I woke up with a strange sense of heaviness, as if my body hadn't quite caught up with my mind. The forest air that seeped into the cracks of our old wooden cottage felt different today—charged, like a storm was coming, but without the clouds.
Outside, Ambrose was already up, sipping coffee like it held the answer to life's biggest questions. He noticed me and grinned. "Morning, Professor Paradox. Sleep okay, or did time reverse on you again?"
I chuckled. "I think I'm still stuck somewhere between yesterday and next week."
He tapped the side of his mug. "That's what you get for messing with dimensions. Should've stuck to board games."
Inside, Bobby was pacing, already neck-deep in a notebook filled with diagrams, equations, and theories. Jacob sat nearby, arms crossed, not looking pleased. Something was up.
"Morning," I said cautiously. "What's the damage?"
Bobby looked up, dark circles under his eyes. "I think I'm getting closer to figuring it out. The time dilation, the memory gaps, the forest's behavior—it's not just supernatural. It's physical."
"Physical?" Jacob scoffed. "Like physics? Come on, Bobby. Don't start nerding out again."
Bobby ignored the jab. "Just hear me out. The distortion we're experiencing—it's consistent with something called a gravitational anomaly. If the forest exists on a point where different gravitational fields intersect, time would warp. The deeper we go, the more skewed the timeline becomes."
I sat down. "So you're saying the forest is like a gravity well?"
"Or a bubble," Bobby replied. "A temporal bubble where time runs independently from the rest of the world. That would explain why minutes here could equal hours—or nothing—out there. It also explains the dreams, or the repeated conversations. The field might be resetting our short-term memory while simultaneously allowing certain consciousness states to leak through."
Ambrose leaned in, eyes wide. "So… we're basically living inside a black hole vacation home?"
Bobby almost smiled. "Something like that."
Jacob rolled his eyes. "That still doesn't explain the hallucinations. The doppelgangers. The old man. Are you going to write those off as physics too?"
"No," Bobby admitted. "I think those are tied to something more… abstract. The forest may be creating versions of us from alternate timelines or dimensions. It's not just bending time. It's merging possibilities."
I could feel the chill return—the same one that had crawled down my spine the night I saw myself. There was something deeply unsettling about knowing you might not be the only version of you walking around.
We needed answers.
"We should head out," I said. "That cave Ambrose found last night—it might be connected."
Ambrose raised an eyebrow. "Why is it always me finding the creepy stuff?"
Jacob shot back, "Because you wander off without telling anyone. That's how horror movies start."
"Relax, Jacob," Ambrose said with a grin. "I've got main character energy. You'll be fine."
We packed up supplies, flashlights, extra batteries, Bobby's notebook, and a makeshift GPS tracker Bobby had rigged up from one of our phones. If time didn't behave, maybe we could at least map the inconsistency.
The cave lay deep within the forest, behind a dense layer of fog and moss-covered trees that seemed to grow more twisted the farther we walked. It wasn't marked on any map, but Ambrose had stumbled across it during one of his 'nature breaks.'
"I swear," he said as we approached the entrance, "this thing wasn't here before. It just appeared."
We entered cautiously. The temperature dropped immediately. The walls glistened with moisture, and the air buzzed with static electricity.
As we moved deeper, Bobby used a laser thermometer to measure the internal environment.
"Guys," he whispered, staring at the readout. "There's a thermal fluctuation here that doesn't make sense. It's colder the deeper we go, but only in pockets, like localized anomalies."
The tunnel led us to a chamber where a pool of still water reflected not just our faces—but something else.
A fifth figure.
I turned sharply. No one was there.
"I saw it too," said Jacob, pale. "Someone else. Watching us."
We backed away slowly. Bobby marked the floor with chalk. "Let's not stay longer than necessary. We don't know what's stable in here."
Back at the cottage, we debriefed. Everyone was shaken.
Bobby, later that night, tried explaining more of his theory. "If that chamber exists at the convergence point of time currents, it might be a rift—a place where realities thin. The figure we saw could've been another version of one of us. Or someone else entirely, leaking through."
Ambrose rubbed his temples. "This is starting to sound like an indie sci-fi film."
Jacob muttered, "Except we don't get to roll credits and walk away."
They were right.
Something was coming.
And we were in the middle of it.