“Hrrgh…” groaned Michael while opening his eyes, raising his head in discomfort. “Where am I?” he asked, looking around as someone walked towards him. The steady beep of an EKG and the slow drip of an IV line snaking into his arm gave him a hint.

  “Finally awake, Mr. Diaz. I am Detective Damian Walter, and you are in a hospital.”

  “Huh?... Where are my parents? Are they alright?” he asked while trying to remember how this unfolded.

  “They are fine; they have been in the waiting room since last night. You will be able to meet with them as soon as you answer some questions.” He waited a few seconds and continued, “Do you remember what happened?”

  “What happened?” Michael paused, rubbing his throbbing forehead, genuinely confused. He remembered falling into the portal and returning to the World Trade Center.

  “Take your time, you lost a lot of blood.” The Detective explained.

  Michael knew he could not tell what actually happened, as even he could barely believe it himself. He had to come up with something convincing enough, but he was not confident in making up some elaborate lie, so he decided to say mostly the truth.

  “I remember I saw a man with a gun walking towards my parents, and I instinctively tackled him without even considering the consequences.” Looking at the small, stitched bullet wound, he continued. “He shot me before I reached him. When I kept charging, I remember hitting something.”

  Michael was trying to mention as little as possible about the portal or what happened outside the gunfight. He tried to make a confused face while looking down.

  “What did you hit? What happened to the criminal and the weapon?”

  Michael swallowed. “I… remember grabbing his wrist, trying to force the gun away from me and driving him into what felt like a column.” The detective’s eyebrow twitched, but he kept writing. “It was really dark. I couldn’t see. He pulled the trigger and-” Michael paused for dramatic effect. “-is blood hit my face.” He described it as a natural face of disgust that came to him from the recollection.

  “What happened after that?” asked the detective while typing away on his laptop, not taking his eyes off Michael’s face.

  “I don’t remember, I remember falling forward after trying to look at my hands covered in warm blood, yet I could barely see the outlines of my hands in the darkness, and I blacked out after a while … and waking up here.”

  “You said it was really dark. What do you mean by that? The observation deck lights were on.”

  “I don’t know. When I tackled the terrorist, I had my eyes closed. When I opened them, it was really dark. I could barely see my own hands.”

  Michael kept answering question after question. Anything up to the point of falling into the portal, he told the truth, since there was nothing to hide about his everyday life. After about an hour, the detective was sure he would not get much more.

  When asked about the cuts on his fingers, he said he had no recollection of them happening, to which the detective frowned in confusion and distrust.

  “The witnesses said that once you tackled the man, a black circle opened up and swallowed both of you before closing again a second later. Then, minutes later, another one opened to spit you out, falling on the floor and closing back up again. Does this mean anything to you?” Damian asked, digging for the truth.

  “Black circle?” Michael was perplexed, which helped his case. The reason for his reaction was that he could see perfectly fine through the portal, which was his biggest worry in his lie, as the witnesses could have seen the clearing when he went in and his bedroom when he came out.

  “No idea… Is that why it was dark wherever I was?” Michael took it as part of his made-up story.

  After more questions and some suggestions on how to address the trauma this situation could have caused, the detective seemed to be done with questioning.

  “Mr. Diaz, I appreciate your cooperation. Your account will be added to the report. We’ll verify the details and may need to follow up with you later,” he said while closing his laptop and reaching into his breast pocket for a business card. “Until then, don’t discuss the incident with anyone outside your immediate family. If anything else comes back to you, no matter how small, contact me. Now rest. The doctor will bring your parents in soon. We’ll talk again when you’re in better condition.”

  ◇◇◇

  “I think it is a terrible idea to go home this early when all the doctors recommended you to stay at least overnight.”

  “You have to let him make his own decision. Don’t get me wrong, I agree, but he is a grown man already.”

  “Thanks, Dad.” Michael looked out the car window as they crossed the George Washington Bridge. What am I going to do? What did I do with the gun? And my room floor is probably covered in blood. I need to come up with something.

  ◇◇◇

  After reaching his house, he put his plan into play. “Mom, I am really hungry.”

  “What would you like?”

  “I would really love some Antonio’s pizza.” First time I am happy about them not having delivery services.

  “You and your mom wait here while I go get it,” Dad announced with a grin." We are feasting tonight to celebrate our hero."

  “Thanks, Dad.” Yes, that probably buys me at least 45 minutes, and Mom never goes into my room without knocking.

  Michael went to his room to see his mostly dried blood on the floor and the gun on the floor next to the bed. The first thing he did was put the gun in a ziplock bag while handling it with gloves. He put the ziplock back inside another one, then put it inside one of his folded shirts in the middle of his drawer, before covering it with some other shirts on the pile of clothes he never wore.

  Then he got to scrubbing and cleaning the floor with dish soap and water, then a bunch of paper towels. He threw it all into a trash bag before putting it inside another, paranoid it would be found out.

  When his father arrived with the pizza, the family got together to eat, bombarding him with questions to which he responded with the same lie he had fed the detective.

