My grandfather Raymond died three days ago. The official cause was heart failure, which made sense given he was 81 and had been chain-smoking unfiltered cigarettes since before I was born. What didn't make sense was the timing, or the phone call I got from his bank two hours before he died, asking why the automatic deposits that had been coming in monthly for 32 years had suddenly stopped.
I didn't even know about any deposits. Raymond had worked as a plumber his whole life, retired at 65 with a modest pension, lived in the same small house in Ohio that he'd bought in the 70s. There was no reason for mysterious payments, and definitely no reason for them to stop right before he died.
The Lockbox
I drove to his house the day after he passed, ostensibly to start going through his things before my mother and her sisters descended to fight over whatever was left. The place smelled like stale tobacco and old coffee, exactly how I remembered it from childhood visits. Everything looked the same—down to the ancient television in the living room and the stack of crossword puzzle books on the side table.
But there was something different about the air itself. A heaviness that hadn't been there before, like the house knew its owner was gone and was holding its breath.
I started in his bedroom, going through drawers full of old clothes and papers—tax returns, utility bills, nothing interesting. Then I found a metal lockbox shoved way back in his closet, buried under a pile of winter coats he probably hadn't worn in a decade. It was heavy, secured with a combination lock that looked military grade.
I tried his birthday, my grandmother's birthday, every date I could think of. Nothing worked. I was about to give up when I noticed a piece of masking tape on the bottom of the box with four numbers written in faded ink: 1991.
My hands were shaking as I spun the dial. The lock clicked open on the first try.
Inside were things that made no sense for a retired plumber to own:
A stack of documents with heavy black redactions covering most of the text Photographs of Raymond in military gear I'd never seen him wear, standing in what looked like a desert with mountains in the background A laminated ID card with his photo and the words "Defense Intelligence Agency" printed across the top A letter dated January 15th, 1991, signed by someone whose name had been blacked out, thanking Raymond for his service and confirming the terms of his "compensation agreement"
The letter mentioned a mission designated as "Operation Sandglass" and stated that in exchange for Raymond's participation and subsequent silence, he would receive monthly payments of $3,000 for the rest of his natural life, adjusted annually for inflation. The payments would cease immediately upon his death or if he violated the non-disclosure agreement by discussing any aspect of the operation with any person not authorized to receive such information. Violation would result in immediate termination of benefits and potential criminal prosecution under the Espionage Act.
I read the letter three times, each time hoping it would start making sense. My grandfather had been a plumber. He'd fixed sinks and toilets, told bad jokes, watched baseball games. He'd never been in the military as far as I knew, never mentioned anything about intelligence work or classified missions.
But here was proof, right in my hands, that his entire life had been built on a lie. Or maybe not a lie, but a carefully constructed cover story that everyone—including his own family—had believed for over three decades.
The Photographs
The photographs showed a different man than the one I'd known—younger, obviously, but also harder somehow, with an expression in his eyes that suggested he'd seen things that couldn't be unseen. I spread everything out on his bed and took photos with my phone, some instinct telling me I needed to document this before someone came and took it all away.
There were more pictures in the box, showing Raymond with other men in similar gear, all of them posed in front of various vehicles and buildings. One photo showed what looked like an enormous hole in the ground, perfectly circular, with Raymond and two others standing at the edge, staring down into it. The back of the photo had a date written in pencil: March 3rd, 1991.
Another showed the interior of what appeared to be a cave or tunnel, the walls smooth and almost metallic-looking, reflecting the camera flash in weird ways. In that one, Raymond was pointing at something on the wall, though the photo was too dark to make out what it was.
The documents were frustrating because so much had been redacted. I could make out fragments like "unidentified structure," "anomalous readings," "containment failure," and "civilian casualties prevented." One page was almost entirely blacked out except for a single sentence at the bottom:
All personnel are reminded that disclosure of any information regarding Site J-7 will result in immediate and permanent consequences.
The Journal
I was so focused on the papers that I didn't hear my mother come in. She called my name from downstairs and I nearly jumped out of my skin, scrambling to shove everything back into the lockbox. But she was already climbing the stairs, asking if I'd found anything interesting.
I met her in the hallway, positioned between her and the bedroom, and told her I was just going through old clothes. She looked tired, her eyes red from crying, and guilt washed over me for hiding this from her. But something in my gut told me she shouldn't see what I'd found. Not yet. Not until I understood what it meant.
She said she was going to start on the kitchen—did I want help with the bedroom? I told her I had it under control. Maybe she could tackle the garage instead. She agreed and headed back downstairs.
I locked the bedroom door and returned to the box, my heart pounding. There was one more item I hadn't examined yet—a small notebook with a cracked leather cover. I opened it carefully, expecting more mission details or coordinates or something equally cryptic.
Instead, I found what appeared to be a journal, written in Raymond's distinctive scrawled handwriting.
The first entry was dated February 20th, 1991:
They told us it would be routine reconnaissance, that we'd be in and out in 72 hours. They didn't tell us what we'd be looking for until we were already on the ground in Iraq, 50 miles west of Baghdad, in the middle of absolutely nowhere.
Coalition forces were pushing toward the capital, and we were supposed to investigate some kind of anomaly that satellite imagery had picked up three weeks earlier—a structure that shouldn't exist, appearing overnight in a location that had been empty desert the day before.
Command was concerned it might be a new weapons facility, something unconventional that Saddam's people had managed to keep hidden. They assembled a small team—six of us total, all with different specializations. I was brought in because of my engineering background, my ability to assess structural integrity and identify potential hazards. The others were intelligence analysts, a linguist, a geologist, and a medic. None of us knew each other before we got on that transport plane.
The entry continued for several pages, describing their arrival at a forward operating base, the briefing they received, the helicopter ride out to the site. Raymond wrote about the heat, the constant wind blowing sand into every crevice, the tension among the team as they approached their destination.
Then the entry ended abruptly, mid-sentence, as if he'd been interrupted.
The Tower
The next entry was dated March 1st, 1991—nine days later:
I don't know how to describe what we found. Even now, sitting in the debriefing room while they decide what to do with us, I'm not sure I believe my own memories. But it happened. All six of us saw it, recorded it, documented it. They can't make us unsee what we saw.
The structure was exactly where the satellite had indicated, rising out of the sand like some kind of monument. But it wasn't built—not in any conventional sense. It looked grown, or formed, like it had been extruded from the earth itself. Perfectly smooth black material that none of us could identify. No seams, no joints, no evidence of construction. Just this seamless obsidian tower about 40 feet tall and maybe 15 feet in diameter, standing alone in the desert with nothing around it for miles.
We approached it carefully, expecting an ambush or a trap, but there was nothing—just the tower and the wind and this strange humming sound that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once.
Collins, our geologist, took samples of the material, but his drill bits couldn't make a dent. Whatever it was made of, it was harder than anything he'd encountered before.
