The Stranger Who Knew My Name

“I thought I was the anomaly—the only one who could summon colours from steel. But the moment Cody raised his hand, I realised how wrong I was.”

"What the fuck!" Cody's exclamation split the air as he stepped into full view, his voice raw with shock, his body rigid, framed by the afternoon light like a sudden apparition. His eyes, wide and unblinking, latched onto the horror sprawled in the truck's shadowed interior.

For a heartbeat, I didn't move. My own gaze locked with his, and in that instant I saw it—the fear, yes, but also something deeper. Recognition. Not of Joel's body, but of me. The terror in his eyes wasn't just revulsion at death; it was sharpened by an uncanny familiarity, as though he'd stumbled upon a page torn from a book he already knew.

That realisation slid into me like ice water finding the spaces between my ribs.

"Who the fuck is that, Luke?" Cody demanded, his voice cracking under the weight of the grotesque scene yet held firm by a steel edge of suspicion.

The name—my name—hitting his tongue so naturally made my stomach twist. I'd never seen this man before in my waking life, never spoken to him, never been introduced. And yet he said Luke with the casual certainty of someone calling an old friend, someone who'd known the shape of that word in their mouth for years.

My jaw tightened as words caught in my throat. "Wait," I stammered, the sound brittle, forced, as my mind scrambled for purchase on a situation that kept tilting beneath me. "You know who I am?"

Cody's reply came with a steadiness that unnerved me. "Of course." He said it without hesitation, without the tremor I expected, his tone almost casual—as though he were confirming the colour of the sky.

"We've been waiting for you."

The words landed heavy, almost ceremonial, reverberating through my chest like the low note of a bell struck in an empty cathedral. My skin prickled, cold sweat breaking along my spine as the ground beneath me seemed to shift. Waiting for me. The simplicity of the phrase belied its weight, carrying implications that spiralled outward like cracks spreading through thin ice.

Who was we? Why me?

"Waiting for me?" I repeated, my voice faltering between incredulity and a dawning, reluctant awareness. My heart thundered, each beat drowning in the whirlpool of possibilities.

I was no longer staring at a stranger stumbling into our mess—I was staring at a man who might hold a key I didn't know existed, who might already know more about me, about this, about the Portal and Clivilius and everything that had turned my life inside out, than I dared imagine.

The world tilted, reality bending under the weight of his statement, leaving me unmoored, adrift in questions with no anchor, no safe harbour in sight.

"What happened to him?" Cody's inquiry rang out, dismissive of my confusion, firm and clipped as he hoisted himself into the back of the truck. His feet landed with a dull thud on the stained metal, and the way he carried himself—deliberate, unflinching—told me this was not a man unused to blood or bodies.

He moved as though he belonged here, in this grotesque theatre, as though the sight of Joel sprawled in decay was simply another obstacle to be catalogued, assessed, overcome. There was something almost clinical about his attention, the way his eyes swept the scene without flinching, the way his posture remained controlled even as the stench must have hit him.

"Shit," I muttered, the word escaping more as breath than speech, my own voice sounding alien in my ears. My gaze clung to Cody's face, to the hard lines of his expression, and recognition rippled through me like a current catching bone-deep. "You were in my dream."

The words hung in the suffocating air between us, a fragile filament connecting the surreal with the tangible. For a second, even the stench of congealed blood and bile seemed muted, overshadowed by the uncanny familiarity of his presence.

I'd seen him before. Not here, not in any waking moment I could recall, but somewhere. In those strange visions that had plagued my sleep since the Portal first opened, in fragments of images that slipped away like smoke when I tried to grasp them upon waking. His face had been there, amongst the swirling colours and impossible landscapes, watching me with the same steady intensity he showed now.

Cody crouched near Joel, his scrutiny clinical, his voice steady and unnervingly focused. "Throat looks like it has been slit. Any idea who did this?" His eyes, sharp as scalpels, lifted from the wound and locked onto mine. They weren't merely looking—they were measuring, interrogating, demanding.

"You were in my dream," I repeated, firmer this time, though no less bewildered. My words trembled with the weight of recognition. It wasn't just déjà vu—it was certainty. "I recognise you now." The admission tasted strange, like confessing something I hadn't consciously known until the syllables carried it into the air. A key sliding into a lock I hadn't realised was waiting.

But Cody brushed it aside, the corners of his jaw tightening. "We don't have time for this now, Luke," he said, my name hard in his mouth, carrying a force that jolted me back into the moment. "I need to know who he is and what happened. We don't have much time."

The way he said it—urgent, commanding, absolute—left no room for dream-talk or riddles. Reality snapped back like a rubber band stretched too far: a body cooling in front of us, neighbours within earshot, and a stranger who somehow knew me demanding answers I wasn't sure I could give.

