Dogs and Disclosure

“The greatest secrets aren’t undone by governments or armies—they’re undone by a boy chasing a dog and a door I forgot to close.”

With a shuddering jolt, the truck lurched to a halt, the seatbelt tugging hard against my chest like a reprimand.

"Shit!" The expletive ripped from me before I could temper it, half startle, half frustration. My hands were still clenched on the wheel, knuckles blanched white, fingers cramped from gripping too hard for too long. The sudden stillness after so much chaos left me suspended in a kind of vacuum—that peculiar silence that follows violence, when the world seems to be catching its breath before deciding what happens next.

The engine ticked as it cooled, tiny metallic sounds that seemed impossibly loud in the aftermath. I sat for a moment, letting my heartbeat settle from its frantic gallop into something closer to a canter, feeling the tremor in my hands begin to subside. The adrenaline that had carried me through the Portal crossing, the frantic unloading, the lurching return—all of it was draining away now, leaving behind the familiar sediment of exhaustion that seemed to have become my permanent state since Jamie's confession.

I clambered down from the cab, shoes hitting the concrete with a thump that jarred through my already aching legs. The air felt oddly hollow, stripped of something essential, and as I turned toward the house my stomach tightened with a premonition I couldn't name.

The front door stood wide open, yawning like a wound in the face of my home.

There was no sign of Joel. No movement in the frame, no footsteps on the tiles. Just absence—that particular quality of emptiness that tells you a space has been recently vacated, that someone was here and now isn't, that the silence you're hearing is the echo of departure rather than the stillness of solitude.

A ripple of panic broke across me, swift and cold, raising the fine hairs on my arms and sending my thoughts scattering like startled birds. Where had he gone? Why would he leave the door gaping like that? The questions multiplied faster than I could process them, each one spawning two more, a cascade of uncertainty that threatened to overwhelm the fragile composure I'd managed to reconstruct.

I rushed forward, taking the porch steps two at a time, the impact of each footfall sending small shocks through my knees. The threshold seemed to resist me for a fraction of a second—that odd hesitation at doorways that happens when something feels wrong, when your body knows before your mind catches up that you're crossing into territory that has changed in your absence.

Inside, the quiet was suffocating. The house had taken on a different character—hollow, unsettling, the silence charged as though something had shifted whilst I'd been wrestling boxes through impossible doorways. The air felt thick, watchful, every shadow more pronounced than it had any right to be. Even the familiar shapes of furniture seemed to have rearranged themselves subtly, adopting poses of patient waiting that suggested they knew something I didn't.

"Are you still in here, Joel?" I called, my voice breaking the hush, too loud in the stillness. The sound bounced down the hallway, scattering into the rooms beyond like something fleeing, but no answer followed. Not even the creak of a floorboard. The silence absorbed my words and offered nothing in return.

I backed out onto the porch, confusion gnawing at me, my pulse quickening into something that felt like the onset of a headache. Where could he have gone in the scant minutes I'd been away? The timeline didn't make sense. He'd been in the bathroom, Duke and Henri had been shut in the house, the truck had been in my driveway—these were the fixed points of reality as I'd left it. But now one of those points had simply disappeared, walked off without explanation, leaving the front door hanging open like an accusation.

The question circled with the persistence of a fly against glass, a riddle in the quiet morning air, and with each pass it lodged deeper into the pit of unease already heavy inside me. Had he seen something? Heard something? Had some noise from my frantic activities reached him through the walls and sent him investigating? The possibilities multiplied, each worse than the last, each one threatening to unravel the careful fiction I'd constructed around my inter-dimensional activities.

The silence fractured so suddenly it nearly stopped my heart.

"So sorry," Joel's voice rang out, and he stepped into view from the side of the house. The shock of his sudden emergence against the stillness made my pulse stumble, a raw jolt of alarm running through me that left my fingers tingling and my breath catching in my throat.

For a fraction of a second, I saw only the shape of him—that silhouette so eerily reminiscent of Jamie, those features that had finally clicked into devastating recognition barely an hour ago—and something in my chest constricted with a pain that had nothing to do with the current crisis. Then my vision sharpened, taking in details that separated this moment from memory: the sheepish angle of his shoulders, the awkward way he clutched something struggling against his chest, the genuine concern written across that young, familiar-unfamiliar face.

