The Glass Room

The Glass Room
It was a dreary night, just as it had been a dreary day. It was the sort of night where the rain fell slowly, as if trapped in a vacuum tube, silently struggling to the ground. It was also the sort of night that one would think to kill themselves, and that anyone not in that state of mind would expect someone to indeed kill themselves. Walter Theodore Linings, a somewhat well-to-do lawyer on the west side of Central London, had resolved himself on where he stood on the matter of suicide, and he had found he had fallen in the category of the former. He rose solemnly from the large chair of ugly red leather in his office. Sighing, he strode with solid steps to his desk. As he opened a drawer, there was no particular reason he could find that he had to kill himself. However, this did not puzzle him but briefly; today was as good as any to die. He took his revolver from the drawer, turned, and took more solid steps to his ugly red chair. He sat, and the old wood to which the leather and cushioning had been tacked decades ago creaked under his weight. He checked the cylinder once; the gun was loaded with a full six shots. He sighed once more and leaned far back into the chair, causing it to moan in protest of his body straining the wood. Deliberately he pulled the hammer of the gun back and let the cool steel rest upon the flesh of his meaty neck. Suddenly, as fate and luck, or perhaps thereof, would have it, there came a rapping at the door. Walter slowly uncocked his revolver, slipping it quietly into his waistcoat’s interior pocket. He waited stiffly for something new to happen, as if waiting for a well-seasoned chess player to make his move. He glanced at the clock, a massive grandfather carved of a rich oak. It read half past eleven. The tapping came once again at the door. Now Walter spoke, “Who bears to me a raven’s midnight visit? Enter, so that my eyes may witness you who does disturb my rest.” The door handle rattled a bit. The door slowly creaked open, the light from Walter’s office cutting through the darkness of the hall as an engine’s beam in a tunnel. The dull glimmer of well-polished leather projected from the tall figure’s boots, and the water droplets from his long, black umbrella pooled into tiny puddles at his feet, eager to mirror all around them. He stood tall, filling the doorframe with his dense figure. He wore a black hat with a long, straight brim, which cast a dark shade upon the man’s face. It occurred to Walter that the man looked quite like an undertaker, and it passed through his mind that this man possibly wished to kill him. Walter cautiously rose from his ugly red chair. “And w-who would you be?” Walter attempted to demand, though a sudden stammer was induced to his voice and his demand sounded very meek. The man stood there for a moment, just inside the threshold of Walter’s office. For Walter that moment took an eternity, and as it passed, it seemed to Walter that the man had a physical form to his presence, a presence that morphed and grew until it had discovered every crack in the baseboards and was attempting to strangle Walter. Then, as suddenly as he had knocked, the man abruptly turned on his heel and strode from Walter’s office. Walter stood immobilized, staring into the agape jaws of the darkness outside of his office. He listened, hardly batting a lash, as the man’s boots sounded down two flights of elegant marble staircases to the ground floor. Then the world was once again silent. Walter snapped from his trance, half-wondering if what he had just witnessed was real or a hallucination of sleep deprivation. Walter moved to close the large door of cherry oak when he realized with a start that he had never heard the sounds of the man passing through the main doors to the street. Walter rushed to his desk. He grabbed his flashlight from a drawer, then felt compelled to replace his gun, did so, and rushed from his office, being sure to turn down the lights and lock the door behind him. He bolted down the stairs, nearly tripping twice, and stopped abruptly in the center of the lobby. Only now did he turn on his torch. Walter swung around, looking desperately for the mysterious man in black. As he turned, Walter’s light landed upon the man sitting in a chair. The man uncrossed his legs and rose. With three steps he crossed the room and stood in front of Walter. Walter stood tall but trembling. The man turned suddenly and threw open the doors, his coat billowing behind him as lightning cracked the sky outside. Walter hurriedly gathered his own hat, coat, and umbrella from the rack, running out into the deserted streets after the man.
Dorothy Ann Kubrick walked from her bedroom to her kitchen drowsily. She retrieved a glass from her cabinet. As she filled it at her sink, she thought that she saw two men in the alley below. One man, the taller of the two, seemed to take something from his coat and write on the alley wall. Then there was a flash and the distant roll of thunder and the men disappeared, leaving nothing but a few curls of smoke.
When Walter’s vision finally returned to normal, the air around him possessed an electric glow. He noticed first the room, made completely out of glass, and then what was beyond the room, a plethora of lights swirling through electrified gas clouds. The room appeared to be floating, and Walter definitely could feel movement. In one corner of the room, Walter saw the man who had mysteriously entered his office, but one detail was drastically different: instead of wearing clad in all black as before, the man’s clothing was identical except it was a clean, crisp, pure white now. Walter vaguely recalled the man leading him into an alleyway and scribbling something in a semi-circle on the wall. Something had flashed and every atom in Walter’s being felt as if it had melted into ice. Then Walter awoke in the glass room.
