Different Worlds

The rain came down hard enough to bounce. It wasn’t cinematic rain—the kind that fell beautifully beneath streetlights, each drop catching the glow as though the night itself had been choreographed. This was real rain. Cold, relentless, and heavy enough to turn the city into a blur of reflections. It gathered in the cracks of the pavement and poured from gutters in silver streams, transforming every streetlamp into a smeared reflection of orange and gold. Above the underpass, traffic moved through the darkness. Fay couldn’t see it. She could only hear it. The distant thunder of tires rolling over wet asphalt was constant, almost soothing if she didn’t think too hard about it. Every so often, a truck passed overhead, making the concrete ceiling tremble faintly above her. She pulled her coat tighter around herself and kept walking. It was already soaked through. Water had found its way beneath the collar, down the back of her neck, and into the sleeves. Her hair had escaped whatever desperate attempt she’d made to keep it tied back. Wet strands clung to her cheeks, and every few seconds a drop slid from the ends and disappeared beneath her collar. She held her phone above her head. One bar. She stopped. “Come on.” She stared at the screen. The single bar vanished. No service. Fay lowered the phone, frowned at it, then raised it again as though the extra few inches might somehow convince the signal to return. Nothing. She took three steps. One bar appeared. She stopped immediately. “Yes.” The signal disappeared. Her shoulders sank. “Of course.” The phone searched again. Nothing. Fay exhaled slowly and looked around. The underpass was empty. On one side stood a shuttered kiosk, its metal door covered in layers of graffiti. A faded advertisement clung to one corner, its smiling model almost entirely hidden beneath black paint. A bench sat nearby, half-submerged in rainwater. The concrete pillars were covered in names, dates, declarations of love, threats, and words whose meanings had probably been forgotten by the people who wrote them. Someone had painted a heart on one of the pillars. A crooked line ran straight through it. Fay stared at the broken heart longer than she meant to. Then she looked away. Her phone vibrated. She nearly dropped it. Fay looked down. Nothing. Not a message. Not a missed call. Just a system notification. NO SERVICE. A small, bitter laugh escaped her. It wasn’t because anything was funny. Sometimes the body laughed when it didn’t know what else to do. She unlocked the phone and scrolled through her contacts. Names passed beneath her thumb. She stopped. For several seconds, she simply stared at one name. Her thumb hovered over the screen. Then she pressed CALL. The phone rang. Once. Twice. A recorded voice answered. Fay froze. She couldn’t make herself speak. The rain filled the silence between them. It drummed against the concrete, hissed along the pavement, and ran in thin streams around the toes of her shoes. She looked down. Her shoes were sitting in two shallow puddles. Her reflection stared back at her from the water. For a moment, she barely recognized the woman looking back. “It’s me,” she whispered. Silence. Fay swallowed. “It’s…” The word caught in her throat. She closed her eyes. She couldn’t say it. Not yet. Maybe not ever. “No.” She ended the call. The screen went black. Fay held the phone against her chest and stood there beneath the concrete ceiling. For a moment, she didn’t move. Then a car horn sounded somewhere above. She flinched. Her head snapped toward the mouth of the underpass. A pair of headlights passed through the rain. Then they were gone. Darkness returned. Fay started walking. ⸻ Her footsteps echoed through the tunnel. Left. Right. Left. Right. The rhythm was strangely comforting. She passed another concrete pillar. Something caught her attention. She stopped. Painted across the concrete in large, uneven letters were four words. YOU CAN’T GO BACK. Fay stared at them. Slowly, she reached out and touched the wall beneath the words. Her fingers came away wet. She wiped them against her coat. “Yeah.” She started walking. Five steps. Six. Then she stopped. Something had changed. She turned around. The graffiti was still there. But now she noticed another sentence beneath it. Smaller. Older. Almost completely hidden beneath layers of paint. She stepped closer. Squinted. There were only six words. SOME DOORS ONLY OPEN ONCE. Fay stared at the sentence. A drop of water fell from above. It landed directly on the word DOORS. Fay looked up. There was no leak. Only concrete. She slowly looked back at the wall. The sentence was gone. The graffiti was ordinary again. Fay stared for another few seconds. Then shook her head. “I’m tired.” She