Never A Sight

I can’t remember when I first noticed the portals.

It seems a stupid word for them, but I’m not sure what else works. Portal implies that you can travel between them, and maybe some people can. I’ve never worked out how to do it though, and I’ve never dared to mention them to anyone else. They’re my little secret, my little piece of magic.

At least, they were. I’m not so sure about that now.

To begin with I thought the patches on my walls were damp or mould of some sort. In that really grown-up way that everyone does, I ignored them, hoping they’d either go away by themselves or become someone else’s problem. Of course they didn’t disappear, and I live alone, so there was no-one else to clean up. Eventually I worked up the caring to sort them out. By that time there were about a dozen of them, scattered about the house in no discernable pattern that I could see.

The first one, halfway up the wall in my hallway, I just tried to wipe off with a damp sponge. The good old, fail safe, default cleaning instructions. Works for cars, people and delicate silks, but not, as it turns out, random patches on your wall. Nothing happened, except a faint tingling feeling in my fingers. That first time I put that down to the warm water, messing with my nerve ends.

When the water didn’t do anything I realised I’d need to put a bit more effort into getting rid of them. A quick internet search brought up some worrying results (Respiratory problems? Seriously?), and that was the end of my blasé attitude. With an old scarf tied round my mouth I took a closer look at the one in the hallway, which was the largest, as well as the easiest to reach.

That was when it dawned on me that it wasn’t mould. Well, no type of mould that I recognised, but that was really saying much. Instead of being made of lots of separate specs it was all one solid layer, one colour covering the whole area. And it wasn’t black; there were hints of other colours as well, dark blue and deep purple. Like the sky on cloudy night.

Despite the inanity of that thought it comforted me. I decided- based purely on the colour, and my general lazy assumption that everything sorts itself out- that the patches weren’t dangerous.

So I touched it.

The tingling sensation was back, like a battery discharge or a really bad electric shock. But my other senses were alive. I could hear the sea and the cry of gulls; I could smell the tang of salt water and pungent fish; I could taste fresh, cool air on my tongue.

I jerked my hand back and fell against the other wall, overwhelmed by this blast of… of life, right inside my house. It took a few moments for my pulse to calm down again.

Then I tried it again.

And again.

And again.

I spent the best part of half an hour stood there, touching the patch- the portal- in different places, with different parts of my hand, with my elbow one time. At first it was fascination, though it soon devolved to a mishmash of scientific procedure. Did the rush of unusual stimuli happen anywhere on the patch? Yes. Did it happen when I was touching the wall next to it with the same hand? No. Did it work with any part of my body? Yes.

Did I ever get any sight? No.

Finally it dawned on me that there were more of these portals, and trying the next one gave me a whole new range of data to work with. That one went to a hillside, and now the smells were of wild-flowers, the taste was of morning dew and the sounds were sheep baaing in the distance.

The rest of the day was spent racing between the different portals, trying them all out. None of them seemed to open up to the same place. There was the seaside one, the first one I’d found, but there was also one that was in a snowstorm, one in a jungle, and one that was entirely submerged. That was the scariest of all. Even to this day I’ve never worked out if I could actually drown, or whether its just a sensation of being underwater. Will my body keep breathing, knowing that its safe? I’ve tried to find out, but my nerve goes every time. I only ever touched that one for a few seconds at most, and then I’d normally go back to the seaside, my favourite one of all.

The eventual hypothesis I’ve drawn is that these are windows onto different parts of the world, and like windows nothing solid can pass through them. I get some of the sensory information of the places, but can’t see anything through the black-out curtains.

I had planned, one day, to try and open the windows.

Then I found that one.

Before I loved having them in my house. If the place got too stuffy, or work was too mundane and tedious, I could just touch a portal and be transported somewhere else. With my eyes closed I could imagine wonderful landscapes, glittering waters and breath-taking vistas. And all without having to use any of my meagre annual leave, and I was back home in time for my next binge-session of TV.

So, when the next portal appeared, randomly one morning in my bedroom, I leapt on it. Where could I go now? A beach, the middle of a city, some quaint little country village? My fingers stroked the wall before I’d even untangled the blanket from my feet.

Explosions. Loud enough to make my breastbone shake.

Burning. Scorched air whistling round, whipping up chaos in its wake.

Metal. A sharpness caught on the wind, not all of it from the machinery.

“Help!”

“No!”

“Run!”

The next thing I remember is being flat on my back by the bedroom door. I was soaked in cold sweat, my heart thumping like I’d run a race. As I sat up, holding my stomach and swallowing down the bile in my throat, tears ran down my face.

No. I was done with the portals. I didn’t want to know where they went any more.

The portals are still here, and there are more of them every day. I haven’t touched any of them since the one in the bedroom. There’s barely any wall space left now, and I don’t want to think about what’ll happen when it runs out.

I know I should tell someone, but who? It’s not like there’s a helpline for ‘weird stuff that doesn’t belong to the emergency services’. That’s why I’ve written this. Hopefully this’ll give someone some clues if… if they need to know. If anything happens.

I’ve only been back in my bedroom once, to get as many clothes as I could. I’m scared to even look at the door now.

Help me. Please.

-From a letter found at Incident Site A, believed to be the original source of the incursions.