The Wayward Portal · Story 3 · A Strangewoven story
The Wayward Portal — Read in order
1. The Wayward Portal · 2. The Things That Stayed · 3. The Upper Crossing · 4. The Keeper’s Table
A story from Strangewoven
By breakfast, Aren had drawn three possible mechanisms for the upper crossing.
Aven had drawn a fourth.
Rose put a plate over all of them.
“Eat.”
“We’re considering possibilities,” Aren said.
“You’re considering machinery you haven’t seen.”
“That is one of the possibilities.”
She sat opposite them with her tea. In the pocket of her coat, the photographs Daniel had given her were wrapped against the rain.
Aven moved her cup off a drawing.
“We did get ahead of ourselves yesterday.”
Aren looked up.
“The missing corner,” she said. “It could have broken between the photograph being taken and Grandma going through.”
Rose nodded.
“Nearly seventy years between the two. Plenty of time for somebody to damage something.”
“So we might be looking for the doorway we already found,” Aren said.
“Yes.”
He regarded his sister’s drawing.
“Yours would still work.”
“I know. Finish your breakfast.”
They did not immediately go looking for another passage.
First, they finished making the one they had safe.
Their father had shaped a permanent timber frame during the evening. The village carpenter arrived to help fit it, carrying a mallet and several questions about Washington. Two council members followed with considerably more questions and no mallets.
Rose took charge of those.
By midmorning, the cracked lintel rested securely on its new supports. The watercourse had been cleared, the loose stones secured, and a simple barrier fitted so nobody could wander through by accident.
Aren stepped back and folded his arms.
Aven studied him.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You have the expression.”
“I have several.”
“The one from the mill.”
He looked at the frame again.
“It needs somewhere to hang the lantern.”
She handed him a hook.
On the Washington side, Daniel had brought a large copy of the photograph, an old map, and a tablet borrowed from Helen.
“She enlarged the picture,” he said. “Thought you might want a better look.”
Aven took the tablet carefully.
The men in the photograph filled the bright surface. She touched one corner and accidentally made them enormous.
She stopped moving.
Aren leaned over her shoulder.
“Do that again.”
“I’m not sure what I did.”
Daniel showed her.
For a minute, the investigation suffered from competition with the means of investigating.
Then Aven found something useful.
“That board. Can we make it clearer?”
Helen’s larger image could not restore what the photograph had lost. Most of the writing remained a pale blur. But below the men, almost hidden by a boot, a length of iron rail crossed the mud.
Daniel bent closer.
“An old logging line.”
He unfolded his map on the truck’s hood.
The twins watched him compare the stream, the slope, and the faint routes marked across the paper.
“There were tracks higher up,” he said. “Before the road. We find where they crossed this drainage, we might find your arch.”
Aren glanced at Aven.
She closed her notebook over the four imagined mechanisms.
“Lead on.”
Rose stayed with Helen that afternoon.
She had a nephew to meet by telephone and a niece who had already called twice to ask whether it was too soon to visit. She waved the twins away with such determination that Aren suspected she had been waiting years to have more relatives than questions.
Daniel drove them to an overgrown turning place above the lower passage.
From there, they walked.
The old track bed was easy to miss until Daniel pointed it out: a narrow shelf running across the hillside, too level and consistent to have formed by chance. Rotten timbers lay beneath the leaves.
Aven lifted her feet carefully over them.
“People here built roads for the wheels themselves?”
“Rails kept heavy loads on course,” Daniel said.
Aren nodded. “We do something similar in the slate quarries.”
“With engines?”
“Usually oxen.”
Daniel looked back.
“Normal oxen?”
The twins considered each other.
“We may need to see yours,” Aven said.
They followed the shelf into a shallow ravine.
Daniel stopped beside a split boulder.
He held up the photograph.
The rock appeared behind the shoulder of the tallest man. Smaller trees had grown around it, but the pale seam down its face matched.
Aven looked past him.
Across the ravine, beneath a curtain of roots, a curved line interrupted the rough stone.
She pointed.
Aren was already looking there.
The upper arch was smaller than their passage.
They could have walked beneath it single file, but there was no open way beyond. A fitted slab filled the recess. Moss covered its bottom edge. Ferns grew from silt accumulated across the threshold.
Aven brushed loose leaves aside.
Two carved bands surrounded the opening. Under them ran shallow sockets, arranged exactly as they were at the lower crossing.
