Ray Upton wasn’t having a good day.
It started much like any other day. He awoke at 5.30am and stumbled into the shower, leaving his wife, Patricia, sleeping peacefully in bed. He shaved, quickly ate some toast and drank some coffee, then walked half an hour to the tube station, where he got onto a graffiti-covered metro. He changed lines twice, and eventually emerged in a grey, ugly suburb with an unsettlingly unsafe atmosphere, surrounded by large concrete tower blocks.
After a further half-hour walk, he arrived at the offices of Richley, Richley and Pearson. There he sat down on a broken office chair and began working at a computer.
His colleague Dave, sitting opposite him, sighed heavily when he sat down. Other than that, Ray’s arrival elicited no reaction.
Ray continued reading the file he’d been assigned. It was a seemingly-endless legal document that rambled on for tens of thousands of words. It was very hard to concentrate on the document, but Ray was determined to get through it.
He’d been reading for half an hour when his boss, Al, appeared.
“A word with you in my office, Ray.” said Al.
Ray followed him silently into the enormous corner office. Al’s office was the only nice bit of the entire building as far as Ray had been able to determine. It looked out onto the tops of the only trees for five blocks, at the back of the building.
“Ray, Ray, Ray.” said Al, shaking his head.
Ray’s face registered surprise at Al’s tone, but he said nothing, since it wasn’t at all clear what Al was driving at.
Al produced a wad of papers, holding them in both hands, and dropped them on the massive desk in front of Ray.
“Did you print out some of this and take it home?”
Ray looked at the top two or three papers.
“Yes.” said Ray. “There’s nearly a hundred thousand words of dense legal text and I’m supposed to understand it all in-depth by Thursday. I printed out fifty pages so I could read them on the tube.”
“I’m going to have to let you go, Ray.” said his boss.
“What?” said Ray. “Why?”
“Sarbanes-Oxley. This is a direct contravention.”
“There was literally no other way I could do what you asked me to get done. No-one else here could have done it, even if they’d taken the whole thing home with them!”
“Sorry, Ray.” said Al. “Out of my hands. You’ll need to collect your things from your desk. Security will see you out.”
Al pressed a button on his desk and two security officers entered the room.
The officers watched as Ray collected a few meagre possessions from his desk and put them in a box that one of the security men had handed to him. The two men carefully checked everything he placed in the box.
As he was walking away, Dave said “Loser!”, half-hiding it with a fake cough.
Dave had never liked Ray. But then, Dave had never liked anyone.
Ray looked back despairingly at him but said nothing.
He soon found himself standing outside the grey office block holding the brown box in both hands.
The nearest public transport was a half-hour walk away. He began walking towards the tube station, and on the way he emptied the box carelessly into a litter bin and left the box on top of the bin.
Then he remembered he’d had a photograph of his wife on his desk. He went back to the bin and picked out the photograph, which was in a little stand. This he placed in the inside pocket of his jacket, and continued on his way.
The metro was delayed by an hour due to someone leaping fatally onto the tracks, but eventually it turned up. He sat down on the only available seat, which was facing the wrong way. An obese woman sat down next to him, and opposite sat a teenager who was playing music via a portable speaker.
The teenager glared at him defiantly.
It was a relief to get out of the metro station. He took his phone out of his pocket to call his wife and let her know he’d be home early, but almost as soon as the phone was in his hand, someone riding past on a moped snatched it out of his hand.
He hurried home so he could try to remotely wipe the device. There was no point reporting the theft to the police. The police wouldn’t care about a phone, or really any kind of theft at all.
When he entered the door of his house, a semi-detached suburban construction that Ray’s wife liked but that Ray had always privately considered a monstrosity, Ray found his wife struggling with a suitcase.
“What’s going on?” he said. “Are you going somewhere?”
An unfamiliar man appeared from the staircase.
“Why are you back so early?” said Patricia, shocked.
“I got fired.”
The strange man put his arm around Ray’s wife and the shocked expression faded from Patricia’s face, to be replaced with a hard resolve.
