Weekly Short Story: Window by Bob Leman

I've read my share of stories about windows or portals into other dimensions and seen enough of the same on TV and in movies...Bob Leman's 1980 short story Window is another one.  It appears in the anthology Donald A. Wollheim Presents the 1981 Annual World's Best SF (DAW Books).  I can't discuss this sixteen-page story without giving way much of the ending, so if you're planning on reading it you're probably better off stopping here and coming back afterwards...

In Window, our military is working with some scientists on a secret project.  The most eccentric of these scientists, Culvergast, has a research station out in a remote woods clearing.  News of a most extraordinary development reaches Gilson, a skeptical government official, and the colonel on duty informs him further and takes him to the site.  He can hardly believe what he sees: in the place where the research facility once stood is a cubical extraction of another place, with its own weather!  In the middle stands a Victorian-style house much like those of the late 1800s.  Reeves, an assistant working there, reveals that there is a family living there, but they can't see out to our world.  Anything crossing the barrier between that zone and "normal" reality is instantly cut off and never seen again...with one exception. For about five seconds every fifteen hours, a hole in the barrier forms through which objects from our world can successfully pass through.  Threatened with the prospect of outside scientists and officials coming soon to interfere in the project, Reeves desperately flings himself through and lands on the other side.  Funny, turns out that the people living there aren't really people at all as we would define the term: they transform into vicious carnivores, attack him, and eat him in front of Gilson and the other horrified observers...

The story reveals that Culvergast had been researching telekinesis and seemed to have come up with the principle that underlies this ability for those practicing it.  He then tried an experiment which went awry, causing his disappearance and the presence of the now-terrifying creatures.  I will leave the very end of Window, which has elements of apocalypse to it, for you to read if you're still interested in it after all I've revealed.  I got two things from this story: one, when you open up a doorway into a new, strange place whose nature is largely unknown to you, you're also opening up a doorway from that place into your own world...this type of venture carries with it consequences.  Two, a lot of us are revolted at the site of a predator chasing down, catching, killing, and then tearing into its prey...but that's how creatures survive.  We try to separate ourselves from this brutality by compartmentalizing the farming, slaughtering, and butchering of our food, but we're no different from the monsters in Bob Leman's story in the end.  And does being a vegan really change all that, I wonder...