was massaging the thing, or maybe squeezing it with his long fingers.
“What are you doing?” I said.
He didn’t answer me that time at all.
Before I could think of what to say or do next, he looked at me again.
Something more final lived in his expression that time.
"Go home," he said. His voice turned more gentle, just before he gave me an odd kind of bow. The gesture was formal-seeming, and precise, but unlike anything I’d ever seen before. “...I will pray for your safety, my friend,” he said, his voice grave. “I appreciate your concern for my wellbeing. It is...” He hesitated. “...Rare.”
Seeming to realize what he’d said, he blanched a little, looking up.
“I do not mean that as an insult to your race,” he clarified. “It only makes the occurrence all the more appreciated...”
"My race?" I said, staring at him. "What ‘race’ would that be, exactly?”
“Human,” he said, blunt.
“Dude, seriously...”
"Go home," he repeated.
Anger, frustration and a kind of panic rose in me.
The fear didn’t make any sense to me, but it worsened as I looked at him, even as it remained nameless, or at the very least, difficult to pin down.
He finished whatever he’d been doing and shoved the remote-control-slash-smart-phone into a pocket of his scuba-like shirt. I watched him do it, silent, and still standing just outside the circle of stones. I tried to understand what I was seeing on his face as he avoided looking at me.
I was already half-bracing myself for... something.
I had no idea what, but some part of me totally believed something new and equally strange would happen soon.
Probably from whatever he’d just done to that remote control.
I started to think it was just my imagination working overtime after all, when a light rose subtly around where we stood.
Dim at first, it rose quickly in strength, until the glare half-blinded me, reflecting sharply on the wet grass. The light didn’t have a source... well, none that I could identify, anyway. I looked around as I blinked against it, but it seemed to come from everywhere and no where all at once.
Whatever generated it, it continued to brighten. It threw my mystery man’s outline into sharp relief with an intense, gold-white beam.
I gasped then, suddenly short on oxygen in my lungs.
Looking down, I realized the light did more than simply illuminate the surrounding space. It raised the hairs on my arms and neck. It tightened the muscles in my chest, forced my breath out in near-pants. A kind of electricity seemed to erupt from the very air.
I felt dizzy, but my muscles tensed so much I couldn’t move.
Then my new friend, my maybe-assassin-definitely-vigilante-maybe-alien-spy, began to disappear.
I thought I was imagining that, too, in the beginning.
The longer I stared, the less sure I felt.
I noticed his leg, first.
The outline of his left leg gradually grew less and less distinct as I watched. I blinked, and it was nearly gone in that fraction of a second.
The leg didn’t look gone exactly, though. He still stood there, as if he had two, fully-functioning legs. It looked instead almost like the leg had been separated from him somehow, by a pane of warped or beveled glass.
I still worked to wrap my head around the disappearing leg when the rest of him began to fade, too... slowly, at first, and then in earnest. It still happened in pieces, but the pieces began to follow one another a lot faster. I couldn’t see his left hand much at all anymore, or his right foot or lower leg. His face still looked reasonably distinct, but his shoulder and most of his right arm had begun to fade, too. I glimpsed his bare chest briefly through the gummy, dense shirt he wore, then his chest began to grow transparent.
The center of his chest changed like the clothes, showing me skin and veins, muscle and bone, as layers gradually disappeared one at a time in front of me.
I felt my body pulled towards what remained of his.
Looking back, I don’t think my mind was really working all that well.
I didn’t even try making up a story about why I would approach him right then, or what I felt as I looked at the guy. All I knew, without a single doubt in my mind, was that if I let this guy disappear now, I'd never see him again. I'd never learn a damned thing about whatever had happened tonight.
The whole experience would just be a big black mark in the weird column... and I wasn’t sure if I could live with that. I’d have to be content with guesses and unconvincing theories from Gantry and others who hadn’t been here about how easy it all was to expl
ain. I wasn’t sure if I could live with that, either.
I knew how good most people were at rationalizing.
Unfortunately, I completely suck at it. Quasi-scientific theories that only ring half-true to me never really satisfy me. Not when I know... like, really know... something more happened. Something that the easy theories flat-out don’t explain.
