Things You Can't Unsee

"He stepped out of the light like he'd never left. But I knew — nothing about this house, this night, this life, was ever going back to what it was."

Kenneth's room was gone.

Not physically — the walls were still there, the bed, the desk, the cricket bat propped in the corner. But the far wall had become something else. Something that moved. Something alive.

Colour poured through the space in coils and spirals — not reflected, not projected, but present, as if the air itself had split open and what was behind it was bleeding through. Greens and blues and purples that didn't exist in any paint tin or sunset I'd ever seen, folding into each other, pulling apart, reforming. They moved with purpose — not random, not chaotic, but deliberate, the way water moves when it knows where it's going.

The hum I'd felt through the house was deafening in here. Not loud — not the kind of noise that hurts your ears — but total. It filled every part of me. My chest, my jaw, the soles of my feet. Like standing inside a bell that had just been struck.

And Jeremiah was gone.

The bed was empty. The sheets were pulled back, the pillow dented, but the room held no breath, no warmth, no person. Just the vortex and the hum and the impossible, terrible beauty of something that had no right to exist in a farmhouse in Gawler, on a Thursday night in October.

I stood in the doorway with my hand still on the knob and my heart trying to punch its way out of my ribs. Every instinct I had was screaming at me — run, wake the house, get out — but my legs wouldn't move. Not because I was frozen. Because some part of me, deeper than instinct, deeper than fear, wouldn't let me turn away.

The light shifted. Brighter. Faster. The colours tightened, pulling inward like a whirlpool finding its centre. The hum changed pitch — higher, sharper, vibrating through my teeth. The air crackled. I could taste it — metallic, electric, like the moment before lightning strikes when the whole sky goes tight and the hair on your arms lifts.

Something was coming through.

I took a step back. My shoulders hit the doorframe. I gripped it with both hands, the wood biting into my fingers, and watched.

The centre of the vortex split. Not violently — more like a curtain being drawn aside. The light peeled back in layers, and through the gap, a shape. Moving. Solidifying. Becoming real.

Jeremiah stepped out of the light like a man stepping off a train — one foot, then the other, then all of him, standing in the middle of Kenneth's room as if he'd just come back from a walk to the shed. The vortex pulsed behind him, still alive, still humming, but quieter now. Settling. Like an engine dropping to idle.

He looked the same. Same face, same leather jacket, same lean frame. But there was something in his expression that hadn't been there before — a tightness around the eyes, a flush across his cheekbones. He was breathing harder than he should have been. And his hands, hanging at his sides, were not quite steady.

He looked around the room — a quick, automatic scan — and then his eyes found me.

For a second, neither of us moved.

His face went through something I could only describe as collapse. Not dramatic — Jeremiah didn't do dramatic. But I watched the composure crack. That careful, measured mask he'd worn all night — at the pub, at the kitchen table, in front of my parents — it shattered. What was underneath was younger. More afraid. More human.

"Cody." His voice was raw. "You weren't supposed to see this."

The words hit me like a physical thing. Not the content — the tone. The admission. The fact that there was a this to see, and he'd known about it, and he'd brought it into my family's home.

Something hot and sharp ripped through me. Not fear anymore. Anger.

"What the fuck is this?"

My voice came out louder than I meant it to. I heard it bounce off the walls of Kenneth's room — my brother's room, with his sheet music on the desk and his model plane turning slowly on its fishing line above the bed — and the wrongness of everything hit me like a truck.

"Cody, keep your voice down—"

"Don't tell me to keep my voice down." I stepped into the room. The air was thick — warmer than it should have been, heavy with that electric charge — and the vortex pulsed behind Jeremiah like something watching. "My family is asleep twenty feet from this. My sisters are asleep twenty feet from this. What the hell have you brought into our house?"

Jeremiah raised both hands — palms out, the gesture you make when you're trying to calm an animal that's about to bolt. "I know how this looks—"

"You don't know how this looks. You don't know anything about how this looks, because thirty minutes ago I was sitting downstairs getting torn apart by my father for defending you, and now I'm standing in my brother's room watching you step out of a bloody hole in the wall."

The words were pouring out of me — raw, unfiltered, the kind of honesty that only comes when you're too shocked to be careful. I could feel the adrenaline shaking through my body, my hands trembling, my jaw tight. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I was aware that I should be quieter. That Dad was down the hall. That this could wake the whole house. But the lid was off and I couldn't put it back.

