IN THE FAR WALL

The house at the edge of town wasn’t much to look at—a sagging roofline, peeling paint, and windows so streaked with grime they seemed to repel the faint light filtering through the trees. But to Detective Sarah Eames, the house was a looming threat. It had taken far too long for her to work up the courage to investigate the property. She gripped her flashlight tightly, the chill of the metal biting into her palm.

The boy’s name was Sam Merritt. Eight years old. Missing for two weeks. Sarah had seen missing-person cases come and go, but this one refused to fade into the background. The town was fraying, parents pulling their children indoors before sunset, streets emptied by fear. Sam’s toothy grin stared back at her from every lamppost, each flyer weathered far more than two weeks would allow, pages yellowed and curling at the edges.

Sarah had always been drawn to cases like this—cases where the missing seemed to vanish into thin air, leaving behind only fragments of their lives. This one, though, had burrowed under her skin. Sam Merritt wasn’t just another missing person to her. He reminded her too much of someone she herself had lost years ago, a resulting wound that never truly healed.

Her own son, Dylan, had disappeared during a camping trip in the Cascade Mountains when he was eight. Despite exhaustive searches, no trace of him was ever found. The grief had nearly destroyed her, but it also forged her resolve. She’d left her corporate job, joined law enforcement, and dedicated herself to finding the lost.

Sam’s case felt like a cruel echo of her past, and the parallels haunted her. She couldn’t shake the image of his blue eyes, wide with wonder in the school photo pinned to her office wall. She couldn’t fail him, not like she’d failed Dylan.

And though there was little official consensus to suggest a connection, her gut told her this house was at the center of it all. That, and seeing Sam inside of it, staring out the glass with an unclear expression on his face, and only for a moment, while passing by. On double take, there was no boy, only the bare, unfurnished living room visible through the bay window.

Sarah's insistence regarding the unmarked house was not enough to justify a warrant to search the place. Hallucination was far more likely and far more common nowadays, they said, and pointed to her loss as further evidence of mental illness. Perhaps they were right, in some way, but Sarah knew what she saw. It would not leave her mind.

She stood at the foot of the house's crumbling front steps, the mid-afternoon sun casting long shadows across the lawn that merged with the shade cast from the awning of the front porch.

The energy here on the outskirts of town felt different, quieter, as though something unseen siphoned away its vitality and filled it with foam insulation, scratchy and irritating. Sarah adjusted her coat, a sudden chill in the air.

As she ascended the steps, rotted boards groaned beneath her feet, each creak unnaturally loud in the oppressive silence. She reached for the door and paused. The brass knob was ice-cold, slick with condensation. Swallowing her unease, she pushed the door open.

The house sighed, a long exhalation of stale air and dust.

The air inside was stagnant, clinging to Sarah’s skin like cobwebs. It smelled faintly of damp wood, mildew, and something sharper, metallic, like rust or blood left to oxidize. Dust motes swirled in the beam of her flashlight, suspended as if time itself had stalled. The walls bore the scars of neglect—peeling wallpaper, water-stained ceilings—but beneath the decay was something else, something intentional.

Sarah’s light landed on a mirror in the foyer, its surface fractured with spiderweb cracks. Her reflection stared back, but something was off. Her movements lagged by a fraction of a second, the mirrored version of herself sluggish, as if the mirror had to think before acting. She turned away, unease crawling at her skin.

“Sam?” she called, her voice slicing through the silence. The sound reverberated through the space, twisting in the air. It felt foolish, calling for a boy long gone, but the house demanded it. Sarah checked her phone, then adjusted her grip on the flashlight and pressed deeper into the gloom.

The house didn’t respond. But Sarah had the unshakable sense that it was listening. Dust floated heavy in the air, catching what little light filtered through the clouded windows. Each step she took disturbed the silence, her boots sending faint tremors through the fragile structure. In the kitchen, she found remnants of a life once lived: a rusted kettle on the stove, a plate left to fossilize in the sink. Yet, it all felt staged, a cruel game of imitation. Nothing here felt alive, nor did it feel truly dead.