"I accidentally let your dog out. I didn't realise he would take off like that. He thought it was a great game," he said, his tone sheepish, both hands struggling to hold Duke as the dog wriggled and squirmed like a creature possessed by demons of pure chaos. Joel extended him towards me, relief written across his young face as though returning Duke safely was a mission completed, a debt discharged.

Duke's legs windmilled frantically, his eyes rolling with the particular brand of indignation he reserved for being caught mid-escape. His tongue lolled, his tail wagged despite his predicament, and he gave a sharp yip of greeting that seemed to say I was winning until this one interfered.

"Oh." The word slipped from me, weak and unpolished, as I reached to take Duke back. The sight of Joel's awkward concern, so ordinary and human, collided sharply with the turmoil still gnawing at me from earlier—the betrayal, the truck, the Portal, the desperate logistics of survival in another dimension. For one fleeting instant, the world shrank back down to something familiar, something manageable: a young man returning an escaped dog, a moment of minor domestic comedy in a morning that had been anything but comedic.

Duke settled against my chest with the immediate entitlement of a creature who believed physical contact was his natural right. His heart thrummed against my palm, rabbit-fast from his adventure, and his warm weight provided a grounding I hadn't realised I needed. Here was something real, something uncomplicated: six kilograms of stubborn affection, demanding nothing more than proximity and the occasional treat.

"Yeah, he does that if he gets out," I added, trying to recover myself, my voice steadier this time though still rough at the edges. "I'm surprised you managed to catch him. Normally, it requires a serious bribe with something like chicken."

At the word, Duke froze in my arms. His ears pricked forward with the intensity of a hunting dog scenting prey. His eyes sparkled with hungry hope, that particular gleam he got whenever food was mentioned or implied or existed within a fifty-metre radius. His tail gave a decisive thump against my chest, a single beat of emphatic agreement with the concept of chicken, the promise of chicken, the fundamental importance of chicken in any rational universe.

The predictability of his greed, so ridiculous and grounding, almost made me laugh. Almost. The sound caught somewhere in my throat, trapped between genuine amusement and the exhaustion that seemed to have seeped into my bones. Even Duke's antics couldn't fully penetrate the fog of the morning's accumulated disasters.

"I nearly didn't catch him," Joel admitted, the words tumbling from him with genuine concern. His shoes scuffed at the concrete, his weight shifting nervously from one foot to the other in a small dance of uncertainty. The movement was boyish, endearing in a way that made my chest ache for reasons I couldn't quite articulate. His uncertainty, the sincerity in his eyes—those blue eyes that kept pulling my attention with their unsettling familiarity—painted him not as a delivery driver completing a routine stop but as a young man caught in a moment he hadn't expected, doing his best to put it right.

There was something touching about that effort, that instinctive desire to fix a problem he'd inadvertently caused. It reminded me of the person I'd been before Clivilius, before the Portal, before circumstances had made me the kind of man who deceived his brother and his partner into crossing dimensional thresholds, who manipulated credit cards and logistics and other people's autonomy in service of visions only he could see. Joel's simple decency felt like a rebuke, though he couldn't have known it.

And in that sliver of silence after his words, the weight of what I'd done earlier returned with brutal force. The truck through the Portal, the frantic unloading, the chaos of boxes and dust and Jamie's hurt expression as we'd worked together despite everything that lay shattered between us—it all pressed against me, converging here, in Joel's anxious glance. My life had cleaved in two: one half clinging to the ordinary rhythms of misplaced dogs and shy smiles, the other bound to the impossible enormity of Clivilius and everything it demanded.

The division felt unbridgeable in that moment. How could I be the same person in both contexts? How could the Luke who stood here accepting his dog back from a concerned stranger also be the Luke who had, minutes ago, wrestled supplies through a gateway between worlds whilst racing against a bathroom break? The identities refused to cohere, leaving me fragmented, scattered across possibilities that should never have coexisted.

Standing there with Duke's heartbeat thudding against my arm and Joel's gaze flickering uncertainly to mine, I felt the clash of those worlds like a fault line beneath my feet, ready to split at any moment and swallow me whole.

"Well," I exhaled, my voice carrying more relief than I intended. "The truck is all good to go."

"Go?" Joel echoed, his brow furrowing, eyes narrowing as they searched my face. There was no malice there, only an earnest confusion, but it was enough to send a fresh ripple of unease through me.