That's when Porter found the entrance.
I stopped reading and checked my phone. My mother was still clattering around in the garage, oblivious to what I'd discovered. I wanted to call someone, to share this insanity with another person so I wouldn't feel like I was losing my mind. But who would believe me? I barely believed it myself, and I was holding the evidence in my hands.
I kept reading.
The entrance wasn't visible from the outside, but Porter noticed that the humming got louder when he stood on the south side of the tower. He pressed his hand against the surface and a doorway just appeared—a perfect rectangular opening that definitely hadn't been there seconds before. We all saw it happen. One moment solid wall, the next moment an entrance into darkness.
Command wanted us to wait for additional support before entering, but we were already there, and God knows when reinforcements would arrive. We'd been authorized to investigate, and that's what we intended to do.
I volunteered to go in first because I was the most experienced with structural assessment and could hopefully identify any obvious dangers. I strapped on my headlamp, checked my sidearm, and stepped through the opening. The others followed close behind, their lights bobbing in the darkness.
Inside was nothing like what we expected. The exterior suggested a hollow tower, but the interior opened into something massive—a space that couldn't possibly fit inside the structure we'd seen from outside. It was like stepping into a cathedral, except the walls were that same black material, and they curved in ways that hurt to look at, angles that didn't make geometric sense.
The journal entry went on for pages, describing their exploration of the interior space. Raymond wrote about finding rooms that seemed to shift when they weren't looking directly at them, corridors that led back to places they'd already been even though they'd only walked straight ahead, doorways that opened onto impossible vistas. At one point, they'd looked through a window and seen what appeared to be an ocean, waves crashing against rocks, even though they were in the middle of the Iraqi desert.
Collins tried to take readings with his equipment, but everything malfunctioned the moment they crossed the threshold. Compasses spun wildly. GPS units showed locations on different continents. Radiation detectors maxed out and then went completely dead.
The medic, a woman named Teresa Vaughn, started experiencing nosebleeds and dizziness. Porter, the one who'd found the entrance, began hearing voices speaking in a language none of them recognized.
They decided to retreat, to get back outside and regroup. But when they turned around, the entrance was gone—just smooth black wall where the doorway had been. They were trapped inside with no way out and no way to communicate with the outside world.
Raymond's handwriting became more frantic as the entry continued:
We spent what felt like hours searching for an exit, but time didn't work right in there. My watch kept jumping forward and backward, sometimes running normally and sometimes completely stopped. Porter said his showed we'd only been inside for ten minutes, but I know it had been much longer.
At some point, we found another room, larger than the others, with something in the center that I still can't adequately describe. It looked like a machine, but also organic, like a hybrid of technology and living tissue. It was pulsing with light—different colors I'd never seen before, colors that don't exist in the normal spectrum—and it was making that humming sound we'd heard outside, except much louder now, vibrating through our bones.
Collins approached it, fascinated, and reached out to touch it.
The moment his fingers made contact, everything changed.
The Aftermath
The next few pages were nearly illegible, Raymond's handwriting deteriorating into frantic scrawls. I could make out fragments about Collins screaming, about the walls starting to move, about Porter's face melting and reforming into something else, about Teresa disappearing entirely—there one moment and gone the next, like she'd been edited out of existence—about the other two team members, whose names Raymond never mentioned, doing things to each other that made no sense, their bodies bending in ways bodies shouldn't bend.
And through it all, that humming sound getting louder and louder until it felt like the inside of their skulls would crack open.
Then, abruptly, they were outside again, standing in the sand beside the tower as if they'd never entered. But it had been three days. Three full days had passed while they'd been inside, though it had felt like only a few hours. And Collins was gone—he wasn't with them when they emerged. And when they tried to go back in to find him, the entrance wouldn't open. The tower had sealed itself, become solid again, no trace of the doorway they'd used.
They called for extraction and spent the next six hours sitting in the sand, waiting for the helicopter, not talking about what they'd seen because putting it into words felt dangerous.
I set the journal down and rubbed my eyes, suddenly aware of how dry my mouth had become. This was insane. This had to be fiction, some weird creative writing project my grandfather had worked on. Except it matched the dates on the official documents, matched the photographs, matched the letter about the payments.
And Raymond had never been creative, never told stories or wrote fiction. He'd been practical, grounded, the kind of man who dealt with concrete problems that had concrete solutions. Reading about him experiencing something so impossible felt fundamentally wrong, like finding out your accountant secretly believed in ghosts.
My phone buzzed with a text from my mother asking if I wanted lunch. I told her I wasn't hungry, that I'd be done with the bedroom soon. She replied with a thumbs-up emoji, and I went back to the journal.
Life After
The entries after the mission were shorter, more sporadic. Raymond wrote about being held in isolation for two weeks while government officials questioned him repeatedly about every detail of what happened. They showed him photographs of the interior he didn't remember taking, footage from cameras he didn't remember wearing. They asked about Collins over and over, wanted to know exactly where he'd gone, what he'd touched, what he'd said. Raymond didn't have answers. Collins was just gone, vanished inside that structure, and none of them knew how to get him back.
Eventually, they were released with the non-disclosure agreement and the promise of monthly payments. Raymond wrote about struggling to readjust to normal life, about taking the plumbing job because working with pipes and water felt real and solid in a way that nothing else did anymore. He wrote about meeting my grandmother six months later, about marrying her without ever telling her what had happened in Iraq, about having my mother, about building a life that looked completely ordinary from the outside while carrying this secret that ate at him every single day.
There was an entry from 1995 where he mentioned seeing Porter at a gas station in Kentucky, hundreds of miles from where either of them lived. Porter had looked at him with empty eyes and walked away without saying a word.
Another entry from 2003 described waking up at 3:00 in the morning to find Teresa Vaughn standing in his bedroom, looking exactly as she had the last time he'd seen her in 1991—not aged a day. She'd stared at him for what felt like an eternity and then vanished, leaving behind a smell like ozone and burnt plastic.
Raymond stopped writing in the journal after that—or at least this journal. Maybe there were others hidden somewhere in the house. The last entry was dated November 2003 and consisted of a single sentence:
I saw the tower again today, but it was in my backyard instead of Iraq, and I think it wants me to come back inside.
The Figure
I was so absorbed in reading that I didn't notice the sound at first—a low humming, barely audible, that seemed to be coming from somewhere below me. I looked up from the journal and realized the bedroom had gotten darker, even though it was only early afternoon and the sun had been shining through the windows moments ago.
The humming got louder, and with it came a smell I couldn't identify—something sharp and acidic that made my eyes water.
I stood up, suddenly afraid, and that's when I noticed the window.
There was someone standing outside, looking in at me. But that was impossible because Raymond's bedroom was on the second floor, and there was nothing outside but a small roof overhang and a 15-foot drop to the lawn below.