She paused at the threshold of the dining room. The far wall immediately drew her attention. At first glance, it was no different from the others: wallpaper peeling in long strips, revealing discolored plaster beneath. But as Sarah stepped closer, she noticed something unusual. Faint outlines emerged, like shadows burned into the surface. There was the suggestion of a doorframe, a chair, even a figure seated at a long-forgotten table. The longer she stared, the clearer the impressions became, as though the wall itself strained to reveal its secrets, and Sarah's eyes strained and crossed as if viewing a stereoscopic image.

Sarah’s fingers brushed the wall. It pushed back—soft, taut, almost alive. She froze as a faint pulse rippled beneath her hand, a shiver crawling up her spine.

“Detective?”

Sarah jumped, her heart lurching. Dr. Graham stood in the doorway, his silhouette framed by the dim light of the foyer. He carried a humming device of unknown mechanism and function that emitted faint, rhythmic beeps and strange tones.

“Damn it, Graham,” Sarah muttered, lowering her flashlight. “Could you try not sneaking up on me?”

He didn’t smile. His eyes were fixed on the far wall.

Graham's gaze slid slowly Clara. “You shouldn’t be here alone,” he said, his voice dry and severe. “Not with this.”

Sarah’s voice lowered as she turned back to the wall. “You were late, I’m not going to just sit around and wait for missing persons to lead themselves to safety.”

He stepped closer, his gaze shifting to the wall that had captured Sarah’s attention. “You found something?”

Sarah nodded, gesturing toward the faint impressions. “It’s like the memory of a room, but it’s wrong. Off, somehow.”

Graham raised his device, which emitted a series of beeps as he waved it toward the wall. His expression darkened, to which Sarah reacted.

“What is it?”

A slight pause. “This house is… fractured,” Graham explained, his voice tinged with unease, choosing his words carefully. “It exists partially in our reality and partially in another. We’ve seen similar anomalies before, but never one this… localized.”

Sarah frowned. “Localized? What do you mean?”

He gestured toward the faint outlines on the far wall. “Dimensional overlaps usually occur on a massive scale—entire regions destabilized by shifts in space-time. But this? It’s like a pinhole. Something small and deliberate. Someone—or something—created this.”

Sarah’s chest tightened. “Are you saying this was done intentionally? For what purpose?”
Graham hesitated. “I can’t say for sure. But if the reports are accurate, the Agency was conducting experiments in this area years ago. They were… trying to fold space. That’s all my clearance is good for.”

Sarah’s stomach tightened. “What kind of experiments?”

Graham hesitated, his eyes meeting hers with a mixture of reluctance and resignation. “The Agency was studying dimensional overlaps—how spaces can fold in on themselves, creating pockets of reality that don’t align with our own. This house is one such pocket, but I have no records implicating the Agency in its creation.”

Sarah noted the inflection. "So, this was the template? What does the Agency want with dimensional... folding?"

Graham shot her an impatient look. “It’s like bending a piece of paper so two distant points touch. Theoretically, it could allow for instantaneous travel—or communication—between worlds.” He paused. “But it’s unstable. Dangerous. And if the wrong kind of energy enters the fold…”

Sarah didn’t need him to finish. She could feel the truth in her bones.

Sarah stared at him, the implications sinking in like a lead weight. “And the boy? Sam?”

Graham’s gaze shifted back to the wall. “If he's here, he’s not missing in the way you think. He would be… in-between. Caught in a shadow of the house’s past, or another version of the house, from another world entirely. Did you search the rest of the place?”

Sarah and Graham moved cautiously through the house, room by room, their steps disturbing old layers of dust. Graham’s device beeped intermittently, each sound feeling sharper than the last. The air grew colder as they ventured deeper, and the faint hum Sarah had heard earlier now seemed to pulse, synchronous with the rhythm of the pounding inside her sternum.

