A long week full of grounded, practical things and suddenly, tired but sedately sitting on the lawn chair, Harland feels before he hears the bitonal buzz of something outside this reality.

Quickly, he gets up and runs for his kit. Radiation levels normal. EMF levels normal. Radio unexciting static.

He listens to this mundane static for a while, straining his ears for something. Then his vision bleaches to grey then white. A vision, if visions were percieved purely by skin and bone. He senses it: something Different. There's something over there, over past the fences, the corn, the road.

He shuts Oily Thomas inside, and the sun goes out.



Brown tendrils a mix of the dead autumn grass and of something beyond death, beyond the sun. In the center lies a pit, bending light like black hole glass. The crispness of the air chills Harland terribly. He gets out his camera.

Click.

The sun comes back on, and with it, half in-here (in Here!) standing in the road as if it belonged. But he knew it did not. He could not explain it. He went into his rational mind, the one he used to pre-argue with his internal scientist self, before getting into the real argument with the real scientists. The consensus was out: he knew nothing.

It was as if reality had become a revolving door, through which shapes and gurgling stomachs from other mathematical dimensions came casually through. Hello yes welcome to Sears, the perfume department is on the 13th floor. Oh what was that? you were looking for my blood and organs? Well, sir I'm sorry but I'll have to ask you to leave.

Harland took photos and hurried away. He was nauseous, and his splitting migraine was penetrating his inner thoughts, turning him basal and bowel-expellingly scared. The buzzing wouldn't stop. He was not one for despairing, but a voice inside him could not stop saying, "Please make it stop please make it stop".

He then found himself steps away from the globular diffraction of light, in the black pit, suddenly so much closer than he swore he was a moment ago. His heart lept like a falling dream. And down he went.



Harland realizes a few hours later that he's in the safety of his own home again. Then he thinks, perhaps it is not entirely as safe or entirely as much "his" home as he led himself to believe.

He recollects vaguely, a stumble through the woods and tripping over the cat as he came in. He flopped on the couch with the blanket and stared at the wall for over an hour.

Now, sitting up and nervously pressing his hair, he walks to the fridge and devours anything sweet he can find. Then back to the couch. Only to stare blank-eyed once more, getting up once more, with as much hunger, for a pair of delicious batteries. He jams them into his camera, which died in his expedition, to confirm if something as real and grounding as a picture machine could tell him if what he saw was real.

A blurry photo of a road.
But, looking closer, an unmistakable /something/. Resembling AI art more than paranormal footage.

Next photo.
A shocking exactitude of exactly what he saw with his own eyes. The field, the grass, the dip into some extradimensional telephotoic ball of unlight.

Harland clutches the camera tightly and breaks into a cold sweat.