Jeremiah stood very still. He didn't argue. Didn't deflect. Didn't reach for one of those smooth, practised responses I'd watched him deploy all night. He just stood there and took it, and something about that — about the way he absorbed my anger without flinching — made me angrier.

"Say something," I said. "Tell me what this is. And don't give me travelling or between things or whatever other bullshit you've been feeding us all night."

He let out a breath. Long, slow, controlled. Like a man setting down something heavy.

"It's a portal," he said. "A gateway. To another world."

The words sat in the air between us. The vortex hummed. Kenneth's model plane turned on its string.

"Another world," I repeated.

"It's called Clivilius."

I stared at him. The name meant nothing to me — just a collection of sounds, foreign and wrong-shaped, like trying to fit a word from one language into the mouth of another.

"You're taking the piss."

"I'm not." He held my gaze. "Cody, I know how it sounds. I know what you're thinking. But you're standing in front of the proof. You can see it. You can feel it."

I could. That was the problem. I could feel the hum in my bones, the warmth on my skin, the pull — that gravitational tug toward the centre of the vortex that was like nothing I'd ever experienced. My body believed it. My brain was still catching up.

"How long?" I said.

"How long what?"

"How long have you had this thing? How long have you been — what, travelling between worlds? Is that what you were doing all those times you dodged questions tonight? All that I move around a lot crap?"

He had the decency to look uncomfortable. "Yes."

"And you brought it here. Into our home. Into Kenneth's room." My voice cracked on my brother's name. "Where my nine-year-old brother sleeps when he's not in bloody Sydney."

"I needed somewhere private. Somewhere I wouldn't be disturbed. The portal is tied to me — it goes where I go. I didn't choose for it to be here, but I needed to check in, to—"

"Check in? Check in with what?"

"With the people I'm working with. On the other side."

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. Hard. Saw stars behind my lids. When I took them away, the room was still wrong. The light was still there. Jeremiah was still standing in front of something impossible, and I was still barefoot in my jeans in the middle of the night in a farmhouse that suddenly felt like it was made of paper.

"My dad was right," I said. The words tasted like ash. "He was right about you. He said I didn't know you, and I stood there in our kitchen and told him he was wrong. I told my mother he was wrong. And the whole time, you had... this."

Something moved across Jeremiah's face. Pain. Real pain, not performed. The kind that comes when someone you've hurt tells you the exact shape of the wound.

"I was going to tell you," he said quietly. "Not like this. I had a plan—"

"A plan." I laughed. It came out ugly. "Right. A plan. Like all those questions at the pub? Like the way you got me talking about my dreams and my family and what I wanted from life? Was that part of the plan too?"

He didn't answer. Which was answer enough.

The anger surged again, hot and sick, but underneath it something else was rising — something colder. Betrayal. The slow, spreading realisation that everything I'd felt tonight — the connection, the recognition, the sense of being understood — might have been engineered. That I wasn't special. I was a target.

"You were looking for someone," I said. Not a question. "At the pub. That's why you were asking everyone those questions. About what they'd change. About what they wanted. You were shopping."

Jeremiah's jaw tightened. "It's not like that."

"Then what's it like? Tell me. Because from where I'm standing, it looks like you walked into my local, found the bloke most likely to say yes to something stupid, and played him like a fiddle."

"I was looking for the right person. Not just anyone. Someone who—"

"The right person for what?"

The vortex pulsed behind him. The colours shifted — darker now, deeper, like a bruise forming in the air. Jeremiah looked at it, then back at me, and something in his expression changed. The defensiveness fell away. What replaced it was exhaustion. The bone-deep tiredness of a man who'd been carrying something too long and had just had it ripped out of his hands before he was ready.

"Guardians," he said. "That's what we're called. People who carry Portal Keys — who can open doorways between Earth and Clivilius. I'm one of them. I've been one for..." He paused, calculating. "Three years. Not long. Not long enough, honestly. And I was sent here — to this part of Australia, to this town — to find people who might be ready to become Guardians themselves."

The room was very quiet. Even the hum had dropped to almost nothing, like the portal itself was listening.

