My father raised me in a mountain cabin, claiming a supernatural plague had killed humanity in 2001. If it takes me, this world will be next.

Part I – Part II – Part III

For a week, I have shared my tale through these diary entries, fearing the end was near.

After what I’ve seen this evening, I know it’s near.

The mountain cabin should feel so distant to me; it was eight years ago, after all, that my father and I fled that place, having witnessed the Phenomenon strike a small rural town in your world. Yet, after nearly a decade moving about the world, forever running and hiding from the terror that is the Voice, I never feel too far from that cabin, in truth.

And as I post this update, I am farther from “home” than ever before.

Whilst telling you my story, from a phone with surprisingly reliable signal, I have been traversing Tibet with my father, hunting the source of the witness accounts I’d researched; accounts from people who had supposedly seen another reality. And, sure enough, villagers and townspeople in this area were quick to point us in the direction of “strange” folk, high up a mountain, who had been at the epicentre of “strange” goings-on since 2017. Any English speakers used that word time and time again, so I knew we were on the right track.

Of course, a mere word wouldn’t have been enough. Truthfully, I just felt it: the “strangeness”, like a foreign chill, rolling down the mountain towards us.

Today, as dusk arrived, so did we. Pointing fingers from dozens of frightened locals, for miles around, had guided us to a small mountain village. This elevated village, on the Tibetan plateau, tottered precariously by a sheer cliff-edge; an escarpment, Papa called it, plummeting thousands of metres to a painful end below. I felt nauseated by the sight of it: this teensy community, a cluster of white clay homes, wedged between a mountain face and a drop to certain doom. The walls of each abode sloped inwards towards the top, but those pyramidical beginnings were capped quite severely by flat roofs of ceramic tile.

I remember thinking that, under the burning sienna and navy of a near-night sky, there was tremendous beauty and an otherworldly nature to this secluded village, balancing like a funambulist atop the rocky-floored tightrope between a wall and oblivion.

“I’m sorry for making you come here,” I told my father as he lumbered lethargically up the last stretch of slope, a hundred yards from the village border.

He smiled open-mouthed, panting as he worked to level his breathing. “You think so little of me sometimes, Evie. Believe it or not, before the Phenomenon, I was occasionally a risk-taker. Take my log cabin in the lakes. Do you think hunting rabbits up there was legal? I’m not saying that made me a moral man, but I was no doubt a braver one.

“It was only after I locked us away from the world that I fell sick, becoming pliant to those thoughts which had tempted me for years. You and I were born this way, Evie, and we must forever keep the dark thoughts at bay. It’s genetic.

“That’s why I didn’t want us to hide anymore, Evie, though I admit running wasn’t the answer either. Still, facing the world has been healthy for us both. Look at you now. Your hands aren’t red and raw. You don’t constantly seek reassurance for your slight anxieties. We’re better than we were, in the mountain cabin, or the shack, or that tiny rural home outside Venice.

“I think we both understand now, wouldn’t you say? We see that we need to fortify our minds against the Voice, which will only happen if we muster the courage to face it.”

I needed to hear those words from my father, more than I knew at the time, for the village that lay ahead harboured truths and horrors not found in even the worst of my nightmares.

As we strode up the first of the uphill streets between the packed houses, we met plenty of friendly-faced villagers, but spoke too little Tibetan to be understood. It took perhaps five minutes for us to stumble upon a young man, little more than a teenager, who spoke English.

“Hello,” he said. “You American?”

The man was garbed less traditionally than most other villagers, but looked just as suited to the frigid climate with his fleece coat; still, this was certainly a youngster who had ventured beyond the confined borders of the isolated village, as evidenced by his bilingual tongue.

I wore a look of disgust at the insinuation. “No, no, no. British.”

“Is that any better?” the villager teased.

“I’m Italian,” said Papa firmly, seeming to take umbrage at the young man’s tone.

The young man smiled. “Sorry. Joke.”

My father managed a disingenuous smile, remaining a plateau unto himself, with shoulders elevated tensely. “We’re just tired.”

“Not used to the mountain?” asked the villager.

I chuckled. “I actually grew up on one, but it was tiny compared to this.”

The youngster nodded at the street around us, filling with intrigued villagers and hushed chatter. “Most of them have never seen westerners. They want to know who you are.”

“I’m Evie,” I said.

“Dawa,” he answered, before looking to my father.

Papa spoke gruffly. “Rapoto.”

Dawa smiled. “Rapoto and Evie. Father and daughter?”

I nodded.

