There is a door in the middle of Patagonia
overlooking a perfect lake utterly clear atop a mountain where once no one lived
but now is thronged by roads
lined by temples and shops and houses
This door is stark and black with deep geometries grooving its surface. It has a handle, no knob, but can be pushed open. As it opens strange lettering of an unknown script glows out from the ridges in arcane patterns that pulse as though the door is breathing. When the door opens one sees only a brilliant beige. A person can enter, but once the door closes behind them, that person is never seen again, never heard from again. The door always swings shut after an entrance. The glowing letters quickly fade. All that remains is the deeply black door, subtle grooving all over, impassive atop its mountain.
Nobody truly knows what is on the other side. Nobody has been able to return to speak of it. There is no way of knowing. The door existed prior to all civilization, so far as everyone is aware. There are tells surrounding the area, a million ruins built upon by a million more. No one built this door. It has always been. And it has always been unknowable.
Carvings on the ruins surrounding the door present priestly guesses at source, some supernatural qualities attributed to gods of heaven and underworld, sky and dark, demiurges, apocalyptics, angels, djinn. A million attributions in languages known and unknown, all with a familiar theme. All iconography wrapped around a single shape: an obsidian doorway.
Rival universities sprang up on either side of town, and many times every year novel instruments are placed within and around the door to detect what might be happening within it and around it when it opens and closes. Every device goes dead as soon as the door is closed. No significant variations are detected upon open or close. There is a very slight chill to the air around the door, about a one degree dip in temperature versus the ambient air on all occasions, but the more sober of the universities attributes this to geology. No answers come from science.
Rival priests speak from pulpits in the city surrounding the door, admonishing adherents not to enter it, or to enter it, or to place sacrifices within it, or only to watch it and pray for those who stand in line, day and night, waiting for their turn to enter the door. While each priest carries with him an answer, each answer is equally plausible speculation on the black maw of the door. All answers are well-contested.
The only thing that is not contested is that the door exists. Surrounded by shrines, pyres, clouds of incense, tangles of wire and screens, ululations, propitious chants, moans and swaying bodies, there is the door atop a mountain, around which the world crowds, pressing answers from nothing to no end.
The door opens, and closes.
- 06.14.2020
