“Date is May 29th, 2013. Time is... 3:16PM. Location is the Old St. Nicholas Coal Breaker. Would have been here an hour ago, but there was an accident on Interstate 81... anyway. Weather is overcast, no rain forecast, fairly warm for this time of year- should stay so through the day. Sunset will be at 8:27PM tonight; I may stay somewhat past that, though near the entrance. This is a big building; should be able to get a lot of interesting shots. Jacob Doakes, ending log.”

Jacob tapped a button on the side of his phone, and the recording software stopped, saving the audio file. The habit had started from an offhanded comment from a friend a while ago, during an argument about how lost urban explorers could help themselves be found; the idea of logging one's planned activities on a recording device- which might be found by someone else if accidentally dropped by the explorer- had been bantered around a bit and eventually rejected, but Jacob had started doing so just to give it a try. While he hadn't yet gotten himself lost enough to test that aspect, the logs turned out to be a good counterpart to the pictures he took- a snapshot of himself, as it were, of his mood and thoughts just before entering a location.

The wide-open doorway of the building beckoned him in. Sunlight, filtered by thick clouds, streamed in through the windows, but as a precaution he slipped his LED flashlight into the strap he'd sewn into his baseball cap, adjusted his glasses, and took a firm grip of his camera before stepping inside.

Debris crunched under his boots as he made his way through the building, his steps echoing back to him at places. Tall machines, covered in dust and rust, stood as silent sentries as he passed them; even as their forms filled the viewfinder of his camera, Jacob could only begin to guess at what functions they once performed. He paused for a moment to gaze at a lonely table saw, marked in white chalk “James' 9/10/05”. After he snapped the photo, he took another moment to look it over. He'd never know who James was, or why his name and a date had been inscribed on the safety shield of a table saw. Had the tool been assigned to him alone? Was there a problem with other people using tools and not maintaining them properly? Not for the first time, Jacob wished he could peek back in time and see how this place was during its heyday.

He'd gotten several dozen shots of the gear and equipment in the front part of the building before deciding to head towards the back. The trip involved a walk down a long, completely lightless corridor; Jacob snapped on the flashlight strapped to his hat and made his way along its length. His footsteps echoed oddly along the corridor, as though he were traversing some grand hall instead of a cramped tunnel in a dilapidated building. If it weren't for the bright, blue-white beam of his flashlight, Jacob would be absolutely blind in this corridor- only a hazard for the debris scattered along it, as walking in either direction for less than a minute would get him to an exit, but still not a condition he wanted to inflict on himself.

Something felt off when he exited the hallway. It took him a few minutes of wandering around and feeling slightly uneasy before he realized- the angle of the sunlight filtering through the broad windows was a lot lower than he'd expected. He retrieved his phone and lit up the display to find that it was already 5:42PM. “Okay, what the hell?” he wondered aloud, rubbing his forehead with his free hand. “How long was I taking pictures?”

He shook his head, lifting his camera habitually... then struck on an idea. He brought up the saved pictures on the camera's small LCD screen and checked their timestamps. Just as he'd thought- the last picture was shot at 4:09. I couldn't have taken that long after the last shot to come back here... could I? he thought, rubbing at the back of his neck. Meh... maybe I was spending longer staring at the machinery than I thought....

With a confused shrug to himself and a quiet sigh, he put the issue out of his mind and started to line up more shots. The highlight of the area he'd found himself in was a huge machine that looked to be a menacing combination of thresher and grater, that would have looked entirely at home in some overblown horror movie. “Hell, OSHA would have a fit if you were still in action, wouldn't you?” he chuckled, taking a few shots of the machine from different angles.

A number of other things caught his attention as he worked his way through the rear of the building- no small number of conveyor belts, flywheels, tools, and even a rusted-out fuse box with tags too faded to read tied to each connection. He ended up snapping more than a hundred photos as he wandered about, until he finally realized that his flash was illuminating far more shadows than it had been earlier; a glance up at the windows showed that the sun was coming fairly close to the horizon, and a quick look at his phone showed the time to be 6:52. “Time to head back,” he murmured, taking one more moment to look around before starting back the way he'd come in.

Once more he found himself in that pitch-black, echoing corridor, but this time he found himself under a growing feeling of uneasiness with every step he took. An urge to run was building in the back of his mind, and it took him more effort than it should have to quash it. What the hell, he thought. You'd think I was marching to my execution, not walking back to the building entrance! Get a hold of yourself.

Emerging from the other side of the hallway, though, did nothing to ease his increasing unease- quite the opposite, in fact.

The waning gibbous moon peeked past the receding clouds and shed its light through the broken windows, coloring everything a bluish-grey and casting stark shadows along the floor and walls. Jacob practically slammed his back against the nearest wall, unable to comprehend what he was seeing for a moment. The sun was up when I entered that hall! he thought, feeling real fear begin to shoot through him. I did NOT take two hours to walk through it!

But the display of his phone- held in one trembling hand- told him otherwise, reading 9:40PM. He almost dropped the device trying to stuff it back in his pocket. This doesn't make any sense! How did I lose nearly three hours just walking from the back of the building to the front? Everything seemed fine until I....

Realization struck, and he slowly turned to look at that dark hallway. Nothing looked out-of-sorts when he shone his flashlight down its length, but what other explanation could there be? He'd only apparently lost time when he'd been walking along it.

Leave, he told himself. Get back to your car, and drive away. Weird shit is going down here. You know why stupid teenagers die in Stephen King novels? Because they DON'T GET IN THE CAR AND DRIVE AWAY.

