December 16th, 1983
Mercy Springs, California

It was a Friday morning. For many, the start of a glorious beach weekend in Mercy Springs.

For Tinson Miller, it was the last morning he would know anything close to normalcy.

Mercy Springs, California, was a bustling beach city that stretched along the coast just northwest of Los Angeles. Famous for the rare, black-dyed seashells that washed ashore at Elva Cove, the city was also a prime destination for teenagers during the summer months. Many residents from colder states even spent their winters in Mercy Springs, drawn by its mild climate.

Tinson Miller moved his wife and daughter here five years earlier so he could snag a job at the Intel Corporation in the Bay Area.

Life had been good for four of those years.

Not this year.

Tinson stood before the Black Door positioned idle in the center of the basement room. With coffee cup in hand, Tinson contemplated the mysteries that lay beyond the threshold of the sealed portal. He stroked the side of his face, surprised at the amount of stubble that had grown in since he last shaved days ago.

Tinson had managed to get a door to appear, but he hadn’t been able to force it to open. From the research Tinson was able to procure on the Black Doors, he surmised that most of them could be opened once they appeared. In fact, strangely enough, most of his research told Tinson the doors wanted to be opened. But this one had been stubborn. Defiant, in fact.

He stared at the black shimmering material that made up the surface of the door, and the strange symbols etched in the threshold, and took a swig of his coffee. He nearly spit it out it was so bitter, and then he slammed his coffee mug down on the desk. Alicia’s coffee always tasted a little bitter, but today it seemed to be worst of all. He smacked his lips, trying to get the taste out of his mouth as he mumbled some curses under his breath.

He heard shouting from upstairs but ignored it. The humming of the three generators scattered around the room being used to keep the door in a state of stasis drowned out most noise in the house, and for this, Tinson was grateful. He didn’t need a nagging wife yelling at him about the loud noise, the electricity usage, or the time away from his family. The work he was doing to uncover the secrets of the Black Doors was unprecedented. He would go down in history for his studies. Besides, he had only been messing with this door for a few days. It was a small sacrifice for a leap into the scientific unknown.

The lights in the basement flickered, and one bulb in the far corner of the ceiling popped and dimmed. That was the third light bulb he would have to replace.

The generators were running off the house’s electric grid and pouring that electricity into the door. He used the generators just in case the house’s grid went down. He couldn’t afford to lose this door. His neighbors didn’t appreciate the draw of electricity on the rest of the neighborhood. The cops had been to his house twice—no, three times—in the last few days, but they never found reason to shut any of Tinson’s research down.

Tinson picked up the collection of notes he had made on the Black Doors and shuffled through the coffee-stained pages, hoping they would unlock something in his brain so he could figure out how to get this opened.

Black Doors were a mystery to everyone. They were a phenomenon, appearing randomly, sometimes in place of ordinary doors, sometimes in the middle of nothing and nowhere. Opening one was like playing roulette with a hand grenade. One door could open to pure darkness. Another could open to a far-off planet. And sometimes, Black Doors had been known to open to monstrous—and very deadly—creatures.

Tinson recalled a news article he pulled from his archives some weeks back. A rogue mercenary group opened a Black Door and a slaughter occurred shortly after. A creature described as a half man, half fish came through into Colorado and went into a killing frenzy. The group killed it, but something else slipped through with the creature: a disease. One they had yet to find a cure for.

The Black Door Knowledge Collective—or The Black Door Collective as they called themselves—formed five years ago with the intent of studying the Black Doors, to hopefully gain an un­derstanding of the strange otherworldly creations. Tinson had no idea who really led the group, nor did he remember how he became a member. The group existed anonymously on the Internet, and everyone went by screen names to protect each other’s identities. Though their identities were unknown to one another, each of them played a specific role within the Collective.

Tinson’s role was to find out what exactly caused a door to give entry, what the strange symbols etched around the door frames meant, and to record how many Black Door sightings there had been thus far.

Tinson cursed the existence of the Black Door in the middle of his basement. Neither he nor any of his colleagues had been able to figure out how to open the door. Each turn of the silver knob did nothing but prove it was locked somehow. But without a place to put a key, how would one unlock it through conventional means? This caused Tinson to question: Were the doors sentient, choosing whom to open for? Was there a trick to turning the knob or pushing on the doorway? Or were the symbols etched around the doorframe a key to understanding what would cause the door to open?

