Each Card begins more or less in the same way. Someone finds it by random chance. Where it came from, how it landed there… or why someone found it is the real mystery. But someone finds the Card and quickly discovers that our ordered mundane reality is an illusion. Then the problems begin.

  Johann Mendel found The Wall in a wallet in a dusty street in El Paso. The worn leather card holder was half hidden under trash bins, but Jorge spotted it. So he bent down, picked it up, and riffled through it, checking what it was.

  Johann expected one of two things. The wallet would be empty and discarded after whoever found it first had grabbed all the valuables. Or, of course, full of credit cards that had already been canceled, a driving license from someone out of State, and a bunch of pictures of complete strangers looking stupid.

  Instead, the wallet had a single credit-card-sized drawing. It looked like a cardboard rectangle, with a perspective brick wall sporting torch sconces and two weird triangles pointing out on the large side, each with an abstract black-and-white symbol.

  Johann was disappointed. He pulled out the Card, unaware that, with this simple gesture, he was discarding his old life. He flipped the picture, looking at the same two symbols from the triangles on the back, but in color. No words, no title, no explanations, or anything. He might have thought it a funny business card, but which business card did not sport a company name or holder title and name?

  What struck him was that, despite looking like a bare cardboard, he couldn’t bend the Card. It didn’t even feel like plastic… more like it was a piece of metal. But the edges felt soft under his thumb.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  The wallet itself was dirty and worn. Seeing as it didn’t have anything else, Johann simply dropped it in the trash box under which it had been. He slipped the Card in his pocket. He’d look on the Internet what kind of business card it was.

  The bus was not going to wait much longer. Johann found buses useful and convenient. For a high school dropout who needed to go pick stuff at El Paso for the store in Dallas, the 4-times-a-day schedule was ok. He’d arrive in Dallas at night, would be at the store opening hour in time, and drop his bimonthly parcel.

  The parcel was probably something illegal. But it was a flat envelope that didn’t seem to have any suspicious powder or liquid. He just used a key to the postal box, opened it, swapped the envelope in it with the one Hermann gave him, and returned to Dallas. Johann had no idea what was in the envelopes. In a way, he did not want to know.

  Today, the envelope gave him an off vibe. That was the fifth time he’d done the swap, and he was already used to those. But this time… it was as if the envelope crawled in the pocket without moving.

  The bus was half-full only, so he had no one around to see him. He fished the envelope and turned it. There was nothing special about it this time. Once in his hands, there was nothing, no weird sensation.

  Johann sighed. He put the envelope back in his jacket and settled back in the seat to try to sleep.

  Five minutes later, the feeling was back. Like the envelope had barbs. Or legs. Or something.

  Johann removed the envelope again and felt the pocket. There was nothing special in it, but… at that moment, he realized that, in the front pocket, there was that odd Card he’d found in that El Paso street. He picked it up and put it along with the envelope.

  The crawling sensation was back.

  A few tries confirmed that, for some reason, whenever he put the Card and the envelope next to each other, there was some kind of strange feeling. But that only happened if he put the card on the front of the envelope. Further experimentation showed him that if he placed the Card’s picture over the envelope or on the back, there was nothing. But if he placed the Card face-up over the envelope, there was a feeling of… something.

  Johann put the Card back in the pocket and examined the envelope more carefully than he ever did before.