"I'm not a con man, Cody. I'm not dangerous. But I haven't been honest with you either, and I won't pretend otherwise. I came to Gawler with a purpose, and yes — part of that purpose involved finding people like you."

"People like me."

"People with something in them. A restlessness. A pull toward something they can't name. People who feel like the world they're standing in is only half the picture." He looked at me steadily. "Tell me I'm wrong."

I wanted to. God, I wanted to. I wanted to tell him he was full of it, that I was just a farm kid who'd had too many beers and made a bad call, and that in the morning this would all be revealed as some kind of elaborate trick or hallucination or nervous breakdown.

But I couldn't. Because he wasn't wrong. That pull — that itch — I'd felt it for years. Long before tonight. Long before Jeremiah. It was the thing that made me stare at the horizon when I should have been mending fences. The thing that woke me at three in the morning with my heart racing and no reason for it. The thing I'd never told anyone about, not even Ben, not even Anne, because I didn't have words for it and I was afraid that if I tried, I'd sound like I was losing my grip.

And here was a man standing in front of an actual hole in reality telling me it was real. That it had a name. That it was bigger than anything I'd imagined.

I sat down on Kenneth's bed. The springs creaked under me. The sheets smelled faintly of washing powder and cedar — Mum's doing, keeping the room fresh for a boy who wouldn't be home until Christmas.

"This is insane," I said.

"Yes," Jeremiah said. "It is."

"And you're telling me this is real. That there's a whole other world on the other side of that... thing."

"Clivilius. Yes."

"And you want me to — what? Go through it?"

"No." The word came fast and sharp. "Not like that. Never like that. If you walked through that portal right now — as you are, without a Portal Key — you'd be in Clivilius. Alive. Safe. But you wouldn't come back. Not ever. The portal doesn't work both ways for ordinary people. It's a one-way door."

The words sat in the air between us. One-way door. I felt them settle into my stomach.

"But that's not why I'm telling you this," he said. And something shifted in his voice — the rawness was still there, but underneath it now was something sharper. Urgency. The sound of a man who'd been knocked off his plan and was building a new one in real time.

"Cody, listen to me. What's happened tonight — you seeing the portal, me being caught — this changes things. For both of us. I didn't want it to happen this way, but it has, and now we need to deal with it."

"We don't need to deal with anything. You need to explain yourself, and then I need to decide whether to wake my father."

"And tell him what?" Jeremiah's voice was quiet, but the question had teeth. "That there's a hole in reality in his son's bedroom? That the stranger he didn't trust has a gateway to another dimension in his jacket pocket? What do you think happens then, Cody? Do you think he calls the police? The hospital? Do you think anyone believes you?"

I opened my mouth. Closed it.

"You'd sound deranged," Jeremiah said. Not cruelly. Almost gently. Like he was describing a weather pattern, not dismantling my only exit. "And even if you showed them — even if you dragged your father up here and I opened the portal right in front of him — then what? Then your whole family knows. Your mother. Your sisters. Your four-year-old sister. And that knowledge doesn't go away. It doesn't get smaller. It only gets heavier."

The truth of it pressed against me from every side. He was right. I hated that he was right, but he was. I couldn't tell Dad. Couldn't tell anyone. Not because Jeremiah was asking me to keep his secret, but because the secret itself was too big for this house. Too big for Gawler. Too big for anything I had words for.

"So what, then?" My voice came out flat. Defeated. I hated the sound of it. "What are you actually asking me?"

Jeremiah reached into his jacket. The movement was slow, deliberate — the same careful way he'd done everything all night, but stripped of pretence now. His hand came out holding something small. Smaller than I expected. A piece of metal, no bigger than a matchbox, dark and dense and covered in markings so fine they were barely visible — lines and symbols that caught the vortex light and seemed to shift when I looked at them from different angles.

"This is a Portal Key," he said. "An unused one. Not mine — a new one."

He held it out on his palm. The metal sat there, unassuming, ordinary-looking. Like something you'd find in a shed drawer and not think twice about.

"If you activate this key, it bonds to you. Permanently. You become a Guardian — like me. You can open portals. You can cross between Earth and Clivilius whenever you choose, and — this is the important part — you can come back. The key gives you both directions. You're not trapped. You're not stuck. You have the freedom to move between worlds."