“Ray, I’m leaving you.” she said.
“What?”
“Sorry, Ray. It hasn’t been working between us for a long time. You know that.”
“What hasn’t been working?” said Ray, utterly baffled.
“You and me, Ray. It doesn’t work.”
“But, I love you.” said Ray.
“You’ll find someone else.” said his wife, as the man ushered her out of the door, taking her suitcase.
“Nice to finally meet you, Ray.” said the man over his shoulder.
Ray collapsed at the kitchen table and burst into tears.
The following day, Ray began looking for a small flat he could rent on his own. Clearly he couldn’t afford to keep up the mortgage payments on the house. Besides, the thought of the strange man carousing with his wife in the house when he was away at work made him want to leave the house and never return to it.
Renting somewhere proved difficult. Landlords all wanted proof of income. Ray had some savings, but even he himself wasn’t entirely sure how he would cover the rent in the long term, although by the time he began looking for a new place, he had already sent off his CV to five possible employers.
He was passing what looked like a dilapidated ruin of a building when he noticed a “For Rent” notice attached to it, together with a phone number. He’d already purchased another cheap phone with a built-in camera, and he took a photograph of the number. The building itself couldn’t possibly be for rent; it was too run-down. The advert, he thought, must refer to some other, perhaps adjacent property.
Only five days later, after a very unpleasant talk with his bank, was Ray desperate enough to actually call the number. A gruff-sounding man answered.
“It’s liveable inside.” said the man. “Four hundred quid a month. Cash. You’ll not get cheaper than that round here.”
“Can I view it?” said Ray.
“Tomorrow, 5pm.” said the man.
“All right.” said Ray.
“Don’t be late. I’m a busy man.”
Ray told himself he was just going to look at the building out of curiosity, but the fact was that he was getting quite desperate to find somewhere to live. Increasingly he was casting his mind back to various hikes when he was younger, and telling himself that in the worst case, he could live in a tent till he got back on his feet.
He met the man outside the run-down building as arranged. The man said his name was Spog. Whether that was his given name or surname, Ray didn’t enquire.
Inside, the house resembled a ruin just as much as on the outside, but a ruin in which some minimal care had been taken to render it, as Spog had put it, “liveable.”
The kitchen consisted of a collection of cheap appliances and a relatively new cast-iron sink, although the walls consisted of rough brick, with old plaster adhering to the bricks here and there. In the bathroom was a filthy old shower with cracked tiles, but a new boiler successfully supplied hot water.
At least it was somewhere to live, Ray thought. He could live there till he found a new job, then get somewhere better. A month or two at the most.
“I’d pay two hundred.” said Ray.
Spog laughed.
“Two hundred? You must be mental.” he said. “This is London, mate. Two hundred wouldn’t get you a rabbit hutch for a week. Three-fifty and it’s yours.”
“Three hundred.”
Spog sighed.
“All right, three hundred. I want two month’s rent as a deposit in case you wreck it, and the first month’s rent in advance.”
Ray’s mind went to the balance of his bank account. He had enough to cover it, but then he’d have nothing left and would have to tap into his savings.
“Wreck it?” he said, growing in confidence since he could tell Spog was keen to let the place. “It’s already wrecked. One month’s deposit.”
“Cash.” said Spog.
“I’ll go to the cash machine immediately.”
The deal was concluded with Ray signing a contract on which Spog’s name and address were illegible, following which Spog handed him the key to the front door. Ray proceeded to sell whatever of his belongings could be sold, and the rest he threw away or left on the street for passers-by to take.
It was as if a switch had flipped in Ray’s brain. His life had crumbled and dissolved; now he had a new life, and he felt ready to throw himself into it, however disturbing it would appear to his friends and former colleagues.
That evening he sat on the floor in his new place and gazed at the plaster peeling off the bricks and the ants and spiders scurrying to and fro on the old rotting floorboards. Then he felt around in the pockets of his three jackets, eventually locating a credit card. He then made his way to the nearest off-licence and purchased two bottles of wine. He drunk almost an entire bottle while sitting on the floor again, eating sausage rolls from a bakery he’d passed on the way to the off-licence.