The figure was tall—inhumanly tall—with proportions that looked wrong even through the glass. I couldn't make out details of its face because the sunlight behind it created a silhouette, but I could see it was watching me, its head tilted at an angle that made my stomach turn.
The humming intensified, and I realized it was coming from the figure, resonating through the window and into the room.
I backed away slowly, the lockbox and journal clutched against my chest, never taking my eyes off the thing outside. It pressed one hand against the glass, and I saw its fingers were too long, each one segmented in too many places. The window began to frost over where it touched, ice crystals spreading across the pane in geometric patterns that hurt to look at directly.
My mother's voice called up the stairs again, asking if I was okay, if I'd heard that weird noise. The sound of her voice seemed to break whatever spell had been cast. I blinked, and the figure was gone—just empty air beyond the window, bright sunshine, normal afternoon. The humming had stopped. The smell had vanished.
I was standing in the middle of Raymond's bedroom, hyperventilating, while my mother climbed the stairs to check on me.
I shoved the lockbox under the bed and met her in the hallway, trying to look casual even though I was drenched in cold sweat. She asked what was wrong, and I told her I'd just gotten emotional going through Raymond's things, thinking about him being gone. She hugged me and said she understood, that it was hitting her too. We stood there for a moment, and then she went back downstairs, satisfied that I was okay.
I wasn't okay.
I went to the window and examined the glass carefully. There was nothing unusual about it—no frost, no marks, no evidence that anything had been standing outside. But I knew what I'd seen, just like Raymond had known what he'd seen in Iraq, even when logic insisted it was impossible.
Following the Trail
I grabbed the lockbox and journal and hurried downstairs, telling my mother I needed to get some air. She said that was fine, she'd keep sorting through things. I left the house and sat in my car for a long time, trying to process everything.
The bank statement had said the payments stopped last week. Raymond died three days ago. But maybe the cause and effect were reversed. Maybe he'd died because the payments stopped, because whatever deal he'd made with the government had come to an end, and that had consequences I couldn't understand.
I drove to the bank that had called me, a small branch in downtown Cleveland. The manager was a middle-aged woman named Dorothy Krauss who looked confused when I explained why I was there. She pulled up Raymond's account on her computer and frowned, scrolling through records that went back decades.
The monthly deposits had indeed been coming in like clockwork since April 1991—always the same amount, adjusted for inflation, always from an account number she couldn't trace. She'd tried looking it up in their system when the deposits stopped and found nothing, as if the source account had never existed.
I asked if there was any documentation about who set up the automatic transfer, and she said there should be, but the files were missing—just gone from the system entirely, which shouldn't be possible given their backup protocols. She seemed genuinely bothered by this, kept apologizing as if it were somehow her fault.
I thanked her and left, feeling more unsettled than before.
In the parking lot, I called the phone number on the letterhead from the document in Raymond's lockbox. A recorded message informed me the number was no longer in service. I tried the Department of Defense mainline and asked about Operation Sandglass. The woman who answered said she had no record of any operation by that name and suggested I might be thinking of something else. When I insisted and mentioned the Defense Intelligence Agency, she became less friendly, told me she couldn't help me, and hung up.
Arthur Westlake
That night, I stayed in a hotel instead of going back to Raymond's house. I couldn't shake the feeling that returning there would be dangerous, that whatever had been outside the window might come back.
I ordered room service and spread out the contents of the lockbox on the bed, trying to find anything I'd missed. There was a business card tucked into one of the document sleeves, so faded I'd initially overlooked it. It had a name—Arthur Westlake—and a phone number with a 703 area code. Virginia.
I hesitated before dialing, unsure if I wanted to open this door any further. But I needed answers, needed to understand what my grandfather had been involved in and why it was suddenly reaching out to me across three decades.
The phone rang four times before someone picked up. A man's voice, older, cautious.
I introduced myself and said I was calling about Raymond, that I'd found his information in my grandfather's belongings.
There was a long silence on the other end. Then Westlake asked me where I was calling from and told me not to say anything else over the phone. He gave me an address in Arlington and said if I wanted answers, I should meet him there tomorrow at noon. Before I could respond, he hung up.
I sat there staring at the phone, wondering what the hell I'd gotten myself into. Raymond had spent 32 years keeping this secret, accepting money to stay silent, living a half-life built on lies. And now I was following in his footsteps, chasing down classified information that powerful people clearly wanted buried.
Arlington
The drive to Virginia took eight hours, and I spent most of it watching my rearview mirror, paranoid that I was being followed. Every black SUV, every sedan with tinted windows seemed potentially suspicious. I probably looked insane to other drivers, constantly changing lanes and taking random exits just to see if anyone followed. No one did—or at least no one I could identify.
The address Westlake gave me was a small office building in a nondescript business park, the kind of place that could house accountants or insurance adjusters or any other boring profession. I parked and checked my phone. Exactly noon.
The building's directory listed the third floor as "Westlake Consulting," but when I tried the main entrance, it was locked. I was about to call the number again when a buzzer sounded and the door clicked open.
I took the elevator to the third floor and found a single door at the end of a short hallway. It opened before I could knock.
Arthur Westlake looked exactly like his voice sounded—older, tired, suspicious. He was probably in his seventies, thin and gray, wearing an outdated suit that had seen better days. He gestured for me to come inside without saying anything.
The office was sparse—just a desk and a few chairs, walls covered in maps and photographs. I recognized some of the images from Raymond's lockbox: the tower in Iraq, the hole in the ground, various other structures and locations I didn't recognize.
Westlake sat down behind his desk and studied me for a long moment before speaking.
"You look like him," he finally said. "Raymond. Same eyes, same stubborn set to your jaw that says you're not going to let this go."
I told him I just wanted to understand what happened, why my grandfather spent three decades accepting government money to stay quiet about something.
Westlake laughed, but it was a bitter sound with no humor in it. He said understanding was overrated, that sometimes ignorance really was bliss. But then he opened a drawer and pulled out a thick folder, spreading its contents across the desk—more photographs, more documents, more evidence of things that shouldn't exist.
The Truth About Site J-7
He said he'd been Raymond's handler for the first ten years after the mission, the person responsible for making sure the non-disclosure agreement was honored and the payments kept coming. He'd interviewed all the survivors multiple times, compiled their reports, tried to make sense of what they'd experienced.
The tower had been classified as an "anomalous isolated structure," given the designation Site J-7, and placed under permanent monitoring. A security perimeter was established, satellite coverage was increased, and additional teams were sent to study it.
But everyone who entered disappeared, just like Collins.
After the fourth team vanished, they stopped trying. The tower was declared off-limits, the area was disguised as a toxic waste site, and the whole thing was buried under layers of classification.