She touched the upper corner.
Whole.
“You were right,” Daniel said.
“This time,” she replied.
Aren examined the ground.
A stone channel curved away from the recess to their left. Beside it stood two low posts, almost buried. Between the posts lay a narrow inspection pit covered with fallen branches.
He crouched.
Through the debris, something dull and green caught the light.
“There’s metal down here.”
Aven was at his shoulder before he finished speaking.
They cleared the branches together. Underneath sat a bronze housing, fixed into the stone. A short lever emerged from one side. Beside it, a circular plate bore three worn symbols.
Aren reached toward the lever, then stopped.
Aven held out her hand.
He passed her his measuring cord.
Daniel watched.
“I thought you were going to move it.”
“So did I,” Aren said.
They spent an hour finding out what the lever was attached to.
Water seeped through a small opening beneath the slab into a shallow basin. From there, it disappeared into a channel packed with roots and gravel. Most of the flow was escaping over the basin’s edge and soaking the hillside.
Inside the housing, a narrow bronze rod rose from a float. Mineral deposits had fixed it in place.
Aven traced its linkage toward a heavy horizontal catch.
“Water level controls that.”
Aren studied the lever.
“And this lets someone release it by hand.”
“For maintenance?”
“Perhaps.”
Daniel examined the soaked ground beyond the basin.
“This has been overflowing a long time. Look at the sediment under those roots.”
Aven followed his finger.
Silverhook leaves grew among the Washington ferns.
They had found another leak between worlds.
But this one had a machine attached to it.
The worn symbols resisted explanation.
One resembled a closed gate. Another might have been an open gate, or a badly drawn comb. The third was a row of descending marks.
Aven copied them while Aren cleaned the edge of the housing with a soft brush.
“There’s writing.”
She leaned closer.
The letters were old-fashioned, but familiar. They had seen similar forms on the foundation stones of the oldest mill in Veyr.
Reading them took longer than either liked.
Daniel sat on a dry rock and ate half a sandwich.
Eventually Aven read aloud in their valley’s language, then translated.
“‘Before lifting the way, prove the fall is clear.’”
“Fall?” Daniel asked.
“The outlet, I think,” Aren said. “The water has to go somewhere.”
Daniel put his sandwich away.
“Then we should find out where.”
The outlet ran beneath the old track bed.
Beyond it, a stone-lined course descended toward a rocky gully. Fallen timber blocked much of its upper end. Water had cut a separate path through the soil instead.
“If we free the mechanism before we clear this,” Aven said, “we could send more water into the bank.”
“And down onto the road,” Daniel added.
Aren looked back toward the housing.
The small lever had seemed harmless enough.
He took off his satchel.
“Good inscription.”
They worked from the firm ground beside the old channel, removing loose debris a piece at a time. Daniel identified a rotten trunk whose position made it dangerous to disturb from below. The twins left it until they had cleared a place to move it from above.
When it finally shifted, Aren and Aven each took an end of the same crossbar.
He glanced at her.
She nodded once.
Together they lifted and rolled the timber clear.
Daniel breathed out.
“I keep forgetting you can both do that.”
Aven straightened.
“He has the advantage of looking heavy.”
“You have the advantage of reaching the top shelf.”
“A balanced arrangement.”
By late afternoon, the channel lay open to the gully. They followed its length twice, checking what the released water would pass and where it would join the stream below.
Then they returned to the arch.
Freeing the float required patience.
Freeing the catch required all three of them.
The twins had cleaned the accessible parts and checked their movement. Daniel held the light while they examined a bronze pin bent against the side of the housing.
“It’s binding,” Aren said.
“If we support the lever, can you ease it clear?” Aven asked.
He checked the linkage again.
“Yes. Slowly.”
She braced herself on the stone platform and took the lever’s weight. Her long arms gave her room to hold it without crowding her brother’s hands.
Aren worked the bent pin free.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then the float rose.
The catch withdrew with a deep, reluctant click.
Across the filled recess, a thin line of light appeared.
Aven felt the lever pull against her.
“Moving.”
Aren stepped back.
“Let it settle.”
She eased it down.
The fitted slab sank into the threshold, revealing an arch full of gray daylight.
Beyond it, water lay almost level with the sill.
A broad stream poured into the waiting basin.
Daniel moved to the channel’s edge. He watched the flow enter the cleared outlet, then hurried a few steps along its course.