“What brought you up this high?” asked Dawa. “Hiking?”

“Curiosity,” I said.

Dawa’s shine dulled a little with that, seeming to read quite deeply into that single word, and his eyes hurriedly, but tentatively, hopscotched across the faces of the surrounding villagers. “Let’s go indoors… I’ll take you to my a ma. My mother. It’s nearly night, and it gets cold quickly.”

Papa and I agreed, though we exchanged glances just as uncertain as the one Dawa had cast about him. The young man then led us up narrow streets, snaking through those little clay houses, and I was grateful when he opened the door to a house not quite on the cliff edge; I hadn’t realised I was so afraid of heights until my father and I had made the excursion up the mountain.

‘A ma’ was a little old lady with grey hair and a striking red tunic, pottering about in the kitchen, midway through making dinner when her son brought two strangers home. They had a somewhat heated discussion in Tibetan. I understood her distrust of Papa and me, or perhaps she wore such a sour face because she was annoyed about suddenly having to cook for four people.

“We don’t want to put your mother out,” I told Dawa as he seated us around a modest dining table in the living area. “We have food in our bags.”

Dawa held up his hands, seeming almost insulted. “My mother wants to cook for you. She was just caught off-guard at me bringing home guests. It has been a… long time for her.”

The man, now seeming more like a boy in the shadow of his stern-faced mother, spoke to her apologetically again (I could tell that much from the tone). Her scrunched-up face unfolded a little, but still looked a little unsure, and I realised I’d misread her expression. She hadn’t looked angry.

Much like Dawa in the street only minutes earlier, she’d looked afraid.

Afraid of us or something else? That, I did not know.

Dawa smiled softly at me. “See. She is happy with me again. All is well. Is that the saying?”

“That’s right,” said Papa. “Your English is better than our Tibetan.”

Dawa laughed and shrugged. “I do not speak Italian. You do not speak Lhasa Tibetan.”

“I don’t speak either,” I said with a smile, and the young man gave me one back, so I felt courageous enough to start prodding. “Dawa, my father and I came here because I’d read things about this area. Strange things happen here, don’t they?”

He frowned. “You reporters?”

“Sure,” I said.

Dawa’s eyes narrowed. “No. You are not reporters.”

Papa cut in. “We’re just curious, as my daughter said, about the things we’ve read. We just have questions.”

“Why would you travel across the world just to ask about…” Then he paused, rethinking his approach. “I do not know what you have read or heard from other people in the area.”

I realised I had to gain his trust, so I admitted the truth Papa and I had been guarding. “We’ve seen it too, Dawa. The gateway. The doorway. The opening. The whatever-you-call-it between worlds. Do any of those words translate for you?”

By the sudden broadening of his eyes, I could tell my words had translated perfectly. Dawa knew what I was talking about. Papa tensed a little, evidently wishing I hadn’t been so candid, but I had shifted something in Dawa’s expression; shifted his willingness, I think, to be candid in return.

“The doorways,” he said.

I nodded. “Yes. Well, the doorway.”

Dawa shook his head. “Doorways.”

“Maybe you don’t understand,” I said with a frown.

“I understand,” he said. “There is more than one door.”

A pause filled the abyssal wake of that revelation. I wanted to cling to denial, hoping something had been lost in translation, but Dawa continued. “There are other worlds. Almost like this world, but with a different… history?”

“Worlds?” asked Papa, practically choking on the word. “Plural?”

I know why my father and I were struggling. We’d already spent so many years struggling to come to terms with the concept of there being this reality and our reality. Two parallel universes. It was enough to unravel one’s mind. Thinking of more realities out there, in the infinite multiverse, was too much for my fragile mind to bear.

“Describe these doorways,” I said hoarsely.

Dawa picked up the bread knife on the table, and motioned as if slicing through the air with it. “They are cuts in the air. Cuts through bread, or paper, or… They are like wounds between worlds, and they come and go. But every time one heals, another emerges. God is forever fixing one, only for the Devil to create another.”

The Devil, I pondered. The Voice? Could it be? I wondered whether that force, defying the laws of nature, had torn holes between realities. That had always been my theory as to why a doorway had opened up on the dirt track for my father, all those years ago. He had always called it God, but I had inwardly called it chance.

“When you say ‘other worlds’, Dawa, do you mean you have seen more than one other reality out there?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said, nodding at the front door. “There is a doorway out there right now. It has been there since last spring. You can only really see it in the sun, when you look at it the right way.”