Westlake said the government had encountered similar structures before, going back decades. Different locations, different configurations, but always the same impossible geometry, same humming sound, same tendency to make people disappear. There were sites in Nevada, in the Canadian Arctic, in the waters off Japan. All of them classified, all of them monitored, all of them fundamentally unexplainable using conventional science.
The prevailing theory was that they were entrances or windows to somewhere else, though where exactly remained unknown. Some researchers thought they were gateways to parallel dimensions. Others believed they were remnants of a civilization that existed before recorded history. Still others insisted they were actively being constructed by an intelligence we couldn't communicate with.
Nobody knew for certain, and every attempt to find out ended badly.
Raymond and his team had been lucky to get out at all, even if they'd lost Collins in the process. Most people who entered these structures were never seen again. The ones who did emerge were usually changed in some fundamental way—like Porter, who'd lost the ability to feel emotion, or Teresa, who'd developed the ability to appear in multiple locations simultaneously before vanishing permanently.
Westlake showed me surveillance footage from 2003—grainy video of Teresa standing in three different cities at the same time, her image flickering like a bad television signal before disappearing entirely.
He said the structures seemed to rewrite reality around themselves, and anyone who got too close risked being rewritten along with it.
Why Now?
I asked him why the payments had stopped, why now after three decades.
Westlake's expression darkened, and he said that was the question, wasn't it?
Three weeks ago, Site J-7 had disappeared. Not been destroyed or relocated—just ceased to exist. Satellite footage showed it standing there one moment and completely gone the next, leaving behind nothing but undisturbed sand, as if it had never been there at all.
When that happened, the monitoring team noticed something else: every person who'd ever entered the structure and come back out experienced simultaneous cardiac events. Raymond, Porter, Teresa before she vanished, and two members of subsequent study teams who'd survived their encounters—all of them had heart attacks at the exact same moment the tower disappeared, regardless of where they were in the world or what they were doing.
Most survived, but the weaker ones didn't. Raymond's heart had given out because he was old and his body couldn't handle the strain.
Westlake believed the structure had been maintaining some kind of connection to everyone who'd ever been inside, and when it vanished, that connection was severed violently.
The payments had stopped because the program was being shut down. Without the structure to monitor and study, there was no reason to keep paying people for their silence. The secret was becoming irrelevant.
Or at least that's what the bureaucrats believed.
But Westlake thought they were wrong. He thought the disappearance was just the structure relocating, that it would appear somewhere else and the whole cycle would start again.
"Why did you agree to meet with me?" I asked. "If this is all classified, why risk telling me anything?"
Westlake leaned back in his chair and stared at the ceiling for a long moment. Then he said he was dying, that cancer was eating through his lungs and he had maybe six months left if he was lucky. The government couldn't threaten him anymore, couldn't take away his pension or throw him in prison because he'd be dead before any of that mattered.
And he was tired of carrying these secrets, tired of watching good people have their lives destroyed by things they couldn't understand or explain. Raymond had been his friend, one of the few people who could relate to the weight of knowing what existed out there in the dark places of the world. He owed it to Raymond's memory to make sure someone knew the truth, even if that truth was dangerous.
Besides, he said, I was already involved whether I wanted to be or not. The moment I read Raymond's journal, the moment I saw that figure outside the window, I'd become part of the pattern. These structures noticed attention, responded to awareness. By learning about Site J-7, I'd drawn its focus, and now it would be watching me the same way it had watched Raymond for 32 years.
Westlake apologized for that. Said he wished there was a way to protect me, but once you were marked by these things, there was no going back.
Montana
But then Westlake said something that made my blood run cold.
He told me there was more to Raymond's story than what I'd found in the journal. The mission hadn't ended when they were extracted from Iraq.
Three months after returning to the United States, Raymond had been contacted again by the Defense Intelligence Agency. They wanted him to consult on another site, this one in Montana, that shared characteristics with the Iraqi tower. Raymond had refused initially, traumatized by what happened to Collins and wanting nothing more to do with these structures.
But they'd made him an offer he couldn't refuse: double the monthly payments, and the chance to understand what had happened to his team. They told him they'd developed new protocols, new equipment, new theories about how to safely interact with these anomalies. They promised that this time would be different, that they'd learned from the mistakes in Iraq.
Raymond had agreed, desperate for answers and seduced by the idea that Collins might somehow be recoverable.
Westlake pulled out another folder, this one thicker than the first, and showed me photographs I'd never seen in Raymond's lockbox.
The Montana site was different from the Iraqi tower. Instead of rising from the ground, it appeared to be a depression—a perfectly circular pit about 30 feet in diameter that descended into darkness. The walls were that same smooth black material, but instead of humming, this structure was silent. Completely, utterly silent in a way that was somehow worse than the noise from Site J-7.
Raymond had been part of a team of twelve this time, all of them specialists in various fields, all of them briefed on what happened in Iraq and supposedly prepared for the impossible. They'd set up a sophisticated monitoring system around the pit, lowered cameras and sensors on cables, analyzed every measurable aspect of the structure before anyone attempted to enter.
Everything had seemed normal—or as normal as an impossible hole in the ground could seem. The readings were anomalous but stable. The structure showed no signs of actively threatening anyone who approached it.
After two weeks of external study, they decided to send someone down.
They'd chosen a volunteer named Dennis Craft, a former special forces operator with extensive cave diving experience. They'd outfitted him with a full safety harness, multiple cameras, radio communication equipment, and enough rope to descend 500 feet. The plan was for him to go down slowly, reporting back every few feet, ready to be pulled up at the first sign of danger.
Craft had descended into the pit while the team watched from the surface, his camera feed showing smooth black walls reflecting his headlamp as he dropped deeper and deeper. He'd reported feeling fine, seeing nothing unusual—just smooth walls and darkness below.
At 200 feet, his voice had started to sound strange over the radio, like he was speaking through water or from very far away.
At 300 feet, the video feed began to distort, showing images that didn't match what Craft was describing.
At 400 feet, he'd stopped responding to their questions, though they could still hear him talking—but he wasn't speaking to them anymore. He was having a conversation with someone else, someone they couldn't hear.
Westlake showed me a transcript of Craft's final transmissions. The words were disturbing—fragments of dialogue that suggested he was interacting with multiple entities that the surface team couldn't detect. He'd mentioned seeing Collins from Raymond's team, along with dozens of others who'd disappeared into various structures over the years. He described a place that existed alongside the pit, accessible only from within it, where the normal rules of physics and causality didn't apply.
He'd said he could see the surface team from where he was, but also see them from hundreds of different angles simultaneously, as if he existed in multiple locations at once.
And then, at exactly 450 feet, the rope had gone slack. Not cut, not broken—just slack, as if there was suddenly no weight on the end of it. They'd pulled it up frantically and found Craft's harness still attached, still secure, but completely empty. No sign of how he'd gotten out of it, no indication of what had happened.