Opening the doors had never been an issue earlier on when the myth of the Black Doors started to pass around the campfire. Doors would appear, people would easily turn their knobs and enter whatever was on the other side, never to return to this reality. Logically speaking, that also meant that other realities would have Black Doors appear, and it was possible that other individuals from other realities would be able to cross over to ours, but nobody had stepped forward as of yet to claim they were from another reality or that they entered ours through a Black Door.

Of course, the doors could also lead to other time periods… though Tinson shook his head at that notion. There was nothing in any of the research he came across that would indicate the doors were time portals. No, they were portals to other realities. Other worlds, even. But not time periods.

Tinson’s main problem was that a lot of the research he did on the doors was pure speculation and theory. Everyone who entered a door never returned to talk about it, so the research wasn’t coming firsthand from those who tangled with crossing through the doors. Some of the research—in fact, most of the research—gleaned from those who encountered the doors was suspect because those individuals were usually in a state of panic and didn’t fully understand what they were dealing with.

Others, Tinson knew, lied about their encounters with the Black Doors to gain some iota of credibility and possible fame. It seemed people would go to great lengths to get their name and face in a newspaper nowadays.

The fact that some of these doors opened and some didn’t told Tinson that maybe someone or something was restraining the doors. God, maybe? The Black Doors themselves are absolute chaos—the crossing of realities—so it would make sense that God Himself would want to bring them in alignment and restore order. Maybe some bastion from another world was attempting to keep the doors from opening. Maybe the doors themselves just didn’t want to be opened, falling into the line of thinking that these were sentient beings.

Tinson didn’t know for sure.

The second piece of research was something Tinson was also making very little headway on. Nobody could interpret the symbols etched into the doorframes. The symbols didn’t match any codex he knew of, and the symbols all seemed random. Almost whimsical. Sometimes trees, mountains, swirls which Tinson thought were suns—all of them would appear on various doors. He surmised that maybe they told of what was on the other side of those doors, but there was no way to test that theory unless he himself could open the door that had one of those symbols on it. At one point, last year, Tinson thought he had broken the code and deciphered one of the symbols—a strange swirl with dots in the middle—when he had gone east to research a Black Door sighting in a shopping mall. His theory was that the symbol represented a galaxy, and he figured the door would open into space. But by the time he reached that mall, the door was gone and he found himself right back at the drawing board.

The third piece of research was a bit more concrete and dare-he-say easier to make headway with. All of the information available to him about the doors allowed Tinson to estimate that there had been a total of 1,567 known Black Door sightings over the course of the last five years, with an almost equal number of those doors popping up on each of the main continents around Earth. When he originally came up with the number, he gawked, as did his colleagues. He ran the numbers three more times and came up with the same figure. What worried him was that the number had increased threefold in the last year and a half. And the number did not account for people actually stepping into the doorways. Nobody who traveled through a Black Door ever came back to report about its existence. Nobody. Those numbers were unknown.

As he sat on the ragged plaid-patterned couch in the basement, staring at the Black Door suspended in the middle of the room, he didn’t hear the faint sound of footsteps creeping down the stairs over the sound of the generators.

His daughter, Olivia, appeared at the bottom of the stairs, staring at him for a few minutes until Tinson just happened to look that way. She wore white capris and a blue T-shirt, and Tinson found her ten-year-old features to mimic those of her mother’s—the way she tilted her eyebrows at him, the way she could stare straight into his soul without moving a muscle. Even her long blonde hair and crystal blue eyes were a carbon-copies of Alisa’s features.

Tinson stood up, stretched his back, and made his way to the bottom of the stairs. “What are you doing down here, sweetie?”

Her face wore a mask of frustration. “Dad, mom says it’s dinnertime.”

Dinner? he thought. He could have sworn it was still late morning. Where did that time go? “I’ll be up in a bit.”

“Mom says you better get up here now or—” Olivia suddenly leaned against the railing of the staircase, her eyes fluttering, her body going limp.

Tinson grabbed her in his arms before she could tumble down the stairs. He carried her into the basement and set her gently on the couch. Her body convulsed against the cushions, and she shrieked briefly, but then relaxed and fell silent.