He decided to buy a second-hand sofa. It would be nice to have somewhere to sit.
Suitably fortified by the wine, he set out to explore what he’d rented.
There seemed to be only one floor to it. Two upper floors technically existed, but the staircase was boarded up and an official-looking sign had been pinned to the boards. It said, “Do not enter. Danger of death.”
He also found a cellar. At first the cellar door proved a formidable obstacle, but soon he found a rusty old key. Descending the steps, he encountered a room almost ankle-deep in filthy water, with the rotting remains of an armchair standing in one corner. The light, a single bulb hanging on a wire from the ceiling, still worked, and this somehow amused him, and he ascended the stairs laughing to himself.
As he was mounting the top stair, the door frame caught his attention. It was extraordinarily thick and broad, and was painted with fresh white paint. It looked as though it had been built to withstand earthquakes, and stood in sharp contrast to everything else in the house, which was rotting and falling apart.
That night Ray fell asleep on a yoga mat his wife had left in their old house, wondering about the previous occupants of his new abode, and why they had taken so much trouble over a doorframe and almost nothing else. Had they intended the doorframe to become the starting point of an ambitious attempt at renovation? There seemed no other explanation.
The following morning, Ray’s wife called.
He was eating instant noodles when his phone rang.
“Hello.” he said, unsure of how to speak to her now that their relationship had abruptly and irrevocably altered.
“Ray have you seen my yoga mat?” she said.
Ray looked down at the mat he was sitting on.
“No.” he said. “I’ve moved out. I’m in my new place now. You can go and look for it if you want.”
“Never mind.” said his wife. “Ray, we need to meet to discuss some things. Bills, who’s going to take what, that sort of thing.”
“You can have the house and whatever else you want.” said Ray. “I haven’t got any money. So that’s that.”
“Ray, are you drunk?”
“I’ve only had two glasses this morning. Of —” he picked up the bottle of wine and peered at the label. Very little light made its way between the slats of the boarded-up window. “—White Zinfadel 2023.”
“We still need to meet Ray. I’ll come to your new place. Where are you?”
He dutifully gave her his new address and they arranged to meet the following morning.
After the call ended, he realised he was rather short of clean clothes, so he took some clothes to a public laundry. For lunch, he ate chips, then he visited a supermarket and bought some bread and cheese for later. The house had no fridge, but Ray felt the cheese would last a while without one.
He knew he ought to start applying for more jobs, but he couldn’t face it. The thought of talking to recruiters, or of having to sit in an interview and pretend not only to be normal, but to be positively enthusiastic about whatever stupid task they’d got for him, was unbearable.
In the evening he began to make a thorough exploration of the crumbling house.
Even a cursory search revealed areas of unexpected filth and abundant evidence of insect life, but the place was so far gone and his contract of such dubious enforceability that attempting to improve it seemed pointless.
While inspecting the brickwork, wondering if it was actually capable of supporting the inaccessible structure above it, he discovered a loose brick.
Behind it, he found a key.
The key closely resembled the key to the cellar door. He fetched the cellar door key and compared the two. They were identical except the new key had an extra bit that was missing from the cellar key.
It seemed there ought to be another door that this new key must open, but after a thorough search, he concluded that if such a door existed, it must be upstairs, in the inaccessible part of the building.
Following his search, he made more instant noodles and sat on a blanket in the middle of the floor eating them, gazing at the crumbling walls. At three hundred a month, if he rearranged his money between different accounts, tapping into his small Bitcoin investment, his money would last a while. Maybe even a year. A year without working. The thought brought a smile to his face.
The following morning, Ray’s wife knocked at the door.
“Ray!” she said, when he answered. “I thought I must have got the wrong place.”
“No.” he said. “It’s the right place. Come in.”
“Christ, Ray.” she said, eyeing the half-ruined interior of the building. “What are you doing here?”