The camera attached to his helmet had continued transmitting for another hour, showing nothing but darkness and occasionally strange flashes of light that hurt to look at directly. And then it had gone dead.
The Montana site had been sealed immediately, the pit filled with concrete and steel—though no one was certain that actually prevented access to whatever existed inside.
Raymond had witnessed all of this from the surface, had heard Craft's final transmissions, had seen the empty harness. According to Westlake, that's when my grandfather had truly broken. The Iraq mission had traumatized him, but the Montana incident had convinced him that these structures were fundamentally evil, that they existed to trap and transform humans for purposes no one could comprehend.
"Why didn't he put any of this in his journal?" I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.
Westlake said Raymond had been ordered not to, that his non-disclosure agreement had been amended after Montana to include even stricter terms. The monthly payments had been increased as promised, but with the understanding that discussing Montana with anyone—even in private writings—would result in immediate termination of benefits and potential imprisonment.
Raymond had agreed because he needed the money, and because he knew that writing about Montana would mean reliving it, and he couldn't handle that.
But Westlake believed there was more to it than simple compliance. He thought Raymond had been genuinely afraid that documenting what happened in Montana might draw the structure's attention, might cause it to reach out for him the same way it had reached out for Craft.
So he'd buried the memory as deep as he could, tried to forget, and drank to keep the nightmares at bay.
Nebraska, 2008
I sat there absorbing all of this, feeling like the ground beneath me was becoming less solid with every revelation. My grandfather hadn't just witnessed one impossible thing—he'd witnessed two. And the second had been so much worse that he'd spent the rest of his life trying to erase it from his mind.
Westlake wasn't finished.
He told me there had been a third incident, one that even fewer people knew about, one that had never been officially documented because it had happened outside of government oversight.
In 2008, seventeen years after Montana, Raymond had received a phone call in the middle of the night. Westlake didn't know who had called or what they'd said, but the next morning, Raymond had withdrawn $50,000 from his account and driven to Nebraska. He'd been gone for three days, and when he'd returned, he'd looked like he'd aged a decade.
He'd never told anyone where he'd been or what he'd done. But Westlake had noticed something: the monthly payments had increased again, substantially, without any official authorization or documentation. Someone very powerful had decided Raymond deserved more money, and that decision had been made quietly, off the books, in a way that left no paper trail.
Westlake had tried asking Raymond about it, but my grandfather had shut down completely, refused to discuss it, threatened to cut off all contact if Westlake pressed the issue. So he'd let it go, filed it away as another mystery in a case full of them.
But then, two months ago, Westlake had received an anonymous package containing a single photograph.
It showed Raymond standing in front of yet another structure, this one in what appeared to be a cornfield. The structure was different from the others—not a tower or a pit, but something like a doorway standing unsupported in the middle of the field. Through the doorway, you could see something that definitely wasn't the cornfield on the other side. It looked like a cityscape, but the buildings were wrong, shaped in ways that buildings shouldn't be shaped, lit by a sky that was the wrong color.
And standing next to Raymond in the photo was Dennis Craft—the man who'd disappeared into the Montana pit in 1991.
But Craft looked exactly as he had seventeen years earlier. Not aged at all.
I stared at Westlake, trying to process what he was telling me.
"That's impossible," I said, even though I knew everything about this situation was impossible. "Craft disappeared in Montana. How could he be in Nebraska in 2008?"
Westlake said he didn't know, but he had theories. The structures weren't separate entities—they were all connected somehow, all parts of the same larger system. Someone who disappeared into one structure might be able to emerge from another, though not necessarily in the same time period or even the same reality. Craft appearing seventeen years later, unchanged, suggested that time worked differently inside the structures, that someone could spend decades there and experience it as only moments, or vice versa.
The doorway in the cornfield must have been another access point, and somehow Craft had found his way to it—or it had found him.
But why had Raymond been there? And why had someone sent Westlake this photograph two months ago, decades after it was taken?
Westlake had tried to investigate the Nebraska incident, had reached out to local authorities and searched property records for the area where the photo appeared to have been taken. He'd found something disturbing: a family farm where three people had disappeared in 2008 without a trace. The father, mother, and their teenage son had simply vanished from their home, leaving behind all their possessions, their vehicles, even their pets. No signs of struggle, no indication of where they'd gone.
Local police had investigated it as a potential murder-suicide, theorizing that the father had killed his family and hidden their bodies, but no evidence of that theory was ever found. The case had gone cold after six months.
Westlake believed the cornfield doorway had appeared on their property and that they'd been taken through it, either accidentally or because they'd gotten too close. And he believed Raymond had been called there to help, to use his experience with these structures to try to close the doorway or rescue the family.
Whether he'd succeeded was unknown. The photograph suggested that Craft had been there and might have helped, but there was no other documentation, no official record of any government involvement. It was as if the entire incident had been erased from history, leaving only this one photograph as evidence.
I asked Westlake who had sent him the photo, and he said he didn't know. The package had no return address, no postmark, nothing to indicate where it had come from. He'd had it analyzed and found that the paper and envelope were completely ordinary, untraceable.
Someone had wanted him to know about Nebraska, but hadn't wanted to be identified. Maybe it was someone else from the intelligence community, another person who'd been involved with these structures and wanted the truth to be known before they died.
Or maybe it was something else, something connected to the structures themselves, trying to communicate in the only way it knew how.
That possibility terrified Westlake more than he wanted to admit. The idea that these structures might be intelligent, might be deliberately reaching out to specific people for specific purposes, suggested a level of awareness and intention that was deeply unsettling.
The Decision
"I need to go to Nebraska," I said, surprising myself with how certain I sounded.
Westlake looked at me like I'd lost my mind—which maybe I had. He told me that was exactly what I shouldn't do, that seeking out these structures was a guaranteed way to end up like Collins or Craft or the Nebraska family.
But I couldn't let it go. Raymond had gone there for a reason, had been involved in something so significant that someone had felt compelled to document it and preserve the evidence for decades. If I wanted to understand what my grandfather had really been, what he'd really done, I needed to see that cornfield for myself.
Westlake tried to talk me out of it for another twenty minutes, listing all the ways it could go wrong, all the people who'd died or disappeared chasing these mysteries. But eventually he realized I wasn't going to be dissuaded.
He pulled out a map and showed me the approximate location based on his research into the photograph—a rural area about 40 miles outside of Lincoln, near a small town called Waverly. He gave me a name, too: Daniel Whitmore, a local sheriff who'd been involved in the investigation of the missing family. Whitmore had retired years ago but still lived in the area, and he'd been one of the few people who'd insisted that something unusual had happened on that farm, something that couldn't be explained by conventional theories.
Before I left, Westlake made me promise to check in regularly, to call him every day so he'd know I was safe. He also gave me a small device that looked like a pager from the '90s. He said it was an emergency beacon that would alert a specific monitoring station if I activated it. He couldn't guarantee that help would arrive in time, but at least someone would know where to look for my body.