“But how do you know you’ve seen more than one other world?” I asked, and another thought came over me. “In fact, how do you know these doorways aren’t just tricks of the light?”

Dawa’s eyes narrowed at Papa and me, as much distrust in his eyes as was in ours. “How do you know the same?”

My father refused to answer. “You first.”

The young man really did look like a boy under my father’s great shadow, so he caved. “I know the doorways are real because… I came through one. We came through one.”

“We?” I asked.

Dawa nodded. “The entire village.”

The young man then told us his story:

Before I was born, something very bad happened to my village. One day, people started talking in tongues. They were scared. A ma says everyone was scared. Suddenly, they started hurting their friends and family. Some even threw themselves off the edge of the mountain. The villagers tied their sick loved ones to chairs or bedposts, to stop them hurting anyone, but the sick died an hour later. All at once.

Elders say it was the Devil.

The surviving villagers went down the mountain to look for help, but the same had happened everywhere. And a ma says the world fell apart over the coming days and weeks. But the strangest thing was that she and a handful of other villagers, from up and down the mountain, did not feel the touch of the Devil. God had spared them.

They survived up here in this village; a handful of the original villagers and elders, and others who had survived in the area. A ma fell in love with a man, and they had me. Life was good for many years, and I knew only of the old world through stories, but my world did not seem so bad.

Then that all changed.

Nine years ago, when I was just a boy of nine myself, it happened. Villagers saw a strange flash of light in the air, at the heart of the village, and panic set in. We peered through this doorway to find faces peering back at us from the other side. Faces from another version of our village.

The village of your world, Rapoto and Evie.

For some hours, nobody on either side of the doorway dared step near it, but the numbers of curious faces on your side were multiplying. There must have been about seventy or eighty people there, as opposed to forty on our side. The village was as populated as it had been in the old days, of which my a ma often spoke.

Elders called this mysterious doorway an act of God at first, but that did not last. You see, as the villagers of my world grew brave enough to creep closer to the opening, we more clearly made out the faces. We recognised some of them. Some of the people in your world looked exactly the same as some of the people in ours.

Mirrors.

Mirror People.

With that, the elders decreed that these other people were, in fact, servants of the Devil. Demons wearing our faces, masking themselves as humans. The people on your side of the doorway talked in terror among themselves. They did not stand a chance. They were a peaceful people, from a world that we would learn had not endured the hardships of ours. My villagers armed themselves and stormed through the doorway, and I, along with the weak and old, followed timidly at the rear.

I still have nightmares about that day. The villagers of my reality killed the mirror people in your reality. We burnt their bodies. We took their places in this other world, not fully realising at the time that we had, as a matter of fact, walked into another world. It was only after scavengers trekked down the mountain, a week later, that we learnt the truth. They returned to our village with stories of a world that had come back to life. Villages, and towns, and cities that were suddenly full of people again.

‘More demons wearing masks’, the elders would say, but villagers disagreed. Many of them went out exploring, building relations and trading with other villagers and townspeople lower down the mountain; people whose mirror versions they had known in our old world, before they all died with the rest of the world.

But these neighbouring communities did not entirely trust us. Some of them had known the original villagers, and I think they sensed that we, though many of us bore the same faces as them, were different somehow. Outsiders were too afraid to come up to us, so we had to go down to them.

And many of the younger folk, like my a ma, saw this as a second chance for us to lead normal lives again. She sent me down to the city to study at school, then university. I learnt of a world with an entirely different history to the one I had been taught in the village. The elders would squabble among themselves. I was a trustworthy boy, they would say, but this had to be a trick from the Devil.

I just think they could not live with the guilt of realising they had slaughtered people, not demons, when we first entered this world. They had slaughtered other versions of themselves. A ma would tell me that she and I had no mirror selves when we arrived in the village, and she was grateful for that. She never had to live with seeing my corpse, or hers.

That brings us to today, years later. Life is not always stable for us, but we survive. We see more and more of the doorways as the years go by, however. Always coming and going, as I said. Sometimes, villagers say or do weird things. People whisper about the Devil coming back for us. I do not know about that, but I do know it is curious that you two are here now.

Why are you here, Rapoto and Evie?

Have you really seen a door between worlds?

“We’ve more than seen it,” I said.

“Evie,” warned my father.

But I finished. “Dawa, we came from another world too.”

The young man smiled, eyes welling as much as mine. “I knew it. I felt it.”

“Don’t tell the others,” Papa said. “Not after the story you’ve just told. They’ll call us demons and kill us too.”