Walter could now clearly see the man’s face. He had strikingly clear blue eyes, a stern nose, and an unwrinkled brow. The man’s high cheek bones easily complimented his complexion, and his mouth wore something with a wicked hint to it, between a grimace and a curt smirk. Now the man spoke, and for an instant, Walter thought that his voice was coming from the walls themselves.
“This place.” The man rose. “This place should not exist. Yet it does. How? Possibly a more important question is, why? Why is the ultimate question, is it not? The question of why has fueled human knowledge, scientific and engineering study, empires has risen and fallen because someone asked the simple question why. Most importantly few can answer it not only truthfully but also accurately. Are you not asking yourself at this very moment why you are here in this place, why I am telling you these things, even why any of it matters? I do suppose I owe you an explanation before we continue, though first understand that I refuse to reveal all you must know, for while the wise may give all of their knowledge to the unwise, that knowledge is not of any use to them, until they have experienced how to use it. Perplexed? Good. First of all, before answering why, we must answer how. For example, how does this place exist when it’s existence is impossible? In simple terms, it is everywhere, and, therefore, nowhere at the same time. With more complexity, we are inside a tesseract, which is formed one of several ways. This particular tesseract is formed by an immovable object being met by an unstoppable force. The resulting pressure causes the tesseract to form to allow the force to pass the object. Do you feel that tingle in the air?” The man paused, and for a moment Walter stared blankly at him. Then realizing the man expected a response, Walter nodded anxiously. The man continued, “That tingle is the energy of the unstoppable force moving through our bodies. However, unlike the tesseract, the energy of the unstoppable force is concentrated, and only passes through to the other side of the immoveable object. But the tesseract is everywhere at once, as are we, because our quarks and anti-quarks are not infused with enough energy to resonate at a frequency of concentration. Another point of importance: Do you see those clouds of color outside mixing with the light particles? That, in fact, is best described as the fabric of time. Do not take this offensively, but if I were to explain it in further detail, not even the most brilliant minds on earth could comprehend what it actually is. The point is that we are removed from the time stream. We can move forward in time, but never back. The energy that it would require to reverse all of time, and all the mass of time, is greater than the energy in the entire multiverse. We can also, because we Are everywhere but also nowhere along with the tesseract, travel in an instant to any point in the multiverse.”
Walter was utterly baffled by this, and it made him quite ill to his stomach. He clenched at his gut and let his large, silver flashlight clatter on the glass floor. Acidic, stinging bile spewed forth form his throat as he fell to his knees, trembling. “Oh, yes don’t mind the sickness, your atoms are just a little out of place. They need to be rearranged, you see, and that tends to make one quite sick the first time around.” The man in white offered these words in condolence as he towered above Walter. Walter was once again reduced to stammering. “W-who are you?” He managed between fits of spitting out the remnants of his evening meal of venison steaks and fire roasted corn. “I-“ The man in white orated his pronunciation carefully, “-may be called Tarp, Fifth Keeper of the Gates. You, Walter will be called from this moment forth, Walter, Sixth Keeper of the Gates.” Walter sat back on his shins, his face squirming with an expression between shock and repulsion. “What in the Bloody Hell do you mean by that? Keeper of what gates?” “The tesserae, of course. You must realize that while they are quite useful for transportation across vast distances on a single dimensional plane, they can and gladly do transport things and beings across multidimensional space as well. You must keep the gates to ensure that nothing unsavory for a dimension enters that dimension. The dimension you have always known is 33-A Delta Prime.” Walter now rose to his feet, slowly shuffling towards Tarp, Fifth Keeper of the Gates, who had strolled across the room. “But why me?” Walter demanded. “Well, you weren’t too drastically busy, about to blow your skull off as it were. Might as well make your life useful to someone. Along with that, I do get to retire, you know, as will you in time, or perhaps the absence of time, depending on how you look at it.” Tarp countered, “And you don’t really have a choice, anyway, so you best get acquainted with all of this.” Tarp gestured to the room around them. “This can be anything you want it to be and everything you need it to be. I can teach you but a fraction of its true potential. You must learn the rest yourself. It will be work, but your work will be rewarded; I myself witnessed the rise and fall of Rome herself. Make no mistake, the knowledge you will gain from keeping the Tesserae will greatly outweigh any disadvantage. Now, would you like to inquire about anything in particular? Remember, there is much that you must learn yourself. Walter’s racing pulse had calmed some now, and his stomach had stopped attempting to exit his gut violently. His mind now came to a clearing, a place from which he could finally understand what had taken place before him. “What I really would like to know,” he began, “ Is how I’m supposedly going to control the gates.” “ Here.” Tarp took a small metallic object from the inside of his coat. He tossed it to Walter, Walter caught it and studied it. It was completely smooth and rounded like a river rock. “ But-“ Walter looked up to protest, but Tarp was gone. His hat and a scrap of paper sat on Tarp’s chair. Walter walked over to the chair. Placing the hat on his head, he read the note. It read simply: “Good Luck.”