She was carrying a cardboard box, which she dropped unceremoniously on the floor.
“Well,” said Ray, “my wife left me and I lost my job and I can’t afford the mortgage on our house by myself, so I rented this place. It’s actually growing on me.”
“You’re blaming me, now? It’s not my fault you lost your job.”
“I’m not blaming you. Just, I don’t understand …”
“I fell in love with someone else, Ray. People change. It’s quite simple.”
Ray quietly digested the information.
“I haven’t changed.” he said.
“That’s the problem, Ray.”
“What do you mean?”
She sighed theatrically.
“Let’s not talk about this now.”
Ray nodded slowly, a resigned expression on his face.
“What’s in the box?” he said finally.
“Stuff from the house that I don’t need.”
“Thanks.” said Ray.
“Is there anywhere to sit?”
“Not really. We can sit on the floor. I’ve got a blanket.”
He had taken care to hide the yoga mat before Patricia’s arrival.
“Fine, I’ll stand.” she said, frostily.
“Trish …” he said.
“What?” said Trish.
“Did I do something wrong?”
Ray’s wife sighed again in frustration.
“I didn’t come here to discuss this. We have practical affairs to sort out.”
“I just need to know.” he said, tears forming in his eyes.
Inwardly he cursed himself for being so pathetic. His wife had never been the type of person who responded well to self-pity.
She paused, watching him, coldly gauging his emotional state, then said, “You’re a very boring man, Ray. I need someone more exciting in my life. When I met Roy, I realised what I’d been missing.”
“His name’s Roy?” said Ray incredulously.
“Can we please talk about the bill situation?”
“That’s all it was? I wasn’t exciting enough?”
“Ray, look around you. This is so Ray. I need someone ambitious. Someone with get-up-and-go. I honestly think you’d be happy living in a shed.”
Ray thought of a shed, perhaps high on a hillside somewhere. Perhaps he could get water from a spring. She was right. He might well be happy in a shed. He’d got the job at Richley, Richley and Pearson just to please her.
“Fair enough.” he said. “So, bills.”
Before leaving, she phoned Roy to come and pick her up. Ray showed her to the door, and a sports car appeared outside, with loud music emerging from it. He caught a brief glimpse of the driver: a pink shirt, sunglasses, gelled hair. His wife got into the car and it shot off with squealing tyres.
He began to rake despondently through the box. It contained only useless things Patricia herself had purchased, and had decided she didn’t like. A cold, icy hand seemed to grasp his heart. He took the box to the cellar door, unlocked the door, and threw the box in, shutting the door again afterwards.
This world is a cold place, he thought to himself. But wasn’t he the architect of his own misfortune? He’d chosen to marry Trish, after all. In the final analysis, it was he himself who had made the critical mistake, by marrying someone who didn’t really care about him. The world supplies an endless parade of uncaring people and he had married one of them, quite knowingly.
Then he realised he’d seen something unexpected. For a second he was confused; a striking but undefinable vision seemed to have made its way unbidden into his mind.
The cellar. There was something unusual about the cellar.
He unlocked the door again, opened it, and stood staring in disbelief.
Where before there had been a short flight of steps leading down to a waterlogged cellar, now stood a vast dark uneven landscape, dotted here and there by twisted dead trees. The items from the box mostly still lay at his feet, just across the threshold, a few of the lighter objects having been blown some metres by a piercing hollow wind.
How was it possible? The landscape resembled nothing that could be found in London.
The answer suggested itself immediately: nuclear bombs had fallen shortly after Patricia had departed, and this was all that was left of London. He rushed to the front door and flung it open, but outside the ugly street was still there and the sun was still intermittently attempting to break through grey clouds.
Ray shut the door again and went back to the cellar. The barren, alien landscape still stood there, where the cellar steps should be. In the distance there was a small house or shed, and aside from that, the rest appeared to consist of ugly hilly wilderness.
Panicking, Ray pulled the cellar door shut.
