Still, if only out of frustration, I wandered over to the entrance of the gate and gazed down once again into its swirling, starry depths.
I couldn’t help but wonder, What really is beyond that tunnel wall?
Drifting down into the gaping hole, I took a closer look at the wall. Reaching out a hand, I dared touch it. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting to feel—some kind of sensation? Resistance? I felt nothing. My hand moved through the swirling substance and passed right through it, as though it were nothing but air. I sank in my other arm, and then half of my body, until I’d stepped completely through the wall and left the portal entirely.
All noise disappeared. I couldn’t catch even the slightest sigh of the wind up on the mountain top. It felt like being in a sound booth, buried hundreds of miles underground.
As I gazed around at what appeared to be an endless world of stars, it felt like a dream. What were those sparkling dots? Were they really stars? Planets? What was this place? Feeling like I was in space, I dared drift a little further away from the tunnel, deeper into the vacuum.
Slowly but surely, I moved further and further away from the tunnel, until I was about twenty feet away. I turned around to examine the portal from the outside for the first time. It was like a wide, smoky tube, attached beneath the mountain and extending much further into the blackness than I could see.
This is just weird.
And was this where Nolan and Chantel—wherever they are now—believed they would be taken on a full moon night?
I wondered if any other ghosts had dared venture through the walls and out into this wilderness by themselves, rather than wait for the elusive ‘midnight light’.
I began wandering with no particular direction as I attempted to make sense of my surroundings. Every speculation or idea I came up with was just as stupid and far-fetched as the others. My attention focused on the shimmering stars. I wondered just how far away they were from me. How long it would take to reach the nearest one. Whether they were inhabited planets, or just burning balls of fire…
I felt like an astronaut exploring the ether as I ventured forward toward what seemed to be the brightest star. Because it was the brightest and the largest, I also assumed it to be the closest, though of course, I saw the flaws in that logic. Still, I didn’t see the harm in moving forward… as long as I didn’t lose sight of the tunnel.
Ben
I had no way of knowing how much time was passing as I drifted in the vacuum. My vision still focused on what I’d deemed to be the nearest star, I began speeding up, until I was hurtling forward with all the supernatural speed that I had. But the star did not seem to be getting any closer at all. I wondered how many days, months or maybe even years it would take to reach it.
As the outline of the long, snaking tunnel had all but faded, I stopped. I couldn’t get too carried away in my curiosity over this strange world. Besides risking getting lost, this would in any case only turn out to be a detour, a waste of time. A way of taking my mind off the frustration that still filled me after my encounter with the oracle.
I traced my route back to the portal and, on reaching the swirling tunnel walls, I paused before passing through it. I couldn’t help but gaze around this silent world one last time. Almost painfully silent. The type of silence that caused a person to go insane if they stayed in it for too long.
I felt the urge to shatter it—or see if I could—before I turned my back on the vacuum, maybe never to return.
“Hello!” I bellowed. I was shocked by how loud my voice sounded. I was so used to it being washed out beneath the noises of the living world, but now, it was as though I’d just hollered into a mega-blast system.
I shouted again, even attempting to increase my volume this time and see how loud it could get. If I’d had ear drums, they would have hurt, I was sure.
Now it’s time to stop procrastinating.
Turning my back on the stars, I returned through the walls of the tunnel. As disconnected as I was from the world above, I felt a surge of relief as I arrived back on the snowy plateau and took in my surroundings—my comfortingly earthly surroundings.
Before thinking about heading back to the supernatural realm in search of more answers, I needed a few moments to recover from that mind warp.
Once I felt ready to pass through the tunnel again to the supernatural realm, I approached the portal and hovered over it. As I was about to dive through, my head panned downward. I froze, my eyes bulging.
Staring up at me through the darkness of the abyss was a face. A man. But he was a man unlike any I had ever seen before. At first I thought he was another ghost, since he appeared to be drifting—the downward pull of the portal having no effect on him at all. But I soon discarded that assumption. His tall, slender body radiated a warm glow—a glow I had never witnessed coming from a ghost before—and his appearance was… breathtaking. A word I hadn’t thought I’d ever use to describe another man. He had straight copper-colored hair that flowed down his shoulders and reached down to his lower back. He wore a white silk sash around his waist, and another over his shoulder, as well as a silver belt holding two sheathed daggers. His eyes were a brilliant amber, his ears were slanted at the tips, and his face was so perfectly symmetrical he almost looked like a drawing.
Then he spoke, in a deep, almost musical voice. “You were calling.”
Calling. This creature is from the other side of the tunnel walls… “The other side”.
My mind began spinning. Could the fable Nolan and Chantel recounted to me possibly be true after all? Are they and the other ghosts gone because, indeed, the light did come for them?