He worried that it was just another point at which he questioned his sanity, but felt powerless before the question. He had to ask until it was no longer real, but just another wild and crazy story he told himself.
By his good fortune a new project came in at the shop that kept him almost occupied so that he could wait the otherwise agonizing weeks for each Friday night to pursue his new hobby of looking for a fake doorway. Of course, checking the online satellite imagery of his town, square by square, had yielded nothing useful. If any part of his memory was actually real, then a good deception would require screens showing false images to the sky, as well. All the more so was this true with the advent of public and private aerial surveillance drones and the simple fact most of the town was under a flight path because the airport was built along the same river bottom.
So here he was, now, five weeks into this new hobby with plenty of things crowding out the spooky memory. As the sun was setting in the warm night air, he froze when he thought he recognized the arched doorway so close to a bakery. He moved to a spot where the ancient stonework of the city formed a section of low stone wall facing across some open ground from the bakery. He held a book, the text just visible in the waning light and realized this was the only part of the open square without any artificial lighting.
Hardly the driving curiosity that loomed so large that afternoon of the riot, which he figured had to have been staged for some reason; he still carried just a vestige of excitement as he watched the doorway out of the corner of one eye. He decided it was completely natural that he would look up when someone came out that double door.
Was it his imagination? The right half of the door opened inward, and as the figure reached back to pull shut the door panel, the action wasn’t exactly matching the visual effect or sound of the squeaking hinges and the door clapping against the lip attached to the other side. Something subtle as he watched wasn’t synchronized. It was the sort of thing almost no one else would have noticed, but was precisely the kind of thing that would have caught his eye. It as what made him useful in the old furniture repair shop where he worked.
He decided it was a faint mismatch in color, like a replaced veneer that needed fading a bit to match the rest of the facing on something. But at this distance, even with his eyes, it was too subtle to represent solid evidence. Still, it was the first time he felt that his strange experience was more than just a hallucination.
He closed the book, and then lowered his head and rested the book on top. He was earnestly praying that he would be allowed to find out what was going on in his head and that he could put this thing to rest. He would have been glad to simply resume his previous life, confusing as it was for a restless mind that wandered every path of inquiry neglected by the rest of the world.
Looking up, he realized it had gotten dark and the plaza was very quiet. The flapping of a small poster in the gentle breeze caught his eye and he remembered that there was an open-air concert in a park across town. A significant portion of the Friday night wanderers would be there, leaving him to test this one most likely place in near solitude. Scanning the square, he realized there weren’t even any policemen.
Somehow, the sense of trepidation deserted him. He rose and wandered over toward the window of the bakery. Because the heavier traffic over the centuries seldom got so close to the buildings, the cobblestone surface sloped upward a bit toward the storefront. After standing a moment gazing at pastries he didn’t really see, he turned and wandered along the wall, absently dragging his fingertips along the surface. He slowed a bit in front of the arched double doors.
With only a moment’s hesitation, he continued past it, still dragging his fingers. It was there! Where his fingers should have slipped into the archway to the deeply set wooden panels, they brushed across a faintly gritty surface just a few millimeters inside the facing. He stopped, but not abruptly, dropping his hand to his side. Glancing in the direction of where his hand had just touched something invisible, he reached out again, gently.
There it was. He pressed in one place and felt a faint moment of resistance, and then his fingers went past the surface. His fingertips disappeared for just an instant before they became visible again. But the color wasn’t quite right. Even in the darkness he could see they had lost a little color, mostly deficient in red.
More, there was a distinct but faint tingle, a boundary only a couple of millimeters thick, rather like an energy curtain. He pushed a bit farther and the odd tingle traveled up his arm. But instead of touching fingers to the wooden door panel, they found nothing, as if the surface of wood wasn’t there.
There, that explained it. Visually his fingers rested on the solid wood, but he felt nothing. He saw his fingertips just a bit closer than he felt them, where they touched nothing. It left him with an odd visual effect, where a thin cross-section slice of his forearm was missing.
Without so much as a flicker of conscious thought, he stepped forward sharply into the arched doorway.