The Portal in the Forest Read Free

afar. "What's that?"
    "It's a journal I found in another universe,"
I replied, carefully directing the makeshift page-turner I'd
created. "But I suspect it's a cognitive hazard. I dropped it, but
then still had it with me later. I even brought it back here to our
world… very stupid move."
    "You're weird." After a small nervous laugh,
he took one step closer. "Why's it red like that?"
    "Don't read it directly," I warned him. "The
book is in the next room. I've reflected its image off of a mirror,
through a smudged and offset spectrum filter, into a camera, which
sends the image to this computer upside down… remember, it's
backwards, too, because of the mirror, so what we see here has many
obfuscations and errors to protect our minds. Finally, I built a
custom OCR program to translate the malformed text to this
device."
    Eyes wide, he came fully forward and touched
the rather battered device directly. "What's it do?"
    "It's a Braille reader."
    He laughed for real this time. "That's an
awful lot to read some book, right?"
    "You can never be too safe. I suggest you
tell the other kids in the neighborhood about this technique, given
their habit of stealing things from other universes."
    He took a step back. "I don't really talk to
the other kids much…"
    "But you've been through that portal in the
woods?"
    "Yeah…"
    "Can you tell me anything about it?" I asked,
running my hands along the Braille reader as I did so.
    Christ.
     
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    Even through all the safeguards, errors, and
translation into Braille - which was normally the holy grail of
hazard filters - the book was insane gibberish. I'd first seen it
as a journal filled with diary-like musings and random doodles… it
was only pure luck that I hadn't read anything but the last entry.
That account had made sense of the empty world I'd visited, and its
apocalypse by hungry darkness entity. Had that part of the book
been fake, too? What, then, had killed everyone?
    But I'd seen the half-disintegrated corpses.
That much, at least, had to have been true. Had the unknown girl
who'd written those things somehow added to the end of the book
without realizing what it was? Or had it acquired cognitohazardous
properties after she was already dead?
    "The portal was just there one day,"
the boy explained. "I was walking and ran into a bunch of younger
and older kids throwing things into it. Guys dared each other,
sure, but nobody was that stupid. We threw stuff into it, even made
a big rope and let a stray dog run around in there. It seemed safe
after a while. Only thing, though. It goes somewhere new every
morning. We don't know what would happen if we were still inside at
night."
    So, it was as I'd suspected.
    Holding a box, my eyes closed, I crept into
the next room and closed the cardboard flaps around the book. I
only opened my eyes once it was safely sealed within.
    "Is it safe now?" the boy asked.
    "As safe as it can be, with barebones tools,"
I told him, heading for the front door with the box under my arm.
"Well, are you coming along?"
    He was, apparently. He followed maybe ten or
twenty feet behind me as I headed through the old Dodson lot and
back into the old-growth forests beyond the last row of suburban
houses. The Blue Ridge Mountains towered on the horizon as I
crested the abrupt hill just shy of the portal. For a moment, I
could see above the treescape, and I scanned the distance out of
habit - but noticed nothing anomalous.
    Several children, ranging from young to upper
teens, sat around the portal. They all froze as I approached,
clearly fearing that their secret had finally been discovered by
the adults, but I ignored their apprehension. "What do we have
today?"
    The oldest boy, probably seventeen or
eighteen years of age, stood slowly. "It's a bad one."
Instinctively responding to my implicit authority, he waited.
    I