  “What went through your head when you charged at the man? You may know some martial arts, but you yourself told us it is useless against an armed opponent,” his mother said to him.

  “I can’t even imagine what we would have done if you had died trying to save us,” his father pitched in.

  “I don’t know, I just reacted,” Michael said truthfully.

  Silence followed for a few awkward seconds.

  “Well, everything ended well, and whatever miracle took place returned our little hero home. Let’s not ruin the celebration.” His father tried to bring the mood back to how it was before.

  After the long dinner, Michael pretended to go to bed because he was tired, which he was, but his mind was still racing. I made those portals. It would be too big a coincidence for it to happen 3 times. He thought as he went to his room.

  Michael closed the door and locked it behind him, making sure the blinds left nothing visible to the public.

  Standing awkwardly in his room by himself, he tried to remember and figure out what had caused them. What he remembered was that each time he desired to be somewhere, he pictured the place in front of him, and the portals opened in response.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

  First, he had to choose a location, somewhere he knew well, without prying eyes to cause trouble.

  The attic. He thought.

  He pictured the attic just above the hatch, and the dusty little pull string hanging down. While still depicting the scene in the attic, he wanted it to be in front of him. And it was then, the same feeling he got when he tried to take the terrorist away from his parents appeared.

  A black ring emerged out of nowhere in front of him. This time, it was a bit smaller, which confused him, as every time it had been slightly bigger than himself, as a perfect circle. He could see the exact pull string he had pictured a second ago inside the black ring, though it was barely illuminated by the light squeezing through the hatch from below.

  Ok, now I’m sure that I was the one who did that… but how? I didn’t even move or say anything. For a second, he just stared, the weight of what this could do pressing on him. If I can… summon these just by thinking, how far does this go? When do they close? And what if I’m found out? He pondered.

  Trying to keep his composure, he crouched and walked through. Perplexed at the change of space he had just caused. How can it be so dark in here if I can see the bedroom light? Why is none of it lighting up this place?

  Looking back at the bright bedroom, he waited as if it was going to close, yet he was surprised as it didn’t. He noticed the edges of the portal were touching the roof, which was just as uncomfortably low as he remembered. Is that why it is smaller? Can it not push on the ceiling?

  Now, how do I clo… Stopped mid-thought as the portal shrank when he pictured it closing inwards, as reality followed his imagination.

  Open. He thought as it appeared back in the same spot, pointing at the now-lit attic. Close. And it shut. Great, this seems easy to control. He said as he continued to test for a while.

  It was like a new muscle. Like one, he could imagine and picture moving his hand, but it was different from actually doing it. He needed to make a conscious decision to overlap reality with his imagined destination, then decide where in that overlap to merge them, and lastly flex that new ‘muscle’.

  After a long series of tests, he started to notice patterns. Unless he deliberately pictured a different placement, the portals always formed about half a hand’s length in front of him. And unless the surroundings forced them smaller, or he willed them tighter, they defaulted to a perfect circle roughly two meters wide.

  Way past midnight, he was testing the edges of the portal. He knew that it was shaped like a falling drop of water. Curved on the outside of the portal, and grew to a point on the inside. He was using two portals, yet this time one was horizontal and the other vertical. Holding the pencil through the horizontal one, he could see it coming out of the other one in the perpendicular orientation.

  While mesmerized by the phenomenon, he heard a knock at the door, startling him. He willed the portal he was currently working on to close without thinking. And the pencil in his hand was split in two with no resistance.

  With no time to ponder on how close he was to losing a finger, or worse, a hand, he went and opened the door. After lying to his dad about not being able to sleep due to the thought of almost losing them and his own life, he finally went to bed. He noticed then that his curiosity about the portals had taken his focus away from the traumatic situation he had just experienced. He was exhausted. The blood loss, the trauma he hadn’t fully internalised, the experiments with the portals that were interrupted, and having lied more than any other day in his life, he prepared to go to sleep.

  Before passing out on his bed, he wanted to leave a test. He pushed his closet off the wall a little and opened two connected portals behind the sliver of space he left behind the closet.

  In the morning, he saw that his parents had left him breakfast and gone to work. With his parents not home, he looked behind his closet, smiling at the two portals still hovering in place. He personally called his employer and asked for 2 weeks of vacation immediately, citing an emergency due to the lack of notice.

  “What now?” Michael started thinking about everything that was now possible and how to take advantage of it without becoming a government lab rat.

  He started looking through his old boxes of things he did not want to throw out, yet knew were useless. He took out an old camera and turned it on. Looking through it, he opened another portal. Through the camera, the portals look very different. The edges that rippled outward like waves of heat haze with hints of black remained. But the center of it was pitch-black, swallowing all the light that hit it and hiding the other side.

  Getting a laser pointer from the same dust-covered box, he turned it on and pointed it at the portal to see nothing coming out of the other side.

  Curious as to what it looked like for him on the other side, he taped the laser pointer’s button on and left it pointing at the portal from the table.

