Beyond the Gate

You'd think a magical gateway would be more difficult to find. It always was in the stories... even if you'd been through it before (as Helena had), trying to find it again almost always proved impossible. Over and over again the stories taught that you couldn't seek the magic place- it had to seek you. And certainly no grown up could ever hope to find it again.

...but apparently the stories had misled her.

She hadn't meant to come back- she'd felt it was better to never be truly certain that she was forbidden from returning, now that she was an adult. She knew she couldn't bear the heartache of not being able to find the Gate, of being confronted with the reality that it might not have been anything more than a young girl's over-active imagination. Of course she knew in her heart of hearts it had happened- and she had the scar on her right hip to prove it to herself no matter how rational her adult brain became- but still she feared that looking for the Gate would bring her only doubt and pain.

Yet when she found herself in ____-shire on a business trip, she couldn't help it- she went back to the woods, and she sought the Gate ought.

And, to her astonishment, found it exactly where she thought it should be.

It was much smaller than she remembered it being: once the Gate had seemed to stretch to the sky, but now she found it didn't top her head by more than a foot. That didn't surprise her at all, of course- she had grown quite a bit in the intervening years. But what did surprise her was that it was slightly open, the doors streaked orange-red with rust and hanging crooked from decaying hinges. Helena felt the hair on the back of her neck rise. There were things in that other world that must not enter ours, things that had been held back only by the power represented by the Gate. She stepped closer, and for the first time in her life felt a tiny wish that her adventures had not been true- because if they were, and if the Gate was broken open...

She would not let herself finish the thought.

(Beyond the Gate)