I passed through Oklahoma plenty of times on long cross country drives, but I hadn't spent much time there until October of last year. That's when I made the trip to the Panhandle, a town called Beaver. I was going to meet my brother for the very first time. That's right. I've got cibs out there I've never met. One pops up every few years or so, but that's a story for another time. Let's just say my father was a lover, not a fighter. And there's all those social media and ancestry sites now, so it's easy for his long lost children to connect with the rest of the barns clan. I'm the oldest as of this recording. It's usually down to me to be the family spokesman and to try to satisfy that look in their eyes they all have. The one that asks, Who am I? Yeah, they're hoping I can give them some closure. Anyway, I'd gone to Beaver to meet my brother. We planned on dinner, but I arrived in town early, just as the sun was setting. So to kill some time, I walked around the area's only attraction, Beaver Dunes Park. This place was wild.

Acres of rolling sand hills, patches of green desert shrubs look more like the Sahara than Oklahoma. While taking in this weird scenery, I realized I wasn't alone. A woman sat on one of the dunes, a silhouette against the evening light. I was drawn to her because she was so still. I wanted to check and see if she was real. When I reached her, I saw she didn't look well, saggy skin and limp hair. She looked up at me with a melancholy gaze place. She didn't ask who I was or why I had approached. Instead, she asked, What do you know about other dimensions? She didn't wait for me to answer. In a hush voice, she said, We'd all heard about those places on this Earth. Where the fabric between worlds is thin and departed spirits can pass through or demons can linger. But see, that legend is incomplete and only addresses what comes out of these delicate spots. It never mentioned in what goes in. Because maybe there are places, portals, that are wide enough to pass through, where folks can visit another time or world and get trapped there forever. She believed the dune we were standing on was one of them.

You're listening to Run, fool. I'm Rodney Barnes. This is episode 40, The Shaman's Portal. The woman told me her name was Lauren. She used to be part of a pair, Lauren of Brian and Lauren. They got married five years ago and were deeply in love. Best friends, soulmates, all that jazz. Lauren wanted me to know that Brian was amazing. Salt of the Earth, the guy you felt compelled to be around. You leave a conversation with Brian, you leave fulfilled, as if his The only focus in the world was you. Lauren, she just felt lucky he'd chosen her because she'd spent her whole life second-guessing herself on things big and small, what to say, what career to pursue, what to have for lunch. Some might call it insecure. Lauren believed she was chronically indecisive until Brian, he was so confident, he gave her a steady hand, helped her move out of the quicksand and onto concrete. Anyway, away. They got married five years ago and went on a gorgeous little honeymoon to the Azores. Nice, right? They got back to their place in Beaver on a Saturday, knowing they had to start work on Monday. Brian didn't want their joyfest to be over, so he suggested they do a picnic at Beaver Dunes Park, a final little evening to celebrate the beginning of the rest of their lives.

They bought a red and white checkered blanket, some wine they got in Portugal, cheese and crackers, and spice corn cobs, Brian's favorite food. They sat on a big old dune with an expansive stretch of sand below them and feasted until the sun sank in the sky. The moon came out, a full one. It cast a bluish dream like you onto the sand. But this was October, so it was cool at night. Lauren started to shiver, and Brian wrapped her in a blanket, kissed her, said he loved her. Lauren looked up at the sky just felt glad because she'd found her person. And if you found yours, you understand that feeling. I've experienced it. It's grounding like all the guesswork has been taken out of life. And you're just Good. Not the most eloquent way of saying it, but that's how it feels. Good. So Lauren was sitting there, head on Brian's shoulder, and she heard something like the sand was moving. It was soft, just the slightest whisper of shifting grains. It came from below them. When Lauren looked, she could see a spot where the sand was swirling around like the wind was giving it a kiss.

But there was no wind, quite the opposite. The air was stale, and it was getting worse, harder to breathe, like the oxygen was slowly seeping out of this place. The sand went still. Lauren felt a flutter in her stomach. She didn't like the way it had moved. She didn't like that it was difficult to breathe. She wanted to leave. When she suggested it, Brian had a whole lot of practicality to impart. See, he hadn't seen the sand thing, but he guessed it was some animal. And sure, the air felt dry. It was just one of those nights. They'd had plenty of time to go home early when they had kids, but now he wanted to look at the stars with her. Just for a little while longer. That was their dynamic in a nutshell. He was always so sure, which is why there wasn't much of a question. They were staying. Even so, Lauren could feel her heart pounding in her chest. Sweat gathered under her arms despite the chill. She tried to relax to focus on Brian's sturdy presence next to her. The heat of his body was comforting, and she allowed herself to look up at the carpet stars overhead, winking dots of burning light, bold against the blackness.