  He leaned closer and looked through the other portal. From his perspective, he could still see the faint red shimmer from the pointer… but only as light already inside the ring, not the beam itself. He shifted his head closer

  A sudden spike of brightness forced him to yank his head back.

  Ouch... Sound was able to make it through in my earlier testing. Maybe it makes it through because it is vibrations in the air, so that makes sense. Matter crosses, but light does not. Weird. Light, and even the heat from the sunlight on the other side of the portal, did not make it through. The only electromagnetic radiation that could be noticed on the other side was light, and only to Michael’s eyes.

  He had even tried to warm a slice of bread by placing a palm-sized portal on top of the slice on a plate on the table, and another portal inside the running microwave, while he was in another room.

  Nothing. Since sunlight does not heat me through a portal, it seems like the only pure energy that passes through is visible light, and only to my eyes. He had even tried it with his walkie-talkies, but the portals just obstructed the signal.

  Tallying what he knew, he thought Right… portals can’t be moved once they’re summoned. They stay exactly where I put them. I control the opening, the closing, and the placement-but not the movement. And they stay open even if I’m unconscious. Amazing… or a nightmare if I forget one somewhere.

  I also need to find a new place to test and practice with these portals; I could have lost a finger last night. He reasoned that he did not want to be discovered. And I know just the place.

  After changing into something a little more appropriate for outdoors, Michael was ready to go back to where this whole portal business started. He went to the drawer and got the gun from inside the ziplock bag. After watching a few videos on firearms and servicing them, Michael took it out and cleaned it as best he could with what he had at home. He put the ziplock and the trash bags with the bloody paper towels he had used to clean his room into a trash can, sandwiched between sticks and leaves he had gathered.

  Taking the metal trash can outside, he lit it on fire with some fuel and matches and cooked a few marshmallows as a cover in case he was being spied upon. After half an hour, the fire died, and he brought it back inside, the smell of charcoal and burned plastic filling the garage.

  Time to deal with the last and most significant piece of evidence. Michael thought as he loaded the pistol with the 7 bullets in the magazine that were left, and in his room.

  Michael opened a portal, and through it, he could see the criminal’s body at the center of the circle of symbols engraved into the ground.

  After taking a deep breath to regain his courage, he stepped through. Immediately looking around, he did not notice anything around him. Crouching up to the body, he could see that the blood had all dried up.

  He thought about somehow dropping off the body at some police station or the crime scene using his portals, but that would only ever cause more unrest and problems for him. So he decided to burn the body and bury it somewhere in that same forest.

  Getting to work, Michael started collecting branches scattered around the place. There was even one fallen tree that looked promising, but it was too large to drag, and he did not have an axe at hand, so he ended up just taking its larger dried branches and breaking them off.

  Getting what he thought was enough wood took a while. He piled the branches and sticks all on the man in the middle of the clearing as a precaution to avoid starting a forest fire and having the police on his back. If there even was a police.

  While dousing the pile of branches that had entirely hidden the corpse after several hours of gathering gasoline from the emergency jerrycan, Michael started to wonder if this was even the same planet. The first time he saw this place was through a portal with ethereal tentacles, where a group of men were lighting symbols on the floor that stayed marked there even 10 years later.

  Striking the match, he noticed that wherever he was, the sun was starting to set behind a mountain. Michael lit a stick in his hand and held it like a torch for a few seconds before throwing it onto the pile a few feet away, which immediately caught fire.

  Michael stood there looking at the fire for way longer than necessary, as if the man would rise from the flames. All I need is to bury him tomorrow. He thought as he crouched to pick up the gun from the ground, and he froze.

  At that weird angle, he could see a massive grey wolf upside down in the corner of his eye between his legs. The wolf was very slowly stepping with one paw in front of the other, the rear ones following where the front ones had stepped, so as not to make noise.

  Michael snapped back to reality as the wolf slowly drew closer, unaware that it had been found out. He finished grabbing the gun, and before turning around, knowing they would start sprinting, he turned off the switch and readied the weapon.

  He did not know if the pistol could take down a wolf the size of a horse, but he sure was going to try. He did not have the confidence to open a portal while being chased by a wolf and close it before it could get its claws on him.

  Turning around as fast as he could, he shot twice at the wolf, aiming for the head.

  The wolf began sprinting as Michael pulled the trigger a third time. The wolf discombobulated, tripped on nothing, and fell, sliding just to Michael’s feet as it spasmed and moved erratically.

  Michael took a step back, terrified as he kept aiming at the wolf with brain damage. As he pulled the trigger, this time it hit dead center between its eyes as its random motions stilled, and it lay there lifelessly before Michael, with the fire behind him crackling as it died down.

  As he stood looking at the beast, a few seconds later, the quiet ended once more. The sound of a screaming child hit the back of his ears.

  Michael could not understand its cries from a distance, and the trees blocked the sound, but he knew it was a cry for help. The sound of the steps grew louder, yet Michael did not open a portal.

  “▉▉▉!” the voice cried a few seconds later, the sound much clearer. Michael didn’t know the language, yet the meaning slammed into his mind: Help! Save me!. A second later, a kid with golden hair came running out of the bushes.