Chapter 1: The Scarred Gateway The cathedral had been abandoned for twenty years. Sarah Chen stood outside the wreckage of what used to be St. Michael's and wondered if the anonymous tip was just someone's idea of a sick joke. The building looked ready to collapse. Half the roof had caved in back in 2019 after a storm, and the city council kept talking about demolition but never got around to actually doing it. Her partner Marcus Webb leaned against their unmarked sedan and scrolled through his phone. "You really think someone's holding people in there?" "The tip mentioned three missing persons by name." Sarah checked her service weapon out of habit. "All three match our open cases from the last two months." "Could be someone messing with us." "Could be." Sarah started toward the cathedral's main entrance. The heavy wooden doors hung crooked on broken hinges. "But we're here anyway." Marcus pocketed his phone and followed. He'd been her partner for six months now, transferred from vice after his last partner retired. He was competent enough, though he complained more than she preferred. "If we fall through the floor and die, I'm haunting you first." The interior of the cathedral was worse than the exterior suggested. Moonlight filtered through gaps in the roof and illuminated a space that nature had started reclaiming. Vines crawled up the walls. The pews had rotted into unrecognizable lumps. But someone had cleared a path through the debris. Sarah could see footprints in the dust, multiple sets, recent enough that the disturbance hadn't settled yet. "Well, someone's been here." Marcus drew his weapon. "Guess the tip wasn't complete garbage." Sarah moved forward carefully. The cleared path led deeper into the cathedral, toward where the altar would have been. She heard something now, a low rhythmic sound that might have been chanting. The acoustics in the ruined building made it impossible to tell how far away the source was. They passed through what remained of the nave. The stained glass windows had all shattered long ago. Graffiti covered the lower portions of the walls, the usual mix of tags and obscenities that marked every abandoned building in the city. But as they got closer to the altar area, the graffiti changed. Someone had painted symbols Sarah didn't recognize, geometric patterns that hurt to look at directly. The lines seemed to twist in ways that didn't quite make sense. Marcus noticed them too. "What the hell is that supposed to be?" "No idea." Sarah tried to focus on one of the symbols but gave up after a few seconds. "Some kind of occult nonsense probably." The chanting grew louder. At least a dozen voices, all speaking in unison. Sarah couldn't make out the words, if they were words at all. The language sounded wrong, like someone trying to speak with a mouthful of rocks. They reached the transept and Sarah held up her fist. Marcus stopped behind her. She peered around the corner toward the altar. About fifteen people stood in a circle around what used to be the main altar. They wore ordinary clothes, not robes or ceremonial garb. Just regular people you'd pass on the street without a second glance. A woman in a business suit. A man in construction gear. A teenager in a hoodie. All of them staring upward at the ceiling and chanting in that horrible grinding language. In the center of their circle, three people lay unconscious on the floor. Sarah recognized two of them from the missing persons reports she'd studied before coming here. Jennifer Martinez, disappeared six weeks ago while walking home from work. Thomas Keller, vanished from a grocery store parking lot three weeks back. The third person she didn't know, but presumably matched the name from the anonymous tip. One person stood apart from the circle. An older man, maybe sixty, holding a book that looked ancient even from this distance. The leather binding was cracked and stained. He read from it while the others chanted. His voice carried despite not being loud, cutting through the other sounds with a clarity that seemed unnatural. Sarah made her decision quickly. "Police! Everyone on the ground now!" The chanting stopped. The cultists turned to look at her with expressions that ranged from surprise to annoyance. None of them looked particularly worried about two detectives with drawn weapons. The old man with the book smiled. "You're interrupting something important." "Great. Do it on the ground with your hands behind your head." Sarah advanced into the open space, keeping her weapon trained on the leader. Marcus moved to her left, covering the rest of the group. "You don't understand what we're doing here." The old man made no move to comply. "This is necessary. The gateway must open." "I understand you've kidnapped three people." Sarah was ten feet away now. "Last chance. Drop the book and get on the ground." The old man looked up at the ceiling. "It's already too late to stop. The words have been spoken. The path has been prepared." Sarah followed his gaze and saw something that made her stomach drop. The air above the altar was wrong. It rippled and twisted like heat shimmer on asphalt in summer, except the cathedral was freezing. The distortion grew as she watched, expanding outward in a roughly circular shape. "Marcus, we need to—" The cultists all started chanting again at the same moment, drowning out her words. The old man raised the book higher and his voice rose with it. The words he spoke now sounded like they were coming from somewhere else, somewhere far away. The distortion above the altar pulsed in rhythm with his voice. Sarah made a split-second judgment call and fired. The gunshot echoed through the cathedral. The old man jerked backward as the bullet caught him in the shoulder. He dropped the book and collapsed. The other cultists screamed and scattered in different directions. "On the ground!" Marcus shouted at them, but they weren't listening. Some ran for the exits. Others dropped to their knees, not in surrender but in some kind of prayer or supplication. Sarah ran to where the book had fallen. She needed to secure it as evidence. The leather felt warm under her fingers, which didn't make