Free Ghost Country by Patrick Lee

probably curious enough to investigate a wide-open hole in midair with a hotel room on the other side. Travis was sure the Ritz’s staff had seen all kinds of crazy shit in their establishment over the years, but there was no reason to go for some kind of record.
    Behind him, Bethany guessed what he was thinking. “I positioned the iris so nothing out there could reach it,” she said.
    He leaned back in and turned to her. “Iris?”
    She indicated the opening, and shrugged. “I gave it a name.”
    “Why iris?”
    “Watch what happens when you close it.”
    Travis stepped away from the opening as Bethany walked to the cylinder. He hadn’t seen her switch it off in the suite earlier; he’d left to get a cab by then.
    Bethany pressed the off button and the open circle contracted shut like an image on an old model television set. Or like an iris suddenly exposed to bright light. It shrank to a singular point and then vanished.
    Bethany shrugged again. “Iris.”
    “Okay.”
    She switched the cylinder back on.
    “Did you try the other button?” Travis said.
    “Yeah.”
    “What does it do?”
    “Pretty much what you expect.”
    He nodded. As soon as they’d learned what the entity did, he’d assumed the third button, off (detach/delay—93 sec.), allowed the hole to stay open for 93 seconds with the projection switched off—with the opening detached from the light that’d created it.
    Bethany pressed the button.
    The light cone brightened and intensified for maybe five seconds. Travis thought he understood what it was doing: it was feeding a surge of power to the opening—the iris. Enough power to sustain it for 93 seconds. Then the cone switched off, and the iris stayed open all by itself.
    “Watch,” Bethany said. She took hold of the black cylinder and moved it left and right. The iris didn’t move with it. It stayed fixed in place.
    “I wonder what the point is,” Travis said. “Why would it be useful to delay the shutdown by a minute and a half?”
    Bethany’s eyebrows arched a little and she shook her head. She had no idea.
    Travis thought about it, but let it go after a few seconds. It was an interesting feature, but he couldn’t imagine a situation in which they’d want to shut the iris slowly. He could think of all kinds of situations in which they’d want to shut it quickly, in which case the regular off button would work fine.
    He crossed to where he’d left the duffel bag. He opened it and began assembling the shotgun.
    “ You don’t have to go along,” Travis said.
    It was a few minutes later. He had the Remington put together, loaded, and slung on his back by its strap. He was standing at the iris, his hands around the thick cord of manila rope. One end of the rope was tied to the pedestal mount of a stool at the room’s wet bar. The pedestal was made of steel. Travis had put a lot of pressure on it and deemed it more than strong enough. From there the rope stretched across the room, through the iris, and hung three stories down, that end trailing among the corroded ruins of the hotel’s collapsed corner. The same bar stool was probably down there somewhere, rusted all to hell.
    Bethany leaned beside him and stared out into the trees. Birdsong filtered through the forest from every direction. Sparrows. Red-winged blackbirds. It sounded like any average woodland in present-day America.
    “Two shooters are better than one,” she said.
    “Have you ever shot before?”
    She nodded. “My company mandated that I carry a concealed weapon and maintain proficiency with it. There were risks to my safety, given what I knew.”
    “Ever climb a rope before?”
    “Gym class in junior high. I wasn’t great at it, but then again the motivation wasn’t really there.”
    “You’re sure you want to do this?”
    She watched the forest for a long time before answering. “I don’t know how it is for you, but I’ve given up on being sure of things for a while.”
    T ravis positioned himself