I stared at the thing in his hand. My brain was trying to process the words, but they kept sliding off, like water on hot metal.

"And if I don't take it?"

Jeremiah met my eyes. "Then you've seen what you've seen, and you carry that knowledge for the rest of your life without anyone to share it with. You go back to bed, you wake up at five, you mend fences with your father. And every night, for the rest of your life, you lie awake knowing that everything you felt — that pull, that itch, that restlessness — was real. And you said no to it."

"That's not fair."

"No. It isn't."

"You're backing me into a corner."

"I'm giving you a choice. A real one. The only one I've got left to give."

"Tonight." I laughed — short, sharp, ugly. "You want me to decide this tonight. Right now. At midnight. In my brother's bedroom. With my family asleep down the hall."

"Yes." No hesitation. No apology. "Because tomorrow morning, your father's voice will be louder than mine. And your mother's. And your sister's. And every sensible, reasonable instinct you have will tell you to forget what you saw and send me on my way. And I wouldn't blame you for listening to them. But you'd be wrong. And you'd know it. And it would eat you alive."

I looked at the Portal Key. I looked at Jeremiah. I looked at the impossible, terrifying, beautiful thing pulsing against the far wall of my brother's room.

And I thought about Dad. About the look on his face in the kitchen. About Mum's hand on his, brief and warm. About Janice on the stairs in her nightie, seeing things the rest of us couldn't. About Anne and her careful questions and her textbooks and her future spreading out ahead of her like a road she'd already mapped.

I thought about all of them, sleeping, trusting that the house was safe. Trusting that I was who they thought I was.

And I thought about the itch. The pull. The thing that had woken me at three in the morning for years with my heart hammering and no reason for it. The horizon I couldn't stop staring at. The feeling — bone-deep, wordless, relentless — that I was meant for something I couldn't see.

Jeremiah hadn't put that there. It had been there long before him. He'd just given it a name.

"If I take this," I said slowly, "and I activate it. What happens to my family?"

"Nothing. They go on as they are. You come and go as you please. They don't have to know anything."

"I'd be lying to them."

"You'd be protecting them."

The same exchange as before. But it landed differently now. Not as a request — as a fact. A condition of the world I was being asked to enter.

"And if I take it and then change my mind? If I decide I don't want this?"

"The key doesn't unbond. Once it's yours, it's yours. But you're not obligated to use it. You can put it in a drawer and live your whole life on this side and never open another portal. The choice is always yours."

"Except the choice to give it back."

"Except that."

I sat on Kenneth's bed for a long time. The springs creaked under me. The sheets smelled of washing powder and cedar. The model plane turned. The vortex hummed. And somewhere down the hall, my father breathed in his sleep — slow, heavy, the sound of a man who'd built his life on certainty and had never once doubted the ground beneath his feet.

I envied him. More than I'd ever envied anyone.

I reached out and took the Portal Key from Jeremiah's hand.

It was cold. Heavier than it looked.

"I'm not doing this because I trust you," I said. "I want you to know that."

"I know."

"I'm doing it because you're right. I can't unsee it. And I'd rather have a key to the door than spend the rest of my life knowing it's there and having no way through."

Jeremiah nodded once. His face was unreadable — relief, maybe, or satisfaction, or something more complicated than either. The face of a man whose plan had gone sideways and landed roughly where he needed it to anyway.

"There's something else," I said.

"What?"

"My family. Whatever happens — whatever this makes me, whatever I become — they come first. Always. Before you, before Clivilius, before any of it. If I ever have to choose between this and them, I choose them. Every time. Without hesitation. Are we clear?"

Something flickered across his face. Not disagreement. Something sadder. Like he'd heard those words before — maybe even said them himself, once — and knew how they sounded at the beginning, and how they sounded later.

"We're clear," he said.

I closed my fingers around the key. The metal bit into my palm. The vortex pulsed once — brighter, as if in recognition — and then settled back to its low, steady rhythm.

I sat there on my brother's bed, holding a piece of metal that could tear holes in reality, listening to the sounds of my family sleeping around me. The house I'd been born in. The farm that had made me. Everything I'd ever known, held in the creaking timbers and the settled dust and the breathing of people I loved more than I knew how to say.

And in my hand, a door to somewhere else.