The Other Side

Scene

The transition happened so suddenly that for a moment I wasn't certain anything had changed. One instant Anna, Emily, and I were standing in Avariel. The next, we found ourselves in the middle of a circle of weathered stones beneath an unfamiliar sky.

I stood perfectly still, trying to understand what I was seeing. Ancient monoliths rose around us from the forest floor, their surfaces blanketed with moss and lichen. Several had partially crumbled, while others leaned at slight angles as though centuries of wind and rain had slowly pushed them from their original positions. Strange carvings spiraled across their faces, badly eroded but still visible beneath the moss.

For all I knew, the stones had stood there for hundreds of years without anyone understanding why they had been placed there. But standing among them now, knowing what existed on the other side, their purpose seemed impossible to miss.

Then I turned around.

The Door stood near the center of the circle.

Without the magic of Avariel surrounding it, there was something almost ridiculous about how ordinary it looked. It was set within a simple wooden frame with no walls attached to either side. The paint, probably white once, had faded with age to a soft ivory, and a brass doorknob shimmered in the afternoon sunlight.

Emily stood beside me, staring at it. For twenty years, that Door had remained unlocked.

I reached into my pocket and removed the silver key. Emily's eyes dropped to it as I held it out to her.

For a moment she didn't move. Then she took the key from my hand and stepped toward the Door. Anna came quietly to my side as Emily slipped the key into the lock.

She looked back at me, and I nodded.

Emily turned the key.

A quiet click sounded through the forest.

That was all. No flash of light. No thunder. No great wave of magic rushing through the trees. Just the small, ordinary sound of a lock turning.

But somewhere beyond that simple wooden Door was Avariel, and for the first time in twenty years, the way between our worlds was closed.

The walk back to the cabin felt strangely familiar. After everything we had seen in Avariel—floating mountains, impossible castles, creatures that should have existed only in stories—the forest around Blackwater Lake seemed almost painfully ordinary. Pine needles covered the trail, birds called somewhere among the trees, and sunlight filtered through branches that moved gently in the afternoon breeze.

Emily walked a few steps ahead of us while Anna stayed close beside me. She had been unusually quiet since we passed through the Door, taking in this new world with the same curiosity I had once felt upon entering hers. Every so often I caught her studying something completely ordinary—a bird moving through the branches, the trail beneath our feet, even the distant sound of an airplane—but she asked no questions.

When the cabin finally appeared through the trees, I stopped.

Something was wrong.

The windows were dark. Leaves and pine needles had gathered across the porch, and weeds had grown high around the foundation. The wood had faded from years of exposure, while dirt covered windows I remembered being clean.

It didn't look like a cabin someone had left a few weeks ago. It looked like no one had been there in years.

I stared at it for another moment before walking toward the porch. The boards creaked beneath my feet as I reached into my pocket for the key, half expecting it not to be there after everything that had happened. My fingers closed around the familiar piece of metal.

At least something hadn't changed.

The key resisted at first, and I had to work it back and forth before the lock finally turned. I pushed against the door, but it barely moved. Something scraped across the floor inside before it reluctantly opened far enough for me to squeeze through.

The smell hit me immediately.

Dust, old wood, and something faintly musty filled the cabin. I stood just inside the doorway while my eyes adjusted to the darkness. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling and stretched between the furniture. A thick layer of dust covered the table, chairs, and almost everything else I could see. Dead leaves had found their way beneath the door, collecting along the walls and in the corners.

I didn't answer. I walked farther into the room and ran my fingers across the table, leaving four clean trails through the dust. Anna entered last and looked around silently.

I knew this cabin. I knew every room, every piece of furniture, every creaking floorboard.

But this wasn't how I had left it.

Whatever had happened while we were in Avariel, one thing was becoming impossible to ignore. We had been gone much longer than I thought.

I reached for the light switch beside the door and flipped it. Nothing happened. I tried again, although I wasn't sure why I expected a different result.

The longer I looked around, the stranger everything seemed. It wasn't only the dust and cobwebs. Things were different. A chair had been moved from where I remembered it. Several objects were missing from the shelves, while others had been placed where they didn't belong. The old blanket that had always been folded across the back of the couch was gone. Even the kitchen looked wrong. Cupboards stood partly open, and several drawers had been emptied.

But whoever had been here hadn't stayed.

I walked into the bedroom. The bed was bare except for the mattress, most of the drawers in the dresser had been emptied, and the closet contained only a few forgotten hangers.

Someone had gone through the cabin.

By the time I returned to the main room, Anna was examining one of the electrical outlets with obvious curiosity while Emily had discovered that opening the refrigerator was a mistake. She slammed it shut and immediately backed away.

Emily nodded enthusiastically.

I was about to check the other rooms when a sound from outside stopped me.

An engine.

I moved to the window. A patrol car was coming slowly along the dirt road toward the cabin. It pulled in beside the porch and stopped.

I recognized the driver before he even opened the door.

Emily hurried to the window beside me. Anna remained a few steps behind us, watching curiously as Mercer climbed from the patrol car. He looked older than I remembered. There was more gray in his hair, and the lines around his face seemed deeper.

Then he saw me.

For a moment, the words didn't make sense.

Two years.

I turned toward the cabin. The faded wood, the weeds growing around the foundation, the dark windows. Inside were layers of dust, cobwebs, empty shelves, and rooms that no longer looked the way I remembered them.

Suddenly, all of it made sense.

Movement behind me drew his attention as Emily stepped through the doorway. Mercer froze again, but this time his reaction was different. He stared at her with an expression I remembered from the night at the sheriff's station, when an old missing-child poster had turned an impossible story into something neither of us could explain.

Mercer slowly removed his hat. For perhaps the first time since I'd met him, the sheriff seemed completely at a loss for words.

Then Anna stepped onto the porch.

Mercer looked at her, his eyes moving to the ears before returning to me.

I looked back toward the dark cabin.

Apparently, I had lost quite a bit of it. ]