“They are not all bad, sir,” insisted Dawa. “They are just—”

“I know what they are,” my father snapped. “I come from the same world as you.”

“Do you?” asked Dawa. “Like I said, there are many worlds. The Devil has ravaged many of them. The newest doorway reveals a sky of ash over the mountains. The sky did not look that way in the world I left behind. Some villagers have become sick recently, and I think the air has swept in this poisoned ash from another world. Radiation sickness. I have been reading about it at the city library. This was another world. One of nuclear catastrophe. Another world taken by the Devil, I think.”

I came up with a question that would give us an answer. “When did your world end?”

Dawa looked thoughtful. “Well, I was born in 2008. A ma told me the Devil came two winters before that.”

My eyes widened. “That would have been 2006.”

Papa frowned. “No. Your mother must be forgetting. The Devil, or the Voice, or whatever it may be, came in 2001.”

“It came for his world too, Papa,” I said. “A different world to ours. That has to be it.”

Papa shook his head and became despondent.

I looked apologetically to Dawa. “I think my father was hoping you would tell us, or show us, something that would bring about an end to all this.”

Papa’s eyes shot up, as if he’d finally registered something. “You said you hear the Devil sometimes, Dawa?” And when the boy nodded, my father turned to me. “Then we’re not safe here, Evie. We’ve found not answers, but plenty more danger, so—”

“So you should leave.”

Dawa’s mother silenced us with that sudden utterance. Only then did I become aware that the clatters of crockery from the kitchen had silenced too, perhaps minutes before; and after a few moments holding my breath in the thick of the silence, I realised something far more terrifying.

The Tibetan woman had spoken in English.

Dawa twisted in his chair to face the frozen woman in the kitchen, turning at the same hauntingly glacial speed as her: the old lady pirouetting on her toes with a nimbleness that seemed unfitting.

“So many little rats from so many little worlds,” said Dawa’s mother in a tongue not her own as she eyeballed the young man. “I will deal with you and yours one day, Dawa. First, the father and the daughter. Every thread must be tidied away, so a new one can… unravel.”

With that ceremonious final word, the furniture in the tiny clay home began to shake, and I screamed as there came the deafening roar of shredding, as if unseen fingernails were clawing through not only the very fabric of existence, but my ear canals. I realised, as an opening suddenly appeared in the air before me, there were no mighty brick walls separating worlds; instead, flimsy sheets of paper served as sheer veils between different realities, and the Voice poked through them with ease.

A moment later, standing in the kitchen behind Dawa’s mother was a needle-eye doorway, about eight feet tall, disappearing through the ceiling, and two feet wide, barely broader than the little old lady with the possessed smile on her face.

On the other side was a different version of the kitchen. It lay in ruins with a crumbled wall behind it, revealing the mountain range beyond.

“Your world beckons,” said the possessed woman to Papa and me as she strode slowly towards us.

Dawa pleaded with his mother in Tibetan, but it was not she who responded. The Voice, exerting its influence on the very air around us, pulled Dawa from his chair, suspended him above the table, then flung him, a discarded toy, into the side wall of the living area. The horror of the Voice’s power stunned me as ever, and afterwards, it was my turn to scream.

An unseen force, that of at least ten men, plucked my body from its seat and hurled it, ragdoll that it must have been, at the far wall of the living room; where my crown connected with something sharp, the back of my hair grew damp with blood, and my blurry eyes grew damp with tears.

I plummeted to the ground and lay on my front, dizzied into producing only a meek scream, as I watched a nightmarish scene unfold before me. Papa had risen to his feet, barricading the possessed woman from me, as if she were the foe; as if there were anything his physical form could do to stop the supernatural breeze that had tossed Dawa and me to the floor.

As I stared into the ruins of our old world, which I had left behind as a baby, I wondered whether my father and I might not be immune after all; whether we might finally become susceptible to the Voice’s influence yet again. Perhaps that thought was planted in my head, or perhaps it was a coincidence. Either way, there followed a piercing scream, and it didn’t come from the other world, visible through that unholy doorway.

It came from the man before me.

“Papa…”

My father clutched his temples, shrieking as he wrestled with some force, or thought, or sight, or sound beyond an unaffected person’s comprehension. Dawa’s mother giggled deliriously, but there were tears coming from her eyes; from the real woman, whose vessel had been commandeered by the Voice. I was no more than a paralysed pup, whimpering pathetically as I cowered against the dining table and watched my father hold that impossibly-long scream for a minute.

“Papa…” I tried once he had fallen quiet.

