The Pattern

By: submission | August 2, 2026

Author: Andy Rutrough

He was being stupid, he knew. He had climbed beyond the petroglyphs—figures etched in the sheer rock two hundred feet from any ledge. Now, fifty feet above them, he reached for the nearest in a system of cracks that ran from here to the base of the cliff. Jack Nelson wiped sweat from his eyes, ran his hands along the fractured stone. The pattern had to be here somewhere.
“No pattern,” Alan Wilson had said after a week of scanning photographs. “I still don’t know how the Atenoi carved those figures so high up, but that doesn’t mean they could open cracks in the rock face.”
“Then where did they go? The Spanish had them surrounded. They were all going to be killed. They just disappeared.”
“Maybe the Spanish carried them off.”
“But there’s no record.” Jack had scowled at his expedition partner. “You know Smyrton’s team found a relationship between altered states of consciousness and dimensional shift. You know it’s initiated by visual stimuli.”
“Smyrton’s results have not been duplicated. They’re not proven,” Alan said.
“But they’re possible,” Jack had leaned forward. “What if they did it? What if the Atenoi found a visual stimulus, a pattern that allowed them to bend space? What if they bent the cracks into that pattern, and carved the petroglyphs way up there as a sign? What if, when the Spanish started closing in, they just bent themselves into somewhere else?”
“Where?” Alan had raised his arms. “Another dimension?”
But now, on the cliff face, Jack could feel it, almost taste the pattern. Maybe if he traced the cracks with his fingers, felt their roughness in his hands. Maybe, just maybe, the Atenoi had escaped.
He glanced down. Three hundred feet to the cliff base. And he had climbed up thirty feet since clamping his safety rope into the stone—not safe. Breathing carefully so as to control his panic, he pulled a clamp from his belt to secure his rope again. He looked to his left, stopped. A curve in the rock matched the pattern of cracks exactly. He ran his hand along the curve. Could it be? He stretched his arm to reach a little farther—this could mean so much—just a little farther. Then his hand slipped.
Empty air yawned out beneath him. He swiped at the cliff face, missed. Adrenaline surged. A flicker of thought pleaded for time to run backward one half-second. One half-second would allow him to regain his grip, his life. But no. Time has no mercy. He was falling.
His first clamp popped out of place. Then his second. The carvings flashed by, then the cracks. They formed parallel lines as he fell past. The lines parted, joined, whirled away again. Jack cried out. That was it, the pattern! Not static like a photograph, but moving. A pattern of dance.
Beautiful, he thought. The Atenoi must have jumped from the cliff to see this. It would have been the only way.
He felt his brain shift. Good. He had a second, maybe till he hit. But if he was right about the Atenoi then maybe, just maybe…
#
Alan Wilson watched his colleague fall. Even amidst his horror, and with no idea why, he whispered. “Come on Jack, come on.” Alan rushed to where his body would have landed, but found nothing. Rescue workers searched for days, but Jack was gone.
For a long time, Alan stared up at the cliffs. “Where did you go?” he wondered, then answered himself finally, “Only one way to find out,” and began to climb.