Pawprints on the Threshold

The Berriedale house received Luke back into its ordinary architecture with the indifference of walls that did not know what had just occurred behind the study door. He made his way down the hallway with one hand braced against the paintwork, leaving faint smudges of Clivilian dust on the wall — evidence of another world tracked through suburban carpet like mud from a garden that existed in no atlas. The winter afternoon light filtering through the hall window seemed wrong after the brutal brilliance of an alien sun. Too thin. Too yellow. Too much like a photograph of a place rather than the place itself.

He collapsed onto the bed he shared with Jamie and pressed his face into the pillow. The scent that rose up was layered — the floral laundry detergent Jamie preferred, underlaid by the accumulated warmth of years spent here. The smell of the life he had been living before everything changed. Sleep, however, refused to cooperate. Behind his closed lids, visions crowded in — cities whose towers spiralled in configurations that defied gravity, faces drifting through impossible cityscapes, architectures that belonged to no civilisation Earth had ever produced.

His hand found the leather-bound dream journal on the bedside table — the latest in a succession of volumes he had kept since childhood, attempting to pin the ineffable to paper. He opened it to a blank page and reached for a pen that was not there. In frustration, he ran his hand across the empty page. When he pulled it away, his own bloodied fingerprint stared back at him from the cream-coloured paper — the wound the Portal Key had opened, dried to something darker than fresh red, stamped onto a journal that was designed for recording things that might not be real. The blood was irrefutably real. The dissonance unsettled him more than all the visions combined.

Duke found him first. The soft scrabble of nails on hallway carpet announced the arrival of the Shih Tzu — brown and white, bright-eyed, his tail already in full motion before he had cleared the doorway. Duke had always possessed an uncanny sensitivity to the emotional weather of the household, an ability to register disturbance before its source was visible, and whatever residue of alien air and alien terror still clung to the man on the bed had drawn him from wherever he had been resting. The bed presented its customary challenge — two failed attempts, claws scrabbling against the duvet — before persistence triumphed over Shih Tzu engineering on the third. Duke settled with his head upon Luke's stomach, eyes open, watching, offering the particular comfort of a sentinel who demanded nothing except proximity.

Henri's arrival was announced, as Henri's arrivals invariably were, by whining. He appeared at the bedside like a small monument to thwarted ambition — rounder than Duke, his coat the colour of biscuits and cream, his expression one of profound injustice at the height of the mattress. Where Duke had eventually conquered the bed through determination, Henri's centre of gravity made the proposition a mathematical impossibility. Luke gathered him up, and the weight of him — substantial, warm, defiantly corporeal — pressed against his chest with a solidity that banished the last tremors of unreality. Henri was not a vision. Henri was approximately six kilograms of contentment-seeking fur who viewed the universe primarily in terms of how it might produce his next meal. Set down on the mattress, he executed his theatrical circling ritual with meticulous precision, then flopped into a compact loaf at the foot of the bed. Whatever was occurring in the wider cosmos could proceed without his involvement.

For a long stretch, the three of them lay there — Henri snoring softly, Duke breathing steadily against Luke's stomach, the winter light fading toward dusk. Luke's fingers found the Portal Key in his pocket. It sat cool and unassuming in his palm, its textured surface feeling older than the materials it appeared to be made from. A thing that could tear open the seams of reality, cradled in the same hand that had just lifted a portly Shih Tzu onto a suburban bed.

The decision did not announce itself. It settled into place with the quiet certainty of something already determined before Luke was consciously aware of determining it. Somewhere between the desert's killing heat and Duke's wet tongue on his cheek, somewhere between the voice's cosmic admonition and Henri's theatrical nesting, the choice had been made.

He was going back. Not today. Not without water, without preparation, without some rudimentary plan for surviving more than a few minutes in that merciless landscape. But he was going back. The Portal Key grew warm in his palm, and it no longer felt like a mystery to be feared. It felt like a key waiting to be used.

Luke rose. Duke huffed in protest. Henri blinked once from his loaf-like sprawl, then settled back to sleep with the serene confidence of a creature who understood that whatever humans chose to do with their afternoons was no concern of his. The Berriedale house stood quiet around them — its hallway marked with smudges of alien dust, its study still holding the fading trace of impossible light — and the last quiet evening before everything accelerated beyond anyone's capacity to control it was almost upon them.