This wasn’t unprecedented. He’d seen glimpses of these kind of glowing “wounds” during past experiments. But this time he felt sure that Bell could see it, too.
“Tell me what you see, Belly,” he said, whispering without knowing why.
“An opening,” Bell said, staring transfixed at the shimmering slit. “Like a kind of... gateway.”
“Yes,” Walter said. “Yes, that’s it exactly.” He gripped Bell’s arm. “Do you realize what this means? Our minds have become perfectly synchronized! We are sharing the exact same vision. It’s incredible!”
“Incredible,” Bell repeated, although it was difficult for Walter to know if he had actually said that out loud, or just thought it.
Bell rose to his feet and waded into the lake, utterly unmindful of his designer trousers and expensive shoes. Walter never let go of his friend’s arm, wading in beside him without a moment’s hesitation. He barely noticed the chilly water and thick, clinging mud sucking at his own shoes.
“But if it’s a gateway,” Bell whispered. “What’s on the other side?”
3
Allan battled his way through the last rank of trees then caught himself on the edge of the lake, ready to slip silently into the water. But the bank was undercut. It gave way beneath him and he splashed awkwardly into the water in a shower of dirt and rotten leaves.
The dogs bayed louder, frenzied by his closeness.
He cursed. Betrayed again by spiteful nature. Finding his balance, he started right, hunching into the undercut, knee deep in water with his ankles tearing clinging reeds up from the mud with every step.
There was a boat landing just around the next point—nothing more than a dirt road that went into the lake so weekend sailors could back their boat hitches into the water. There were always a few rowboats and canoes tied off or turned upside down and stored to either side of it. With his strength, they would never be able to catch him if he took one.
Behind him, the dogs reached the bank, snuffling and milling around, reluctant to dive in. The squeals and grunts of their pig masters echoed their confusion, and the piercing beams of their flashlights darted everywhere. Except in his direction.
He laughed and, as silently as he could manage, headed for the closest canoe, only a few yards away. It was floating in the high tide, its tether submerged under the lapping waves. He squatted down in the cold water and reached for the knot, fingers groping blind in the weeds and mud until he found it. The wet rope was swollen, the knot slick and tight. Methodically, he went to work, pulling and teasing it apart.
As he did so, a dancing light on the surface of the water around the tether was mesmerizing. It carved swirling arabesque calligraphies into his retina, a cursive cuneiform that seemed almost decipherable, if only he could concentrate on it long enough. It was trying to tell him something—a story of other worlds, of pathways between realities, of an endless, ever-repeating, never-repeating pattern of possibilities. He thought he heard a clear deep voice, speaking directly into the vibrating cortex of his tripping mind.
A profound empathy, bordering on telepathic...
The ripples turned jagged, and began jumping. Baying filled his ears. He looked up to see dogs and grunting, two-legged pigs splashing down from the pine bank and racing toward him as red and blue lights screamed and sirens bounced off the trees along the dirt road that led to the launch.
The water had tricked him! Made him forget the knot. He’d been crouching in the water just staring at the hypnotic patterns.
Enraged, he surged upward, tearing the canoe’s iron mooring stake out of the mud, using it to swipe around at the dogs that churned the water around him. But there were too many of them, all around him now. The pigs were among them, grabbing his arms, his shirt, his throat. A hundred piggy hoof-hands groping him and violating every part of his body as dog teeth tore at his pants and the flesh beneath.
His head was plunged maliciously into the water and then wrenched back out again.
“Cuff him!” This from one of the gleeful pigs. Their laughter and squealing swirled around them like thick, choking smoke from a grease fire.
“Careful!” one pig said. “We wouldn’t want him to accidentally drown while resisting arrest, now would we?”
“That would be terrible, wouldn’t it?” another replied.
“We have to take him alive!” This from a cop standing on the shore and calling over the shoulders of his more aggressive brethren. “What about the missing bodies?”
“Shut up, Jensen,” the first pig snapped.
Again, Allan’s head was shoved beneath the surface of the lake. Water filled his nose and throat, and blinded his eyes. The thrashing bites of snarling dogs tore at his wildly flailing limbs, then the bright bite of steel as a handcuff closed around his left wrist.
He lost his grip on the mooring stake and kicked out with a boot heel instead. The response was more piggy squealing, and a lessening of the crushing weight that was holding him down.
Allan fought his way to the surface, retching and gasping and swinging as dogs and pigs fell away all around him.
“Son of a bitch broke my damn kneecap,” an injured piggy cried.
“I told you not to...” the other began. Then his voice trailed off. “Wait... what... what the hell is that?”
Allan backed away from them, snarling and tearing at the dangling handcuff. He waited for them to charge again, wary and ready to fight to the death. But they didn’t. They were staring at something behind him, their snouted, pig-eyed faces bathed in a pale flickering light.
He looked back over his shoulder. The dented canoe was floating away from him in the knee-deep water, drifting further into the lake, but that wasn’t what had caught the eyes of the gaping, awestruck cops.
A strange shimmering fissure hung in the air, just a few feet away, like a rip in the night. As he looked, it seemed to grow. He thought he saw movement within it. He heard voices, whispers.
Was it another hallucination?
No. The pigs were seeing it too. Unless his visions were somehow bleeding into reality? Impossible. But yet...
“What are you waiting for, knucklehead?” one of the pigs bellowed. “Get him!”
Allan turned back around to face his pursuers. The swine and the hounds were coming for him again with renewed fervor. He took a sloshing step backward, instinctively reaching to catch the drifting canoe. His hand passed right through the plane of the shimmer and didn’t touch the canoe. Instead he felt a swirl of cooler water and a chilly breeze. Curious, because the air around them had been warm, still, and dead all night.
Then the pigs were reaching out for him. The dogs leapt, snarling and snapping. He had to act, and fast.
Allan threw himself backward, screaming defiance, falling.
The shimmer surrounded him, engulfed him. It’s curious, clinging glow filled his eyes, filled his lungs, filled his mind. A sickening disorientation overwhelmed him, obliterating any sense of up or down. All of a sudden, the squealing pigs and snarling dogs looked like salvation to him.
He reached for them, bellowing for them to pull him back, save him from this terrible spinning nothingness. His arms pinwheeled, trying to stop his fall, and then...
* * *
Walter and Bell each reached out a hand toward the undulating gateway, doing so at the exact same moment, as if they were two arms attached to one body. The edges of the gateway seemed to respond to them, sending out glistening tendrils in all directions, like the tentacles of a sea anemone.
A millisecond before their fingers touched the strange, shimmering substance of the gateway, a stocky, heavy-set man with a reddish brown crew cut came tumbling backward through the opening. He staggered against Walter and Bell, knocking them back so the three of them fell together, flailing in the shallow water.