The Portal in the Forest (3 page)

My date insisted we leave when the commotion
started, and I agreed wholeheartedly. On the way out, I heard a
very odd cry: "
She's gone - her body's gone!
" - but I wasn't
sure what to make of it.

On the walk home, I apologized profusely, but
she just seemed scared. Two blocks down, we saw a group of people
huddled around another body.

It was then that I felt something chill and
sharp move by me - but I turned, and saw nothing. I had the
inexplicable sense that I was very close to something large and
menacing, but the night-darkened street seemed normal, save for the
worried people calling emergency services.

Another few blocks down, my date and I stood
under a streetlight and waited for the bus.

We decided to keep moving when a homeless man
on the other side of the road seemed to fall rather roughly. Blood
splattered up as if he'd… but it didn't make sense… why were all
these people having terrible accidents?

Just after we kept walking, I looked back,
and - for a split second - I thought I saw something moving toward
us. It was a mere blink against the streetlight we'd just
abandoned, and it was gone almost immediately, but I quietly
insisted we walk a little faster.

Four police cars surged past us, lights afire
and sirens blazing. In the rotating red and blue, I thought I could
make out a weird blur behind us on the sidewalk, but my eyes just
couldn't make sense of it.

***

I looked up from the book. The boy I'd talked
to earlier had followed me. "You shouldn't be here."

"
You're
here," he replied, standing by
the door and peering out into the storm.

I shrugged. As long as he didn't come further
in, he wouldn't risk running into the rotting bodies dotting the
restaurant. How far behind me had he been? Did he know about
them?

I looked down to find that the story had
skipped part of the narrative. There was a small gap where I'd
stopped reading, and no text in between. Odd… but, then again, this
wasn't just a book, and these weren't just written words…

***

She slammed the door behind us just as
something bashed angrily on the other side. She couldn't help but
scream hysterically. "What the hell is going on?"

I had no answer for her.

I helped her force the door shut, and I
locked it with a relieved sigh. "I have no idea, but we can hole up
here until… until the police do something." The door to my
apartment was solid and sturdy, containing a heavy sheet of metal
as a form of security most campus houses shared. I had no windows
on the first floor; instead, stairs went straight up to my
apartment on the second floor. Never was I more thankful for my
cramped brick-and-metal entryway.

Dashing upstairs and closing and locking the
door to the stairwell, we took refuge in my bedroom and turned on
my small television.

Static. There was only static.

Our cellphones didn't work, either, and the
Internet was out…

It was then we really started to think we
were screwed.

Deciding to turn off the lights so as to
avoid drawing attention to our location, we sat and peered out the
windows into the night.

Clouds covered the moon. Trees swayed in
chilly autumn winds. Nothing living seemed to move…

"There!" she whispered, pointing down the
street.

I saw nothing.

"It was under the streetlight for just a
second…" she said, trembling as she clung to my arm.

I had to confess, despite the terrible things
happening, part of me was still happy… "Wait, I saw something under
a streetlight, too. And when the cops passed, and the lights -"

The lights. Something had brushed past me in
the dark, and something had pounded on our door just as we'd gotten
inside… but I had no porch light.

Intently, I stared at the closest streetlight
until it happened.

Something horrible and twisted shambled past,
visible only under the strongest part of the streetlight's glow. It
was gone almost as soon as I realized I was really seeing
something.

"Do you smell that?" my date asked, almost at
the same time that I realized we'd made a terrible mistake in
turning off all the lights.

In the very dim orange glow from the
streetlights outside, I noticed a dark stain on the carpet near my
roommate's bed. What if one of those things
had already gotten
inside here before we'd arrived?
I jumped up and flipped all
the lights on, illuminating each room in the apartment with a
heart-freezing moment of terror.

The last light, the one in the kitchen,
finally revealed it. It'd been on the other side of the apartment
from us, and we'd stayed quiet, but… now it knew we were there. It
came for me with a demonic and wholly inhuman grin.

I shouted, ran for the front door, and pulled
my date through as she came to meet me. I knew what these things
were, now, and I knew we were doomed… but I still managed to grab
the emergency flashlight from the front staircase.

We burst forth from the heavy door, shoving
the creature there aside, and I hesitated only long enough to shine
my flashlight at it and get a good look.

I'd guessed right.

We took off running into the night, but
screams were already ringing out from multiple nearby streets. We
could seek shelter, seek food, seek safety, but… from the horrors
I'd seen, I knew there was nowhere to hide.

That, and it wasn't cloudy at all. From out
here, we could better see the reflected glow from the city's
lights. There was no Moon, not because of clouds, but because
something massive was blocking out the entire sky. The dim twinkles
I'd mistaken for stars were in fact the city's own light reflected
from some sort of massive structure arching over us from horizon to
horizon. Not a ship, not a building… it seemed more like…
a
leg…

But none of that mattered, after what I
already knew. I didn't have the heart to tell my date as we picked
a basement to huddle in, but we'd seen the creature pursuing us
before.

It had followed us from the party.

It was - or had been - Jen.

Twisted, bloody, and visible only in direct
light… but it was her, no doubt, without any trace of humanity left
within.

***

I looked up as the implications of that
statement sank in. "Hey kid," I whispered, as quietly as I could.
"What's your name?"

"Thomas…" he whispered back, emulating me out
of worry. "What's up?"

"We really have to go, and… you can't make a
sound…"

"Why?"

I stood slowly, shaking my head. I couldn't
tell him that we were sitting in a room full of invisible corpses
that were anything
but
dead. Ever so slowly, I stepped
between the tables, heading for the front door.

Creaks echoed around me as unseen joints
began snapping, cracking, and… moving.