My mouth was parched, as though the desert of Clivilius itself had crept inside me, drying every word before it could take form. I tried to speak, but the truth clung stubbornly to the back of my throat, refusing to emerge.

"His name is Joel," Beatrix cut in, her voice carrying a blunt clarity that I could not summon. "He is Jamie's son."

Cody's head tilted, his eyes narrowing with intent as he nodded towards me. "Is he…?" The unfinished question was heavier than anything spoken aloud, the implication striking like a hammer: was this my doing?

"No. I don't think so," Beatrix answered swiftly, her voice like a shield raised in my defence. Her words were firm enough to deflect suspicion, but not so firm as to erase the lingering doubt that now prowled the edges of Cody's gaze.

I should have been grateful for her intervention. Instead, I felt a twist of something uncomfortable—the knowledge that she was defending me from an accusation I couldn't entirely dismiss from my own conscience. Joel had died because he'd seen the Portal. My Portal. The chain of causation might be indirect, but the links were there if you followed them far enough.

"What happened?" Cody repeated, his tone sharpening. It wasn't a casual question anymore—it was a demand, a command, a refusal to accept anything less than the raw, unvarnished truth.

Beatrix's shrug was a quiet surrender, an admission of how tangled this had all become. It was the kind of gesture that said everything and nothing at once: that we were deep inside a labyrinth of chance and choice, bound by threads that none of us could see but all of us felt tightening.

"I'm not sure," I finally forced out, each word scraped from a throat constricted with tension. "He delivered a few tents here this morning." The memory flickered in my mind, ghostly, detached, as if I was retelling someone else's actions. "I took the opportunity to take them through the Portal while he was in the toilet. Then the boys accidentally ran through."

Even as the words left me, they felt absurd, belonging more to some fevered dream than to the brutal reality that surrounded us now. The boys ran through. Such an innocent description for the moment that had shattered any possibility of Joel's survival.

"The boys?" Cody's voice was sharp, cutting through my explanation.

"Dogs," Beatrix interjected quickly.

"And did he see?" Cody pressed, his tone not merely inquisitive but forensic, as though assembling evidence in his mind. His eyes never left mine.

"Yeah," I admitted with a heavy nod. "I'm pretty sure he did. And when I returned, I found him like this."

"Shit." Cody's exhalation was long and low, and then he moved—pacing back and forth in the cramped confines of the truck bed, his steps heavy, restless. Each stride radiated calculation, as though he was rearranging every piece of the puzzle in his head, testing for patterns none of us could yet see.

I watched him move, this stranger who knew my name, who spoke of waiting for me, who examined a murdered body with the detachment of someone who'd seen worse. Questions multiplied in my mind like cells dividing—who was he, really? How did he fit into the architecture of secrets that seemed to surround the Portal? And what did his appearance now, at this precise moment of crisis, actually mean?

"Oh my God!" Gladys's shriek cracked through the tension, her wide eyes darting between us. "We've both seen the Portal too," she blurted, her hand flapping between herself and Beatrix like a metronome of panic. "Does that mean we are going to die too?"

I felt the weight of her terror and couldn't dismiss it. Joel had seen the Portal and now Joel was dead. The correlation was undeniable, even if the causation remained murky. Who had killed him? And why? Was there someone out there eliminating witnesses, protecting the secret of inter-dimensional travel with murder?

"Not today, Gladys. Not today." Cody's answer was as much command as comfort. His voice carried a grim authority, like a soldier reassuring civilians whilst shells fell around them. It wasn't denial. It wasn't a promise of safety. It was an acknowledgement that death circled us but, for this moment at least, its gaze was elsewhere.

And in that simple exchange, I realised something terrible: Cody wasn't merely here by chance. He spoke like a man who understood the rules of a game I didn't even know I was playing. A game that apparently had been waiting for me, according to some we that I had yet to identify.

Confusion churned inside me, thick and suffocating, like storm clouds pressing low against the earth. My thoughts tangled, knotted threads impossible to unpick, and every attempt at clarity only tightened the snare around my reason.

"I am really confused," I admitted, my voice unsteady, the words slipping out before I could filter them. My hand rose to my forehead, massaging the skin as though the act might force sense into existence, as though pressure alone could drive order into chaos.

"Who are you again? And how do you know me? Did you have a dream too?" The questions tumbled out, urgent, clumsy, unchecked. They fell into the space between us like loose bricks from a crumbling wall.

My mind scrabbled at fragments—visions, half-remembered echoes, Cody's face flickering through the veil of my own subconscious—and I wasn't sure if I was inviting understanding or disaster by asking. A connection dangled there, tantalising, a key poised at the edge of a lock that might fling open answers... or unleash something I couldn't contain.

"I think Gladys and I had better finish making those deliveries," Beatrix's voice sliced through my thoughts, crisp and purposeful, like a captain steering a ship out of a storm. "I'll call you later when we're done."

