A portal opens - Tell a story to me contest #9
Deep below ground, a portal opens…
The hum reverberates around the room. A breeze wafts from the portal rippling through Stacy’s hair. Her heart is pounding.
Stacy puts a hand up to the edge of the portal. She steadies her breathing. She's lost count of the number of times she's used the portal.
This time is different.
This time she's not coming back.
3 weeks earlier
Stacy climbs the steps towards the library. She messes with the strap on her bag. She’s feeling nervous about meeting the professor.
Professor Chance is seen as the leading expert in portal-ology.
She pushes open the heavy door revealing a huge entrance hall. Heels clack against marble floors, the sound traveling up to the domed glass ceiling. The walls hold doorways and full-size tapestries.
The sight takes her breath away.
A round desk sits in the center of the room with three people working busily behind it.
Stacy steps up, worrying she's going to stumble her words.
“Professor erm Chance seeing me. Appointment today.”
She curses herself silently. Her cheeks reddening from becoming flustered.
The man behind the desk looks up over his glasses. “One moment miss.”
The tapestries across the room catch her attention. Scenes of war and battle are faded to a murky yellow. One, in particular, catches her eye; an open portal.
It's a stunning design, something that she could lose hours looking at.
Stacy is eventually lead into a small office and told to wait. Her eyes are immediately drawn to the bookcase. The shelves contain books, mainly written by portal-ologists.
She scourers the titles and authors names, she smiles at the ones she has read and is surprised by the number she hasn’t heard of. Her eyes come to rest on a particular book.
The Truth of Portals by Shirley Lamb
She pulls out the book and examines its clean cover.
“Hello Miss Smith”
Startled by the voice, Stacy drops the book and scrambles to pick it up again. The professor reaches it first.
“Ah the truth of portals, have you read it Miss Smith?”
Stacy nods her head. She has read the book. She knows the contents of its pages well.
“They called Shirley Lamb a prodigy of her time, although her work never bore much fruit. I believe she had big ideas for portals.”
The professor points for Stacy to take a seat.
Stacy feels like she's back at the head teachers office being scolded for not paying attention in class. She never like that feeling.
School had never interested Stacy. The teachers were not very intelligent and none of them knew much about portals.
“So what do you think you've found Miss Smith?”
Stacy rummages for her notes in her bag. The loose pieces of paper are crumpled and stained.
“I redesigned the portal to go beyond.”
She flattens out a particular piece of paper in front of the professor.
“Go beyond what dear?”
“Earth.”
She starts to doubt herself.
The professor looks over the paper.
“And how have you come to this conclusion?”
“I made it. It works.”
The professor sighs in frustration.
Stacy knows that sigh well. It's the sigh people only make when they talk to Stacy.
She prepares herself, mentally, for what she's about to say.
“I have a portal that I have been working on and I believe it can travel to more places than just what's on earth. It can go to other dimensions. Instead of going from A to A it can now go from A to B or even A to Z.”
“How do you have access to a portal?”
“It was my mother's.”
“And your mother was?”
Stacy feels a sudden disconnect from herself. The way she does when people say her name or ask her a question she's not prepared for. She stands up and pulls a book from the shelf, the one she had picked up before. She hands it to the professor.
“Shirley Lamb? She’s your mother?”
Stacy nods.
“She was.”
This conversation isn’t going the way she had planned. She was supposed to talk about the portal and her calculations and her tests.
“She taught me everything she knew about portals. The portal I have leads to another place, not in this world.”
The professor places the book on her desk. She looks at Stacy with a cold expression.
“I’ve heard enough, thank you for your time, Miss Smith.”
Stacy makes her way home, running the conversation over in her head. She knows she failed.
The professor had shut down the minute her mother was mentioned.
She had needed the Professor to get her work and the portal's capabilities verified. At the moment she is a nobody, trying to enter a field that is highly restrictive and secretive.
Stacy concludes that she is going to need physical proof that the portal works.
She's going to have to enter it herself.
In the beginning, Stacy had tested the portal with an apple. The first attempt had resulted in the loss of the apple and half a length of rope. Stacy had reconfigured the portal over and over again until finally, an apple would come back in exactly the same condition as she sent it.
After that, she tried using watches and other gadgets to see if they would still work when they were no longer on earth. Most didn’t, and some came back broken or destroyed.
The possibilities of what was happening to the items bewildered Stacy. She couldn’t see where they were going and she had no idea what could be transpiring on the other side.
She had sent a camera that was prepared to take photos every few seconds; it had returned without the memory card. This had frightened Stacy the most.
She knew that sending some fruit and a watch wasn’t reliable enough to demonstrate that humans could enter the portal to another world, and survive. She decided to test it on her neighbors' cat.
The cat had come back without its tail.
She had cried at the result of her experiment with the animal.
The cat had refused to come near her since.
Stacy puts her satchel down on the table. The room is dark, the only illumination coming from the portal.