The drive from Virginia to Nebraska took two days. I stopped at a motel outside Indianapolis the first night and barely slept, my mind churning through everything Westlake had told me. I kept thinking about Raymond standing in that cornfield with Dennis Craft, both of them facing a doorway to somewhere impossible.
What had they seen through it? Had they gone through? And if they had, how had Raymond made it back?
I thought about the three missing family members, imagined them stumbling across this thing in their cornfield and being pulled through before they could understand what was happening. Did they still exist somewhere, trapped in whatever place these structures led to? Or had they been transformed into something else, scattered across dimensions like Teresa Vaughn?
Waverly
The next morning, I forced myself to eat breakfast and then continued west, watching the landscape gradually shift from eastern forests to midwestern plains. Nebraska felt emptier than Ohio, the sky bigger, the horizon stretching forever in all directions.
I reached Waverly in the late afternoon and found it to be exactly what I expected—a tiny town that was slowly dying, its main street half-abandoned, its population aging and shrinking.
I found Daniel Whitmore's house easily enough. It was a small ranch-style home on the edge of town with a well-maintained lawn and an American flag hanging from the porch. I knocked and waited, half expecting no one to answer.
But after a minute, I heard shuffling from inside, and the door opened to reveal a man in his seventies, heavyset and gray-haired with sharp blue eyes that assessed me quickly.
"Help you?" he asked, his voice gruff but not unfriendly.
I introduced myself and mentioned that Arthur Westlake had given me his name, that I was looking into something that happened in 2008 involving a missing family.
Whitmore's expression changed immediately, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. He asked me who I was really and what I wanted, his hand moving toward his waistband where I assumed he kept a weapon.
I told him the truth—or at least part of it—that my grandfather had been involved in classified government work involving anomalous phenomena, that I believed he'd been in Nebraska in 2008 dealing with something connected to the missing family, and that I needed to understand what happened.
Whitmore stared at me for a long moment, then stepped back, gesturing for me to come inside.
His living room was neat and spare, decorated with photographs of what I assumed were his children and grandchildren. He sat down in a recliner and pointed to the couch, so I sat.
Then he asked me point-blank if I knew what had appeared on the Morrison farm in August 2008.
I said I had theories but no facts, and I needed his help to understand the truth.
Whitmore leaned back and closed his eyes, and for a moment I thought he'd decided not to talk. But then he started speaking, his voice quiet but steady.
The Morrison Farm
He said that in early August 2008, there had been several 911 calls from people driving past the Morrison farm, reporting strange lights and sounds. Deputies had been sent to investigate but found nothing unusual. The Morrisons—John and Linda and their son Patrick—had said everything was fine, that they didn't know what the callers were talking about.
But over the next few days, more calls had come in, and some of the reports were bizarre. People claimed to see the farmhouse from the road but also to see it somewhere else at the same time, like there were two farmhouses occupying the same space. Others reported that time seemed wrong near the property, that they'd drive past and suddenly lose fifteen minutes without realizing it.
Whitmore had gone out there himself on August 12th and had seen something he still couldn't explain. In the middle of the cornfield behind the house, maybe 200 yards from the road, there was a thing that looked like a door frame standing unsupported. It was made of that black material that seemed to absorb light, and through it, you could see somewhere that definitely wasn't Nebraska.
He'd stared at it for several minutes, trying to make sense of what he was seeing, and then John Morrison had come out of the house and asked him to leave the property. Morrison had been agitated, nervous, insisted that everything was fine and that the sheriff's department needed to stop bothering them.
Whitmore had complied because he didn't have probable cause to do anything else, but he'd filed a report and contacted the FBI because he knew this was beyond local law enforcement's capability to handle.
The FBI had never responded. Instead, two days later, men in unmarked black SUVs had arrived in Waverly. They'd shown federal credentials but wouldn't say which agency they represented. They'd gone straight to the Morrison farm and set up a perimeter, keeping everyone away.
This had gone on for three days, during which time Whitmore had tried repeatedly to find out what was happening. He'd been stonewalled at every turn, told it was classified and that he should focus on his regular duties.
On the third day, August 17th, the federal agents had suddenly packed up and left. The Morrison family was gone. The doorframe thing in the cornfield was gone. Everything looked completely normal—except for the fact that three people had vanished without a trace.
Whitmore had investigated, of course—had searched the property and interviewed neighbors and tried to figure out what happened. But he'd found nothing. No bodies, no blood, no signs of struggle. The Morrisons' belongings were all still in the house, their vehicles in the garage, their bank accounts untouched. They'd simply ceased to exist.
The federal government had refused to cooperate with his investigation, had actually threatened him when he'd pushed too hard for answers. Eventually, he'd been forced to drop it, officially classifying it as a cold case with no leads.
But he'd never stopped thinking about it, never stopped wondering what those men in black SUVs had been doing on that farm for three days, and why the Morrison family had disappeared right after they left.
I asked Whitmore if he remembered seeing anyone matching Raymond's description among the federal agents.
He thought for a moment, then said there had been one older man, civilian clothes rather than the suits the others wore, who'd seemed to be in charge. He'd been giving orders that the younger agents followed without question, and he'd spent a lot of time staring at the doorframe in the cornfield, like he was trying to understand it or communicate with it.
Whitmore had tried to approach him once but had been physically prevented by other agents, warned that if he interfered again, he'd be arrested for obstruction.
That had to be Raymond. My grandfather had been there, had been brought in to deal with this structure because of his experience with the others.
But what had he done? And why had the Morrison family disappeared?
Whitmore said there was one more thing I should know. About two weeks after the incident, he'd received an anonymous letter in the mail. It had contained no return address and no signature, but the handwriting had been shaky, like it had been written by someone elderly or sick.
The letter had said that the Morrison family was safe—or as safe as they could be given the circumstances—that they'd been taken somewhere they couldn't return from but where they'd be cared for. That what happened on their farm had been unavoidable once the doorframe appeared, and that the federal response had been about containment rather than rescue.
The letter had also warned Whitmore to stop investigating, to accept the official story and move on, because knowing more would only put him in danger.
He'd kept the letter for years but eventually destroyed it, afraid that possessing it might bring unwanted attention from whoever had sent it.
I asked if he thought Raymond had written the letter, and Whitmore said he didn't know, but it was possible. Whoever wrote it had clearly been involved in what happened, had known details that weren't public knowledge, and they'd cared enough about Whitmore's safety to warn him off—which suggested a level of personal concern that a government bureaucrat wouldn't have.
Back to the Cornfield
I thanked Whitmore for his time and asked if he'd be willing to show me where the Morrison farm was. He hesitated, clearly conflicted, then said he'd take me there on one condition: that I'd turn around and leave Nebraska immediately afterward. This wasn't something I should be involving myself with, he said. Good people had died or disappeared chasing these mysteries, and he didn't want to add my name to that list.
