The Portal in the Forest

I'd instinctually noticed something wrong
with the neighborhood for several days before my brooding focus
lifted long enough for me to truly grow curious.

Standing and walking out from the porch where
I'd been sitting, I approached three children that were huddled
around some sort of object.

"What do you have there?"

Immediately, the children dropped their
object of interest and bolted.

I scanned the street, but nobody else was
around at this time of day. The object they'd dropped was a
book
- and that was the odd thing. I'd recently seen
children walking around with half-hidden books, magazines, and even
newspapers.
That might have been normal in my day, but
modern children were obsessed with their phones and video games.
Why were they all walking around with artifacts of the written
word?

A Tale of Two Cities… I dusted it off,
flipped it over, scanned the front and back… opened it up, nothing
inside… flipped to the first page…

It was the worst of times, it was the best
of times, it was the age of foolishness, it was the age of
wisdom…

I frowned. It was technically correct, but
the phrases were out of order. "Hey! Where did you get this?"

The darting children rounded a distant corner
without more than giggles and screams.

Patience. I had it, they didn't. I watched
from the porch for the next several days, waiting for the right
moment. It came without much fanfare: an older boy walked past with
several of his friends in tow. None of them looked down the row of
bushes in the yard that led to me; none of them were concerned by
my presence.

I followed them nearly a block behind. They
did look back at several points, confirming my suspicions about a
neighborhood secret, but I casually evaded their worried scans.
They turned into the old Dodson lot, now overgrown with heavy
brush, and I followed them beyond into thicker Virginia woodlands
that lay untouched past the edge of our suburb.

It sat right off the edge of an old trail,
flanked by centennial trees. There was no weird device, no flaring
energies, no fanfare at all - just an odd and highly irregular oval
of blurred space. Beyond sat a suburban street lined by houses.

I actually wasn't too surprised. I'd had
several days to think and guess, and what else could it have been
but a portal to another dimension? Neighborhood kids weren't about
to order books printed with strange malformations, but they would
certainly trade around oddities from another universe. The boys
ahead had disappeared into the vast breach, and I'd seen children
acting oddly for weeks, so I assumed there was little threat from
biological contamination. We'd have all been dead much sooner if
there was any threat of that.

I hadn't seen any suspicious activity at
night. Best to be back by nightfall. The kids might have found out
something about the behavior of the portal, and they'd probably
spent weeks poking at it before daring to go through. There was
every chance it disappeared at night, or… maybe it changed
destinations, stranding anyone on the other side. I hadn't heard of
any missing children, so I guessed that they'd taken the
appropriate precautions.

Peering beyond, I tried to notice anything
out of the ordinary before crossing the threshold, but it looked
like any other suburban town.

I stepped through, noting no unusual
sensations. The bridge between dimensions seemed to be stable
enough.

The moment I crossed, I realized that there
was a problem: the portal back was a ten-foot-long jagged oval, and
it was sitting in the middle of the street.

There was no commotion… no hub-bub… no one
had noticed a portal to another universe hanging around and
blocking traffic. That meant that this portal was new to this
location, this suburb was newly built and empty or very old and
abandoned, or… everyone here was already dead.

Straining my ears to listen to the absolute
quiet, I gradually began leaning toward that most grim
analysis.

The closest houses to the portal had broken
windows. What time was it? A little past noon? The neighborhood
kids had clearly begun systematically looting, but it was
impossible to tell whether this was a new daily location, or
whether the portal only went here.

And why had the portal been created at all?
There seemed to be no significance on either end.

I heard the older kids smashing about in one
of the nearby dwellings, so I chose a quick direction, and I soon
came to houses that had not been broken into. Carefully eyeing the
vector of the portal's backwards emanation, I came to a split-level
house that was unremarkable… except that a hole had been carved out
of one wall of a size that matched the expanding cone of the
rift.

A strong breeze at my back, I approached the
repeatedly swaying front door. If it wasn’t already closed by the
wind - yes, the wood near the knob had been ruptured by someone who
had been very desperate to either escape or get inside. I stepped
across the threshold… only to crunch across glass. After clearing
several corners in the living room and kitchen beyond, I backed
into a safe area and looked up. As I'd guessed, every light bulb
that I could see had been purposely broken.

What the hell had happened in this house?

"I know you wrote it down," I said to the
still and silent darkness. "You always do."