continued walking. ⸻ For a moment, she was somewhere else. Sunlight. Warm sunlight. A kitchen filled with laughter. Someone was laughing. Someone she knew. A child’s hand reached across a table. Small fingers. A glass. A cup tipping sideways. Then— SMASH. Fay stopped. The memory vanished. She stood in the middle of the underpass, breathing harder than she should have been. She looked down at her hands. They were trembling. She shoved them into her coat pockets. Then she kept walking. ⸻ The underpass should have ended by now. Fay realized it slowly. At first she assumed she simply hadn’t been paying attention. The tunnel had always seemed longer at night, especially in bad weather. Maybe she had taken a wrong turn. Maybe the exit was farther ahead than she remembered. Then she realized she’d been walking for far too long. She looked ahead. The tunnel continued. Concrete. Graffiti. Puddles. Darkness. No exit. She turned around. The entrance wasn’t there either. Instead, the tunnel stretched behind her and disappeared around a bend. Fay stared. There hadn’t been a bend. She was certain of it. “What the hell…” She pulled out her phone. No service. She turned on the flashlight. The narrow beam cut through the darkness. Concrete. Graffiti. Water. Nothing else. Then— KNOCK. Fay stopped. Her heart seemed to stop with her. She listened. KNOCK. Two knocks. Polite. From somewhere ahead. Fay slowly raised the phone. The flashlight swept across the tunnel. Nothing. She held her breath. KNOCK. This time, it was closer. Her breathing became shallow. “Hello?” Silence. Then— KNOCK. Fay took one step forward. Then another. The flashlight beam moved across the wall. And found something that shouldn’t have been there. Wood. Fay stopped. There was a door in the concrete wall. An actual door. It was old, blackened by years of water and neglect. Heavy iron hinges held it in place, and a thick iron ring was fixed in its center. Dark streaks ran down the wood, though they looked less like water damage and more like something had seeped through the grain from within. Fay stared at it. There was no frame. No brickwork. No hallway behind it. No architectural explanation for why a wooden door should exist in the middle of a solid concrete wall. It simply existed. As though the wall had been built around it. Fay moved closer. She ran the flashlight around its edges. Nothing. No seam. No c***k. No gap. Her stomach tightened. “No.” She backed away. One step. Then another. The door remained exactly where it was. Fay turned around. She walked away. Five steps. Ten. Then she turned. The door was still there. She walked back toward it. “Okay.” She looked at her phone. Still no service. Then at the door. “This is how people end up on documentaries.” For the first time that night, the corner of her mouth almost lifted. Almost. She reached toward the door. Stopped. Her hand hovered inches from the wood. Something moved on the other side. Fay jerked backward. “Hello?” Nothing. She stared at the door. Then came a whisper. So faint she wasn’t certain she had heard it. “Fay.” Her eyes widened. She stopped breathing. “Fay.” This time she heard it. Her name. Fay spun around. Nobody. The tunnel was empty. She slowly turned back toward the door. “Who are you?” Silence. She stepped closer. “How do you know my name?” The iron ring moved. Fay froze. Nobody had touched it. The ring swung gently from side to side. Once. Twice. Then stopped. Fay stared at it. Her hand moved before her mind could tell it not to. Her fingers touched the iron. Everything disappeared. For one impossible second, she saw another place. A stone hall illuminated by hundreds of candles. A man stood at the far end of a long wooden table. A child laughed somewhere nearby. A woman’s hands fastened a cuff around someone’s wrist. A black pool of water reflected a sky Fay couldn’t see. A crown lay abandoned on cold stone. Then she saw a hand. A pale hand. It was reaching for something. But the fingers couldn’t close. Fay screamed and ripped her hand away. She stumbled backward and fell into the puddle beneath her. Her phone flew from her hand. The flashlight spun wildly across the tunnel, throwing fragments of light against the walls. Fay sat there, breathing hard. Cold water soaked through the back of her coat. Her palms stung against the concrete, and for several seconds she could hear nothing except the frantic pounding of her own heart. She looked at her palm. A red mark crossed it. Almost like a burn. “That’s not right.” She pushed herself to her feet. She retrieved her phone. The screen was cracked, but still working. She looked at the door. “I am going home.” She turned. Took one step. Then she heard it. A child’s voice. Soft. Familiar. “Mom?” Fay froze. Every muscle in her