sense. Everything else in the cathedral was ice cold. She picked it up carefully and was about to call for Marcus when the distortion above the altar tore open. The sound was worse than the sight. Reality itself seemed to scream as the rift opened, a diagonal slash in the air about six feet long. Through the opening Sarah could see something that wasn't the cathedral ceiling. Colors that had no names. Shapes that existed in dimensions her eyes couldn't process. Movement that suggested vast intelligence and utter alienness. The temperature in the cathedral dropped twenty degrees in an instant. Sarah's breath came out in white clouds. Frost spread across the floor in intricate patterns that again looked like the symbols painted on the walls, except these seemed to write themselves. Marcus grabbed her arm. "We need to leave right now!" The unconscious victims on the floor started convulsing. The cultists who had dropped to their knees began bleeding from their noses and ears. One of them was laughing hysterically. Sarah couldn't look away from the rift. Something was trying to come through. She could sense it, feel its attention turning toward this small space in the material world. It was aware of her. It knew she was there. The old man she'd shot crawled toward her, leaving a trail of blood. "You stupid girl. Do you have any idea what you've done? The ritual was controlled. The gateway was supposed to be bridged properly. Now it's raw. Unfiltered." Sarah kicked the book away from him and raised her weapon. "Stay down!" The rift pulsed again, wider now. Eight feet across. The things moving on the other side pressed against the opening, testing the barrier between their realm and this one. Sarah could almost see shapes, almost understand what she was looking at, but her mind refused to make sense of it. Marcus was yelling something into his radio, calling for backup and ambulances. His voice sounded distant to Sarah, like she was hearing him from underwater. The old man laughed through his pain. "Shooting me doesn't matter. The words are spoken. The sacrifice is prepared. It will come through whether I live or die." "Then I stopped nothing." Sarah kept the book clutched against her chest. Evidence. She needed it as evidence. "You made it worse!" The old man's face twisted with rage and terror. "The ritual provided structure. A framework. Without it, the breach is unstable. It could collapse, or it could tear wider. You've gambled with forces you can't comprehend." The rift shuddered. For a moment it seemed to expand even further, then suddenly contracted. The scream of tortured reality intensified. Sarah had to clench her teeth against the sound. It wasn't just noise, it was somehow reaching inside her head and vibrating against her thoughts. Then the rift stopped growing. It hung in the air, roughly ten feet across now, but not expanding anymore. The things on the other side receded slightly, as if retreating. The terrible sound faded to a low hum that Sarah could feel in her bones more than hear with her ears. The old man stared upward at it and started crying. "No. No, it has to complete. We've waited so long. We did everything right." "Ambulance is three minutes out," Marcus said. He'd moved to check on the unconscious victims. "These three are still breathing but they need medical attention." Sarah finally tore her gaze away from the rift and looked down at the book in her hands. The leather felt almost alive, warm and pulsing slightly. The symbols on the cover seemed to move when she wasn't looking directly at them. She wanted to drop it, throw it away, but she forced herself to hold on. Evidence. This was evidence of whatever insane thing had just happened here. The cultists who hadn't fled were all unconscious now or unresponsive. The ones who'd run probably wouldn't get far. Sarah could already hear sirens approaching. Someone must have reported the gunshot. "What do we do about that?" Marcus pointed at the rift without looking at it directly. Sarah had no answer. The thing hung in the air above the ruined altar, a tear in reality that pulsed with alien light. It was smaller than it had been moments ago, contracting slowly but still very much present. "I don't know. Call the fire department? Building inspector?" "This isn't a structural issue, Sarah." "I know that!" She tried to think. Her training had covered hostage situations, active shooters, bomb threats, even terrorism. Nobody had ever mentioned what to do about dimensional rifts in abandoned cathedrals. "We secure the scene. Get these people medical attention and into custody. Then we call someone who might actually know what to do about that thing." "Who would that be?" Sarah realized she had no idea. "We'll figure it out." The backup units arrived, then the ambulances. Sarah gave a brief statement to the responding officers, enough to explain the situation without getting into the impossible parts. Marcus handled most of the logistics while she stood guard over the book and watched the rift slowly contract. Over the next two hours, the tear in reality diminished from ten feet across to about three feet. The light bleeding through from the other side grew dimmer. The sense of vast intelligence pressing against the barrier faded to a whisper. By the time the crime scene techs arrived to photograph and document everything, the rift had stabilized at roughly two feet in diameter. One of the techs, a woman named Patterson who'd been doing this job for fifteen years, stared at it for a full minute before speaking. "What the hell am I looking at?" "Wish I could tell you," Sarah said. "Can you photograph it?" Patterson tried. The camera couldn't seem to focus on the rift properly. Every picture came out blurred or distorted, showing strange artifacts and color aberrations that weren't visible to the naked eye. After several attempts she gave up. "I'll document everything else and note the anomaly in my report." "Anomaly. Sure." Sarah would have laughed if she wasn't so tired. The old man she'd shot, whose ID identified him as Robert Vance, was taken to the hospital under guard. The three victims were also hospitalized but expected to