This wasn’t the first time Tinson had witnessed his daughter fall into a fit like this. When it happened, she usually awoke a few minutes later spouting nonsense about visions. He wasn’t sure why these things happened to her. She had had extensive medical studies done on her in the past couple of years, and nothing conclusive was ever found. Some believed she was having mini strokes when these collapses occurred, but Tinson didn’t buy that, and other experts fought that assumption by pointing out that some of her symptoms weren’t stroke related.

He turned back and looked at the door idling in the center of the room.

The Black Door.

Olivia’s eyes opened and she stared at her dad with a look of dread.

“What is it honey?” he asked as he brushed some blonde strands from her forehead.

“The door,” she whispered.

“What about it?” He glanced back at the object in the center of the room.

“You can’t open it.”

“I know.” He looked into her vexed face and shrugged. “I’ve been trying, but—”

“No, I mean you shouldn’t open it. Don’t open it.”

He smirked. “Honey, what are you talking about? I have to open it. I have to see what’s on the other side.”

Olivia scrambled up to a sitting position on the couch and then grabbed her dad’s arm. “Daddy, I saw something.”

“Your visions again?” He tried to not sound condescending or patronizing, but it was just so difficult. The whole premise of visions and dreams was ridiculous to him. Or maybe it was just her visions and dreams that felt ridiculous to him. His own daughter, hallucinating, with no reason or cause.

Her face went listless and her eyes seemed focused on some point on the other side of the room. “I saw the door open and a great beast escape from it.”

“Sounds a bit biblical,” Tinson said with a slight laugh in his voice. One look at his daughter’s serious gaze told him she didn’t find anything funny about what she was saying to him. “What did you see?” he asked in a more serious tone.

She looked at the door and shook her head. “There’s someone—or something—behind this door. It was sealed behind this door by… others. The door is a prison that was created for whatever it is. You aren’t meant to open it. You aren’t meant to unleash it.”

The faraway look in her eyes was normal, Tinson told himself. He saw it every time she told him of her visions. Her dreams up to this point had been nothing more than fragments of reality. One of her visions was of her mother baking an apple pie. The next day, her mother baked an apple pie. But it was more than that. Olivia could tell what the pie looked like, what the kitchen looked like after the baking of the pie, what her mother conversed about while she was baking the pie. The pie was an anchor, and the rest of the details were fed to Olivia through what? Maybe God? Maybe through a space/time paradox of some sort?

Tinson hadn’t figured it out yet. And he didn’t really have time to. Though her medical condition had been with her for a while, her visions started increasing in number almost immediately after he was able to force this door to appear here in his basement.

Through science and technology, he had managed to create the frame that the door was now sitting in. He figured out a short time ago that the doors were tied to frequency. Radio frequency. He tried numerous channels, numerous electric levels, until last Wednesday when he managed to pulse enough electricity and frequency throughout the reality in this room to force the door to appear within Tinson’s frame. His homemade frame managed to lock the door in place and kept it in this reality so Tinson could study it and attempt to open it.

Though her prescient dream seemed grim, Tinson couldn’t help but realize that her vision of the door opening meant the door could be opened. And this gave him hope.

“Honey, there’s nothing to worry about. Nothing bad is going to happen. If your dad can open this door, do you know what that would mean for the scientific community? We could study another world. Possibly another reality.”

Olivia shook her head, tears filling her eyes. “Don’t open it. There’s something bad on the other side of that. It’s closed for a reason.”

Tinson ran his hand through her hair, doing his best not to make his tone sound condescending. “Okay, honey. Okay. Why don’t you get back upstairs and tell your mother I’ll be up in a minute to have dinner with you guys, alright?”

Olivia slid off the couch and made her way without protest or comment.

Tinson approached the Black Door, setting his hand on the silver knob. It wouldn’t budge.

“Why?” he growled. “Why won’t you open? You’re so eager to share your secrets with others. So eager to allow others to enter our world. What’s beyond your threshold? A creature? Another reality? Why is it all a secret?” He removed his hand from the door and shoved both of his hands into the pockets of his khakis. He let his fingers fish around in his piles of pocket change and hard candy, his mind racing with caffeine and frustration. His daughter’s concerns only added to his angst.

“Fine,” he said to the door. “Fine. I’m going to go eat. You sit there and do what you always do—nothing. I’ll be back. Maybe some fried rice and steamed noodles will do me some good. If you want some, just say so.”

Tinson stared at the door, as if waiting for it to respond.

“Have it your way.”