That stuff definitely hadn’t been there earlier. Why was it there now? How could it even be there? He took the key from the lock and it was then that he realised he’d accidentally used the key that he’d found behind the brick, instead of the usual cellar key.
He proceeded to carry out systematic experiments, and indeed he found that one key opened the cellar door in the usual fashion, while the other key, from behind the loose brick, opened the door onto the strange dark landscape.
The difference must have something to do with the unusually large doorframe, he decided. It must have some kind of mechanism built into it.
He was pondering the matter when a knock at the front door startled him. He hastily shut the cellar door and went to see who it was.
“Chris!” he said, upon opening the front door. “What are you doing here?”
“You invited me. Don’t you remember?”
“Did I?”
“Yes. You said, ‘come round sometime’. So I’m here.”
An amused frown appeared on Chris’s face.
“Sorry, if it’s not a good time I’ll come back another time. I was in the area anyway. My studio’s three blocks away.”
“No, no, it’s a great time. Come in.” said Ray.
Chris gawped at the interior of the house in surprise, but refrained from commenting on it. Instead, he said, “So what’s up with you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You seem in a daze.”
“Pat just visited. It’s probably that.”
“She was never right for you anyway, if I’m honest.” said Chris.
“What do you mean?” said Ray.
“She’s a bit … materialistic.”
Ray stared at Chris and for a second Chris thought Ray was going to explode at him. But Ray only burst into laughter.
“Yeah.” he said. “You’re not wrong.”
“I should introduce you to my friend Lorna.” said Chris. “She’s more your kind of girl.”
“It’s a bit soon. Trish has only just dumped me.”
“Yeah, fair enough. Hey, this place is quite something. Are you really living here?”
“Sure, why not? It’s cheap.”
“You don’t say.” said Chris.
Ray fell silent, wondering whether he should show Chris the strange landscape beyond the cellar door.
“You all right?” said Chris.
“Oh!” said Ray. “Yes, I was just thinking about something. Actually I want to show you something.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s going to blow your mind.”
“Really?”
“I promise, you’ve never seen anything like it.”
“What is it?”
“You won’t believe me if I tell you. I’ll have to show you. Get ready to be amazed.”
Ray unlocked the cellar door and, standing by the side of it, flung it open.
“That’s really something.” said Chris.
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?”
“Yeah. My aunt’s cellar got flooded once.”
“What?” said Ray, and he came around the door to see for himself.
Where he had expected to see a wilderness, was now only a short staircase leading down to a flooded basement.
“This isn’t it!” he said, and he shut the door, locked it, then unlocked it and opened it again, with the same result.
“Dammit!” said Ray. “This isn’t supposed to be here.”
He repeated the procedure, locking and unlocking the door, and then again, a fourth time, always with the same result.
“How about I make you a nice cup of tea?” said Chris. “You’ve got tea, haven’t you?”
Ray was standing staring into the cellar, baffled.
“I-I’ll make us a tea.” he said.
“The mental strain is getting to you.”
“You’re probably right.”
After Chris had left, Ray opened the cellar door again. There, on the steps, were some of the objects from the box his wife had pushed into his hands, but others were nowhere to be seen, and the box itself had vanished.
He blinked heavily, and shut the door, locking it.
Obviously Chris was right. The mental strain had affected him to the point where he was hallucinating entire landscapes.
He was about to go and lie down when an irrational obsessive impulse seized him, and he unlocked the door and opened it again.
It was there; the whole thing. In front of his very eyes was a repulsive windswept vista. He could feel the freezing wind blowing on his face. In the distance was a small shack. He hesitated, then stepped through the door and onto a damp gravelly surface covered in dead weeds. Then he stepped back again into his house.
With sudden resolve, he put on a jacket and walked purposefully out into the wild landscape, towards the shack in the distance. The wind blew particles of gravel against his face and there was a faint foetid odour in the air.
There was a slight gradient leading up to the hut and Ray was surprised by how out of breath he became. He was unsure about whether this was due to his lack of physical fitness or some property of the air.
