The Door Between Worlds

The Douglas firs know something I don't.

Three years since I built my cabin in the Cascades, three years of listening to whispers older than human speech. Though sometimes I wonder if it's been longer. Memory feels slippery here, like trying to hold water. My grandfather would've called this foolishness - trees talking, mushrooms drawing circles like ancient compasses pointing toward secrets. But Grandpa never lived alone with forty acres of old growth, never felt how the forest breathes differently at 3 AM when the world splits open just enough to let strange things slip through.

I discovered the path on a Tuesday.

More like it discovered me. I'd been following my usual loop - down past the cedar grove where the moss grows thick as carpet, then up along the ridge where lady ferns unfurl like green prayers between scattered trilliums. My boots had memorized every root, every stone. Five miles of winding trail that ended at my front door, where coffee waited and the radio crackled with distant human voices.

But Tuesday, the path forked.

Right where it never forked before. Yesterday: nothing but sword ferns and cedar trunk. Now a narrow track curved away into shadows, marked by mushrooms I'd never seen - pale caps that seemed to glow with their own light, arranged in a perfect spiral that made my eyes water if I stared too long.

I should have turned back.

Should have jogged home. Made that coffee, checked email on my satellite connection like a reasonable person who chose off-grid living for the solitude–not the mysteries. Instead, I followed the new path. Because that's what you do when the forest offers you a door.

The trees changed as I walked deeper. Old growth gave way to something older - massive trunks that seemed to bend space around them, bark that looked almost metallic in the filtered light. The air tasted different here. Electric. Like the moment before lightning strikes, but sustained, ongoing. My skin prickled.

Thirty minutes in, the path ended at a door.

Not a metaphor. The door was set into a hillside that felt wrong—too geometric, too purposeful. The door itself was unremarkable: weathered wood, iron hinges gone green with age, a handle worn smooth by countless hands. It looked like it belonged on a farmhouse, not embedded in a forest that predated European settlement by millennia.

I stood for ten minutes. The usual sounds—squirrels, a woodpecker, wind—were muted, as if someone had turned down the world.

No signal—not unusual—yet the clock read 2:47, frozen. Power-cycling did nothing.

The handle turned with no resistance.

Inside was a room that couldn't exist—larger than the hill, walls curving into darkness, a ceiling lost above. But it did exist, obviously, because I was standing in it, breathing air that smelled of ozone and something else - something clean and sharp that reminded me of winter mornings before snowfall.

Along the walls, shelves. Thousands of shelves, stretching up beyond where my flashlight beam could reach. They looked like books—covers of pressed leaf, bindings of twisted root and vine. Some glowed softly. Others seemed to absorb light entirely. I pulled one at random from shoulder height.

It fell open. Pages covered in symbols that hurt to look at directly. But as I stared, fighting the headache building behind my eyes, the symbols shifted. Rearranged themselves. Became letters. Became words.

Day 847. Subjects adapting. Memory suppression nominal—recall bleeding: 12%. The weather stabilized. Local ecosystems: nominal.

Note: Observer 47‑N reports elevated native sensitivity. Recommend enhanced screening of isolated populations. Priority: rural/off‑grid subjects.

The forest remembers. We make them forget.

My hands shook as I read. The words kept shifting, reorganizing, as if the book was writing itself while I watched. I flipped pages. More entries, more observations. Maps of areas I recognized - my valley, my cabin, marked with symbols I couldn't decipher. Photographs of people I'd never seen, except...

Except I had seen them. Hiking the same trails I walked. Standing in clearings where I'd stopped to rest. Always at a distance, always just familiar enough that I'd assumed they were other locals, other forest lovers like myself. But now, looking at these images, I realized something that made my stomach drop: they were wearing the same clothes in every photo. Standing in exactly the same positions. As if they were mannequins, someone kept moving around the forest, props in a play I didn't know I was watching.

I snapped the book shut and shoved it back on the shelf. Grabbed another. This one opened to technical specifications—lists of equipment, deployment schedules, something called "baseline maintenance protocols." Words that looked like English but arranged in sentences that made no grammatical sense, as if written by someone who understood the mechanics of the language but not its heart.

The third book showed maps. Not of my forest, but of hundreds of forests. Thousands. Each marked with the same symbols, each with notes about "integration levels" and "subject compliance rates." A global network of... what? Observation posts? Research stations?

Prisons?

I don't know how long I stood there, reading by the light of books that shouldn't exist, learning about projects that couldn't be real. The lighting never changed. But my body told me hours had passed. My legs ached. My mouth was dry.

When I finally looked up from the books, someone was watching me.

He stood near the entrance, tall and thin, wearing hiking clothes that were perfectly clean despite the muddy forest outside. His shadow fell wrong—too sharp, angled toward no visible light source. His smile was the kind you practice in mirrors - too wide, too friendly, not quite reaching his eyes. When he blinked, it took a moment too long.

"You're early," he said. His voice sounded normal, pleasant even, but it seemed to come from slightly the wrong direction, as if ventriloquized. "We weren't expecting access until the next cycle."

I clutched the book tighter. "Who's 'we'?"

"The research team. We've been monitoring your integration since the homestead establishment." Very impressive results, actually. Most subjects require extended conditioning periods to develop your sensitivity markers."

Subjects. The word from the book. I was a subject.

My stomach dropped. I was a subject. Heat crawled up my neck. The room tilted slightly, like standing on a ship in rough water. Nausea swept through me. "I need to go home." The words came out smaller than I intended, like a child asking permission.

His smile widened. "Of course. Standard procedure requires intake completion first. Simple measurements. Minimal discomfort."

The room felt smaller suddenly. Despite its impossible dimensions. The shelves seemed to lean inward, the books glowing brighter, their light pressing against my eyes. I could feel something shifting in my head, like fingers rearranging furniture in rooms I'd forgotten I had.

"I said I need to go home." Louder this time. Steadier.

"This is home." His voice had lost some of its practiced warmth. "This is where you've always been. You just temporarily forgot."

Memory fragments, unbidden: my apartment in Seattle, the job at the marketing firm, the decision to buy land and build a cabin. But underneath those memories, others were stirring. A different Seattle, where the Space Needle twisted in directions that defied geometry. A different job, tracking migration patterns of things that weren't quite animals through forests that weren't quite forests.

A different world, where doors like this one were as common as coffee shops, where the forest was an interface, a bridge between realities maintained by people who wore human faces but stood wrong, smiled wrong, spoke with voices that came from the wrong direction.

I turned and ran.

Behind me, I heard him call out - not words, but something else. A sound like wind through pine needles, like the creaking of old wood, like the forest itself speaking a name I used to know but had learned to forget.

The door slammed shut behind me. When I turned back, it was gone. The glow snapped; the hillside was just ferns again.

I made it home as the sun set, stumbling through familiar trails that felt foreign now, past trees that whispered secrets I didn't want to understand. My cabin waited, solid and real, coffee maker ready, radio crackling with human voices discussing weather and traffic and all the mundane problems of a world I was no longer sure I belonged to.

But on my kitchen table, a book waited. Weathered brown cover, title in symbols that rearranged themselves as I watched: Integration Protocols: A Subject's Guide to Baseline Reality.

It fell open to Chapter One: "Memory Suppression and You: Living Happily in a World That Isn't Quite Real."

Outside, the Douglas firs whispered their ancient secrets, and I finally understood what they'd been trying to tell me. The forest remembers, even when we make them forget.

Even when we choose to forget ourselves.

I made coffee and began to read.