She finally felt herself relax, and then a bolt of lightning lit up the sky. There were two alarming things about this. The It means it had been right above them. So close, Lauren was surprised they didn't get hit. Second thing, it was green. I'm not talking about some corny neon radioactive green. This had a deep, rich olive hue, a bizarre a shade to see in the sky, and even stranger for it to emit any light. It should have been impossible. It was too dark a color. I don't mean to go on about the green. It's just that this detail bothered me. It had that weirdness that gets you all turned around, which is dangerous because when you're confused like that, you don't trust your senses. You think you're dreaming things up. That's what Lauren and Brian thought at first, but it happened again, right overhead. This time, a wooshing accompanied in it like a gust of wind was passing through, except the air didn't change. It was still stagnant, maybe even more so. I bet You all can guess at the reactions that followed. Lauren froze, and Brian, our man of action, jumped to his feet, ready to investigate.

He thought the lightning had touched down on the other side of the dune. He was going to go check it out. He told Lauren to wait there, and before she could say anything, he was off. Lauren's hands instinctively reached out for Brian as he departed. Her fingers clawed the air. She wanted to tell him not to go, to stay with her, but she didn't speak, and Brian disappeared into the darkness beyond the dunes. Lauren watched the spot where she'd last seen him, and maybe it was her imagination, but the air got even murkier then. Thick. She gasped because she was trying real hard to stay calm, but Brian wasn't back, and the air was wrong. Every time she inhaled, she wheezed. Then she saw something move out of the corner of her eye. It was the ends of her hair. They floated upwards like gravity had called in sick. Then something tickled her ankles. The sand, it rose up from the ground and brushed against missed her legs. A scream towards way up Lauren's throat. But before it could hit her airwaves, she heard Brian's voice from a few yards away. She couldn't see. The moon's light didn't reach him wherever he was.

He said, Whoa, lard, look at this. That's when everything changed. The sand suddenly shot upwards, gripping around her in a storm. Her hair did, too. It whipped around her neck, smacked at her face. Lauren frantically waved her arms around, trying to push away the onslaught. She attempted a scream, too, but her cry just sucked in the airborne grains, coating her mouth and grind. Through it all, bolts of lightning flashed. That awful green color over and over and over again, five times, and then everything stopped. The sand fell. Her hair did, too. The air cleared, breathable and crisp once again. Lauren yelled for Brian. Well, it was more like a croak at first because she had all that sand in her mouth. She staggered forward, calling his name louder and louder as she ran all around the dune. He didn't answer. Like I said, Lauren was an uncertain person, but eventually, she landed on a horrible gut-wrenching uncertainty. Brian was gone.

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Now, there are a few things you could do when a person disappears. Look for them, call the police, and file a missing person's report. Get in touch with friends and family and ask if anyone has heard from them. Lauren did all those things. And when none of them helped solve the mystery of Brian's disappearance, she organized a search party. For a whole weekend, dozens of beaver residents combed the dunes. Now, this park is almost 600 acres. 300 of those are dunes. There's also a playground, a lake, hiking trails, and campgrounds. It's not small, is what I'm saying. You might guess where I'm going with this. No one found Brian or any sign of him. Doing something helped Lauren, though, because it was practical. It was a way to avoid the crushing confusion of it all. The lightning, the sand, the air, and of course, Brian. One minute, he was there saying he loved her. The next, he was gone. And maybe he wasn't coming back. That's the problem. That word. Maybe. Because there weren't any answers available for Lauren. It was an astounding mystery, which was driving her nuts. Anyway, the search party wrapped up.

Folks went home. Lauren didn't know what to do with herself, so she sat there on the tomb where Brian had vanished. She put her head in her hands and cried. After she had exhausted herself from sobbing, she heard someone clear their throat. Lauren flinched. It was their neighbor, Terry. He looked apologetic for scaring her. He'd been searching alongside everyone else and wanted to stay behind to ask if anyone had told Lauren about this place, the park, and the strange things that happened there. Well, no, Terry. They sure as hell hadn't. And he could tell by Lauren's bewildered face that they hadn't. So he filled her in, talking in a roundabout way, of course, because Terry was a relentless talker. But eventually, he got to the point. Brian wasn't the only person who had vanished in the dunes. Not even close. According to Terry, folks had been going missing in this place for years. There was a little girl a few years back, a family of five before that, and probably many more that no one knew about. Outkast, loners, folks who wandered into the sand and never wandered out. No one knows where they went.

