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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.