I nodded, but it was mechanical, my neck moving without conviction. My eyes, however, stayed fixed on Cody. Perhaps, once the sisters were gone, he would lower his guard. Perhaps then he would tell me what he really knew.

A flicker of hope stirred inside me—fragile, yet sharp-edged. The hope that clarity could be wrestled from him if I pressed at the right angle, in the right moment.

"Be careful. Both of you," Cody said, his voice carrying something disconcerting—a calm authority dressed in genuine concern. The way he addressed them suggested more than casual regard; it carried the tone of someone accustomed to giving orders, someone used to people listening. That unsettled me more than it should have.

"We will," Beatrix replied, steady as always. Her hand pressed against Gladys's back, ushering her with a firmness that brooked no argument. The sight should have been ordinary, but to me it felt like the world was splitting into camps: those Cody seemed intent on protecting, and those—like me—he was weighing up.

As the sisters moved off, I caught myself wondering: was Cody here to help, or to make sure inconvenient pieces of this puzzle were quietly swept away?

The sisters' voices faded into the distance, the slap of concrete under their feet growing softer until it disappeared entirely. The quiet that remained was heavy, oppressive, like a lid sealing me in with Cody. His eyes locked onto mine, sharp and unblinking, carrying an urgency that needed no embellishment.

"I think you are in imminent danger, Luke," he said, each word measured, weighted, as if he was trying to impress the seriousness upon me through sheer force of will.

A chill coiled itself around my spine. My thoughts, already frayed, snapped towards the one possibility I had tried to push away. "Was he killed because of me?" The words slipped out before I had the strength to contain them, my voice cracking under the strain. "Because I let him see the Portal?" The admission tasted bitter, shame curling on my tongue like smoke from a fire I'd started but couldn't extinguish.

Cody shook his head, slow and deliberate. "No," he said, his tone resolute, his gaze steady. "I don't think it was your fault at all." His conviction landed with a weight that momentarily steadied me.

I drew in a deep breath, the air flooding my lungs with the faint taste of dust and oil, clinging to Cody's words as though they might carry me back from the brink. For a fleeting moment, relief washed over me, softening the jagged edges of my guilt.

But then his next words hit. "We need to get rid of the body. You should take him to Clivilius."

The suggestion punched the air from my chest. My head shook instinctively, violently. "I can't. Jamie would kill me if he knew his son was dead because of me."

The truth of it pressed down like a millstone, crushing, suffocating. The thought of Jamie's face when he found out—of the grief, the fury—was unbearable. I could already feel the accusation in his eyes, sharp enough to cut me open. He'd already revealed one devastating secret today, the affair with Ben that had sent me spiralling. How could I now confess that his son had died in my driveway, murdered by someone unknown whilst I was busy letting our dogs slip their way through the Portal?

"Luke!" Cody's voice cut like a whipcrack. His hands gripped my shoulders firmly, grounding me, anchoring me. His touch was warm, steady, commanding. "It's not your fault."

But the words only clashed against the storm inside me, sparks meeting the fuel of self-recrimination. My brow furrowed, my jaw clenched, the tension carving deep lines across my face. "There has to be another way," I muttered, barely more than a breath, the sound almost lost to the wind. A prayer more than a plan, a desperate plea to the universe for a loophole, an escape hatch from this crushing inevitability.

Cody released his grip, his posture softening as he leaned back slightly, a thoughtful hum escaping his lips. His eyes shifted, no longer fixed sharply on me but drifting inward, as if he was running calculations in some hidden ledger, weighing options that I wasn't yet privy to.

The sudden change unsettled me more than his urgency had—because if a man like Cody didn't have an immediate answer, then what kind of storm were we really standing in?

I watched, almost spellbound, as the tall man paced. Each step was deliberate, weighted with thought, as though his very feet were grinding solutions from the metal. Back and forth, back and forth—his body moving like a pendulum to the rhythm of an inner calculation I could neither read nor interrupt.

By the sixth turn, he halted abruptly. The sudden stillness was stark, his frame silhouetted against the daylight like some carved sentinel, caught between decision and revelation.

"There is," Cody declared at last, the confidence in his tone abrupt, almost unnerving. He leapt from the truck bed with the fluidity of a man who had just solved a problem too heavy for the rest of us to lift. "Get out of the truck," he instructed, the command sharp, clean, and impossible to ignore.

For a heartbeat, I hesitated. Was this trust—or folly? But my legs moved before my doubts could stop them. I climbed down, following him, my body a marionette pulled by equal parts desperation and an unwilling faith that he might know what I did not.

"I need the keys," Cody said, his hand outstretched, his gaze fixed on mine. Those eyes—unyielding, certain—pinned me in place, and in that silence there was no room for bargaining. Only surrender.

