as large as a lemon. He tossed it gently at the portal. He more than
half expected the stone to bounce off the blackness with a hard
metallic tonk, for it was still easier to believe he was looking at an
object rather than peering into infinity. But it crossed the vertical
plane of the doorway and vanished without a sound.
He edged closer.
Experimentally, he pushed the barrel of the Remington shotgun across
the threshold. It didn’t fade into the gloom. Instead, the blackness
so totally claimed the forward part of the weapon that it appeared as
if someone had run a high-speed saw through the barrel and the forearm
slide handle, neatly truncating them.
He pulled back on the Remington, and the forward part of the gun
reappeared.
It seemed to be intact.
He touched the steel barrel and the checkered wood grip on the slide.
Everything felt as it should feel.
Taking a deep breath, not sure whether he was brave or insane, he
raised one trembling hand, as if signaling “hello” to someone, and
eased it forward, feeling for the transition point between this world
and . . . whatever lay beyond the doorway. A tingle against his palm
and the pads of his fingers. A coolness. It felt almost as if his
hand rested on a pool of water but too lightly to break the surface
tension.
He hesitated.
“You’re seventy years old,” he grumbled. “What’ve you got to lose?”
Swallowing hard, he pushed his hand through the portal, and it
disappeared in the same manner as the shotgun. He encountered no
resistance, and his wrist terminated in a neat stump.
“Jesus,” he said softly.
He made a fist, opened and closed it, but he couldn’t tell if his hand
responded on the other side of the barrier. All feeling ended at the
point at which that hellish blackness cut across his wrist.
When he withdrew his hand from the doorway, it was as unchanged as the
shotgun had been. He opened his fist, closed it, opened it.
Everything worked as it should, and he had full feeling again.
Eduardo looked around at the deep and peaceful May night. The forest
flanking the impossible circle of darkness. Meadow sloping upward,
palely frosted by the glow of the quarter moon. The house at the
higher end of the meadow. Some windows dark and others filled with
light. Mountain peaks in the west, caps of snow phosphorescent against
the post-midnight sky.
The scene was too detailed to be a place in a dream or part of the
hallucination-riddled world of senile dementia. He was not a demented
old fool, after all. Old, yes. A fool, probably. But not demented.
He returned his attention to the doorway again–and suddenly wondered
what it looked like from the side. He imagined a long tube of
perfectly nonreflective ebony leading straight off into the night more
or less like an oil pipeline stretching across Alaskan tundra, boring
through mountains in some cases and suspended in thin air when it
crossed less lofty territories, until it reached the curve of the
earth, where it continued straight and true, unbending, off into space,
a tunnel to the stars.
When he walked to one end of the thirty-foot-wide blot and looked at
the side of it, he discovered something utterly different from–but
quite as strange as– the pipeline image in his mind. The forest lay
behind the enormous portal, unchanged as far as he could tell: the moon
shone down, the trees rose as if responding to the caress of that
silvery light, and an owl hooted far away. The doorway disappeared
when viewed from the side. Its width, if it had any width at all, was
as thin as a thread or as a well-stropped razor blade.
He walked all the way around to the back of it.
Viewed from a point a hundred and eighty degrees from his first
position, the doorway was the same thirty-foot circle of featureless
mystery. From that reverse perspective, it seemed to have swallowed
not part of the forest but the meadow and the house at the top of the
rise. It was like a great paper-thin black coin balanced on edge.