In the master bedroom, the smudged window revealed a striking scene, not the overgrown backyard Sarah had expected, but a distorted version of the world outside. Trees twisted impossibly, their branches writhing as if alive. On the stairs up to the second floor, the wooden steps rippled beneath their feet, wood undulating like disturbed water. Sarah pressed a hand against the wall to steady herself and recoiled—it was warm and soft and wet, like the skin of some horrible, slumbering creature.

“This place isn’t stable,” Graham said, his voice low and without affect. “We need to find the source before it collapses entirely.”

“What about Sam?” Sarah demanded, her voice sharp. “Is he in here?”

Graham’s expression darkened. “As I said. If he is, he’s caught in the folds. If we don’t act fast, he might not be anywhere. We may already be too late.”

They found their way back to the dining room, attention centered on the far wall. The jagged outline of the door was wholly visible to Sarah, knowing now what to look for after having stared the featureless wall down for the better part of a half hour, as if watching the paint dry.

Graham knelt, manipulating the rectangular device in his hands, before retrieving a number of smaller, cubic instruments and switching them on. “This should stabilize the fold long enough to open it,” he explained, his movements precise but hurried. “Once it’s open, we’ll have to act quickly. And don't get your hopes up.”

Sarah swallowed hard, feeling a heavy misery accompany her parsing of Graham's words. She considered how lucky she was to have met the Agent under better circumstances; his pessimism felt particularly unbecoming, borderline cruel, in the dim light of the house. She also couldn't help but feel like he was annoyed this whole affair, though she had been asking him a lot of what were probably basic questions for a PhD in dimensional sciences. She shifted her stance, feeling ill at ease in her awkwardness.

Graham hesitated, placing one of the objects in the corner of the room, on the left of the far wall, then repeating the process using another on the right. "We might find the boy. Or we might…"

"Might what?" Sarah pressed.

He looked at her, his jaw clenched and skin pallid. "We might find something that doesn’t want to be found."

The devices emitted a high-pitched whine, and the wall began to ripple violently. The jagged doorframe glowed, an uneven rectangular outline revealing itself and glimpses of a space beyond within its bounds. It was the dining room, but not—pristine, untouched, yet unnerving and wrong in a way she couldn't place. Graham looked up at her, indicating to the wall beside them.

"Want to do the honors? Careful though, it might be a tad disorienting."

Sarah nodded, took a deep breath, and stepped into the rippling space in the wall, her body protesting as the air in the space between worlds took on the consistency of memory foam, threatening to compress her form on all sides and force itself into her lungs. The world shifted with her, a jarring sensation like falling and flying at once.

When Sarah emerged, gasping, into the Other House, the empty space around her returned to its previous quality, though pressure in her ears left her hearing muffled, until she swallowed, rapidly clearing the stuffiness with an intense pop. She looked around slowly and found herself in the same dining room, but the decay was gone. The wallpaper was vibrant, the furniture pristine. Yet, something was deeply wrong. The angles of the room felt unnatural, the lights too bright and the shadows too deep.

And then she saw him. Sam sat at the table, his small frame hunched over a drawing.
The boy didn’t move. Sarah’s heart pounded. She approached the table slowly, her gaze locked on his motionless form. He didn’t react to her presence, and the sense of something wrong deepened.

And then—almost as if on cue—he turned his head toward her, his eyes empty, sad.

He opened his mouth, but no words came out.

Sarah knelt beside him, her hands resting on his small shoulders. “Sam, listen to me. We’re going to get you out of here, okay?”

He looked at her with a weariness far beyond his years and shook his head.

“What do you mean?” Sarah pressed, her heart pounding.

Sam hesitated, his gaze distant. When he looked back at Sarah, he simply shook his head again.

“I know a way out, but you have to come with me.” Sarah spoke with artificial confidence, pointing back to the doorway.

The boy finally spoke, but his voice was cracked and hoarse, the words labored and slow to form. “I can’t leave.”

