This story is set in the Alps, principally in an unnamed village near Mont Blanc. I collected the footage on a number of different jouneys I've made around the Alps, especially in the Trentino Alto-Adige region of Italy and in France or Italy close to the Fréjus Tunnel.
The village seen around 9 minutes in is actually Abetone in Tuscany, and the footage filmed from trains was taken on the train that goes from Trento up to Innsbruck.
The main reason for using this setting for my horror story was really just so I could conjure up a journalist wearily driving from ski resort to ski resort, scared out of his wits. I find it intriguing how the weather can even be hot and sunny at the bottom of a mountain, then after a long drive to the top, you find yourself surrounded by snow and fog. It's as if there exists another world at the top of the mountain, and you gradually ascend into it as you travel upwards.
Parallel universes are a theme I've employed in many of my stories, and this time I've utilised the absolute most scientifically credible notion of a parallel universe, although the "re-entangler" is of course purely fictional and likely an impossibility.
Ultimately this story explores the horror of eternal punishment and asks whether anyone truly deserves an eternity in Hell: a question which I can't answer for myself, since the fundamental nature of evil is as unclear to me as it is to the story's narrator and protagonist.
And of course, while I don't want to give away the ending, I have borrowed a plot twist from one of Kafka's stories.
If the punishment must always fit the crime, then who could possibly be more deserving of an eternity of suffering than someone who has sentenced someone to an eternity of suffering without being absolutely sure that they deserved it?
Is all evil madness and misunderstanding or is it a thing in itself? I didn't explain too much about quantum physics in the introduction, because I didn't want it to get too long or boring, but note that "quantum mechanics" is a mathematical theory which is largely synonymous with "quantum physics", since it is the only really well-established quantum theory in physics.
A "mechanics" is a theory concerned with force, matter and motion. Quantum mechanics owes its inception to Heisenberg and his colleagues, and an equivalent formulation was later given by Schrödinger ("wave mechanics"), who also devised the cat-in-the-box thought experiment as a way of pointing out the absurdity of interpretations of quantum mechanics that involve things existing in two states at the same time (two locations, or "alive" and "dead", etc.).
Paul Dirac, an English physicist, created an elegant mathematical formulation of Heisenberg's theory which is still used today. Apparently Heisbenberg's original notation was rather impenetrable. Hence my reference to Dirac, although at that point my own Derbyshire accent sounds so thick to me that I can hardly even understand what I'm saying myself, so it's a good job it's not important in the story.
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