body locked. Her face changed. The fear disappeared. Recognition replaced it. “Desmond?” The name left her mouth before she could think. Before she could question it. Before she could understand why she knew it. The tunnel gave no answer. Only silence. Fay stared into the darkness. Desmond. The name seemed to exist somewhere deep inside her, beneath memory and reason. It felt like something she had carried for years, something written into her bones before she had ever learned how to speak it. But she didn’t know why. She didn’t know where the name had come from. She didn’t know how she could recognize the voice of a child she could not see. And yet the moment she heard it, something inside her had reached toward him. Not thought. Not logic. Something older. Something stronger. Her chest tightened with an ache so sudden and powerful that she had to press a hand against it. She could almost feel small arms around her waist. Almost feel the weight of a child asleep against her shoulder. Almost remember the warmth of a little hand curled around her finger. The sensations vanished whenever she tried to hold on to them. But the pull remained. Desmond. The name echoed inside her. It frightened her more than the door did. Because the door was impossible. The feeling was intimate. The feeling belonged to her. “Desmond?” she whispered again. Nothing. Fay closed her eyes. She didn’t know who he was. She didn’t know where he was. She didn’t even know why saying his name made her feel as though something precious had been torn away from her. But she knew one thing. Wherever he was, he needed her. Or perhaps— Perhaps she was the one who needed him. Fay opened her eyes. The door waited in front of her. She ran toward it. She grabbed the iron ring. “DESMOND!” Nothing. She pulled. The door didn’t move. She pulled harder. “Open!” Nothing. She slammed both hands against the wood. “OPEN!” Her voice exploded through the tunnel. The sound echoed back. OPEN. OPEN. OPEN. Fay pressed her forehead against the door. Her eyes squeezed shut. “Please.” The word came out broken. She didn’t know what she was asking for. The door to open. The child to answer. The missing memories to return. The ache inside her to explain itself. Maybe all of it. A long silence followed. Then something changed. The iron ring beneath her hand became warm. Fay opened her eyes. The rain had stopped. Not slowed. Stopped. Every drop of water in the tunnel hung motionless in the air. Thousands of tiny silver beads suspended around her. The distant traffic disappeared. The dripping water disappeared. Even her own breathing seemed impossibly loud. The entire world had gone silent. Fay slowly turned. A single drop of water floated inches from her face. She reached toward it. Her fingertip touched the drop. It trembled. Then drifted away. Fay looked back at the door. Her hand tightened around the iron ring. She swallowed. “Okay.” She pulled. The door opened. There was no darkness on the other side. There was light. Warm candlelight. Golden and alive. Wind swept through the doorway, carrying the distant sound of bells. It smelled of smoke, stone, and something green and unfamiliar, like wet leaves after a storm. Fay stared. Beyond the door was a world that could not possibly exist. A world waiting for her. Then a man’s voice came from somewhere beyond the threshold. “Who are you?” Fay didn’t answer. She couldn’t. She stood frozen, staring into a world she had never seen and somehow felt she had been searching for all her life. She took one step forward. Then stopped. Slowly, she looked behind her. The tunnel was empty. Her phone lay abandoned on the wet concrete. The screen suddenly illuminated. Fay stared at it. For one second, a photograph appeared. It showed her. And beside her stood someone whose face couldn’t be seen. Before Fay could understand what she was looking at, the phone went dark. She looked at the doorway. Then at the phone. Then back at the light beyond the door. Whatever waited on the other side was terrifying. But somewhere in that impossible place, she had heard a child’s voice. A child named Desmond. She didn’t know why she knew his name. She didn’t know why the sound of it made her heart break. She didn’t know whether he was truly calling for her or whether some buried part of her had called out to him first. But the emotional pull was undeniable. It tugged at her from beyond the doorway, deep and desperate, like an invisible thread tied around her heart. And if there was even the smallest chance that Desmond was there— She had to find him. Fay took a breath. Her decision took everything she had. Then she stepped through. The door closed behind her. On the other side, bells continued to ring. And back in the city, the rain began again.