“You can leave, I know it doesn't look like it, but there's a way through the far wall.” Sarah asked, her voice urgent.

He shook his head again.

“What do you mean?” She asked, dreading whatever answer would come.

He opened his mouth as if to say something, but a pained expression was all that he could muster before returning to his drawing, a stick figure with no legs, surrounded by a black circle. He selected a red crayon and started scribbling at the top, where the sky should be.

A feeling of dread gripped the detective. Something was terribly wrong. “Graham, what’s going on?” she asked, turning to face the wall she entered through. He wasn't there. “What’s happening to Sam?”

After promising to return to him, she reluctantly left Sam to his creative endeavors, forcing herself back through the far wall.

On the other side, she barely had time to reacclimate when a figure had her pinned against the ground.

She began to protest, but a sharp pain pierced the flesh of her arm. Sarah’s other hand shot up to rub the point of injection, but she was far too slow, and everything went black.

***

When the unlucky detective awoke, her head throbbed, and the sterile scent of disinfectant filled her nostrils, vision swimming as she tried to make sense of her surroundings. She was lying on a cold metal table, an IV line attached to her arm, which was bound via zip-tie. The room was otherwise empty, save for a nondescript desk and some chairs. As she sat up, noisy fluorescent lights flickered on above her. the only door opened, Dr. Graham stepping in, holding Sam’s drawing in his hands.

“Where am I? What the fuck, Graham—” Sarah demanded, her voice hoarse.

“You’re in an Agency facility,” Graham replied, holding a hand up. “Don't speak. Just listen."

"You shouldn’t have gotten involved, Sarah. The boy... Sam... is a part of something far larger than you understand.”

Sarah’s chest tightened. “What do you—”

Graham sighed, sitting at a desk across from her. “The Agency knows about him, Sarah. We’ve been monitoring this house for years. It’s a dimensional anomaly, the template, as you put it. And Sam is... an anchor. As long as he stays where he is, everything remains stable. There is no danger as long as he stays in the house."

Sarah’s heart sank. She opened her mouth to continue the line of questioning, but closed it. Graham smiled.

"Good. You're learning. I know what you were about to ask, anyway. 'What happens if he leaves?'"

Sarah stared expectantly, slowly nodding. A brief pause filled the space between them as Graham's smile faded.

“It’s better for everyone if he stays. You won't understand, and that's fine. You aren't meant to understand. If you are to understand anything, it's that Sam is not missing. We know exactly where he is, and it's exactly where he should be."

Graham stood and paced for a moment, tossing Sam's drawing onto the desk.

"I didn't want to have to do this, okay? You gave us no other option. Denying your requests for a warrant to search the property wasn't enough, which was our mistake, I suppose. I don't think any of us thought you'd commit a felony in order to remove Sam from his current guardians. You understand that's not a good look, right?"

Sarah's vow of silence was broken by sheer anger. "Fuck you. You kidnapped a child. You kidnapped a member of law enforcement. Do the math. Greater goods, and all that, right?"

Graham's face darkened. "I can vouch for your release, but you must cease all investigation into Sam Merritt. You must cease all investigation into the unmarked house at the edge of town. Promise me this."

"I'm not gonna let you get away with this." She shot back, a look of disgust across her visage. "Sam will be returned to his family, and, God willing, you will face judgement for your crimes. These, and all the others."

A long pause manifested between the two, Sarah staring, unblinking, at her captor and his suddenly punchable face. Graham sighed again, retrieving something from inside the desk.

"We have more effective methods of influence. I was really hoping you'd cooperate, but it's no matter. I should thank you, though."

"Why? I don't want your gratitude."

"Well, regardless. You were the first human trial of my new dimensional calibrator system. By the end of your stay here, I'll have a questionnaire for you to fill out and a number of tests to ensure you didn't... acquire any tumors in the process. The risk is minimal, but if we find any, we'll cut them out and patch you back up good as new.”

"Fuck off, dude."

"Tsk, tsk. LE shouldn't talk like that, you know better."