Just poof, gone, like Brian. Lauren felt her whole body go numb. Her cheeks burned. Listening to Terry made some fierce adrenaline kick in. Not that anything he was saying cleared things up for her. If anything, the more Terry spoke, the more turned around Lauren got. Still, she managed to ask Terry the only question that mattered. Where did they go? Terry had no idea. I mean, he had some theories or rumors. Some thought there was a serial killer on the loose, but he disagreed with that. More likely it was something otherworldly, an alien abduction, an ancient evil, or, and this was Terry's favorite, a portal to another world. Because legend has it, these kinds of disappearances have been happening for centuries, dating back to the European colonizer days. Apparently, a Spanish expedition in the many hundreds got warned about this place by the Indigenous folks of Oklahoma. The explorers didn't listen. They wandered into the dunes, searching for gold, and more than half their party banished into thin air. The survivors spoke of green lights, sand moving on its own. A deep, aching feeling of dread. Well, that was a familiar sequence of events for Lauren.

She tried swallowing, but it felt like knives. Her throat was so dry. There were too many questions and not enough answers, which meant Lauren got to agonize about a multitude of possibilities. Brian was murdered, abducted by aliens, swallowed by a portal, or a simpler whore. He left her Lauren didn't say bye to Terry. She didn't thank him. She had no idea when he left because after he said his peace, she just looked out into the dunes. Her thoughts raced faster than she could keep up. The sun set, but she barely noticed that either. The desertscape around her settled into that bluish Moon-led expanse. This view was romantic when Brian was there. Now it's downright eerie. The dunes looked like the curved backs of hungry beings, lurking in the darkness. Maybe they were. Maybe that's what happened to Brian. A sand monster ate him. Days passed, then weeks, then years. Eventually, folks stopped looking for Brian. He became an eerie legend, the newlywed who evaporated into thin air. Then people stopped talking about him at all. He eventually disappeared from their memories, too, just like all the others had been lost in the dunes. Lauren vanished, too, in a manner of speaking.

She retreated from the world because without Brian, she didn't know what to say or do. She was stunned by indecision, so she got stuck in this loop. Every week on a Saturday, she'd pack the same picnic: wine, cheese, crackers, spicy corn. She'd go to the same dune and waited there until the sun set, hoping to see Brian or a clue that could lead her to some answers. When you're in a loop like this, time doesn't pass in the same way. Everything becomes this mysterious fog. And in Lauren's case, the fog was filled with endless wondering, unrelenting questions and theories and posits. The kind that kept her up at night made it impossible to work or socialize. It was an agonizing way to live. All that's to say five years went by in a flash. That October, on the anniversary of Brian's disappearance, she did what she always did, brought the spread of spiced corn cobs and crackers and cheeses, sat on the dune atop a checkered blanket, and watched the sunset. It was vibrant that evening, reds and oranges mixing together and all that. It felt special, like the sky was celebrating this anniversary. Then she noticed something on the horizon, a cluster of darkness in the middle of the sand.

It was moving and glowing. A bright, abrasive green light flashed over and over, coming from that cluster of black. Lauren stopped breathing as she watched it move closer. Her stomach flipped when she finally saw what it was. Figures, but not people. They had green skin, black eyes, and long poles in their hands. Lauren felt tears prick at her eyes. Her whole body went rigid. Because she guessed she was finally going to learn what happened to Brian, and it wasn't going to be good. Running was safer. It was smarter, but Lauren couldn't move because as much as she wanted to get away from these things, she also wanted to understand what they were and what they did to Brian that night five years ago. While Lauren was paralyzed by indecision, those freaky greenies picked up their pace. Their strides ate up the sand beneath their feet until finally, they gathered around Lauren, black eyes bearing down on her. Except up close, Lauren could see there was a shine to their eyes. The sunset's mesmerizing glow bounced off them, reflective like goggles. They were goggles. And up close, she could see their green skin was cakey and mad, like makeup.

The flashing lights, strobes around their necks. These weren't sadistic aliens. They were people dressed like them. Lauren watched as they all lowered their goggles one step forward and asked Lauren if she was there for the portal. Okay, so apparently there was a group of folks in Beaver who believed in Terry's portal theory. They thought it was an alien portal, specifically, and they came to the dunes every five years on the day they thought the thing opened. They were adamant about this. Around the same October weekend, every half decade, folks went missing. Flashing lights were seen, movement in the sand where there was no wind. They'd never seen it themselves. But here's hoping. These folks went on their way soon after. They wanted to set up their watch site on the other side of the park where the campgrounds were. But listen, this group wasn't important. It was what they said that factors into our story here. See, all their talk about a portal got Lauren considering it as a viable theory, which gave her a bit of hope. A portal meant that Brian wasn't dead. He was just elsewhere. And they said the portal opened every five years.