As if in response to my cynicism, the
darkness offered up a book sitting quietly among shards of broken
glass. Carefully picking it up and cleaning it off, I flipped
through half of it, skipping past random illustrations and musings
to find the most recent writings.

***

185
101 84 very
slight change between

48 Jeffers

~45 seconds?

Moves no sooner than 45 seconds
✔

first appeared at
2
am?
1 am but slow

hide,
break all light
sources
done

wait

write down
everything

[tear drop stain]-omething is outside our
house. We're sitting now. Nothing more can be done. All we can do
now is wait.

We first noticed it somewhere around 1 AM in
the morning. David came over right about that time, and he says he
saw something weird with one of the neighbor's houses, but he
didn't know what to make of it. Ryan and I were here housesitting,
but did not notice anything strange until 2 AM. It began with an
eerie sense of unease. We were in the basement
watching a show on a laptop,
playing cards
?

David felt it too, and thought he heard
something. We went to the windows. It was a very dark night. Clouds
covered the moon. The back yard was lit only by two floodlights
from the property across the way, and very thick fog rolled across
the long expanses of grass and bushes. We saw a few lit panes in
the house directly opposite ours, and, through other windows, we
saw a few lights on in a neighbor's house. Something seemed off
about the shared back yards - something horribly and innately
wrong
- but it was impossible to say what.

We went around the house closing and locking
every window and turning on every light. For a while, it made us
feel safe. We clung low, peering out between the blinds, each of us
trying to figure out why the back yards terrified us so.

I had the strangest idea, before it even
happened, that there was something wrong with the lights outside. I
watched the two flood lights far off and to the left, and then I
watched the lit window directly opposite us that seemed to be
weirdly bulging and changing shape as I stared. Was it just a trick
of the light? The crossbar seemed to be moving up and up and up
until… there was no way I was imagining it…

We knew for sure when our neighbor two houses
down came out to let out his dog. We heard it barking, and we
rushed to the side windows, watching from total darkness. Ryan slid
the window open just enough to shout
go inside! It's not
safe!
, even though we didn't know for sure…

A third floodlight came on abruptly three
houses down; an angled and bright light that usually lit up many of
our backyards. The back porch light our unaware neighbor had turned
on…. suddenly went dark. A strangled cry rang out, the dog squealed
in horrible pain, and we slammed our window shut in terror.

There was something out there.

Ryan suggested that it was some large and
fast-moving creature that had been lurking between us and the third
floodlight.

David peered out the window, offering no
ideas.

I sat in a corner, trying not to
hyperventilate. We'd been afraid, definitely, but there'd been no
proof until… until…

"There!" David whispered. "It moved
again!"

We practically planted our faces against the
glass. Our hapless neighbor's porch light was back on, and… the
middle floodlight across the way was out. Darkness dominated the
space between our backyards.

"What's it shaped like?" Ryan asked,
confused.

David just shook his head as he peered
intently at the night.

To block out that high-set floodlight, the
thing
out there either had to be very tall, or… very
close…

Gasping, I pulled them both down just as the
windows began to rattle.

We hid in the corner beneath the windows, not
daring to move until the rattling stopped.

Eventually, David peeked.

As he did so, screams rang out from the house
opposite ours. We peeked, too, and we saw that the weirdly morphing
window had gone dark. All the other lights outside were on at full
strength.

"It's… jumping from light to light…" David
breathed, looking rather sick. We watched intently as his guess
proved true: one light came on, another went out, and our neighbors
within that light screamed in pain and terror… and went silent.

"Turn off all the lights," I whispered, my
heart pounding. "We have to break all our lights."

David stayed at the window and brought out
his cellphone to call the police. Ryan and I hurried through the
house, smashing light bulbs with shaking hands.

"I'm so sorry," Ryan said quietly as we met
up back in the kitchen, now cloaked in darkness. "I just wanted to
hang out with you, and then… this…"

I touched his arm. "It's crazy, I know, but
it's not your fault. There's stories, always stories…"

I remember our words, because… screams came
from the basement, and we rushed through the house -

Pitch black radiated from a rectangle on the
floor, darker even than the non-light of the basement at night. I
realized our mistake at the same moment that I saw half of David
lying in silhouette on the floor: with all our other lights broken,
the entity had jumped to the glow of his cellphone. An expanding
rectangular cone of utter darkness lined the space from the phone
on the floor to the ceiling.

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