He’d planned to avoid the comer where Rachel had seen the enigmatic eye, but habit was a hard master to disobey, and since they had fallen into their traditional routine without thinking, soon they were at the same spot once more. As they waited to cross the street, Tanner felt his little girl grip his hand even more tightly.
“We should stop at market for potatoes, Theo. I’ll add them to the stew tonight,” Emily remarked. “I should have brought the shopping basket along.”
Her husband didn’t reply. His attention was on the spot where Rachel had seen the eye and devil take it all, but was there a strange shimmering hanging there in space and time? A sort of quivering of the air, like the haze of heat on a summer meadow in the midst of a hot July day at noon? Yet, there was no heat in the brisk Nebraska ah–only a queer dryness-a lack of moisture that seemed to be spreading in his mouth and nasal passages.
“I say…I feel a most definite chill coming on,” Tanner muttered, stomping his feet and vigorously rubbing his hands together.
Emily’s brow furrowed beneath the bangs of her auburn hair. “Nonsense, Theo, it is a beautiful af- ternoon. Are you coming down with an illness? Those students of yours. There is no telling what types of germs they bring into the classrooms on a daily basis.”
Tanner smiled at his wife, showing off his beautiful array of teeth, only to discover his intended gesture of reassurance had created the exact opposite effect.
“Your teeth, Theo, they are chattering,” his beloved wife said, a hint of worry coloring her gentle voice.
He reached up and felt his lower jaw. “Hmm. So they are, so they are,” he murmured. Again, he glanced over at the street, but the odd warping of the air was gone. He was torn between asking if Rachel had seen anything and dismissing it immediately, in order to keep from upsetting the girl yet again.
“My delicate constitution seems to have caught a cold,” he finally announced. “Yes, I do not feel all that well, I am afraid.”
“What is wrong, Father?” Rachel asked, peering at her father with the intent gaze of a child.
“Nothing, dear little one,” Tanner lied. “Nothing at all.”
Rachel turned as white as an eggshell. “You saw it, Father! You saw it! You saw it, did you not?”
Tanner nodded. “Aye, perhaps I did see… something-”
“More eyes from heaven?” Emily asked in a teasing tone, but before she could add another word she was interrupted by a sound unlike any that she had ever heard in her twenty-seven years; a sound that she would never be able to forget, or rid her memory of. A sound that would take up residence in her dreams; a sucking noise that was cut off by a loud, pithy pop. And then, before the waiting Tanner family, a temporal doorway was torn open, renting the very fabric of time and space.
This was no wooden door in a frame of the type familiar to the denizens of this particular point in time, nor was it a fanciful air lock of the future, nor even a magic portal. This doorway was something else, something more precise, with accurate angles and deliberate calibrated measurements, hanging suspended in what Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner had always understood to be three-dimensional space.
What floated within the angles was a darker kind of geometry. This was a gateway via a fourth unknown dimension.
Later, long after the shock had faded, Tanner would find this route to be one of an infinite number along the currents and eddies swirling within the invisible dimension of time-no time.
“The eye! God’s eye! God’s eye! Look, Father! Do you see it? Do you see?” Rachel screamed, a loud piercing sound that stabbed at Tanner’s wildly pounding heart even as the scientist in his brain looked upon the sight with detached fascination. A mix of dread and fear combined with his wondering about what exactly the eye was, and what the eye had wrought.
The sun still hung in the sky, but the color of the world changed from light to dark as the door swung open and gave a great cosmic inhalation. The world was now a reverse negative, white on black with an absence of color, the atmosphere thick and cloying.