Although I could see he was terrified, Thomas
knew better than to make any noise. I listened carefully to the
movement around me: were they simply reacting, or were they certain
of my presence? I took one quiet step at a time until I saw chairs
began to move back as their unseen occupants stood.

I broke into a run, and I pointed toward the
door. Thomas wasted no time in rushing out and into the rain, but
he almost immediately tripped on invisible rotted piles of flesh.
Picking him up, I waited, heart threatening to thump out of my
chest, until the next flash of lightning revealed a path
forward.

He saw the bodies strewn about - he saw that
they were starting to move and awaken - but I grabbed his mouth and
kept him from screaming. Now that he knew, I used my flashlight,
shining it hurriedly around us to -
shit!

The beam shined across a moving circle of
decayed flesh; hundreds of unseen corpses approached through the
streets, like ghosts in the rain. I shined the flashlight ahead,
illuminating our path, and we splashed through heavy puddles and
leapt over clawing rotten hands.

Pushing down the alleyway as the rain
intensified, we ran back through the portal at full speed.

Pausing in the safety of the forest to catch
my breath, I turned and looked back.

The alley sat clear and empty… until a flash
of lightning illuminated an endless legion of living corpses, all
standing still and gazing at us. They made no move to enter the
rift, but that didn't make me feel any better. Beyond them, up in
the sky… I'd made the same mistake as the doomed man and his date.
Those weren't clouds - just the reflection of other parts of the
sky on vast metal, impossibly high chrome, and it began moving as
we watched…

The children all around screamed and flinched
as a silent but tremendous impact on the other side threw mountains
of rubble across the portal. Moments later, it was buried, and
showed only onto the impenetrable blackness of layers of rock and
dirt. We, however, remained perfectly safe. Only the other side of
the portal had been buried, and I was certain it would simply open
on a new destination the next day without interruption.

"Are you alright?" the oldest boy asked
me.

"That was so cool!" the other kids exclaimed,
gathering around Thomas. "What did you see over there?"

Enjoying the attention, he began smiling and
telling them exactly what had happened. There was no need for
embellishment.

"I'm fine," I told my lone listener, shaking
water out of my hair. I looked down as I did so. "Goddamnit…"

Without realizing it, I'd brought the book
back again. Had it been in my hand through the whole escape?

I set my jaw. I'd try again tomorrow.

Chapter Three

I crested the last hill and immediately
noticed excited energy among the neighborhood kids crowded around
the portal.

"We got a good one today?"

The children parted, and my unofficial
second-in-command stepped forward - the eighteen-year-old boy who
often corralled the others. "Looks like it."

Peering beyond him, I found a rather
surprising sight.

Each day for the last week, the random
destinations had been non-starters. One world had been completely
on fire - from the closest flaming ground to the distant smoldering
mountains - and there'd been no sign of abatement.

We'd spent another whole day staring in
horror out across a vast ocean of what seemed to be thick blood.
The smooth and endless crimson surface had been interrupted only by
a few massive bone-like protrusions, and a sunless sky of carved
ivory presided over the inexplicable sight. Weird ripples had moved
in that blood ocean, as if hidden creatures lived beneath. The
portal had never shown anywhere but alternate Earths as far as
anyone had seen… I'd warned the kids not to think too much about
how our Earth had become like that ungodly place. That way laid
madness.

It had definitely been a relief to find the
portal showing onto an open green pasture the next day, and we'd
almost gone in - but my second noticed it at the last moment: an
eerie lack of parallax. The green pasture was an illusion, almost
like a perfect television screen displayed across the rift, and
what truly lay beyond was impossible to know. Such a deception
hinted at far worse intentions through that particular portal than
in most worlds. Most worlds didn't seem to know or care about
us.

Every Earth we'd glimpsed in the last week
had been anathema to human life in some way or another. Every world
had been dead or dying. I'd figured that this was all somehow
related to the otherworldly book I was trying to get rid of, and
its inexplicable penchant for detailing the final stories of the
doomed, but I couldn't be sure. I didn't know if it controlled the
portal, or whether it was merely connected to it somehow, but the
children reported that the destinations were definitely getting
worse. The first few weeks they'd observed it, there'd been nothing
but pleasant forests, open plains, and innocuous oceans.

But today's sight changed our data set.
Today, the portal opened on a busy street in a city that looked
much like New York. We watched people drive past in recognizable
cars and trucks. Many passersby were on foot, hurrying with very
human impatience.

It didn't occur to me until I'd already
stepped through - nobody on the other side had given the portal any
heed.

Suddenly surrounded by the hustle, movement,
and engine rhythms of a busy city street, I turned and looked back.
Yep, there it sat: a ten-foot-wide jagged oval in space showing a
forested path and a crowd of children watching from the other side.
None of the suited busy-bodies on the sidewalk gave even the
slightest glance at the portal.

Or at me, for that matter. They bumped
against me and pushed past in an ongoing series of collisions. None
so much as flinched. None apologized. They weren't completely
unaware of me - they just didn't care.

Given that we'd not yet seen a world where
any human being was still alive, I had the distinct concern that
these people were nothing more than marionettes. If they were dead…
if they were just emulating life… then that meant, in the middle of
a busy big city street, I was actually completely alone. I'd seen
many things in my life, and almost nothing truly got to me anymore,
but I'd never been able to handle p-zombies. Something about that
kind of soulless fate just struck me as existentially horrifying in
a basic and gripping way.

Forget this.

Placing the book down on the sidewalk, I
darted back through the portal.

"What happened?" the kids asked. "What's
wrong?"

I looked down. The book was in my hand again.
"Damnit." I watched their expressions. "Did I put this book down on
the sidewalk?"