She takes off her coat and falls onto her bed. She's exhausted from the trip and falls to sleep immediately.
She wakes up groggily, remembering the events of the day before and chides herself for not fighting harder to be heard. She makes herself something to eat and looks over her plans.
Today is the day, she is going to go through the portal herself.
She gathers the supplies she is going to take with her; food, water, warm clothes. She also prepares her camera.
She picks up her worn copy of The Truth of Portals. It opens to the page she has inscribed in her mind.
Stacy never understood what it meant but it didn't matter, her mother had dedicated the book containing her life's work to her.
The pages of the book are worn and yellow. Stacy’s scruffy handwriting is scrunched onto every page.
The portal hums to life as she steps towards it. A breeze wafts through the room. It’s now or never.
Stacy steps through the portal.
It isn't how she imagined it.
There's no earth-shattering sensations or electrifying feeling from the portal. There's no feeling at all.
Stacy steps through making a mental note of the significant lack of awareness of traveling.
On the other side, Stacy opens her eyes wide in confusion.
She feels overwhelming disappointed. She thinks she hasn't left earth. The field before her is green and full of yellow dandelions. Not an alien planet she had believed it would be.
She had been so certain that the portal was different, that she had made it more powerful.
The sun falls behind a cloud and for a moment Stacy can see nothing. A spike of fear fills her.
She presses the shutter on the camera; the flash goes off automatically.
She screams and falls back through the portal.
She doesn't have a chance to stand up let alone close the portal behind her when the thing that terrified her, follows her through.
“Hello, Stacy. I’ve been waiting for you.”
—-
Stacy wakes up scrambling to grab a weapon. She picks up a chair looking around the room frantically.
There’s a girl, not much older than Stacy, sat at the table. She's reading Stacy's notes.
“Who are you?”
The girl looks up.
“I’m Har. You’re Stacy. And I think you should come with me now.”
“Where?”
“Through the portal of course.”
“I’m not going back there.”
The girl, Har, stands up.
“We need you. I’m sorry you were frightened before. But it’s imperative you come with me.”
Stacy's arms start to ache from holding the chair.
“Why do you need me?”
“You fixed this portal, we need you to fix more. They will be able to explain it better than me. Please, Stacy.”
Stacy puts down the chair, her arms sore. She senses no real danger from the girl, Har, but what she is asking isn’t high on Stacy’s wishlist.
“The thing you saw was me. I didn’t want you to disappear. Somehow I followed you here. I’ve been watching your progress for months.”
“The cat?”
The girl sighs looking upset. “My friends thought it was funny, they wanted to scare you. I couldn’t stop them in time. They were punished for that.”
Stacy sits down on the edge of her bed. Her mind is swimming with possibility.
“The watch? The camera?”
“They thought it best you didn't find out too much about us so soon. We needed to know if you were willing to enter the portal on your own.”
“Why?”
“The portals stopped working about a year ago. None of our engineers can figure out why. I’ve been watching you. I’ve seen you make this portal work, it can take us from your world to mine. You can find the problem with our portals, I know you can.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“Then we’ll all die.”
Har isn’t lying. She holds onto a pendant around her neck.
“We’re starving. Portals are everything, we use them to transport food across continents and spread medicine and provide people with safer places to live.”
Stacy thinks about her own world.
Portals had become integral to the society. They were used for everything and everyone was richer because of it; if the portals stopped working the whole system would collapse.
Stacy stands up abruptly and picks up her toolbox.
“No time to waste then.”
Har stares in shock but composers herself and walks over to the portal.
“If you do this you might not come back. Once you fix the portal at my end, the way to here might collapse. It’s a big risk. You need to think about this.”
Stacy looks around the room she’s been calling home. It’s dark and dirty, the walls mouldy and her possessions few.
She’s never felt connected to the world she was born in.
Her last ties to this world died with her mother.
“I have nothing here anyway.”
This is my entry to @calluna ‘s Tell A Story To Me competition.
Find out about the competition here.
Image from Pixabay
A very strong opening, and the use of the present tense creates an immediate sense of immersion. The tone you have used carries the emotional thread and development perfectly, the details build so well, each tying into to the greater picture.
I loved how you described the crossing, and the story set up so well to feign one way, then go another. I really thought her mum would be on the other side, and loved it when that wasn't the twist at all. You create a story with a sense of gaining independence, Stacy's emotional development, her early (well described) anxiety and tension, her sense of not being heard, of having faltered with the professor, leading into her bravery, her almost breaking point, where her fears disappear in the face of something greater. Her bravery means so much more when it comes to it, not just for her earlier self-doubt, but also a sense of being alone (in her research, in her life, in her family) falling to the wayside as she finds a purpose. A leap she maybe couldn't have taken for her own gain, she can take for the sake of others. Not only does the plot have great momentum and propulsion, your character development makes it feel like a very complete story, every thread well tied off.
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This was a great read, very well written and well paced! Respect!