Doorway Dreaming

The door was the size of a cathedral wall, and it had no business being under the ice. At first the archaeologists thought it was a seam in the glacier—a trick of pressure and light. But when Dr. Keene brushed away the frost with the back of his glove, the pattern beneath was too precise. Iron, or something that only pretended to be iron. Lines inlaid with gold. A lattice of circles and symbols older than language but unfortunately for him, they seemed intentional. They called it a door because that was easier than admitting it looked like one.

The keyhole alone could swallow a man’s head.

They set up camp around it, a ring of heaters and bright orange tents that flickered like candle flames in the endless white. It was never fully day or night there—only an arctic half-light that couldn’t decide which way to lean. The glacier groaned in its sleep.

Dr. Keene didn’t. He watched the door.

Something about it itched in the back of his thoughts. He’d been in love once, long ago; the feeling was similar. That awful magnetism. That need to know a thing, or a person, without knowing why. He told himself it was just history whispering, that every archaeologist craves the voice of the past. Someone, or something to tell them the answers they seek. To let them know that they weren’t crazy for pursuing this pipe dream of piecing together stories long gone. The door was there to be opened, for that is what doors were for, but it felt more than just a door, for when he pressed his palm to the metal, the door was warm.

And when he leaned close, he thought he heard something breathing.

“Pressure pocket,” said Lena, the team’s geologist. “Ice settles around the cavity and compresses air. You’re hearing that move through the cracks.”

Keene nodded, grateful for the potential fib. A lie to cool their thoughts and anxieties. It made the most logical sense too. For it could not be what it sounded like. Keene always appreciated Lena’s words. She had a way with him, and he supposed others, that could calm his worries in a brief smile, or a reassuring pat on the shoulder. Despite everyone else having a private panic at this uncanny discovery, she had such a calm presence it was as if it were just another Tuesday for her.

They drilled a narrow hole for a fiber-optic probe. The engineers complained about cost, about risk. The door didn’t care. When they pushed the camera through the keyhole, the image on the monitor was static at first, just images of grey snow. Then the focus cleared, and everyone stopped talking.

It was a world.

A landscape behind the door: rivers like mercury, forests that looked like the bones of enormous creatures, and far away, so far the scale refused sense, something sleeping. Its flank rose and fell in slow tides. The glow from its breath painted the bone trees silver.

Keene forgot to blink. The creature wasn’t merely large. It was proportionate to the world around it, as though that landscape were its skin and its dream. The only reason they thought it was a creature, a giant at all, was due to its humanoid facial features. It had what appeared to be a mouth, a nose, and a sight that sent shivers into the very core of Keene’s soul; eyes.

Someone whispered, “Jesus.”

Someone else said, “That’s not ice.”

Some one else went to say something but instead ran away to vomit.

Lena was the first to notice the frost creeping up her wrist. Her veins turned white under the skin, cold blooming inward. Within seconds, she was shaking, her breath a cloud that didn’t quite line up with her mouth. She did her best to keep calm but Keene could see it in her eyes, something deep within her was shaken.

They pulled the probe back in panic. The feed cut to black.

The frost on Lena’s skin melted slowly, but her eyes stayed too pale after that, as if she were still seeing something no one else could. He tried to comfort her, the same way she would try to comfort others, yet she never gave much of a response. Keene gave her his share of the portioned food for dinner, and it seemed that she appreciated it, or maybe that was his wishful thinking. It was hard to tell, and harder to trust his senses after that days revelation.

That night, Keene dreamed of a heartbeat so deep it moved continents. When he woke, the heaters were off. The generator hadn’t failed—he checked. The heat just refused to come alive, as if it were scared and hiding away. As if it were stolen from the air. The others blamed wind, polar thieves, sabotage. Keene knew better, or so he thought. He had the uneasy certainty of a man whose name has just been spoken in a language he doesn’t understand.

They rebuilt the generator. Or at least they tried. They tried again. And again. And of course, again.

Every attempt to see through the keyhole brought something back: frost, ash, the scent of seawater, the echo of a whisper that could not be translated. Each time, one of them fell ill—eyes glazed, skin pale, muttering in their sleep about shapes under ice and stars with jaws.

They should have stopped. They wanted to stop. They argued, or at least those left still sane argued over and over. How they should leave. Grab their ill team and run while they still can. To get help. Call the military. Blow the thing open, or blow the ice around them down so that no one could ever find the blasted key hole. They thought of a hundred different logical ideas on what to do next.

Yet they did not go through with a single one, a choice that Keene would not live long enough to regret.

When Lena finally died, she died mid-sentence, sitting upright, frost blooming in her lungs. Keene pulled her into his arms, as if his body temperature could bring her back to life. As if he could breathe the warmth that somehow still remained in his chest, and give it all to her. If it were possible, he would. Keene took her notebook from her frozen fingers. Every page was covered in circles and loops drawn over and over again, each one spiralling toward a tiny dark centre. At the bottom of the last page was a single line, written so hard the paper nearly tore:

WE ARE ITS DREAM. AND IT IS WAKING.

He didn’t sleep after that. Sleep, he thought, was an invitation. That when they dreamt, their brains must be susceptible to whatever it was that infected them.

The next night, the door began to breathe.

It was slow at first. Subtle. You could mistake it for wind in the tents, for the long sigh of ice settling. But then the ground began to move with it. Like the glacier itself was a chest drawing breath.

The team ran. Some made it to the snowmobiles, some tried to but were taken by the cold, as if it were hunting them. Keene didn’t even try. He stood before the door, hand pressed flat against the metal. It was hot now. It throbbed with something like gratitude.

“Are you dreaming of us?” he whispered. “Or are we dreaming of you?”

From somewhere beyond the door came a sound too large to be heard, like continents scraping together. The symbols in the metal lit up, one by one, in a dull golden pulse.

He realized, then, that the “keyhole” wasn’t a lock at all.

It was an eye.

And the probe they had pushed through it had been the irritant in its tear duct.

When the glacier cracked, it wasn’t an explosion. It was an exhale.

The cold fled. The ice melted. In the satellite footage they found later, the entire ice field seemed to sink an inch, then two, then vanish beneath a bloom of steam that covered half a hemisphere.

No bodies were ever found. Only the door—tilted now, its edges rimed with salt, its metal gone dull.

And beneath it, the faint imprint of a hand.

Sometimes, on clear nights, you can see a ripple pass through the aurora. It looks like breath moving across the sky. Scientists call it solar interference.

But if you listen closely, if you’re the sort of person who can’t help looking through keyholes, you might hear something vast shifting just under the crust of the world.

Dreaming, maybe.

Or remembering the touch of a curious hand.