Sarah rolled her eyes. "Condescending prick. I don't know what I ever saw in you."

"I'm not the prick you need to worry about."

Sarah's memory blurred at the moment Graham approached her with another syringe.

***

When Sarah regained consciousness once again, she found herself in a small, dimly lit cell. The walls were concrete, cold, and unyielding. She shot up and groaned, a sore ache radiating from her shoulder, perhaps from being tossed unceremoniously onto the solid ground beneath her. Instinct screamed at her to move, and as her mind cleared, she realized that her chances of escaping were growing slimmer by the minute, and they didn't look very good to begin with. But there was no time to waste.

Sarah's body felt heavy, but she began shaking off the last remnants of sedative and lost consciousness, wrists aching from the thin zip-ties that bound her hands together. The growing fear of what the Agency, self-proclaimed masters of time and space itself, would do to her for her disrespect chilled her to her bones.

She was a liability. Either they would kill her, experiment on her, or run a large magnet over her head until the drive is wiped clean. What else would they do? Even then, Sarah couldn't think of a reason why they would choose anything other than the first option. It's certainly the cheapest route, and if Daniel Weatherby's disappearance was any indicator, the captive detective was in danger either way. She had to make the first move. She couldn’t let Sam be lost to the faceless men in black that believed they could do whatever they want to whomever they want. She couldn’t let him remain trapped in the folds of that cursed house, a pawn in their twisted game. Her thoughts drifted to Dylan, heart thudding painfully in her chest. How many disappearances were the work of the Agency?

Her mind raced as she assessed her surroundings. She was in a small, featureless room made of floor-to-ceiling concrete. A small window of reinforced glass allowed a thin shaft of light to bleed in from the corridor outside. The room was devoid of furniture—save for a single, uncomfortable-looking metal chair which had been bolted to the floor—and that was it.

It wasn’t hard to deduce that the Agency was keeping her in isolation with intent to use her until they could no longer, but they underestimated her resolve, her determination, her desperation. The fear that had gripped her earlier replaced itself with a sharp clarity.

Sarah tested her restraints, pulling gently at the plastic cuffs with her wrists. They were snug, but not tight enough to cut off circulation. Her mind flickered to Sam’s drawing—the legless boy, a flightless bird chained to the earth, while the sky bled crimson. If Graham was here, he'd likely have research, notes on how best to use Sam as an anchor, to manipulate dimensional anomalies. He had no intention of saving the boy. Sam’s safety was irrelevant. He was just a tool to be exploited, but perhaps through that exploitation, Graham had left detailed notes on how he trapped Sam within the house. Perhaps she could use that information to reverse-engineer a way to break him free.

Sarah slowly worked the restraints around her frame, positioning them from behind her body, to the front. She began untying her shoes, threading one lace through the zip-tie and knotting it to the other, as if she were playing a prank on herself, though the woman knew better. She began pedaling her feet, creating a friction saw against the thick plastic around her wrists.

The goal was not to cut through the entire zip-tie, but to create a weak point. After what felt like an eternity, she stopped, satisfied with the result. Raising her hands above her head, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. With a sharp and deliberate motion, she pulled her hands to her sides with all her might. The zip-tie snapped as her left wrist emitted a painful a sickening pop. White hot pain radiated from her hand as she bit into the balled up fabric of her top and stifled a small scream. She maintained that position as she reset her dislocated wrist, which elicited another silent shriek of pain. Moments later, adrenaline flooded her mind, numbing her body. Sarah stood and moved to the corner of the room closest to the door, waiting, seething with rage and choking back tears.

Not long after, an Agent pushing a small cart of syringes and IV fluids looked into her room, panicking upon seeing it empty. He unlocked the door and entered, needle in hand, and Sarah's desperation kicked in once more.