But even as he did his best to convince himself to break several traffic laws in vacating the area as quickly as possible, something else tugged at him- a need to know what was going on, why something so bizarre was actually happening. He stood there for a couple of minutes, doing nothing but staring down that hallway, as his mind warred with itself in a clash between rationality and curiosity. Finally, some sort of bizarre compromise won out. I'll... just go partway down. Yeah. Not so far that I lose sight of the front of the building. ...God, I am such an idiot, but here we go....

As much as he tried to keep his footsteps quiet, it seemed that they echoed even louder than before. That same sense of foreboding pressed upon him almost like something physical, and he could feel sweat drip down the back of his neck despite the cool, still air around him. Yet there was nothing visible within the bright-white cone of light his flashlight gave off to justify the feeling of imminent danger.

A quiet sound interrupted his concentration- the alarm on his phone was going off. Slowly he pulled it out of his pocket and glanced down at it.

I didn't set an alarm for midnight... what the hell-?!

Light began to seep through the cracks of the cement floor, seeming to come from the very ground itself. Zig-zagged lines of illumination raced along the length of the corridor. Jacob's mind screamed for him to run, but his legs were sluggish to respond, like someone had replaced his bones with lead; he was only a quarter of the way back to the hall's entrance before the light caught up with him, surrounding and blinding him. He only managed a short yelp of fear as he felt the floor crumble and give way beneath him, and he instinctively pinwheeled his arms as he fell into pure whiteness.

(-)

...what?

What is this?

Can- can it be?! Sister! Sister, are you there?!

I am. What is it?

The contingency! It has been triggered, at last! But....

Hm. Strange. Very strange. Can you explain this?

No! I... wait. Wait! How long has it been since... oh no.

...my goodness. So very, very long... were we in slumber all this time?

Worse than that, I fear! We... we have waned! We are adrift within the ethereal plane!

And as we have drifted, so has our influence... your contingency came to affect a place it should never have reached. And now this unfortunate soul is trapped with us.

Trapped? Wait... no, not trapped. It maintains a connection to the material plane, somehow! Perhaps....

Sister! How could you even consider such a thing? Our plight is not its own! The only right thing to do is to return it to its home!

Would that I were able! Its realm is alien to me; I could easily visit all manner of horrors upon it unwittingly, merely through ignorance!

I see... but it cannot remain here. The ethereal plane would simply absorb it, destroy its uniqueness.

Perhaps... perhaps by rescuing it, we can in fact save ourselves and our home as well. I have an idea. Creature? Creature, can you understand me? Good. Time is short; I must hasten you to the physical plane in your own form, in a place which will prove unfamiliar to you. I can grant you some basic knowledge of what you will find there. When we are able, we will contact you again, but for now all I can tell you is this: Curiosity and caution must be partners. Tread lightly. Treat nothing as safe.

And above all else... avoid the sun.

(-)

He awoke to darkness and dust. His startled gasp turned into a coughing fit as the thick cloud of grit around him entered his lungs, and he reflexively covered his mouth to stifle the noise. His other hand fumbled for his flashlight, which had inexplicably gone dark; he was afraid he'd find it broken, but a single press of its button lit his surroundings.

He was laying on his back in a small depression of sorts, surrounded by broken rock and timber. His clothes were covered in dust, but otherwise unharmed, as were his glasses and other equipment- including his phone. Thank God, he thought with a sigh of relief. No injuries, nothing damaged, and it doesn't look like I should have much trouble getting out of this pit. You'd think I'd at least have a headache from knocking myself out, though... and what a weird dream that was!

He pulled out his phone again. The display read 1:32AM- and the connection meter showed no bars. Good thing I didn't need to call for help, he mused, tucking the phone away and slowly getting to his feet, then pulling himself out of the hole he'd fallen into.

But it wasn't the lightless tunnel of the Old St. Nicholas Coal Breaker building that greeted him. Instead, he'd come to inside what seemed to be an exceptionally cramped utility closet; brooms, mops, buckets and other such tools- curiously smaller than usual- were scattered haphazardly around the dust-covered room. The hole he'd climbed out of looked like nothing so much as an impact crater- but the amount of force that impact would've required would've turned his body into paste.

Standing around inside would give him no answers as to what the hell was going on. He grasped the knob of the door- which was also smaller than seemed sensible- and pulled it open... only to be hit by a burst of frigid air.

Beyond the door was part of a collapsed wall, the rubble having just missed blocking the doorway when it fell. Incomplete rows of tables, lamps hanging down from a partially-destroyed ceiling, what seemed to be a counter of some sort that sparkled with shattered glass- obviously some sort of restaurant, crumbling thanks to neglect. The only source of illumination aside from his flashlight was the bright white light of the moon flowing in through the still-intact front of the building; with nothing else to do at the moment, and desperate for some sort of bearings, he ducked through the open doorway and out into the street.

And then he made the mistake of looking up.

A moon that was in no way the one he was familiar with loomed large in the sky, its quarter-full light revealing a bizarrely flat surface; behind it, the skies sparkled with stars, far more than he'd ever seen in the night sky, glimmering like jewels beneath the surface of some impossibly deep ocean. He couldn't find a single constellation he recognized. The shiver that ran down his spine had only a little to do with the cold air around him. “What... the... fuck....” he managed to utter. “Where... where the hell am I...?”

A frantic glance around for anything familiar or useful as a landmark brought his gaze to a lonely-looking sanitation cart lying against the side of the restaurant. Something was painted on its side, but shadows obscured much of it; he practically sprinted towards it, bringing his flashlight to bear on it and brushing away a thin layer of dust that covered the stenciled letters on the side.

On the side of that dilapidated cart, in a language he'd never seen before but could somehow read, were stenciled two lines of text.