“It’s taking it!”
The water in the basin rose, but stayed below the carved line around its rim.
Aven kept her hand near the lever until the linkage stopped trembling.
Then she looked through the arch.
The three of them grew quiet.
On the other side stood a long stone terrace beside a pond.
Low walls divided beds of overgrown plants. Beyond them rose pale trees whose branches forked in groups of three. A roof had fallen into the remains of a building at the terrace’s end.
Farther off, beneath a clear sky, a town climbed a ridge.
Its roofs were blue.
Aren moved beside Aven, leaving the threshold untouched.
“Do you know it?” Daniel asked.
She shook her head.
The trees were familiar. The town was not.
An overflow channel on the far terrace ended at the arch. The pond was draining through it, its high water slipping across worlds into the basin at their feet.
Aren studied the rim of the pond.
“Storm storage, perhaps. This lets the surplus out.”
“Into Washington,” Daniel said.
“Yes.”
He looked from the stonework to the unfamiliar sky.
“Someone planned that.”
Aven nodded slowly.
The outlet’s size, the float, the warning cut where a worker could read it—all had been made for this.
She turned back to the bronze housing.
As the pond level fell, the flow weakened. The float lowered with the basin’s water. Nothing slammed or shifted unexpectedly. The mechanism waited until the channel was nearly empty, then the catch began to move toward its seat.
“It’s going to close,” Aren said.
They stood clear.
The slab rose slowly. A last ribbon of water slipped beneath it.
Daylight narrowed to a line and disappeared.
The lever settled into the position marked by the closed gate.
In the ravine, a bird began calling again.
Daniel lowered the light.
“Well.”
Aven sat down on a stone.
Aren sat beside her.
“We should probably write that down,” he said.
They stayed long enough to check the float through a smaller rise and fall in the basin. The outlet carried the water cleanly. The slab remained closed.
Aven recorded what they had observed separately from what they suspected. Aren drew the linkage, adding arrows where he had finally seen its direction of travel.
Daniel photographed the housing and the arch. The photographs of the open way showed the blue-roofed town clearly.
He looked at them several times.
“Helen’s going to want to come next time.”
“We don’t know enough to go through,” Aven said.
“She’ll be pleased to hear somebody said that.”
Before they left, Aren noticed a flat stone beside the platform. Mud filled a shallow carving on its face.
He brushed it clean.
Two bands surrounded a simple arch. Below it, a small figure held a long-handled tool. A second figure stood on the opposite side.
Daniel crouched beside them.
“What does it say?”
Aven read the short line twice, testing the unfamiliar ending of one word.
“‘Leave the keeper’s step clear.’”
Aren looked down at the stone platform they had been working from.
Smooth hollows marked the places where feet had stood.
For the first time, Aven found herself wondering about an ordinary day here, long before the logging camp. Someone bringing lunch. Someone complaining about rain. A worker setting down a bag, checking the water, and calling to a colleague on the other side.
She sketched the little figures before they covered the inspection pit again.
At Daniel’s house, Rose listened without interrupting.
Helen interrupted only once, to make them wash their hands before handling the photographs.
They spread the pictures across the table.
Rose studied the pale trees.
“Your grandfather knew those. He called them lantern ash.”
“Did he ever mention a town with blue roofs?” Aren asked.
“Probably. He mentioned a great many towns.” She smiled sadly. “I wish I’d written more down.”
Aven touched her notebook.
“We can start now.”
Rose looked at the drawing of the two small figures.
“You think people worked there?”
“I think we found where they stood,” Aven said.
Daniel sat beside his sister.
“And we know it was there before you crossed. Much before.”
Rose looked toward the window. Outside, rain was beginning again.
“All those years,” she said. “I kept wondering how I’d walked into something that could happen only once.”
Aren turned the photograph so she could see the open arch.
“Someone knew how to make it happen again.”
She studied it a little longer, then slid it carefully beside the photograph of Daniel’s granddaughter.
Helen rose from the table.
“Before anyone plans another expedition, I made dessert.”
She opened the freezer.
Both twins stood.
Daniel laughed.
“You’ve seen a doorway into another world today.”
Aven accepted a bowl and examined the scoop of ice cream Helen placed in it.
“That doorway didn’t offer us anything.”
Aren tasted his.
He stopped.
His sister watched his expression, took a spoonful of her own, and slowly sat back down.
Rose began to laugh before either of them could speak.