I honestly wasn’t sure if I could live with any of it.
Maybe I was getting too used to getting answers to most of the puzzles that got thrown my way. Maybe I hated how this guy gave me the brush-off, like I was just too much of a simpleton to fully get his weird and dangerous world.
Either way, I knew that leaving things like this wasn’t going to work for me.
The light inside that circle of stones brightened still more.
Now, it filled most of the small field.
I started noticing other things about that light, too. Like, how it wasn’t cold like that blue-white blast from the weapons in Chinatown. Instead, a kind of fire underlay the brilliance, something denser and more real-seeming, like shafts of sunlight slanting through deep water. I still couldn’t see a source of the light; in fact, now it almost seemed to be coming from my friend. Even so, I felt like I knew the light better, somehow.
And yeah, I know what a fat lot of no-sense that makes.
Even as I thought it, though, he looked up at me again. I could see his pale green eyes staring at me through the shadow of his face, even as the outline of his head began to shimmer, making his symmetrical features indistinct for the first time.
His cheekbones began to fade... then his mouth.
My throat constricted as those flames strengthened.
Tongues of white fire sharpened in the night sky, seemingly rising from the ground at his feet up into the sky. The expression on his face stood out to me briefly, the colors sharp even through the oddly-perfect lines. I got the sense, suddenly, that I was seeing only the barest hint of him, what might even have been a costume of some kind, or some mirage to keep me and whoever else from seeing what lay behind it.
Then his form melted.
It just... melted.
The white flames ascended abruptly to a shocking flash.
Then, slowly, the brightness began to dim. Still fighting to breathe, I stared over the edge of that circle of white stones, looking for him.
He was gone.
Something in my chest hurt, surprising me, I guess, with the intensity of emotion behind it. It wasn’t just the mystery of the whole thing, I realized, a few seconds later. It wasn’t just the thought of having no answers that upset me when I saw his outline start to fade.
I really didn’t want him to go.
The light was definitely fading now, though. I watched it, knees shaking, conflict rippling through my mind, tugging my thoughts back and forth.
Abruptly, I stepped over the line of stones.
Hairs on my arms and the nape of my neck leapt to attention.
That electric current flared before I could take a breath, light igniting like a spotlight inside the stone-bound circle. My whole body grew hot at once, as if the very blood in my veins had been ignited by that same fireless light.
Light began to shine off my skin, off my fingers and the toes of my boots.
From inside the circle, I could now see that the light emanated off the white, basketball-sized stones themselves; they sparked like giant, glowing embers, too bright to look at once I faced them from the other side.
I took another step towards the middle of the ring, but that time, I didn’t see where my foot landed. I could no longer see the grassy knoll, or the trees.
All around me shone that fathomless white.
Fear clutched at me, paralyzing in its intensity.
I wondered what the hell I was doing, why I’d risk something like this, when I’d just seen that guy vanish right in front of my eyes. Was I really so complacent that I’d think nothing bad could happen to me here, when he just told me this same thing would probably kill me?
I saw myself trapped in time for that brief instant, stripped of embellishment, even of linear progression. I saw myself as someone who really hadn’t experienced very much at all, despite what I’d thought. I saw someone young, and yeah, kind of dumb.
The forest around me faded, grew impossible to distinguish through that light.
In its place, the universe grew luminous, tilting on a far greater axis above.
I stepped into that greater space, both terrified and weirdly at peace.
It was too late to go back, I knew.
I didn’t just think it... I knew.
It was too late to panic, too. It was too late to second-guess what I’d already set in motion. It was too late to wonder if I could have found another way to follow him to his other world. I knew all of these things, as unshakably as I knew that the guy in the scuba-shirt really had been trying to warn me, that he’d only meant to keep me safe.
For a brief instant, everything grew blindingly bright.
My heart leaped in an unnamed joy.
Then, everything disappeared.
5
THE WRONG END OF THE RABBIT HOLE
... I OPENED MY eyes.
Seconds, minutes, maybe even hours could have passed.
