The Afternoon That Split the World

The winter afternoon held nothing in its early hours to suggest it would become the most consequential day in Luke Smith's thirty-four years of existence. Grey cloud pressed low against the shoulders of kunanyi, drawing early darkness down over the Derwent estuary. The house in Berriedale — a modest place shared with his partner Jamie Greyson and their two Shih Tzus, Henri and Duke — sat quiet, its sole occupant alone whilst Jamie worked his shift at the Vaucluse aged care facility across the river.

Luke had fallen asleep at his desk. Not the deliberate rest of a man who had taken himself to bed, but the involuntary surrender of someone whose body had simply overridden his intentions — chin dropping toward chest, consciousness sliding sideways into the kind of shallow doze that winter afternoons and poorly lit studies conspire to produce. His bookshelves stood sentinel around him, filled with novels and poetry collections and missionary-era reference texts that charted the various selves he had been or attempted to become.

What found him in that sleep was not rest.

The nightmare that took hold bore the particular cruelty of dreams that disguise themselves as waking. Luke believed himself to be in his own bed, in his own home, pulled from sleep by footsteps in the hallway. But the hallway was wrong. The carpet beneath his feet was taupe and faded — not the modern berber of the Berriedale house but the worn weave of a modest brick home in Elizabeth, South Australia, where the Smith family had lived before divorce and remarriage scattered its members across state lines.

The dream drew him down that impossible corridor with the logic of compulsion. Past the bookshelf where his mother's poetry collections had stood beside his father's technical manuals. Past the place where the rotary phone had hung with its permanently tangled cord. Toward the bedroom he had once shared with his older brother Paul, before their parents separated the boys into rooms at opposite ends of the hall — a well-intentioned arrangement that had only deepened the younger brother's loneliness.

Paul lay in the upper bunk, caught in the amber of adolescence, breathing with the uncomplicated peace of someone who did not yet know what watched from below. Moonlight fell across his sleeping form in silver ribbons.

Beneath the bunk, something waited.

The eyes that stared back at Luke from that darkness glowed with a light that belonged to no living creature — red as dying embers, shifting through shades of lurid pink and orange that writhed like flame on oil. They were not animal. They were not human. They belonged to something that had occupied that space since before the boy in the doorway was born, something patient and ancient and intimately acquainted with the child who stood frozen before it, voiceless, every fibre straining toward a scream his throat refused to produce.

The entity that emerged wore the shape of a man the way shadow wears the shape of whatever casts it. Compact, solid, assembled from darkness made corporeal, it moved with a grace that mocked its obvious menace. The room surrendered to it — walls dissolving, boundaries collapsing, reality thinning to tissue beneath the weight of its presence. Its arms extended toward Luke with the inevitability of something that had always known this moment would arrive.

Luke fled. The dream permitted this much: a desperate sprint through a corridor that narrowed around him like a throat swallowing, feet hammering against floorboards in a rhythm of pure refusal. He reached the front door, wrenched it open, and found not the quiet street of his childhood suburb but an eruption of cascading light — technicolour brilliance that belonged to no place he had ever known.

He woke at his desk with the violence of a drowning man breaking surface.

The study reassembled itself around him in fragments. Bookshelves. Notebooks. The familiar scent of dust and ink. But the nightmare clung to his perception like smoke to fabric, every shadow in the room a shade too deep, every silence stretched a fraction too taut. Afternoon light filtered weakly through the blinds, thin and provisional, as though it too doubted its authority over whatever had just occurred.

His phone buzzed against the glass desktop. Jamie's name flared on the screen — a call from across the river, from the ordinary world of shift work and aged care routines and the domestic life they had constructed together over nearly a decade. Luke reached for it with trembling fingers. The call ended before he could connect.

It was in the silence that followed that Luke became aware of the object in his hand.

Small. Cold. Heavier than its size warranted. It resembled a USB device in the way a fossil resembles a living creature — the shape was familiar but the substance was wrong. Its surface carried a texture that suggested age rather than manufacture, purpose rather than design. A recessed button sat along one side, incongruous and deliberate.

How it had come to rest in Luke's study — amongst scattered papers and forgotten pens and the accumulated debris of a life suspended between worlds — would remain a question without satisfactory answer. Luke had lived with strangeness since the age of eight, when a voice first spoke to him during a dream so vivid he had woken weeping. That voice had accompanied him through his parents' divorce and the family's relocation to Broken Hill, through Mormon missionary service and the slow accumulation of spiritual questions no doctrine could adequately answer. It had followed him to Tasmania, where he had settled with Jamie in an attempt to build something stable atop foundations that had never stopped trembling.

The voice had never given him anything he could hold. Until now.

His fingertip found the button — tentatively, almost accidentally — and the device answered with a sharp sting that drew blood. A single bead of crimson welled against his skin, vivid and undeniable, dissolving whatever residual hope remained that he might still be dreaming.

Then the device opened.

A spark leapt from the narrow seam — no larger than a marble but possessed of an intensity that seemed to compress starlight into a single point — and struck the study wall. The impact produced no sound. The effect was absolute. The wall ceased to exist as wall and became instead a gateway: a vortex of liquid colour that moved and breathed and shifted through hues belonging to no earthly palette. Sapphire wound through emerald. Crimson pulsed like arterial blood. Threads of gold wove through the chaos, binding it into something that almost resembled intention.

Luke threw a pen into the light. It vanished without sound or trace, swallowed as completely as though it had never existed.

Jamie's missed call still glowed on the phone beside him. Luke did not return it.

What happened next was not a decision in any conventional sense. It was the culmination of three decades of preparation that Luke had not known he was undergoing — every dream, every whispered word, every sleepless night spent wondering whether the voice in his head represented madness or meaning. The portal blazed against his study wall like an answer to a question he had carried since childhood, and the part of him that had always known he belonged somewhere else recognised it with the certainty of homecoming.

He stepped through.