recover. The other cultists were being processed. Most were still unconscious or in some kind of catatonic state. Dawn was breaking when Sarah finally left the cathedral. She'd been there for almost six hours. The rift still hung above the altar, smaller now, barely a foot across, but definitely not gone. The building had been sealed and officers posted to keep people out. Sarah wasn't sure what good that would do if the thing decided to tear open again, but it was better than nothing. Marcus drove them back to the precinct. Neither spoke much during the trip. Sarah kept the ritual book on her lap, unwilling to put it in the evidence bag they'd brought. Something about sealing it away seemed wrong, though she couldn't articulate why. At the precinct, she went straight to her desk. The bullpen was mostly empty, just a few officers working the tail end of the night shift. Sarah set the book down and stared at it. In the fluorescent light it looked less ominous, just an old book with a cracked leather cover. But when she touched it again, that warmth was still there. Marcus brought her coffee. "You should go home. Get some sleep." "In a bit." Sarah opened the book carefully. The pages were thick parchment or vellum, covered in handwritten text. The language wasn't English. Wasn't anything she recognized. The symbols looked similar to what had been painted on the cathedral walls. She turned pages slowly, not reading exactly but looking for something she could understand. Diagrams. Illustrations. Most of the drawings made no sense, geometric patterns that hurt to look at for too long. But some seemed to be maps or star charts, though showing no constellations Sarah knew. Marcus leaned over her shoulder. "Can you read any of that?" "No. We'll need to find an expert. Maybe someone at the university." "An expert in what? Crazy cult books?" Sarah didn't answer. She turned another page and paused. This diagram looked different from the others. It showed a circle with a vertical slash through it. Around the circle were more symbols and what might have been instructions or annotations. At the bottom of the page, someone had written in English: "The Gateway Prepared, The Path Made Clear." She traced the diagram with her finger, not quite touching the page. The ink seemed to shimmer slightly. Probably just the lighting. She was exhausted and seeing things. Marcus's phone rang. He stepped away to answer it. Sarah kept studying the diagram, trying to make sense of what she was looking at. If this was instructions for the ritual, maybe someone could reverse it. Close the rift properly. Her hand cramped. Sarah looked down and saw that she'd pressed her palm flat against the page without realizing it. The warmth from the book had intensified, spreading up her arm. She tried to pull her hand away but it stuck to the page for a moment, like her skin had adhered to the parchment. When her hand finally came free, Sarah saw a symbol printed on her palm. Dark lines that looked like they'd been drawn with ink, except she hadn't touched anything wet. The symbol matched one from the page she'd been reading. She rubbed at it with her other hand. The mark didn't smudge or fade. "Sarah?" Marcus had finished his call. "You okay?" She showed him her palm. "Does this look like anything to you?" Marcus leaned in close. "Is that a tattoo?" "It wasn't there five minutes ago." Sarah rubbed harder but the symbol remained. The lines were dark, almost black, and seemed to sit on top of her skin rather than in it. "It came from the book." "How does a symbol come from a book?" "I don't know!" Sarah closed the book quickly and shoved it across her desk. "I touched the page and when I pulled my hand away, this was there." Marcus grabbed some hand sanitizer from a nearby desk and squeezed it onto Sarah's palm. They both watched as she rubbed the gel across her skin. The symbol stayed exactly as it was. "Okay. That's not normal." Marcus pulled out his phone. "I'm calling someone." "Who?" "I don't know. A doctor? A scientist? Someone who can tell us what the hell is happening." Sarah barely heard him. She was staring at her palm, at the symbol that had somehow transferred from the ancient book to her skin. The warmth had faded but she could still feel something there, a slight tingling that wouldn't go away. Then the symbol moved. It was subtle, just a small shift in the lines, but Sarah saw it clearly. The geometric pattern rearranged itself slightly, still recognizable as the same symbol but somehow different. She watched in horror as a second symbol began appearing next to the first, lines etching themselves onto her skin as if being drawn by an invisible pen. "Marcus." Her voice came out as a whisper. He turned to look at her. "What?" Sarah held up her hand so he could see. The second symbol was fully formed now, and a third was starting to appear. The marks spread slowly across her palm, then began creeping onto her wrist. Each new symbol seemed to write itself into her skin, dark lines that pulsed with a faint light. "Hospital. Right now." Marcus grabbed her other arm and pulled her toward the door. Sarah let him lead her, unable to stop staring at her hand. The symbols kept appearing, spreading up her forearm now. They didn't hurt, which somehow made it worse. She could feel them manifesting, like invisible fingers tracing patterns on her skin, but there was no pain. Just that constant gentle warmth and the tingling sensation that grew stronger with each new mark. By the time they reached Marcus's car, the symbols had spread to her elbow. Sarah counted at least twenty distinct marks, all different, all pulsing with that faint otherworldly light. She wondered if they would stop or if they'd cover her entire body. She wondered what would happen when they did. The book sat on her desk back at the precinct, closed and innocent-looking. Sarah had touched it and now something was happening to her. The ritual had been interrupted but not stopped. The gateway still hung open above the cathedral altar, a scar in reality that pulsed with alien energy. And whatever intelligence lived on the other side of that rift had apparently found a new conduit.