She dove at the man and clawed at the syringe he had intended for her. After a brief scuffle, she had knocked the man unconscious against the hard concrete floor, no sedative needed. A thin stream of blood escaped from the back of his skull. She grabbed the Agent's syringe and keycard badge, turning her attention back to escape. She did not have time to consider the wellbeing of her captors and thus Sarah wasted none of it. She darted through the door, each step fueled by a thousand thoughts cascading at once, thoughts about Sam, about Dylan, about Graham, about herself. Her eyes scanned the labyrinthine corridors for an exit. A vehicle was her only chance—if she found one before they caught her.

The facility was vast, twisting complex of brutalist concrete and reinforced glass. Sarah presumed it to be Euclidean and thus opted to solve it like she would a maze, hugging the right side wall. She followed the corridors until she came upon a stairwell, which she ducked into without hesitation. Not a moment later, an alarm sounded from the corridors beyond.

Following the stairs to a sign indicating she had reached the ground floor, Sarah slipped back out into the hallway. She continued to move swiftly, finding the halls surprisingly empty. Was the Agency going through a hiring crisis? Or were they all tending to their various manmade horrors and the anomalies the Agents based them on?

Soon, Sarah found herself in eyeshot of the main entrance. However, something more interesting had captured her attention; a facility directory on the wall near an empty front desk. She scanned it, found what she was looking for, and turned around, heading back into the heart of the building.

Graham was sitting at his desk when his ex-captive entered the room. By the time he looked up, she was already diving at him, syringe in hand. She stabbed him in the thigh, pressing the plunger down and twisting the object in its place until the man was too unconscious to continue screaming. She gathered Graham's dimensional calibrators, his car keys, whatever notes she could find, and, for the hell of it, the coffee mug he'd been drinking from, leaving the way she came with an almost giddy spring in her step.

Egress from the building was quick. Sarah had not run into a single security guard until the point where she had once again reached the front entrance. Two guards stood, blocking the way, and had begun to advance on the detective before she simply hurled the ceramic mug at the head of the nameless guard on the left. It contacted the man's right eye socket, shattering on impact as he screamed and clutched his face. Sarah didn't wait to assess the damage, as the other guard backed up, hands raised in front of his head, clearly unwilling to entertain the same fate.

Sarah emerged into the blinding sunlight of midday. Of what day, she could not be sure, though it mattered little. She held up Graham's key fob and mashed angrily at the lock button, scanning the rows of employee vehicles for whichever honked in response.

A minute later, she was behind the wheel of Graham's Toyota Camry, stabbing the key into the ignition and twisting it violently. The car roared to life, the engine settling into a quiet purr. She floored the gas pedal, tearing through the parking lot, exiting before anyone could catch up with her. The gate had barely opened when she accelerated, throwing the vehicle into a tight turn as she sped away. The facility was a distant memory by the time she weaved through the dark roads that encircled the mountains, back toward the town of Jasper's Wake. The Agency would be looking for her soon, but they were still a step behind.

It felt like an eternity of tense driving before Sarah reached the outskirts of town. The house loomed ahead, silent and waiting. Her mind locked on Sam, on the fear in his eyes, on the impossible choice ahead. The car slid to a halt near the abandoned house’s boundary, tires grinding against the cracked asphalt. Sarah didn’t hesitate as she threw open the door and stepped out, her eyes scanning the familiar landscape.

The house was darker now, its oppressive presence far more intense than it had been before. Sarah’s instincts screamed at her to turn back, but she couldn’t. Not when Sam was still inside, not when the weight of her choices pulled her forward. She didn’t have much time. She knew Graham would be closing in soon.

Her heart clenched as she approached the front steps. But she didn’t knock. She didn’t even hesitate. She walked right through the front door, knowing the house was waiting for her, its hunger stirring with each step she took.

When Graham had been discovered and supplied a counteragent, he left immediately, borrowing one of the company vehicles and speeding towards the town. As he arrived at the unmarked house at the edge of Jasper's Wake, the building loomed with silence, satiated once more. Sarah was already inside. The door had swung shut behind her, its final creak heavy like six feet of soil on the lid of a coffin.

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