A/N: Rated mostly for language and violence at the moment, but may include sexual content later. Warnings for graphic scenes and specific triggers will be placed at the top of applicable chapters. Rating will change if the content goes in a direction that calls for it.

Any reviews are appreciated, all critiques/criticisms/suggestions for improvement are accepted and considered. If you spot any typos, misspellings or grammar mistakes, let me know! I try to fix anything that slips through my proofreading.

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Suzanne Montgomery couldn't help but wonder what, exactly, was so wonderful about garage sales. She had never felt compelled to traipse around in someone's driveway in the middle of the summer, dripping sweat and haggling over broken lamps and cross-stitch samplers. Great-Aunt Agnes absolutely loved them, and since she was blind as a bat and eighty-seven, someone had to take her. Suzanne got stuck with it because she wasn't quick enough to invent something she just couldn't get out of doing.

It was hot. It was muggy. Her hair was frizzing and her skin was uncomfortably damp, but the wrinkled sack of bones that passed for Aunt Agnes moved through the piles of useless junk with as much youthful vigor and spry energy as she'd ever possessed. They had already collected an ugly poodle lamp, an uglier kitten cookie jar, and the ugliest orange and olive argyle sweater Suzanne had ever seen.

Aunt Agnes clutched an unpainted garden gnome in her hand, the bare wood grain giving the thing's scrunched-up little face a nearly demonic look. "You see, Suzanne, this is what your generation is lacking."

"Gnomes?" Suzanne asked, trying to seem interested.

"No, no, no. Quality American construction. Back in my day," she drew out the last phrase in a way that sort of indicated nostalgia, "we made our own shit. None of that Chinese crap you kids want now-a-days." The declaration was punctuated by an aimless wave of her cane.

"Do they make Chinese garden gnomes?" Suzanne paged through a stack of cookbooks, looking for something at least vaguely useful.

"Probably," Aunt Agnes muttered, as she inspected a pillow embroidered with lumpy butterflies.

Suzanne was bored out of her mind and getting ready to leave when she spotted a small but very thick, heavily battered leather book, sitting askew on the table. Casually she picked it up, flipped it open to somewhere in the middle; there were a few paragraphs of neat cursive handwriting on aged paper. On the next page was a rough sketch of what appeared to be a cross between a squirrel and a panda, and on the next a tight grid of random numbers. The binding was loose, and a few leaves threatened to fall out entirely.

There was no price on it, but she felt that perhaps she had found something... worthwhile. At the very least it appealed to the eccentric in her, as it didn't make any sense at all; fun and random was what garage sales were all about, right? She spotted the owner straightening up a rack of clothing not too far away.

"Excuse me, how much is this book?"

The woman looked slightly irritated. "Fifty cents, just like the others."

Suzanne smiled widely. "I'll take it, then." She fished around in her pocket for change.

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That night, after dropping Aunt Agnes at Silver Creek Leisure Home and stopping by the local 7-11 for a slurpee, Suzanne sat in her bedroom. She was not-really-watching TV and flipping through the book. It seemed to have belonged to someone named Roger Borrowman, who got the thing in 1924 and liked to write a lot of paranoid nonsense.

The first page began with "I've been noticing a lot of strange connections lately, and thought it good to set them all down in case I forget them," which didn't exactly scream mental clarity. It went on to detail how "strange people" had been "coming and going in the wood behind the butcher's", and by the fifth page, he had decided they were "involved with the government, of course".

On the tenth page, he described finding something rather odd in that little wooded area back behind the butcher's: a man in a black suit sitting around, doing nothing, for several hours. When he'd returned the following day, the man was gone, and instead there sat a different man in a grey tweed suit.

The next page was mostly blank, except for a set of tiny numbers in the very middle, in faded blue ink: 34 10 40 10 26

Suzanne stared blankly at it – was it a lock combination he wanted to remember? – then moved on. There was a rough map sketched out: a road, some sort of flowing water, a large square for a building, then an X some ways away.

Then a series of completely blank pages, five or six; then, in an excited and messy scrawl: "I have found it. It was difficult to get into, but I stepped through and have found the greatest discovery in mankind's history.

I have found another world."

She couldn't hold in a snort. The guy was either crazy or the whole book was some weird little joke. Bored with it, she flipped it closed and tossed it on her desk.