"The Other Side of Sanity"

It was a sunny day, everything was beautiful, and today was a day in which two kids thought it was a great day to go exploring. One Saturday Morning. 14-year old Alice and 10-year old Cooper found themselves outside their wood cabin and finally had the chance to do something they've been wanting to do for a while; explore the forest around them. Now on regular days, their parents wouldn't allow them to do it by themselves...but both Cooper and Alice's mother and father had a work day on the exact same day for their sake, so they imagined this as a great opportunity to look around away from their home.

Anyways, it was a Saturday morning, as soon as the rest of the house was to themselves, they 'sneaked' out and went out to wander in the environment around them. Alice was prepared in case they got lost, of course, packing a cell phone with a tracker that locates their house and supplying Cooper with a house phone that also came with a tracker so Alice could locate him as well. "Wow, I've never seen the trees like this, before!" said Cooper. "Yeah, it's strange how we've lived here for 2 months and never seen this side of the forest," replied Alice.

A few hours later, Alice gets a text message from one of her friends whom which she replies in a call. Their conversation went on for so long, she lost track of Cooper! "I'll call you back in a minute, be right back." Alice panics until finally she meets back up with a curious Cooper, observing a strange brick wall in the middle of a forest. "COOPER! Get back over here!" Alice scolds, "But Alice! Look at this!" Cooper wants Alice to notice the wall. "I can see the wall, but I don't care, It's getting late and I don't want to get in trouble if mom and dad noticed we were gone! Do you know how worried they would be? Do you know how much trouble we will be in once they find us wandering in the dangerous parts of the forest?" Cooper realizes that he doesn't want to get in trouble either, so he follows Alice back to the cabin with her hand around his shoulder.

While retreating back to the cabin, Cooper turns his head to look back at the wall due to his curiosity. It's not there anymore. He wonders about the impossibility of this knowing that he stood near that same wall until sundown only for it to mysteriously vanish out of nowhere. Cooper thought he was imagining things and just didn't bother to question it since he knew Alice didn't want to hear it. As soon as they got back home, both of them went straight to bed since it was 11:00 PM and it was past their curfew, thankfully their parents haven't gotten home yet so it's as if nothing happened. During the night, Cooper couldn't stop thinking about the wall. He wondered all night about its questionable existence.
The next morning, Cooper drops out of bed at 5:00 AM to notice that his parents haven't gotten home yet. Cooper himself is incredibly drowsy because he was paranoid all night thinking about that darn wall. Wondering about his parents, he checks the house's answering machine to see if they called during the night. They left a message saying it was going to be a week-long business trip that they didn't expect and they won't be home until next Sunday. Cooper was confused but also relieved from finding this out. He remembered Alice wasn't awake yet and the morning was young. Cooper couldn't take it anymore, he had to know if this wall actually existed so he sneaked into Alice's room and snatched her cell phone in case of emergencies and waltzed his way out of the house to search for the outlier on his own. It took him half an hour to find the wall again. He could see it plain as day, so he took a picture for evidence on the phone. It didn't show up however, but he didn't care, he knew he saw the wall and was relieved to bring this case to a close. Suddenly, the brick wall started to shake for no explained reason and toppled over in the direction Cooper was standing. In no time flat, the wall fell down and crashed directly on him.(or so you think.)
Alice woke up hours later, furious and confused because she was up until 3:00 PM because her phone wasn't there to be her alarm clock, plus she is a VERY heavy sleeper. She wonders if Cooper sneaked off with it (which he did) to screw around with her text messages and her contacts, so she looks for Cooper all around the house but couldn't find him. Alice was beginning to worry and thought Cooper might wandered off into the woods by himself while she herself was asleep. Alice rushed out into the forest and searched around for hours. Suddenly, she heard a ring tone. Alice followed the sound to know that the sound was coming from her phone, it was a call. When Alice located the phone, she snatched it off the ground and observed the number. It said “Unknown Caller”, but then after a few seconds the text changed and it displayed the number of the caller. WWW-WWW-WWWW. There were letters instead of numbers, something she didn’t think she could see on an OS. Either way, she was too worried about her little brother to answer it and tried to formulate what happened.
Alice noticed the brick wall on the ground, it was at this time 7:59 PM and nighttime would replace the afternoon any minute by now. As Alice observed the fallen wall and her phone, she was horrified to imagine if her brother was crushed by this wall, but she threw that thought away because there were no blood splatters anywhere. It was all clean. Alice, with no options left, lifted up the wall with all her might and was astounded of what she found. The side facing down presented a glowing portal to an unknown area, she had no idea what she was looking at and rested it back down to really think about this. While thinking about it and staring away from the wall, Alice opened up her phone and as soon as she opened it up, she saw a picture of the forest in young daylight. Just the forest.
Alice closed her phone and turned back to the wall to recheck what she really saw, but...it was gone! The time was now 8:02, nighttime. Alice could NOT formulate ANYTHING of what she saw and tried to think...but just couldn't. Was she going crazy? Did the paranoia of possibly losing her little brother forever give her mental insanity? Alice ran away back to the cabin as fast as she could, panicking. When she got back, she opened her phone back up to report the absense of her little brother to their local officials to put on a watch for him.
The phone instantly opened back to the picture she saw before. If you thought she was confused before, the sight of this completely put her out of her mind. The wall. It was present in the picture when it wasn't before. Seeing this completely tore her up from the inside of her mentality. Alice was so mentally disoriented that she fainted in the middle of their living room. She was out for the rest of the week until her parents came home and found her seemingly unconscious on the floor. "Alice!?! Alice! Wake up! Are you alright?" her father immediately rushed to her to find any sense of consciousness. Her mother went into the kitchen and grabbed a bucket to fill with water and splashed it on Alice.
This opened her eyes up, and yes, she was fine. No abrupt recovery from sleeping, just opening the eyes. "Mom? Dad? Are you two really here or am I just imagining you two?" Her parents were extremely worried and thought she had a concussion leading to a case of amnesia. They carried her to the van to take her to the hospital. Before they left, the mother went upstairs for Cooper to see if he was alright. He was not present. Not in the house, not in the forest, nowhere. Alice's mother told the father that Cooper was missing. The agony and stress they were now going through was staggering.
They looked all around in the forest with Alice in the air-conditioned van, resting in the seats. Cooper just wasn't found. Their father instantly dialed up the emeragencyotline to request a town-wide search to find their missing child. The father hung up when the search was set, the parents walked back to the van to continue their previous objective to take Alice to the hospital. Her father opened the driver's seat and buckled in. "I'm sorry about that, Alice, but your brother is missing! I don't know what happened while we were gone, but I'm stressed beyond belief right now. I know you didn't cause this to happen. You're a good girl and I trust you, I put on a town-wide search to find him. Several people are looking for him as we speak, it might sound like I have too much trust in these people, but a lot of these people are my friends and know who Cooper is, so I think we might have a good chance of finding him." Her father continued to drive as Alice, barely awake, spoke a slightly-audible response. "No Dad, he's farther away from us than you think. Much....much....far...ther..."
Alice fell asleep. She knew that even though she had the closest idea of where Cooper is now, her mind is as lost as he is right now. It's unknown where that questionable-existence of a pportaluld've taken him, but with odds of 1 out of infinity, there's a chance that no one's ever going to see him again.
To Be Continued…?