As he walked he began to wonder where he was, and it occurred to him that he might not even be on Planet Earth. A few stars were visible above him, and indeed they appeared quite unfamiliar. Looking around, he spotted a half-moon, of a strange reddish hue and smaller than our own moon. A thrill of excitement shot through him; he had somehow become the first man ever to travel to another planet. But no, not quite the first. Someone had designed the cellar-door portal, and probably whoever it was had built the hut that he was steadily progressing towards.
Then a sudden frisson of fear washed over him. Was he in danger? What if there were wild animals roaming these morbid hills? What if something awful lived in the hut?
By then he was halfway there.
The wind had a strange quality to it and seemed to whistle unsettlingly with a high-pitched whistle; faint, but irritating. Neither did the air smell exactly clean; it stank of decaying vegetation.
Finally he reached the hut. The hut was bigger than it had seemed in the distance; perhaps even as large as typical suburban house in terms of its footprint. It had no windows and it was made of wood. In structure and fabric it appeared oddly familiar; it closely resembled the kind of shed one can buy and assemble for garden use, although it was unusually large.
The door stood slightly ajar. With a fast-beating heart, he swung it open.
An overpowering stench of decaying flesh assaulted his nostrils. Something had clearly died in the hut.
At first he could see nothing in the gloom, and he regretted not bringing a flashlight with him. He felt around on the wall inside for a light switch. He could feel numerous spider webs on his hand, and he hoped fervently that these were English spiders and not some poisonous tropical variety, or worse, alien spiders of unknown habits.
His hand lighted on a switch, and he pushed it firmly. Strip lights flicked on in the roof of the hut, to reveal a hideous sight.
Surrounded by vast curtains of spider web, containing many grotesquely large spiders, was the body of a man, hanging by the neck from thin rafters supporting the ceiling.
For some moments he was paralysed with shock, then he rushed forwards to see if the man was still alive, even though it was apparent from the smell that he probably wasn’t.
Indeed the man proved to be quite dead, and he had clearly died a while ago.
Aside from the corpse and the enormous spider webs, the hut contained tables and trestles filled with scientific apparatus, and on one he spotted a pile of journals.
He found sticks for hiking propped against a wall and began to use them to clear a space through the spider webs. The spiders, which seemed largely of familiar types but unnaturally distended and of unusual size, scurried away.
When he reached the pile of journals he began to leaf through them, and soon an extraordinary story emerged; a story which threw Ray into a semi-panic.
The corpse evidently belonged to a man by the name of Eugene Redford, who had worked as a physicist before developing an obsession with certain unorthodox theories of physics. He had rented the half-ruined house where Ray currently lived with a view to testing his theories in an environment somewhat more robust than his customary abode, wherever that was.
Redford had successfully opened portals to a series of locations on distant planets, eventually settling on one particular planet as the one most capable of supporting life out of all of them. This planet, the one where he had constructed the hut and had ultimately taken his own life, happened to have a breathable atmosphere, but he had found it very difficult to maintain any kind of plant life on it, due to an extremely changeable climate.
At one point the journals appeared full of optimism, and Redford had succeeded in covering a wide expanse with grass, and even trees had begun to thrive there, but then the weather had turned sour and most of the plant life had simply died.
The circumstances that had led to Redford’s death were as follows.
The portal, as Ray had discovered, was activated by a particular key, turned in the cellar door. However, the mechanism had proven temperamental, and evidently Redford’s practical skills lagged somewhat behind his astonishing fluency with obscure and innovative theories of physics.
Upon stepping onto the planet and closing the cellar door behind him, the portal would deactivate, as a security measure. It could be reactivated by flicking a certain switch and re-opening the door from the side of the alien planet.
One day, after working on something in the laboratory hut that he had built in the barren wilderness, Redford had returned to the portal only to find it absolutely refused to activate. He had eventually concluded that something was seriously wrong with it and had tried to fix the putative problem, but had realised he was lacking certain key tools that he felt were needed for the job.