My father wouldn’t meet my eyes as he convulsed, and he clutched the sides of his head as he started to shout. “I WON’T DO IT! GO AWAY! I…” He stopped, as if overcome by an instantaneous and fully-formed idea, then he faced me with eyes red and puffy, swollen with sorrow rather than some infectious bacterium; he looked eerily calm. “I’m sorry, Evie. This is the only way.”

His fingers were around the bread knife in a moment. I screamed out, but he had already started to run the blade across the length of his neck, to let out red ribbons of life. And Dawa’s mother, or rather the Voice controlling her tongue, cried out furiously as my father’s body collapsed to the ground.

Stricken by grief, denying what I had seen, I remember little of what followed. I think I may have knelt and sobbed at my father’s unmoving body. I think the earth then quaked once more. I think Dawa’s mother may have been exorcised of the Devil, for I heard her speaking in Tibetan again. I think the doorway closed; not slowly or ceremoniously, but in an instant. God, according to Dawa, had zipped up that hole in reality, restoring normalcy again.

I tuned back into my surroundings when there came screams from outside, and I felt Dawa rattling me urgently by the arms.

“Get up!” he yelled. “Get up!”

I started to squirm as he escorted his mother and me to the door, not wanting to leave my father’s corpse behind in that growing puddle of blood. But I was only half-there; limbs and mind too flimsy to put up a fight as Dawa barged open the front door, pulling the three of us out into—

Bedlam.

There stood, in the street, more of those needle-eye openings. More of those doorways, revealing alternate versions of the mountain village. Maybe about three or four, dotted about the narrow and short street. And from those openings, there emerged confused villagers from other worlds, no doubt left in ruins by the Voice.

More mirror people, as Dawa called them.

Like Dawa’s community of displaced villagers, these mirror selves reacted with extreme prejudice at the sight of their own faces on the clones dotted throughout the village, clearly believing they were staring into some demonic reflection.

Villagers from each of the realities tore one another limb from limb. Atrocities were committed not by affected persons, but by the unaffected of fallen worlds; those led astray by years living in fear, questioning and doubting every last shadow. Everything was the Devil to them, and why wouldn’t it be? They had witnessed a being of seeming omnipotence annihilate their worlds, stopping billions of hearts with fright.

These survivors from countless realities, who had endured the Voice—the “Devil”—and seen its trickeries in various forms, believed these “demonic” mirror people to be a new trickery; and that was the insidious irony of it all. The Voice’s true trickery was to simply open the floodgates and let the villagers kill themselves. I wondered why he had not done as such long ago, but the answer seemed clear.

This was him expending, most likely, the fullest extent of his power, in a fit of fury at Papa.

My father had not served him as instructed. Whatever the Voice had asked him to do, my brave papa had chosen instead to take his own life. Perhaps, I considered, that was the same of all the affected persons who had taken their lives, in all of the affected worlds, rather than do the Voice’s bidding.

Perhaps you’re saying that to give yourself hope, came a less hopeful thought.

The mountain streets were paved with still corpses, and still-twitching half-corpses. Dawa hurried his mother and me through the village, and I groaned painfully as we passed a sequence of opening and closing gateways; like revolving doors, as Dawa’s God played whack-a-mole, sealing up each of the Devil’s wound between universes.

It was only two hundred yards from Dawa’s house to the edge of the village, but it felt as if we’d travelled a mile, skirting around bodies and bloody fights between villagers and their multiple clones. We survived through sheer luck, I think, though I do recall Dawa wafting a dagger of his own at any would-be assailants coming too close to us.

My memory is hazy, not only from the grief, but the migraine that worsened as we walked through the town; it got no better as we reached the border. At first, I blamed the bloody wound at the back of my head, but it wasn’t that. We walked through the night, as the screams and the opening-shutting doorways died out behind us, and my headache alleviated somewhat, but I felt different.

I felt changed.

When we reached a town near the foot of the mountain, Dawa got us situated at a hotel, and I started to make sense of my surroundings again.

“Evie?” he pressed. “Evie, you look bad… You are in shock, I think.”

I was, but that wasn’t the problem either.

There were new memories in my head. Memories of a life I had never lived. Something had slipped out of another reality and into me. There should never have been a headlong collision of half a dozen, or more, parallel universes at variance with one another. It had muddied the natural way of things. Don’t ask me to explain the human soul or brain, because I have no answers. All I know is something horrifying happened, but it may have given me an idea to finally end all of this.

I have the memories of a parallel Evie in my mind.