Chapter 3: The Castle | The Lock
Lena's face was less than a foot from the ground.
But that was impossible. She should have been gazing down at the desolate street below, not bracing herself mere inches from a stone floor, inside a dreary stone corridor lit by torches affixed to the walls.
She pulled her head out of the gate. She was still crouched on the pedestrian bridge. Her feet were still perched on the worn asphalt situated in the heart of Seattle. There was no sign at all of the medieval-looking structure she'd found herself in on the other side of the gate.
"What the hell?" she muttered to herself. She felt like she was dreaming or hallucinating. What she'd just seen couldn't exist. It was impossible. And yet, there it was. She'd seen it with her own eyes. She'd smelled the mustiness of the room and heard the flicker of the torches' flames. It was real.
She wanted to run away — to go home, slide into her bed and pretend like none of this had ever happened. And yet ... how could she go on living her life knowing she'd witnessed something that shouldn't be, and done nothing about it?
She poked her head through the opening again, half expecting the dark room to be gone. But it was still there. She craned her neck to look above her and saw that the ceiling matched the floor and walls — it was all made of stone.
She placed one hand on the cold floor, then the other. She heaved herself up and crawled through the opening.
When she was fully through, she stood and looked behind her. The rectangular portion of the fence was hanging open in the corridor, looking completely out of place. The gate she'd crawled through was about an inch above the ground and looked like it was set inside the stone wall at the end of the hallway. It looked like a window into another world. She could see the pedestrian bridge and even the cafe where she worked. Yet instead of careening onto the street below, which everything she knew about physics suggested should be happening to her right now, she was standing on an ancient-looking stone floor.
She grabbed the corner of the chain-link gate and swung it back into place. As it realigned with the wall, Lena gasped as the chain links became stone, matching the wall behind it. It was like the gate had disappeared.
She stopped just shy of closing it completely, though. It had suddenly occurred to her that if it closed completely, she may not be able to open it again.
That's when she remembered the lock.
The homeless man had removed the lock from the fence at this very spot. Lena had assumed he was removing a symbol of some long lost love, but what if that lock really had been locking something? What if it had been locking this gate that led to ... what? Another world?
Without the lock securing the gate, she shouldn't need to worry about this interdimensional portal locking behind her. She turned around and took in the dimly lit corridor. It looked like it belonged in some aging castle in Europe or Scandanavia — not hanging hidden above the streets of Seattle.
Part of her was scared by the unknown this stone castle — as she'd begun calling it in her mind — represented. But another part of her was exhilarated. She was an explorer, diving headfirst into an unknown world. Who knew what awaited her — good or bad? She'd explore this place for a few minutes, then head back.
Her shoes clicked against the stone floor as she strolled through the hall, squinting in the dim torchlight. The corridor wrapped around to the right, and as she made the turn, the path that lay ahead looked exactly like the one she'd just traversed.
When she came to the next bend, however, instead of coming to another flat corridor, she was confronted with a set of steps descending into the heart of the castle. They continued down out of sight, giving no hint what treasures or horrors may lay below.
She stepped down, feeling deep down that she shouldn't descend these steps, that it would be best to turn around and walk back the way she'd come. But something kept her going, as if her body was on autopilot and she was just a helpless passenger.
Finally, she reached the last step, finding herself at the bottom of a stairwell that opened to the right. She walked through and found herself in a foyer. Her eyes stung from the sunlight streaming through several large windows in the wall.
Her mind was bombarded by the countless contradictions. It was after eleven at night, and yet sunlight streamed through these windows. The foyer looked abandoned, overgrown with wild vegetation, yet the hallways were lit with torches that required constant refueling.
On the other side of the foyer was a door that led outside. Lena walked to it. She wanted to see what this place looked like from the outside. She'd do that much, and then she'd be satisfied. She'd walk back through the gate, resume her normal life and forget that this place, whatever it was, existed.
She trudged through the overgrowth, cursing her decision that morning to wear flats and tights instead of something more rugged — but of course, she hadn't known she'd be tumbling through a gateway to another dimension built into the side of a pedestrian bridge. She tore a couple holes in her tights, and tripped a couple times over the vegetation, but she managed to make it to the edge of the forest.
She turned around and gasped as she took in the full magnificence of the castle she'd just emerged from. It towered over her, like some massive skyscraper in her home city. But it was in ruins: The west wall had collapsed, and the walls that were still standing were covered top to bottom in thick gnarls of vines.
The scene was even more surreal on account of the eery silence that accompanied the moment. There was the faint rustling of a breeze, but nothing more. For a woman who had lived her whole life in the city, surrounded by the constant cocaphany that accompanied such a life, the absence of noise was not just palpable, but unsettling.
She stood there for several minutes, letting the breeze pass through her hair, taking in the majesty of the castle, the forest and the brilliant blue sky overlooking it all. She was struck by the sudden urge to capture the moment. She reached down to pluck her phone out of her pocket.
Before her fingers met her pocket, a pair of large, rough hands gripped either side of her waist. Before she could even scream, someone slid a bag over her head and pulled it down over her upper body. Now, she screamed, a shrill, terrified scream that echoed beyond the castle but was deadened by the density of the forest.
Something struck her in the side of her head, and her world faded to black.