Sohna and Vivian - My Brother's Keeper
Tom ran in the darkness, the rhythm of his footsteps muffled by the packed snow on the path. In the distance he could hear an occasional car passing on Fifth Street, interrupting the faint electric buzz of an ailing streetlight. He'd continued his early morning jog despite the shortened daylength, not caring what might lurk in the shadows of the trees. If asked, he would have invented some rational excuse for why his behavior was perfectly normal, but he knew, realistically, that it was not. He was actively seeking the shadows, and he knew it. He wanted to find what lay there, to make it accountable for what it had done. He wanted to make it pay.Of course, he had no concrete idea of how he would go about exacting revenge if the opportunity he sought should arise, and this he also knew.
The coin he'd found lying in the snow the day he'd seen Virginia Wolf and her husband disappear weighed heavily in his coat pocket. Without conscious thought his fingers closed around it, holding it like a talisman. The possibilities of which it hinted buoyed him; gave him hope in a little corner of his soul that more might be possible than he'd ever dreamed - but at the same time, his rational mind dismissed this notion as fantasy.
You saw what you wanted to see, he told himself. The coin is fake - anyone might have dropped it. But it's real gold he countered haltingly. Is it? came the reply. Are you absolutely sure?
He pulled it out of his pocket with his black-gloved hand, but it was still too dark to see. He stopped.
To the right a flicker of bluish light caught his eye momentarily. He blinked and looked up, but saw nothing. With a start, he realized he was in the same place in the park that he'd witnessed the couple's disappearance. Squeezing the coin, he left the path, seeking the light's source.
It was just a headlight, his inner voice of reason insisted. But there's no street in that direction, he countered. A reflection, then, came the explanation, followed by, A reflection off of what? He'd gone maybe half the distance to the copse of tangled branches when he heard them. The voices weren't loud, but in the relative quiet of the park they were quite easy to recognize, especially since he'd been half-expecting them anyway. Their words were immaterial and ordinary: "It's almost daylight, let's hurry and get back to the apartment," but he suspected, now more than ever, that Virginia and her husband were anything but. He waited a little while, until they'd walked a few yards away from where he waited in the dark, then cautiously made his way through the thicket towards the place from which they'd come.
The sight of the portal shocked him, although he'd been expecting to find it. Though it was nothing more than a door-sized area where the background of trees was somewhat blurry, it gave him the shivers. Odd, he thought. He'd been so anxious to believe in its existence, fighting the side of himself given to rational explanations, that he'd expected to feel jubilant at the discovery. But, for the moment, all he felt was fear. He stood motionless for a moment, still in the thicket cover, forcing himself to breathe, and as he stood there, the portal began to glow.
Instinctively, Tom crouched low, but though the frightened part of him begged to run away, he fought it, watching with wondering eyes as the light reached a crescendo and a figure stepped through. For an instant, the light from the portal held him in silhouette, then it flickered out. In the half-moment, all Tom could make out was a man, tall and rangy but faceless, dressed in a long cloak. He paused in the darkness, glancing furtively about. Then, to Tom's horror, he appeared to sniff the air like a dog seeking a scent and finding it, before gliding gracefully away.
The portal itself remained open. For a long while Tom remained still, staring at it, but it didn't seem to change. Though he was conscious of a deep fear within himself of approaching the doorway, he was unable to will himself to simply walk away, either. Slowly, he forced himself to walk forward.
Unfortunately, there was little to be discovered even in close proximity to the phenomenon. It seemed to bend the light in an odd way, but that was all. He wanted to touch it, to verify its nature, but his senses were all screaming for him to run, run away before it was too late, before someone or something else came through. It was all he could do to hold his ground. He realized then that he was also holding his breath.
He let it out, and took a deep breath, and then another. What am I afraid of? he suddenly wondered. What could possibly happen? He knew the answer: Many things: Pain, suffering, death. But do I care?
An inner calm came over him. What did it matter, he thought? None of those was worse than the shadow of a life in which he was presently trapped. If death came, he would take it as a release, not a trial. Almost eagerly, he plunged his hand up to the elbow into the vortex.
The result was decidedly anticlimactic. It felt rather like sticking his hand in cool water. He pulled it back, unharmed, and also dry. Then, with a shrug, he stepped through.