He had spent six months marooned on the planet, gradually starving, consuming all of his supplies, until eventually he had taken in his own life, pitifully emaciated and having lost all hope of ever returning home to Planet Earth.
Ray stood staring at the journal in his hands, shocked at the possible implications for his own situation. But then he remembered that he hadn’t closed the cellar door behind him. He rushed outside, and thought he could see the faint light of his primitive living room and kitchen shining through the open portal. He began to run towards it, and indeed found it open. He ran back home into his living room, finally collapsing on the yoga mat on the floor, since he still hadn’t purchased a sofa.
Over the next few days he pondered what to do with the portal, torn between wanting to tell people about it, but on the other hand deriving a deep satisfaction from being the only man alive on the Earth to have access to a whole vast alien planet.
He decided he needed to bring Redford’s body back to the Earth. He owed the man that, at least. He would buy a child’s sledge, load the body onto it, and drag it back into the living room. Then he would tell the police he’d discovered the body in his cellar. At least then any family that Redford happened to have would be able to stop wondering about his disappearance.
He put the plan into action the following week. Redford was still heavy even though emaciated, and Ray had no desire to embrace the decaying corpse, so he stationed a plastic sledge underneath the body and cut it down. Then he spent some time straightening it and tying it to the sledge. Finally he dragged it back to the portal, where he had wedged the cellar door firmly open with several bricks.
He was pulling Redford’s body into the house, the sledge having jammed against the lower edge of the rectangular doorframe, when the door of the house opened and his wife appeared.
“Ray! What in Heaven’s name?” said his wife, covering her mouth with her hand in shock.
She walked towards him and soon saw the barren windswept landscape.
“It’s a kind of portal.” said Ray, weakly.
“What’s that awful smell?” she asked.
There was nothing for it but to explain everything to Patricia. She immediately began to take charge, as was her habit.
“Put the body back on the other planet for now, Ray.” she said. “Leave it with me. I’ll discuss it with Roy. He’s good with these kinds of things.”
“Really?” said Ray.
“While we’re on the topic,” said Patricia, “I came here to give you these.”
She pushed some papers into his hands.
“Divorce papers.” she said. “I need you to sign them. I’ll be back in a week to collect them. And I’ll draw up a plan for what to do about the portal.”
After she left, Ray felt horribly deflated, to the point of being quite depressed again. What had been his, was now hers.
He glumly considered his options. He could tell other people about the portal; university professors, perhaps. Or the police? But then he would lose all rights over it. At least as things stood, Trish would surely have to acknowledge that he had certain rights as the portal’s discoverer. After all, he was renting the house in which it stood. Perhaps it was best to simply wait and see what she proposed.
He dragged the body back onto the alien planet and left it near the portal, but far enough away that one could at least come and go without looking at it too closely.
Shortly afterwards, Patricia and Roy arrived rapidly at certain mutual conclusions.
“His life insurance policy is still valid.” said Patricia. “I was going to drop it but, imagine if he were to starve himself to death in his own house. Perhaps due to a broken heart.”
“Do you really think he’d starve himself to death?” said Roy.
“No, silly.” she said, slapping his arm playfully. “We’ll make him show us the planet, then we’ll run back through the portal and leave him there. Then he’ll starve. It’s what he deserves after how he treated me.”
“I thought you said he loved you and he was incredibly attentive.” said Roy.
“Yes, but he knew I wanted to study ballet and instead I had to work to help pay off our mortgage.”
Roy shook his head sympathetically. “I’d never do that to you, my darling.” he said.
“I know you wouldn’t, dear Roy.” said Patricia. “You’re so much more successful than him, with your business and your yacht. We can’t risk you losing all that just because of some silly fine you have to pay, just because some idiot customer claims your herbal supplements destroyed his liver. Ray’s life insurance would cover most of the settlement or whatever it is.”
“But wouldn’t we need his body to actually claim it? If he just goes missing, it could be seven years before we can get him declared dead. I looked into it in connection with my ex.”
