Ghost Country

Chapter Eight

What it did, it did instantly. Travis felt the button click under his fingertip and a cone of light shot from the lens at the end of the cylinder. The cone was long and narrow, fanning out maybe one foot in width for every five feet in length. It had a dark blue cast to it. Almost violet.

Ten feet out from the lens, the light cone simply terminated in midair, as if there were a projector screen there. What it projected in the air was a flat disc, two feet across, perfectly black. The disc was centered at about chest level, due to a slight upward tilt of the cylinder on the couch.

Travis stared at it.

He lost track of seconds.

In his peripheral vision he saw Bethany glance at him, but only briefly. Then her gaze went right back to the disc and stayed there.

More time passed.

Nothing about the disc changed.

Travis wasn't sure what he expected to happen. Maybe the projection would show them something. A video recorded on the other side of the Breach. That fit the scale of something Paige might have been compelled to show the president. Though how it could've touched a nerve with him, Travis couldn't guess.

He watched. Bethany watched.

Nothing happened.

The black disc just hovered there at the end of the projected beam.

It wasn't reflective, Travis noticed. The way they were sitting, with large windows full of daylight spanning half the room, a reflective surface would have bounced nothing but glare at their eyes. A glass-screened television, positioned like the disc, would've been impossible to watch.

But the disc bounced nothing. It was no more reflective than cloth. And even cloth would've picked up plenty of the room's light and appeared much brighter than true black. It would've looked gray, no matter how dark it was colored.

The disc was simply and purely black.

Only one explanation came to Travis's mind.

"Holy shit," Bethany said.

Travis turned and saw that she'd drawn the same conclusion he had, and at the same moment.

For a few seconds neither spoke.

Then Travis stood from the couch. The move was almost involuntary. The couch cushion responded to the sudden loss of his weight on it, and as it rose, some of its movement transferred to the middle cushion, where the cylinder rested. Travis saw the black disc-or what looked like a disc-bob up and down a few inches as the light cone shifted and settled. It happened again a second later when Bethany stood.

Travis moved forward. He gave the cone of light a wide berth as he went. He saw Bethany do the same on her side. Then she drew a sharp breath and stopped. Travis looked at her.

Her hair was moving in a steady breeze, though none of the windows in the suite were open. She turned her face directly into the slipstream of air, which was at least as strong as a current driven by a table fan. The wind appeared to be coming from the disc itself. But that wasn't exactly true.

Because it wasn't a disc.

It was an opening. T ravis felt the rational parts of his mind gradually coming back to life after their initial freeze-seeing the impossible could have that effect. Now as the seconds drew out he found himself trying to make sense of what he was looking at. Whatever sense could be made of it.

The projection was an opening. A hole in midair. Like a doorway between rooms. On this side was the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C. On the other side was-what, exactly?

The wind through the opening continued blowing Bethany's hair around. It ruffled the fabric of her shirt. Her expression was nearly blank, as if she wasn't sure yet what to feel. Travis imagined his own looked similar.

He took another step forward. It put him two feet away from the opening. He could reach it from here. Could reach through it, if he wanted to.

Being closer to it made no difference in its appearance. Still black. Like an open window on a moonless night, seen from inside a brightly lit room.

Bethany came closer on her own side. So far neither of them had put so much as a hand into the projection beam.

The angled windstream was still mostly affecting Bethany, but Travis could feel the edge of it, too, at this distance.

Bethany spoke, just above a whisper. "What's over there?"

Travis could only shake his head.

Whatever the place was, it had to be outdoors. There was wind there. And it was nighttime, which narrowed the location down to half the Earth at any given moment.

Assuming the place on the other side was on Earth.

Travis wondered if the air coming through was safe to breathe. Probably too late to worry about it, if it wasn't.

And it hadn't killed the test animals in Border Town. Travis suddenly understood what they'd been used for. Paige and the others had put them through the opening, to test the safety of crossing the threshold.

He glanced at Bethany and saw her staring through into the darkness, eyes narrowed, no doubt thinking all the same things he was.

She turned to him. "Remember the end of the phone call? Paige said something like, 'You can go through and come back.' She practically screamed it."

Travis nodded.

The wind through the opening shifted a bit toward him. He felt it tug at the arms of his T-shirt. It also gave him the scent of the place on the other side-a number of scents. Strong vegetation smells: pine boughs, dead leaves, ripe apples, all of it sharp and crisp on a wind that was maybe ten degrees cooler than the air-conditioned hotel room. The other side of the opening felt and smelled like an autumn night in the country.

"What location on Earth right now would have a climate like fall in the northern United States?" Travis said.

Bethany thought about it. She shrugged. "Maybe western Canada, a few hundred miles up the coast from Seattle. I really don't know. It would still be dark there, for what it's worth."

Travis took another breath of the chilly wind.

"It doesn't make sense," he said. "Even if it really is an opening to someplace thousands of miles away-as impressive as that is-what could Paige and the others have learned from this thing? What could anyone learn from it that they couldn't learn by just flying to wherever it leads?"

"There must be more to it than we're thinking," Bethany said.

Travis nodded. There had to be. And they weren't going to find out what it was by just standing here. T ravis turned and looked around. There was a leather-bound room service menu on the nearest end table. He crossed to it, picked it up and came back to where he'd been standing beside the opening.

He held the menu by one end. He put the other end into the projected cone of light. It blocked a big chunk of the beam, maybe a third or more. That portion of the light no longer reached the black opening.

But the opening was unaffected.

In a way it was the most surreal thing Travis had seen yet. It was like sticking your hand into the beam of a movie projector, seeing the shapes of your fingers cast down the length of the light-but seeing no shadow on the screen.

"It makes sense," Bethany said. "They'd have to build it so that the hole stayed open, even if part of the beam were blocked. Otherwise, think about it: you'd block the beam with your body before you could climb through the opening."

Travis wondered how much of the beam could be cut off before the opening failed. Keeping the menu in the light cone, he moved it slowly toward the couch. Toward the cylinder's lens, and the narrow part of the beam.

He watched the opening as he did it. Watched the rectangle of blocked-out light grow until it was well over half of the beam. Then three fourths. The opening showed no effect at all. It didn't so much as flicker.

It stayed that way until only a sliver of blue light reached the hole. Maybe five percent of the total. When Travis blocked it further, the opening vanished. At the same time the projected light on the leather menu began to flash symbols in the same text that was engraved on the cylinder. Maybe it said obstruction error. Maybe it said stop blocking the light, asshole. Travis pulled the menu out of the way and the opening immediately reappeared.

He pressed his other hand to the menu. It felt as cool to the touch as when he'd picked it up. He held it close to his eyes and tilted it so that the gleam of sunlight showed him the surface in detail. It didn't appear damaged.

He went back to the opening. He still held the menu. He shared a look with Bethany: Here goes.

He put the menu fully into the cone of light, and then he put half of it through the hole in the air.

It met no resistance. The leading half of the menu simply went through, as if the opening were no more than a hole in a wall, with a darkened room on the far side. They could still see the entire menu. It was right there with them-even if part of it was also far, far away from them, in the night air of some rural place halfway around the world.

Travis drew it back into the room and tossed it onto an armchair a few feet away.

He turned back to Bethany. "Unless you know a place in D.C. to get lab mice, I'm out of things to try."

"I think we're the lab mice at this point."