Of course he was confused. He'd gone to my bathroom, done whatever young men do in bathrooms—probably checked his phone, scrolled through something mindless, taken longer than strictly necessary because that's what everyone did when they had a momentary respite from work—and returned to find his truck somehow empty, its cargo vanished, the task he'd been about to perform already completed by mysterious means. The timeline didn't add up. Even someone as seemingly unquestioning as Joel would notice that particular impossibility.

"Yeah, I managed to unload the boxes while you were in the bathroom," I said quickly, the lie tasting hollow as it left my lips. I tried to sound casual, as though the explanation required no elaboration, but the slight hitch in Joel's expression told me he wasn't convinced. His brow remained furrowed, that crease between his eyebrows deepening with the effort of reconciling what I'd said with what made sense.

Desperate to patch the flimsy excuse, I tacked on, "The neighbour happened to be walking past. He helped." Even as I said it, I knew it was clumsy, unconvincing, the kind of lie that drew more attention than it deflected—the kind of obvious fabrication that would make any reasonable person wonder what you were actually hiding. But it was all I had in the moment, all my exhausted, grief-addled brain could summon.

The neighbour. As if my neighbours routinely wandered past at this hour, eager to assist with furniture-scale lifting tasks. As if any human being could have unloaded that truck in the time it took to urinate. The lie was tissue-paper thin, and we both knew it.

Joel's response, a nonchalant "Sure, okay," came with a shrug that released the tightness in my chest just slightly. His indifference was a small mercy, a gift I hadn't earned but gratefully accepted. He wasn't the type to pry—or at least, not yet. Perhaps he simply didn't care enough about my strange behaviour to pursue it. Perhaps his mind was already elsewhere, on the next delivery, the next stop, the ordinary rhythm of his working day that my lies were briefly interrupting.

I felt a surge of something like gratitude towards him—this young man with Jamie's features who chose not to press, who accepted my ridiculous explanation with the easy disinterest of someone whose curiosity had limits, whose investment in a stranger's eccentricities extended only so far. In another context, I might have found that incuriosity disappointing. Today, it felt like salvation.

But then his voice dropped, low and unsteady, cutting through the thin veil I had thrown over the truth. "What the hell is that? I've never seen anything like it."

The words froze me in place, dread flooding my veins like ice water injected directly into my heart. My stomach sank with the particular weight of catastrophe confirmed—that moment when you realise the thing you feared has actually happened, when hope finally admits defeat.

His eyes weren't on me anymore—they were fixed beyond my shoulder, wide with a mixture of awe and fear that transformed his young face into something older, something touched by wonder that didn't belong in the mundane world of delivery routes and bathroom breaks. The colour had drained from his cheeks, leaving him pale beneath that light tan, and his lips had parted slightly as though words were trying to form but failing.

Slowly, I turned to follow his gaze, my breath catching even before I saw what had captured him. My body already knew. My body had known since the moment his voice changed, since that shift in register that announced the arrival of the impossible into an ordinary conversation. The turning was merely confirmation, merely my eyes catching up with what my instincts had already screamed.

The Portal.

My greatest secret, the delicate threshold to another world, stood gaping and luminous for anyone to stumble upon.

The realisation hit me with the force of something physical—a blow to the solar plexus, a punch that drove the air from my lungs and left me gasping. In my haste—first with the truck, then with Joel's sudden reappearance, then with Duke's wriggling return—I had neglected the most vital detail of all. I had crossed back through the Portal and simply left it open, left it blazing there like an advertisement for impossibility, like an invitation to anyone who happened to glance in the right direction.

How could I have been so careless? How could the same mind that had coordinated the logistics of inter-dimensional supply transfer have failed at the most basic operational security? The answer was obvious, of course: exhaustion, grief, the accumulated weight of too many crises piling atop one another until my capacity for attention had simply collapsed. But knowing the reason didn't help. Understanding my failure didn't undo it.

A wave of icy panic surged through me, gripping my chest and stealing what remained of my breath. The implications cascaded through my thoughts like dominoes falling—each consequence triggering the next, each disaster spawning fresh disasters in an endless multiplication of catastrophe. This wasn't just a slip; this was exposure. The Portal wasn't a curiosity that could be explained away with some clever lie about unusual weather patterns or experimental lighting or whatever desperate fiction my mind might construct. It was an aberration, a phenomenon so far beyond the reach of earthly comprehension that no amount of casual deflection could conceal it.