I agreed, knowing full well I was lying.
We got in his truck and drove out of town, following back roads through endless cornfields until we reached a property that looked abandoned. The house was still there but overgrown and falling apart, its windows broken, its paint peeling. The barn had partially collapsed. No one had lived here in years, and from the look of it, no one ever would again.
The property had been seized by the county for unpaid taxes, Whitmore told me, and had been sitting empty ever since. Multiple attempts to sell it had failed because of its reputation. People in the area believed it was cursed, haunted, bad luck in physical form.
We parked and walked into the cornfield behind the house. The corn was wild now, untended and overgrown, reaching well above our heads. Whitmore led me to a spot about 200 yards in and stopped.
"This is where it was," he said. "The doorframe. Right here."
I looked around and saw nothing unusual—just corn and dirt and open sky. But there was something strange about the air in this spot, a quality I couldn't quite identify. It felt heavier somehow, thicker, like I was standing at the bottom of a pool.
The silence was wrong, too—absolute in a way that silence shouldn't be. No birds, no insects, no wind moving through the corn. Just nothing.
I pulled out my phone to take a photo and found that it wouldn't work. The screen was black, completely dead, even though it had been fully charged moments before.
Whitmore said that happened sometimes—electronics failing for no reason when you got too close to this spot. He'd learned to leave his phone in the truck when he came here.
I walked forward slowly, one hand extended in front of me, half expecting to encounter some invisible barrier. My fingers brushed against something cold, and suddenly I could see it—the doorframe appearing out of nowhere like it had always been there and I'd just been unable to perceive it.
It was exactly as Westlake had described from the photograph: black material, smooth and featureless, standing unsupported in the middle of the cornfield. And through it, I could see somewhere else—not a cornfield, not Nebraska, but a place that made my eyes hurt to look at. Impossible architecture. Buildings that curved in ways buildings shouldn't curve, lit by a sky that was the wrong color.
I could see movement in that other place—figures that might have been human or might have been something else, walking along streets that seemed to shift and reconfigure as I watched.
I heard Whitmore shout something behind me, his voice distant and distorted like he was calling from very far away, even though he couldn't be more than ten feet behind me.
I tried to turn around, but found that my body wasn't responding properly. My limbs felt heavy, disconnected, like I was controlling them from a great distance.
The doorframe was pulling me, I realized—not physically, but in some other way, drawing my consciousness toward it while my body remained rooted in place. I could feel myself starting to fragment, part of me still standing in the Nebraska cornfield while another part was beginning to exist in that other place beyond the doorframe.
It felt like being stretched thin, my awareness distributed across two locations simultaneously.
I thought about Teresa Vaughn, scattered across multiple cities until she dissipated entirely, and terror flooded through me.
This is how it happened. This is how the structures took people. Not by physically grabbing them, but by causing them to exist in multiple places at once until they couldn't maintain coherence anymore and simply dissolved into wherever they'd been pulled.
I tried to scream, but no sound came out. My vision was splitting, showing me both the cornfield and the impossible city simultaneously, and I couldn't tell which one was real—or if both were, or if neither was.
And then, just as I was certain I was about to lose myself entirely, something grabbed my shoulder and yanked me backward.
The doorframe vanished as if it had never been there, and I was lying on the ground in a normal cornfield in Nebraska, with Whitmore kneeling beside me, his face pale and terrified.
"Don't ever do that again," he said, his voice shaking. "Don't ever get that close. I've seen it happen before—seen people start to slip through even though they're standing still. You were disappearing right in front of me, getting transparent, like you were turning into a ghost."
I sat up slowly, checking to make sure all of me was present and accounted for. Everything seemed normal, but I felt wrong somehow, like I'd left a piece of myself behind in that other place.
My phone was still dead, and when I checked my watch, I found that two hours had passed, even though the experience had felt like only seconds.
We walked back to the truck in silence, and Whitmore drove me back to town without saying another word. When we reached my car, he finally spoke.
"Whatever you're looking for," he said, "it's not worth it. Your grandfather knew that. That's why he spent the rest of his life trying to forget. These things, these structures—they're not meant for human beings to understand. They change us just by being known, corrupt us just by being perceived. Raymond understood that, and he tried to protect you by staying silent. Don't waste his sacrifice by throwing yourself into the same darkness that consumed him."
I thanked him and got in my car, but I knew I couldn't follow his advice. I was already too deep, already too changed by what I'd learned. The structures had marked me the same way they'd marked Raymond, and there was no going back to the ignorant life I'd lived before opening that lockbox.
The Second Attempt
I drove back toward the Morrison farm, waiting until Whitmore was out of sight, then parked on a side road about a mile away. I walked back through the cornfields as the sun began to set, using the GPS on my backup phone to navigate since my primary was still dead.
I found the spot again, and the doorframe was waiting for me, visible now that I knew how to look for it.
I'd felt myself starting to slip through before, and I needed to understand what that meant, what existed on the other side. Maybe I'd find Raymond's answers there. Maybe I'd find Collins or Craft or the Morrison family.
Or maybe I'd just dissolve into nothing, my consciousness scattered across impossible spaces until I ceased to exist in any meaningful way.
But I had to know. The not-knowing would drive me insane the same way it had driven Raymond to drink himself to death.
I stood in front of the doorframe for a long time, watching the impossible city on the other side, trying to build up the courage to step through. I thought about calling Westlake, activating the emergency beacon he'd given me. But what would be the point? No one could help me now. No one had been able to help any of the others who'd gone through.
This was something I had to do alone.
I took a deep breath, pulled out Raymond's journal from my bag, and opened it to the last entry, the one from November 2003 about seeing the tower in his backyard. I realized now that he'd been where I was, standing in front of one of these structures, deciding whether to go through.
He'd chosen not to. Had chosen 32 more years of life, even if that life was haunted and half-lived.
But I wasn't Raymond. I didn't have his strength or his restraint.
I needed to understand.
I stepped forward, my hand reaching out to touch the surface of the doorframe.
The moment my fingers made contact, reality shattered.
I was simultaneously in the Nebraska cornfield and in the impossible city, existing in both places at once, my consciousness fragmenting across the boundary between worlds. I could see Whitmore's truck driving away in one direction and strange figures approaching me in another direction. I could feel cornstalks brushing against my legs and also feel whatever passed for ground in the impossible city beneath my feet.
My sense of time became meaningless, stretching and compressing until I couldn't tell if seconds or hours or years were passing.
And then I saw him.
Raymond.
Standing in the impossible city, looking exactly as he had in the photographs from 1991—young, healthy, wearing his military gear. He was watching me with an expression that wasn't quite sadness and wasn't quite relief.