This was the five-year anniversary of his disappearance. It was because of all this that Lauren stayed in that park. The sun set, the stars came out. A chill settled in. Lauren shivered, put her jacket tied around her. She'd done this time and time again, but tonight would be different. The moon hung overhead full and vibrant. The stars appeared around it. Then she heard it. A soft slide of sand. Her heart rate picked up because just like five years ago, there was no wind. Lauren staring into the ether, pulse racing. Whatever had taken Brian all those years ago, it was coming again. She'd waited for this, an answer to that horrific lack of closure, a desperate need to know what happened to Brian. But she was scared, too, because what if this portal was deadly? Then again, she wasn't sure it mattered. She hadn't really been living since Brian went missing. Wasn't it better to know than to continue to exist with this desperate, aching sense of uncertainty? Then she heard the sand move again. Except this time, it sounded off. That's because it wasn't coming from below her like last time. It was coming from behind her.

Then something grabbed her shoulder. That, my friends, was me. Guilty as charged. I didn't mean to scare her, of course, and I had no idea what I'd interrupted. After hearing this story, I was feeling a little of that wrong time, wrong place energy. This probably wasn't somewhere I wanted to linger. Before I could finish that thought, Lauren's head jerked towards the sands. She went still once again. I followed her gaze and saw something that made me go rigid, too. The moon lit up the sand below just enough to see that it was moving, grains sliding all over, undulating all on their own. No wind, no critters. It was the only movement in this place because the stillness had descended over the dunes like all signs of life had fled. It was then that I understood what Lauren had been talking about, the dread that built up in her when the air went thick that night. I understood this because it was happening again. It was hard to breathe like a soggy summer on the East Coast, but it wasn't humidity exactly. It was like the oxygen was being sucked away, a receding tide. Then a bolt of deep, viridescent lightning cut through the sky.

It was just like Lauren said, the color was all wrong. A rancid green, like something in the air had gone foul and rotten. It happened again, and I felt something tickle my ankles. Sand rising up around me. I heard Lauren gasp, and I saw why the air was whippling. The scenery behind it contorted and churned, then separated. A tear in the fabric of the world. A deep black envelope of nothing opened up, surrounded by that wretched, flashing green. A portal right there in the dunes of Oklahoma. I'll be damned. Lauren started towards it, then stopped, then walked another pace, then stopped again. She was shaking real bad as she turned to me. Her eyes were wide. She asked, What do I do? I couldn't help Lauren make this choice. It was too personal. Only she knew if she could exist in this world with a question mark hanging over her head, and if that was worse than whatever lurped in that hole. This was a big, big choice, right or wrong. It had to be hers. I said as much, and Lauren Lauren staring at the holes churning abyss. The sand continued to rise around us.

The air felt impenetrable. I was wheezing. So was Lauren. But a determined look crossed her terrified face. She told me she was going Inside. I watched her head towards the portal. The green lightning flashed around us, illuminating her with a sickening glow. Before she stepped inside, she called to me, said she'd yell out what she saw loud as she could. Then I'd know she was in there. That way, I wouldn't have to wrestle with the ugliness of ambiguity. I nodded, said I'd wait here, and she could turn back anytime. She smiled and shook her head. She couldn't. Then she stepped forward into that gaping shadowy sliver. She did not come out on the other side. The sand wept up then, catching me in a swirling tornado. Grains pelted my face, squeezed their way into my eyes and mouth. Through my cracked lids, I could see the green lightning flash repeatedly, five times. Then I heard something I'll never forget. Lauren's voice, high pitch and full of a deep, rattling terror. She said one word, death. There was silence after that. The hole closed up. The sand settled. A breeze spread across the terrain, an actual one that kicked up the dunes in a normal way.

And me, I took off as fast as I could. I wish Lauren hadn't told me her story that she hadn't called out that single spine tingling word. Because you know what? I was someone who could live with a question mark. In fact, I might prefer it. I'd go on to meet my brother. I'd be kind. I'd tell him about our dad. But before I did, I was going to warn him about Lauren and the door to death she walked through. Because he should know there are worse things in this world than uncertainty. Runfool is a production of Ballon Studios, Campside Media, and Atwell Media. It is hosted and executive, produced by me, Rodney Barnes. This episode was written by Kate Murdoch and produced by Abicar Adan and Lee Mangistu. Editing by Abicar Adan. Sound Director, Designer, and Mixer is Kevin Seaman. Creature vocalization by Célia Anderson. And artwork by Jessica Clauxton-Kyner. Production support by Jeremy Bone and Cole Lacassio. Special thanks to our operations team, Doug Slawin, Ashley Warren, Sabina Mara, and Destiny Dink. Executive producers at Ballin Studios are Mr..

Ballin, nick Widders, and Zack Levit.

Executive producers at Atwill Media Media are Will Malnadi and Rosie Garren. Executive producers at Campside Media are Matt Sher, Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriades, and Adam Hall. Thanks for listening, and see you next week.