Sam leant against the back wall of the house and checked her watch. 1:05 am. Any minute now.
Her breath fogged the air in front of her, curls of mist list up by the LED glow of the display.
As the time ticked over to 1:06 the watch beeped loudly, a jarring noise that was echoed by the eerie screech of a night owl, somewhere in a neighboring garden.
Lugging her backpack, Sam strode to the bottom of the garden, the icy blades crackling under the soles of her walking boots. she pushed her way through the bushes, already damaged by repeated journeys, and out into the small clearing by the fence. It had almost become routine now.
1:09.
A stream of blindingly bright daylight snapped into existence. It didn’t sweep into place like a blind opening, it was simply not there one moment and there the next, bringing with it the heavy, smell of summer meadows and radiating heat that swarmed Sam’s senses.
Sam squinted and started the stopwatch. She would have just over two minutes to get through before the gate closed. This wasn’t her first trip, but still her heart was beating frantically in her chest, adrenaline running through her system.
With a deep breath Sam stepped through the gateway, into summer.
Back up.
How had she ended up here? Standing on a grassy hill, in some strange, unknown place next to a hole in reality with England on the other side.
Perhaps it started almost a month ago when a stream of brilliant daylight suddenly and incongruously illuminated a metre square of rotten fencing at 2 in the morning, jarring Sam’s concentration away from the MMORPG game that had her hooked.
Or perhaps it started three months prior, when Sam’s entire team had been called into the main conference room at work and been informed that regretfully they were going to have to be let go. It had been the last straw in a run of really shitty luck, forcing a reluctant moving in with her parents in their little cottage in the arse end of nowhere, Dorset.
Either way. Here she was, and would stay. At least for the next 24 or so hours.
As if echoing that thought the gate blinked out of existence. Right on schedule.
Taking a deep breaths to calm her jittering heart. Sam clicked the stopwatch back on, and pulled the binoculars out of her pocket to survey her surroundings.
Like the previous two times she was standing at the top of a small hill, with more hills rolling away from her in all directions. The tumbled terrain obscured the view but with the help of the binoculars she could make out mountains in the distance far to her left, and a forest or copse on her right. Other than that there were just grassy hills, dotted with bushes, trees and rocks, with no animal in sight. Apart from the birds. They darted around the sky energetically, on a wild dance to catch flies and bugs.
Pulling the phone out of her pocket, Sam checked the display quickly. No signal.
With a sigh Sam dumped the heavy backpack and got settled on the warm grass. Luckily her tan skin didn’t burn easily because she’d forgotten sunscreen again. Laying down the blanket she had brought, Sam spread out her equipment on it and took out her dictaphone.
“It’s 1.24am back in the UK, 23rd January, 2024. This is trip number three.”
Sam looked down at her equipment.
“So the temperature here is 19 degrees Celsius today.”
Sam lifted the binoculars to her eyes again and to watch the birds. They had been the first sign – other than lack of phone signal – that she was very far from home. They were pitch black and as large as swans, with short, sharp beaks that looked more like songbirds than crows.
“Still no animals. Just birds and insects”
Sam squinted at the ant she had picked off of her shoe, then flicked it away
“Birds are definitely different but the ants look the same. Not that that says much I guess – they could have crossed through easily – the door stretches all the way down and into the ground a few centimetres”
“The air is the same – I think.”
Sam wasn’t a complete idiot. Before her first trip she’d shoved a buderigar in its cage through the gate for an overnight visit. The budgie had survived its stay in this world without obvious side effect. Rather than attempting to return it to the pet shop, Sam had freed it back through the gate the following night on her first and shortest visit. Watching the speck of bright yellow disappear into the blue sky had been satisfying. It felt good to share the excitement – even with a brainless bird.
“What I just don’t get is why the gate is fixed though. It didn’t move an inch despite the fact the world is spinning and rotating round the sun. Unless the space at the bottom of mum and dad's garden is the centre of the universe and everything is rotating around there. Or that the gate is somehow designed and intentional and not some random occurrence. Both of these ideas are crazy.”
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“Anyway...it seems to be that these two locations are locked together even when the gate is closed. It always opens in the exact same place at the bottom of the garden, and always at the same place on this side too. There’s a tidy cut in the grass here to prove it”
Sam nudged the line with her boot gingerly. When it was open, the edges of the gate generated some kind of outward force that protected the borders of it – no chance of accidentally giving yourself a haircut due to not ducking enough. But when the gate snapped open or shut, anything in the way was toast. It had only taken one strategically placed large rock being perfectly bisected for Sam to give the gate the respect it deserved. She had no desire to risk losing a limb.
“The gate opens every 25 hours and 14 minutes and stays open for 2 minutes and 14 seconds. So it will open in... just over 25 hours for about 1 minute and 52 seconds.”
Sam still couldn’t quite believe she was here – she was usually pretty risk averse – boredom was a funny thing.
“OK - so I brought a compass with me this time and it works here, and it looks like the sun is setting in the west still – for what that’s worth. So this place is rotating the same way as earth and has a magnetic north too.”
“That’s it for now. I'm going to go explore a bit to the south this time. I’ll check back in later”
Sam dumped the sleeping bag and heavier equipment in a pile on the chequered picnic blanket, before jogging down the grassy hill with a much lighter pack on her back.