He opened his mouth to speak, but I couldn't hear him. Or maybe I could hear him, but in a frequency my brain wasn't designed to process. He was trying to warn me, I realized, trying to tell me something urgent and important, but the message couldn't cross the boundary between where he was and where I was.
I tried to move toward him, but found that I couldn't control my movement anymore. Part of me was being pulled deeper into the impossible city, while another part remained stuck in the doorframe, unable to go forward or back. I was trapped between worlds, existing in both and neither, slowly losing coherence as my consciousness stretched too thin to maintain itself.
The Voice
That's when I heard the voice—not with my ears, but directly in my mind, speaking in a language I'd never heard but somehow understood.
It said that I'd gone too far, that I'd crossed a threshold that couldn't be uncrossed, that I'd become like the others now—the ones who'd gotten too close and been changed by proximity to something humans weren't meant to perceive.
It said I had a choice to make, though the word "choice" seemed inadequate for what it was describing.
I could continue forward and let myself be taken completely, joining Raymond and Collins and all the others in whatever existence they now inhabited. I'd be transformed, changed into something that could survive in the spaces between worlds, but I'd no longer be human in any meaningful sense.
Or I could resist, pull myself back, return to the Nebraska cornfield and accept that I'd been permanently marked by this experience. I'd live the rest of my life like Raymond had—haunted by what I'd seen, unable to forget or explain or escape. The structures would always be watching me, always pulling at me, slowly drawing me closer until eventually they succeeded in taking me completely.
There was no third option, no way to go back to ignorance, no way to undo what I'd learned.
The voice was patient, infinite, utterly indifferent to which choice I made. It had all the time in existence to wait for my decision.
I thought about Raymond's life, about the decades he'd spent drinking and smoking and slowly dying while trying to forget. I thought about the journal entries where he'd written about seeing Porter and Teresa, about the nightmares that never stopped. I thought about him standing in this exact position, facing this exact choice, and deciding to pull back, to live in the haunted half-life rather than surrender completely.
And then I thought about Collins, lost since 1991, existing somewhere in these impossible spaces, unable to come home. I thought about what it would mean to find him, to understand what he'd experienced, to maybe help him somehow.
I thought about the Morrison family, taken through the doorframe and never seen again. About all the others who'd disappeared into these structures over the years, scattered across dimensions or transformed into things beyond recognition.
Could I help them? Could I find a way to bring them back, or at least understand what had happened to them?
Or would I just become another lost soul, another name on the list of people who'd gotten too close and been consumed?
The voice in my mind was growing quieter, fading, as if it had said everything it needed to say and was now withdrawing. I realized that this was my last moment to decide. Once the voice was completely gone, once the connection was severed, I'd be locked into whichever state I'd chosen, and there would be no changing it.
I looked at Raymond standing in the impossible city, and for just a moment, I thought I could understand what he was trying to tell me. It wasn't a warning to stay back. It was an explanation, a justification for the choice he'd made all those years ago. He was showing me what happened to people who went through, what they became, and asking if I was ready to accept that fate.
And I realized I wasn't.
As much as I needed to know, as desperately as I wanted to understand, I wasn't ready to stop being human. I wasn't ready to exist scattered across impossible spaces, watching the normal world from outside it, unable to return or communicate or help anyone.
I pulled back, wrenching myself away from the doorframe with every ounce of will I possessed. The impossible city receded, Raymond's figure fading into the distance, the strange architecture collapsing back into not-quite-real.
And then I was just standing in a Nebraska cornfield at sunset, completely solid and entirely present, with no trace of the doorframe visible anywhere around me.
My phone was working again. My watch showed that only ten minutes had passed since I'd touched the doorframe, though it had felt like hours.
I was back. Intact. Unchanged from the outside.
But I knew something fundamental had shifted inside me. I could feel the structures' attention on me now, constant and inescapable. They were watching, waiting, patient as geological time. They knew I'd come close, had almost surrendered, and they knew I'd do it again eventually—because the pull would never stop, the need to understand would never fade.
And one day, maybe years from now, maybe weeks, I'd stand in front of another doorframe or tower or pit, and the pull would be too strong to resist. I'd make Raymond's choice in reverse, step through completely, and join him and all the others in whatever existence awaited on the other side.
But not today.
Today, I was still human enough to walk away, still connected enough to normal reality to drive back to my car and leave Nebraska behind.
I'm standing in my apartment now, six months later, writing this all down before the details fade any further. The lockbox sits on my desk, its contents spread out like evidence in a crime that can never be prosecuted.
My mother called yesterday. She's selling Raymond's house. Asked if I wanted anything from it before the estate sale. I told her I already have everything I need.
She doesn't know what that means. She'll never know.
The figure appears sometimes, standing outside my window regardless of which floor I'm on. It doesn't try to communicate anymore, just watches. Waiting.
Westlake died three weeks ago. The obituary said it was cancer, which was true enough. But I think part of him was relieved to go, to finally be free of the weight of knowing.
I received a package yesterday—no return address, no postmark. Inside was a single photograph.
It shows me standing in the Nebraska cornfield, my hand extended toward something that isn't visible in the frame. But I can see it in my eyes, reflected in them like a distant city burning.
And standing behind me, barely visible in the shadows at the edge of the frame, is Raymond.
Not young Raymond from 1991, but old Raymond—the grandfather I knew, the one who died six months ago. He's watching me with that same expression I saw in the impossible city, the one I couldn't quite read.
On the back of the photograph, in handwriting I recognize as his, are three words:
Not yet, but soon.
I don't know who took this picture. I don't know who sent it. I don't know if Raymond somehow reached back across the boundary to deliver a message, or if something else is using his image to communicate.
But I understand what it means.
The structures are patient. They can wait. And eventually—not today, not tomorrow, but eventually—I'll make the choice Raymond couldn't make.
I'll step through.
And maybe, on the other side, I'll finally understand what he spent 32 years trying to forget.
The journal sits open on my desk. I've been adding to it, continuing Raymond's work, documenting everything I've learned. Maybe someone will find it someday, the way I found his. Maybe they'll be smarter than me, will read the warnings and actually heed them.
Or maybe they'll do exactly what I did—follow the trail deeper, get marked by the structures, become part of the pattern that's been repeating for decades, maybe centuries.
Outside my window, the figure raises one too-long hand in something that might be a wave or might be a beckoning.
I don't wave back.
Not yet.
But soon.
The doorframe is always there, waiting at the edge of perception, visible to those who know how to look. And once you've learned to see it, you can never unsee it. It becomes part of your reality, a constant presence at the periphery of your awareness, pulling gently but persistently toward somewhere that isn't quite here and isn't quite anywhere else.
Raymond knew this. He lived with it for 32 years.
Now it's my turn.
The structures are patient.
They can wait.
And so can I.
For now.