Marcus hadn’t meant to find a hole in reality. He was just looking for his car keys.
They’d fallen behind the old bookshelf in his grandmother’s house—the one she’d left him along with the house itself and all its peculiar shadows. He’d moved the shelf, cursing under his breath at the dust, and there it was.
Not a hole exactly. More like a seam. A place where the wallpaper didn’t quite meet reality, where the plaster beneath seemed to breathe.
“What the hell,” he muttered, reaching toward it.
The moment his fingers touched the seam, it opened.
Not like a door—doors have edges, have frames, have the courtesy to exist in three dimensions. This opened like a thought, like a realization, like remembering something you never knew.
And then he was through.
The first thing he noticed was the light. Not sunlight—this was older, softer, like the memory of every sunrise filtered through crystal. The second thing he noticed was the sound, or rather its absence. No traffic, no wind, no heartbeat.
Wait. No heartbeat?
Marcus pressed his hand to his chest. Nothing. Yet he was breathing. Yet he was thinking. Yet he was standing on ground that sparkled like—
“You shouldn’t be here.”
He spun. The figure before him was tall, robed in something that might have been cloth if cloth could be woven from twilight. Its face was obscured, but Marcus could feel its gaze like pressure behind his eyes.
“I was looking for my keys,” Marcus said, because what else do you say?
“You’ve found something considerably more inconvenient.” The figure tilted its head. “This is the Edge. The place between. And you, impossible man, have walked in without invitation or protection.”
“The edge of what?”
A pause that somehow contained centuries.
“Heaven,” the figure said. “Or at least, what remains when you strip away the stories humans tell about it.”
In the distance, something that might have been a mountain—if mountains could float—drifted past a sky that had too many colors.
“Can I go back?” Marcus asked.
“That,” the figure replied, “is exactly what we need to discuss.”