“We’ll have his body. After a suitable amount of time—let’s say, two months—we’ll open the portal and retrieve it. Then I’ll say I found it in his cellar.”
“Is two months enough?”
“He’s very thin. I think so.”
“You’re a genius, my petal.”
“I know.” said Patricia, blushing and smiling prettily.
Ray suspected nothing when Patricia turned up the following week, ostensibly to collect the divorce papers. He thought it a little insensitive that she had brought Roy with her, but then, that was Trish all over.
“Ray, I want you to show Roy the portal.” said Patricia.
“Don’t you want the divorce papers?” said Ray.
“We’ll deal with that in a minute.”
Ray took the old rusty key, turned it in the lock of the cellar door and flung the door open, revealing the alien barren landscape beyond.
“Incredible.” said Roy.
“So, did you … come up with some kind of plan?” said Ray nervously.
“We certainly did, Ray.” said Patricia. “We know exactly what to do. First let’s take a closer look. We want to see the hut.”
“There’s nothing much there apart from spider’s webs and the journals, and there’s no technical information in the journals. I checked.”
“Doesn’t matter.” said Patricia. “Come on.”
She stepped out onto the grey rocky ground, beckoning him eagerly. Roy followed, and Ray was about to follow them too, when there was a loud crack, a small bright flash of light, a puff of smoke, and the portal vanished.
In a panic, Ray desperately tried to get the portal to work again, opening and closing the door, locking and unlocking it, but every time he opened the door, he saw only the short flight of steps leading down to the cellar.
For two months he worked tirelessly on the portal, gradually disassembling the door frame and attempting to determine where the mechanism had broken. The task proved impossible. The entire mechanism of the portal was itself unknown and obscure, and the entire thing was embedded in a solid block of epoxy resin, the resin surrounding every component.
After two months, he gave up, and lapsed into despair.
His loyal friend, Chris, tried his best to console him.
“It wasn’t your fault, Ray.” said Chris, as they sat together on the worn-out uncomfortable sofa Ray had bought for the living room.
“To die alone in a place like that …” said Ray, allowing the sentence to trail off.
“She wasn’t alone.” said Chris gently. “She had Roy.”
A range of emotions took their place rapidly one after the other in Ray’s eyes: a faint relief, then pain, hurt, disappointment, guilt.
“I suppose.” said Ray.
“Ray, I can lend you some money if you like.” said Chris. “You can get yourself out of here. Find a job.”
Ray shook his head.
“I can’t borrow money from you.” he said. “This is what I deserve.”
After that, abandoning hope, he tried only intermittently to get the portal to work, certain that Patricia must have starved to death.
But he was wrong: Patricia was still alive.
Six weeks later, Patricia’s body was found, in a forest in Northumberland. Police were baffled by her emaciated appearance. The autopsy only raised more questions. She had clearly died from starvation, but human flesh was found in her stomach; the flesh of a man named Roy, as determined by DNA analysis. Particles of earth of unknown origin were found under her fingernails, and it appeared she had wandered the forest only for a matter of hours before expiring. Police were not able to determine where she had spent the past three and a half months, nor how she had ended up in the forest.
“I suppose it malfunctioned.” said Ray, when he eventually told the story, two years later, to his new fiancé, Clara. “She must have tried over and over again to get back through the portal, and somehow it eventually spat her out in the forest. Something I did to the portal must have caused it to temporarily half-work.
“Where is it now?” asked Clara. She had been somewhat perplexed by the shocking story, but the grave expression on Ray’s face proved to her that this was no joke.
They were sitting at a table outside a cafe in the south of France. Ray was wearing a crisp white shirt and sunglasses; Clara, a summery dress, her sunglasses perched on the top of her head.
“Still in the house.” said Ray. “I bought the palce with the life insurance money, along with the new house.”
“Do you think you’ll ever be able to fix it?”
Ray shook his head thoughtfully.
“I can’t even begin to understand how it works.” he said. “I look at it from time to time. Perhaps the secret’s best off remaining with its inventor.”