"Where are you taking him?" My voice came out low, hoarse, carrying both the dread of betrayal and the faint ember of hope. I dropped the keys into his open palm, the metallic clink sounding louder than it should, like a deal being sealed.

Cody didn't answer. He turned, purposeful, striding towards the gate with a calm certainty that jarred against the chaos still screaming in my head. Then, with a casual motion that made my stomach tighten, he slipped a hand into his shirt and drew out something small, sleek, and impossibly familiar.

It caught the light—a curious device, unremarkable in shape yet humming with an unseen promise. A simple USB stick, or so it seemed, until recognition dawned and my lungs froze mid-breath.

"A Portal Key," I whispered, the words barely audible even to myself.

Awe surged through me, tinged with something darker—envy, perhaps, or fear. I had believed myself unique, an anomaly, the only person on Earth who possessed the ability to tear holes in reality and step between worlds. The discovery of the Portal Key had felt like destiny, like something meant specifically for me.

But Cody had one too.

I watched as he lifted it, and without ceremony, fired a tight orb of energy at the broad gate.

The effect was immediate. The metal shimmered, then ignited with life, an eruption of radiant, shifting colours that bled into one another like living paint. The swirling hues clawed at the ordinary wood, pulsing with the same energy I had seen countless times—but from my Portal Key, not his. Seeing it emerge from Cody's hand was like watching a stranger recite a prayer I thought only I had been taught.

"I'm taking him to Clivilius," Cody said, his voice level, certain, a line delivered without hesitation. The words should have been a balm, an answer. Instead, they rattled in my chest, filling me with a contradictory mix of relief and unease.

I stood frozen, eyes fixed on the shimmering gate, my thoughts spinning. There's another device? How is that even possible? Each revelation seemed to fracture the fragile reality I had built for myself. If Cody had one, how many others existed? And more pressing still—was he here to help me, or to make sure I disappeared into the colours alongside Joel?

With a sense of purpose etched into every movement, Cody swung himself into the cab of the truck. The driver's door clanged shut with a metallic finality, the sound vibrating through the marrow of my bones. A second later the engine roared alive, a guttural growl that seemed to answer the low, anxious rumble in my own chest. The vibration filled the air, rattling through the driveway, through me, as if the truck itself understood it was carrying something unholy.

He reversed with unnerving calm, each adjustment of the wheel deliberate, each check of the mirrors carried out with smoothness. The sight of him manoeuvring the vehicle towards the living wall of colour was surreal, like watching someone guide a coffin into a furnace.

The truck moved steadily backward, tyres crunching concrete in a rhythm that felt like the ticking of a countdown. Joel's lifeless form was inside. Cody too. And then, in one shuddering moment, all of it was gone—swallowed whole by the shimmering storm.

The silence that followed was cavernous. A void opened up, not just in the air around me but in my very chest. It was as though the world had exhaled, and in that breath Cody and Joel had been erased.

Slowly, almost against my own will, I drifted towards the gate. Each step felt heavy, drawn forward by equal measures of dread and an insatiable hunger for answers. My heart hammered in my ears, a rapid-fire drumbeat that made it hard to breathe.

Thoughts battered me from all sides—had Cody just freed me of a burden, or had he buried something deeper? Was he cleaning up the mess, or cleaning me out of the picture? He'd said we've been waiting for you, but who was we and what did waiting entail? Were there others like him, others with Portal Keys, some secret society of guardians who'd been watching me without my knowledge?

The vortex glowed before me, radiant and alive, a canvas of colours that rippled as though it knew I was watching. The sight tugged at me, clawed at the corners of my reason. The questions piled higher than I could contain. What lay beyond? What truths about me—about all of this—waited inside that portal?

My hand lifted without conscious thought, trembling but resolute. I reached out, fingers inching closer, compelled by the mantra thundering in my mind. No more shadows. I need answers. Inch by inch, my fingertips neared the surface.

And then—darkness.

The vortex snuffed out in an instant, as though extinguished by an invisible hand. The radiant colours collapsed into nothing, leaving only the cold, unremarkable surface of the gate staring back at me. The silence that followed was deafening. The abrupt return to dull, ordinary reality struck like ice water down my spine, washing away the heat of my determination and leaving only a clammy chill.

I stood there frozen, arm extended toward nothing, like a man trying to touch a ghost. My hand hovered against wood that had once shimmered with impossible life, the contrast so stark it felt like mockery.

Cody was gone. Joel was gone. The truck, the body, the evidence—all of it had vanished into Clivilius, taken by a stranger who knew my name and spoke of waiting.

And I was left standing in my driveway, surrounded by the detritus of an impossible morning, with more questions than I'd had before and fewer answers than I'd ever thought possible.

The world had grown larger in that moment—infinitely larger—and yet I had never felt smaller.