The ground was soft and springy, a thick carpet of grass untouched by grazing animals. Again, Sam wondered where the cows and sheep could be, or whatever the equivalent here were. She had a sudden mental picture of velociraptors circling and pushed it away forcefully; no, there were no tracks in the grass, no noise but the gentle buzzing of insets and discordant calls of the odd birds.
Taking samples took an hour or so. Sam had bought a bunch of plastic test tubes online and filled them with leaves, insects and bits of foliage from the sparce bushes and plants. She’d just taken her phone back out to snap some photographs of the landscape when an odd movement caught her eye. It came from one of the black shapes in the sky.
At first she took it to be one of the birds, but it was moving in a steady straight line, not the random chaotic darting of the crow-things. Pulling out her binoculars, Sam focussed the lenses on the shape and then almost dropped them as a sick wave of shock swept over her. It was not a bird.
About the same size as the crows, the thing was bullet-shaped and moved steadily in a north-easterly direction, covering the distance at a steady pace. The moment after she spotted it, its pace slowed and it came to a stop, hovering in place about a metre off of the ground. Then it started in her direction.
“Fuck! Fuck!”
Sam couldn’t help swearing as she dropped to lay on the ground, hidden amongst the tall grass. All she could think to do was to lay still and hope that the drone would not be able to sense her.
Her heart pounded in her chest as she tried to press herself into the flat, dusty soil, hand pressed over her mouth.
It was silent for a while and then a strange beep and growl from above her caused her to spin onto her back, raising her hands above her face.
The drone was right there: hovering over her just outside of her reach.
Again the strange growling, beeping noise came from the drone, causing Sam to pull herself up to sitting and shuffle backwards and away from it.
“I don’t understand...” she said, almost to herself.
The drone beeped and growled for a bit, then dropped to hang in front of her, an arm’s length from her face. Waiting.
After an eternal moment of gibbering fear, Sam calmed down, panic subsiding in the face of the bobbing, weaving drone.
This close Sam could admire its design; it was not bullet shaped but instead more of a classic flying saucer, no bigger than a dinner plate - its perfect matte grey surface only disrupted by a curving pattern of gentle indents on top and bottom. The indents were the thing that gave away the slight back and forward rotation of the drone. Like it was slowly shaking its head. There was no sign of propellers, boosters or anything that might explain how it remained hanging in the air, neither were there holes or any sign of a camera or charging point.
“So - wow – freaky. Sci fi world not fantasy world? That’s a shocker” Sam said, wonder taking over horror. The drone seemed harmless, the little bobbing and nodding movements it was making like the head of a curious cat.
She went on thinking that until the moment the world turned off.
Awake.
Sam opened her eyes to more darkness and gasped.
It was night time.
Sitting up, she winced at her throbbing head, then patted herself down. she was still wearing her clothes, her bag was still next to her where she had put it, open to show the samples in the light of the moon.
With shaking hands, Sam pulled the stopwatch out of her inner pocket, then let out a sigh of relief when she saw that the timer had just ticked over twelve hours – she still had over thirteen hours left until the gate reopened.
What the hell? The drone had somehow knocked her out for ten hours?
Above her alien constellations hung in the black velvet skies like scattered jewels, millions of stars all in vivid, unfamiliar patterns. For the first time – Sam longed to be home.
Back at the picnic blanket, Sam pulled out the dictaphone.
“Update at 12 hours in. I met a local. Some kind of drone – more advanced technology than I’ve come across because I can’t figure out how the hell it was getting around.“
“It knocked me out somehow and I’ve only just woken up. I think I’m ok. No - that’s a lie - I’m not ok, I’m freaking out. I’ve still got almost 13 hours until the gate reopens and I can go home. I don’t know why the drone knocked me out, and I don’t know where the hell it went and whether it will come back. I’ve got the mother of all headaches, probably from whatever the drone did to knock me out. I can’t believe I was out for the count for almost ten hours.”
“I’m going to sit tight here and hope the drone doesn’t come back. I don’t really have much of a choice. I don’t want to get lost or cut off from the gate. I’m going to sit here and watch a movie to distract myself.”
Sam took a shuddering breath and pulled out her ipad. Some episodes of a comfort TV show would be the perfect distraction right now.
A few hours later Sam felt her eyelids closing. The drone hadn’t returned and the adrenaline had finally left her system. her period of unconscious clearly hadn’t counted as sleep as she truly felt as though he’d been awake for more than 24 hours. Climbing into her sleeping bag, Sam set an alarm to wake her up before the gate reopened and fell asleep.
‘System Initialising’
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‘Upload complete. Integration successful. Please hold’
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‘Subject is designated ID 43702. Subject 43702: you have been discovered in a restricted deadzone. After scanning, it was established that you are suffering complete mana deprivation and absence of a functional system interface. In accordance with the Alta act an emergency interface has been installed. We apologise for any inconvenience or discomfort caused by the installation process.’
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‘Dead zone 132 is a restricted zone. Please depart immediately and make your way to your nearest meeting point for medical assistance. The nearest meeting point can be found at
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