The Portal in the Forest

By Matt Dymerski

From the author of Psychosis, Matt Dymerski, comes a new reality-bending tale of horror and adventure.

THE PORTAL IN THE FOREST

This neighborhood has a secret - while the adults work multiple jobs to make ends meet, the children trade around strange trinkets and famous books with odd misprints. It seems that, without supervision, they've gotten into something extremely dangerous: another universe.

One adult is not working. One adult notices. One adult discovers their secret - a portal a few miles deep in Virginia woodlands; a portal that goes to a new universe each day. It's a fantastic opportunity to explore, certainly, but there are two problems: the destinations are all dead worlds that have suffered unique and terrible apocalypses... and the portal is getting bigger.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Matt Dymerski
• Release date: Jan 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310661976

Matt Dymerski

I'm an author of horror. I write a wide range; everything from short story anthologies to full-length novels. As an avid horror fan myself, I specialize in finding new ways to disturb even the most jaded horror reader.

Book preview

Matt Dymerski

The Portal in the Forest

Proximate Publishing, LLC

Smashwords Version

All rights reserved.

Copyright © 2014 by Matt Dymerski

http://MattDymerski.com

@MattDymerski

Proximate Publishing, LLC

Cover Art:

Miller Creative Consulting

millercreativeconsulting.wordpress.com

Image courtesy of:

U.S. National Park Service

Redwood National and State Parks

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part

without permission.

Proximate Publishing Books by Matt Dymerski

Psychosis

The Asylum

Creepy Tales

Aberrations

The Final Cycle Series

World of Glass

The Portal in the Forest Series

The Portal in the Forest

The Desolate Guardians

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

About the Author

Other Works

Preview of The Desolate Guardians

Chapter One

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.

***

48

65

47

185 101 84 very slight change between

99

48 Jeffers

62

47

~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