Joel had seen it. Joel—this young man with Jamie's face, this stranger who now possessed knowledge that could unravel everything I was trying to build—had witnessed the impossible with his own eyes. You couldn't unsee something like that. You couldn't forget the way reality had torn itself open and revealed something that shouldn't exist.

My thoughts spiralled, racing through half-formed excuses that evaporated the instant they came to me. It's a light installation, a friend's art project— No, too absurd. You're hallucinating, the morning light does strange things here— Insulting and unbelievable. I have no idea what you're talking about— He was staring directly at it; denial was impossible.

No explanation could cover what Joel had seen. The Portal was undeniable. The question was no longer how to hide it—it was what the hell to do now.

Henri's tail brushed against my calf, a fleeting, grounding reminder of ordinary life—of dogs, fur, and familiar chaos—right at the brink of calamity. But the grounding sensation only sharpened the panic boiling in my chest rather than calming it. Henri was loose. Henri was here, outside, near the open Portal, rather than safely shut in the house where I'd left him.

"Henri, get back inside," I barked, my voice carrying a sternness edged with desperation. Every syllable betrayed the terror twisting inside me. This was no time for another runaway dog drama; the Portal's open mouth devoured the background, shimmering, beckoning, dangerous. I could feel its pull even from here—that subtle gravity it exerted on my attention, that whisper at the edge of consciousness that promised wonders if only I would step through again.

But Henri wasn't me. Henri didn't understand what that swirling gateway meant, didn't know that crossing it would strand him in an alien desert where small dogs had no business being, where the silence stretched forever and help might be hours away.

Joel, to his credit, seemed to catch the urgency in my tone. His knees bent awkwardly, arms extending as if he could physically bar Henri's path—a human barrier against canine determination. But the poor boy's legs trembled beneath his own hesitation, shock and confusion still rippling through his frame from the impossible sight he was processing, and that split-second of weakness was all Henri needed.

A sharp yelp split the air, not of fear but of gleeful rebellion. My heart stuttered as Henri bolted forward, his tiny form fuelled by some invisible mischief, by the particular perversity that seized him whenever obedience was most crucial. It was absurd, almost laughable, how something so ordinary—a Shih Tzu's stubborn sprint—could ignite terror greater than any supernatural threat I had yet faced.

But there was nothing funny about the trajectory of that small brown-and-white body, nothing amusing about the way his paws carried him unerringly towards the swirling abyss at the gate.

"Henri, stop!" The command tore from my throat, ragged with desperation, but the dog was already committed. His paws kicked up tiny pebbles, as he aimed straight for the shimmering gateway that should not exist, that even now called to him with colours no earthly creature had any business seeing.

Did dogs perceive the Portal the way I did? Did Henri see the swirling light as beautiful, as inviting, as a doorway to something marvellous? Or did he simply see an opening—a gap in the fence, a chance for adventure, one more territory to mark with his stubborn presence?

I would never know what drew him. I only knew that he ran—and that I couldn't let him go alone.

And then—gone. Just like that. His little body vanished into the riot of colour, swallowed whole by the Portal's luminous maw.

A hollow silence followed, broken only by the thundering of my pulse in my ears. The world seemed to pause, holding its breath, waiting to see what I would do. Joel stood frozen beside me, his face a mask of incomprehension, his eyes still fixed on the spot where a dog had simply ceased to exist. His mouth opened and closed without producing sound, his brain apparently struggling to process what his eyes had witnessed.

But I couldn't wait for him to catch up. I couldn't stand here and explain or reassure or do any of the things that a reasonable person would do when a witness had seen the impossible.

There was no time to think, no space for doubt. Instinct overrode everything—logic, fear, reason. Henri was in Clivilius. Henri was in a dimension he didn't understand, a landscape that stretched endlessly beneath a starless sky, a world where small dogs had no survival skills whatsoever. Every second I delayed was a second he spent confused and frightened and impossibly far from home.

My arms clutched Duke to my chest as if he might anchor me, though in truth he became my unwitting companion, dragged into the unfolding disaster by my refusal to put him down. His warm weight pressed against my sternum, his heart racing against my own, and I felt a surge of irrational protectiveness—both dogs, I would keep them both safe, I would not let this spiral claim either of them.

Legs pumping, I hurtled forward. Duke yelped once, startled by the sudden motion, but I couldn't slow down, couldn't pause to reassure him.

The Portal surged closer, its light staining my vision with colours that seemed to seep into my thoughts, and with one desperate step I plunged in after Henri, adrenaline roaring through me like a tide.