I drove up and parked in the same gravel area in which Magda had kicked up dust so few weeks before. Ed was leaning against his work vehicle and scowling at his smartphone as if his expression could pick up the right kind of signal to make it work. He twitched his nose a few times, and his frown turned into a wry grin as something he thumbed gave him an answer he liked. I moved over and waited for him to be done.

He had changed out of his work clothes, and was in the sweatshirt and jeans he practically lived in as a second house. (He kept that one very close to his chest, you might say.) I watched past him, looking at the anomaly he had warned me about, trying to figure it out for myself.

When I stop trying too hard, I’ve got a fair head for math. At least, for making sure my guesses are in the right overall area, if not always exact. I think that’s a good knack to have, honestly. In this case, my guesses all went kind of haywire, kind of, “This is higher math than I can handle.” The kind of thing I’d bring in a science fiction writer for, I think. I was wondering how to measure folded space without going inside and taking a ruler to the fold.

“So, I was thinking,” Ed started, “how do you measure folded space from the outside?”

I resisted the urge to laugh aloud.

“It’s easy,” he continued. “You use the reference points you already established. But I’m not a math guy. And, of course, I’ve never been here before. Passed it a few times, but you can see, it doesn’t look odd to anyone just driving. Maybe it’s a variable because of the speed of traffic – if we had a rush hour jam people might notice it, but I have to really stop and look before I see that it’s weird.”

I had been resting against his truck, too. When I moved, I lost the faint line I was looking at, so I nodded. “How did you find it in the first place?” I asked.

“I was trying to be surreptitious. You know, all sneaky-sneaky.” He grinned, and made tip-toeing motions with his fingers. “So after it took me a few minutes to figure out where the place needed to be, and a few turns up and down the road, I just brazened in, took the best parking spot, and, look there–” he pointed at the ground.

I moved over and saw just what he meant. I don’t have any hunting or tracking skills, either, but Ed has an attention to detail tuned to small crawly things that don’t belong. In this case, what didn’t belong didn’t crawl – it was like a cleaning commercial, actually. Things on the left were used and didn’t come up like the stuff on the right with the special brand name cleaner. In this case, it was like the stuff on the left had been used for a house, and the space on the right had been next to the road, or against the wilderness.

I moved around and tried to keep the strange line in space at an angle. Once it hit “sky” you couldn’t tell at all. I hoped it wasn’t intersecting any airspace. We’d have our own Bermuda Triangle scheme. (Or is it only a scheme when it’s a pyramid?) Not to mention all the utility questions I had in mind.

“What kind of witchery is it?” I breathed aloud. It wasn’t quite talking under my breath, but it was full of wonder. I’d never seen anything like it affecting my own world.

Maybe that was it. It could be an illusion – a matter of perception. A way of bending light or something else that just made it seem different. After all, a great deal of magic did have to do with prestidigitation, right? And headology. This would be a fabulous conjunction if…

I realized the second bit more belatedly than I had any right. There was no open door.

See, if it had actually been put somewhere else, but still evident, the door would have to be open. I didn’t hear anything, not a sound. I didn’t smell the wind of somewhere else. I didn’t taste the spheres of Beyond.

I picked up a rock and tossed it where I thought things might be. The rock itself underwent a kind of shimmery cartoon-like change, flattening and then turning in on itself and disappearing. The way cats sometimes do when they’re startled.

“Hah!” I exclaimed in triumph.

“That was…odd,” Ed said. “Hey, do it again so I can capture it on my camera and upload it to Youtube or something.”

“Eh,” I shrugged. “They’d only think we were doing it for a special effects class or something. We’re being tricked.”

“Is someone going to jump out and say we’re on Candid Camera?”

“Cantrip camera, maybe.” I shook my head. “I wouldn’t walk in there – what happened to the rock might be a warning that the place is twisted. You know, like leaving someone’s monitor display turned to the side or something. But it isn’t a doorway, it’s all just hidden.”

“Pretend for a moment that I understood. I kind of get the idea that if we went up to it and we weren’t Bugs Bunny or Duck Dodgers we wouldn’t survive the trip. Question is, who hid it?” He put his phone away and went into the passenger side door. He came out with a couple industrial flashlights, handing one to me.

“I think it’s a good question, but tell me why you do?” I asked.

“Because people hide things for one reason – to make sure other people can’t find them. But you do that for two reasons, both of which seem like the same thing but have different emphasis. It’s like nests. You want to keep your eggs safe for you, and you want to keep them safe from someone else. It’s the, um, for and from that make the difference.”

“Right. Did Sylvie do this as a panic mode or did something do it to her?”

“What you said.” He nodded and flashed the light towards the line as it was fading in the darkness. I heard him gasp, and I turned to look at what it revealed.