I had no way of knowing what occurred inside that long-seeming flash of unconsciousness. I had no real concept of time, either, or even of my own person, meaning my body. I had no memory of where I’d been, not in those first, new beats of life in my chest, or that different mixture of air filling my lungs.
I stood in a clearing.
Above me, a stone arch darkened part of the sky. It reflected light, shimmering at me, blinding me briefly until I raised a hand.
I saw hieroglyphics. Writings and pictures in that stone arch. They confused me more.
I dropped my gaze, fighting to focus my eyes.
On the edges of the clearing where I stood, I saw what looked like machines.
Some of those machines emitted black smoke, like they’d recently been on fire.
All looked foreign and weirdly alive, given their odd, twisted and rounded shapes. Tubes came out of their sides next to long, smooth bodies that squatted low to the ground, making them resemble something between boulders and hunkered animals.
I looked back up at the stone arch. It hung over the whole clearing, immovable.
Strangely quiet. Also strangely alive.
In the distance, I saw trees that weren’t really trees, a long slope of rocks that looked unlike any rocks I’d ever seen. I couldn't take it all in at first... it was too much information, and too much of it was new. My brain fuzzed out in the excess of newness. Too many things I couldn't wrap my head around vied for attention. Too many of them defied easy categorization. Too many of them didn’t look right to me. Too many things I couldn’t understand, name, or even describe, screamed to be understood, named and described.
Surrounding me, about the size of a large pond, stood a ring of basketball-sized white rocks.
My mind latched onto those rocks.
I’d seen rocks exactly like those before, only in a different place, a different time. When I’d last seen them, though, it had been night outside.
Night...
I looked up, suddenly understanding a least one of the many reasons I felt so completely disoriented. The sky no longer hung over me like a shroud, dark and full of indistinct clouds, shimmers of stars and moon barely glimpsed through the fog.
A long, curved swath of blue led my eyes, instead.
Thin, striped clouds colored that shockingly high dome, emphasizing a sky I absolutely did not recognize, not in any way. The expanse felt entirely too large to me... a cavern of space that made me feel strangely weak, yet also strangely claustrophobic, despite all of that space.
When I looked down, my eyes focused on those odd-looking trees––trees that grew in a weirdly sentient-seeming jungle.
> That jungle started on a ridge up above the rocky canyon that housed the burnt-out crater filled with all those crouching machines. The machines began some twenty feet past the edges of the ring of white, basketball-sized stones.
My mind calculated distances, but I still wasn’t fully absorbing any of it.
Cliffs rose on either side of me, dotted with hanging fingers of green, like ferns only not, closer to what I imagined might have lived at the time of the dinosaurs. Water trickled down blue-green, scarlet and yellow flowers, making a cheerful sound that felt hollow in the silence of that freakishly large sky. That sound of water falling through dirt and rocks and fingers of plant was the first familiar sound or familiar much of anything that I could perceive in the landscape around me, though.
The air. The air smelled like...
I tried to take a step. I was breathing too much. I tripped over a shining white rock, one that stood so near to my foot that I hadn’t seen it from where I'd landed.
Landed.
My mind spun around the word briefly.
I thought all of this, even as I stumbled over that same rock... nearly fell... moving so slowly, yet too fast to stop any of it...
Below me, a ravine glimmered with smoky chunks of glass-like rock.
Again, too much stimulus and information filled my eyes, but in fragments, pieces I fought to arrange back into some kind of logical order inside my mind. I saw the mystery guy I'd followed through that light door.
He stood a dozen feet away, also breathing hard, and now staring at me, as if out of all of this unreality, I was the most unreal thing.
Before I could form words well enough to communicate anything to him, movement jerked my eyes to the side, where I saw a small creature with hooked claws gripping the trunk of one of those fern-like trees. I stared at its white face. More movement jerked my eyes upward, allowing me to catch a glimpse of a bird caught in flight.
Not a bird.
I stared at the human, baby-like face, heard it scream.
My legs collapsed.
Buzzing filled my ears.
I sprawled on the ground, but had no idea how I’d gotten there.
Over me, a human face appeared.
