Big Dark Hole

by Jeffrey Ford

  Harry advanced gingerly to kick it into the ditch, only 50 percent sure it was dead. As he inched closer, one of the three tentacles popped up and, quick as a blink, shot a golden seed into his forehead. It happened too fast for Amy to see it. A moment later, one flew out and hit her in the forehead as well. He staggered backwards toward the cab of the pickup, and she reached for him from the passenger seat. They both knew the instant the golden seed entered their heads, breaking a tiny hole in the skull and burying itself in the gray matter, that they were somehow transformed. The universe whirled in his mind’s eye—planets and stars and clusters, weaving in and out and around, spinning like a top. In her thoughts the ground leaped up into her through her shoes. As she reached out to touch his shoulder, the two of them turned to pink dust and blew away.

  Eight minutes later, the thing was at the side of the truck. It lifted the empty clothes of Amy and Harry and inspected the pockets. In them, among other things, it found a cheap pen, the lighter, a peppermint candy stuck to the lining, a sapphire necklace. It kept the necklace and the lighter. Using its tentacles as hands, it tossed the remainder of belongings into the cab. It scuttled away through the snow, bullet wounds slowly healing beneath the action of a laving ten-inch sky-blue tongue that darted from the lipless hole in front. As it moved and healed, it inserted both the gun and the necklace into another large, lipless hole, only this one in the rear. It shoved two tentacles into two face holes and moaned low through its back hole. A second later there was an audible popping noise and the pickup vanished, snow filling the place it had been.

  The creature travelled on through the night, drooling, burbling, scuttling. It moved through the storm. It moved across a field, its tracks being slowly covered, and rested in a windbreak of trees. Snow swirled around it, and it was cold. Its bottom half, dragged through every snowdrift on the way, was frigid, but the thousand legs never ceased moving. Tentacles wiggled and swooped through the air like escaped fire hoses, and it sharpened its concentration on the circle of blue within the circle of black. In among the towering white oaks, the sun now up and shining in a blue sky onto pure white, the creature found a comfortable spot and fell over, face-first.

  The wind swept in among the trees and rearranged the snow to cover the gray meat package. A week later it thawed out and then proceeded to lie there beneath the trees, in the weeds, a platform for insects, a curious scent for coyotes. Seasons upon seasons passed—sun shining, rain falling, snow blowing, leaves turning. Its tentacles eventually rotted off and broke down to the point where field mice could chew them, and they did. Its thousand legs went to sod, like so many miniature cigars left out in a downpour. When the temperature climbed, gleaming liquid drizzled out and left a lavender crew-cut moss growing across the ground. The spot was so peaceful and quiet, just the wind passing through the leaves of the old trees and the padding of squirrels along the boughs.

  In the midst of a very virulent spring in which the beetles made lace of leaves and yellow flowers grew throughout the thicket, there came without warning a sudden blip of air from the creature’s back hole, and a mote of an idea was loosed into the atmosphere. That minuscule pink dot caught the wind and was up and out over the field in a moment. As insignificant as it seemed, it contained multitudes, the information for a command that upon contact with a human’s nasal lining would download into the host to be run. The virus replaced DNA with strands of alien-spun sugar and initiated through mitochondrial transcendence in the host the conception of a story.

  The virus instructed the subject to tell a long, involved tale in a certain manner, with a certain rhythm, tone, and character. In fact, the host had no choice but to perform the story for a listener the way its programmers intended. To begin listening to it meant that one couldn’t stop. They became infected with it and were able to tell it exactly the same way as the initial host. When that story ran in a mind for seven days, all thoughts became irreparably corrupted and seized like a pickup engine run out of oil. The imagery of the story toppled and jumbled and choked the byways of thought till all became less and less unto nothing. Even the merest notion stalled, withered, and died.

  Don’t worry, this story isn’t that story. The reason you know it isn’t that story is because in that story Becky never got her necklace. In this story, she does. Here’s how it happened.

  Becky was in her mid-40s by then, married with three kids, all girls. Five nights after Christmas, she woke up around 2 a.m. to find a strange man standing at the foot of her bed, holding a lit cigarette lighter in one hand and proffering forth a sparkling necklace with the other. She cleared her eyes, believing it a dream, but there he was—a stooped old man with straggly white hair parted in the middle. He was dressed in a threadbare jacket and trousers with cigarette holes in the lap, zipper half open. She was instantly numb with fear.

  The intruder leaned forward toward her from the bottom of the bed, whispering, “We are not without mercy. Take what is yours.” The third time he said it, Becky nudged her husband and said, “Tim, Tim, there’s someone in the room.”

  He pretended to still be asleep but slowly snaked his arm up the side of the nightstand and slipped his hand into the second drawer from the bottom. He got a grip on the gun and once it was firmly in his hand, he lunged upward, spun, and squeezed off five rounds. Three of them hit the old man and sent him sprawling against the closet door. One had taken out his eye, one shattered his chin, and the third was a bullseye to the Adam’s apple. He slumped down into a sitting position, croaked, “Mercy,” fell into a dream of the peaceful spot beneath the white oaks in the soybean field where he found the lighter and necklace the voice in his head demanded he retrieve. He fell into the lavender fuzz that spread across the ground and passed through to the next world.

  The police reported the break-in at Becky and Tim’s place as a burglary. A week after the medics had come and carted the old man’s body away, a police officer who’d arrived that night to answer the 9-1-1 call Tim had made as the gun smoke cleared, showed up at the front door. He had the necklace and lighter and was returning them, assuming they had been stolen by the intruder that night. Becky liked the looks of the necklace so she went along with his scenario and figured she might as well get something out of the horrible incident. Tim wasn’t home, which was good, because she was sure if she tried to lie to the officer in his presence, he’d have corrected her that the items weren’t theirs.

  Before he left, the officer told her something about the “perpetrator,” as he called the burglar. “That old guy just basically disintegrated over a period of a few days. I mean a body usually sticks around till they can find relatives and bury it, but not this perp. He came apart like overcooked salmon. Just rotted away in the morgue drawer. The guys down there told me they’d never seen anything like it. Said he stank to high heaven.”

  “Right,” said Becky, not really wanting to listen to descriptions of the demise of the horrid old pervert. The officer had more to say, but she wiggled her fingers at him in a casual goodbye and shut the front door before he could go on. That afternoon, she wore the necklace without the slightest idea it had been made specifically for her years earlier. While she sat drinking a cup of coffee, staring through the sliding glass door to the backyard, she noticed the sapphire pendant of the thing had begun to glow a deep-space indigo.

  She was astonished when a blue beam shot out of the precious stone and projected a moving image on the glass door. If she could have, she’d have gotten up and run, she’d have ripped the necklace off, she’d have screamed although the house was empty. As it was, though, she was paralyzed. All she could do was watch. The scene through which she could see the white oak and the garden and shed was of a kindly looking old man with white hair and a white walrus mustache. He wore khaki pants, sandals, a V-neck sweater, powder green, with a short-sleeved white shirt under it, and he could have been the nicer brother of the man who’d broken into the house.

  He s
at under a tree projected upon the glass just about where the real tree could be seen through it. “Greetings,” said the old man and smiled. “Call me Uncle Gribnob. I’m appearing to you in a familiar form so as not to frighten you. I’m here to offer a sort of explanation as to why your planet is being invaded and your species is being wiped out. We’re not without mercy. We thought you deserved an explanation. Just keep your peace for a few minutes while I explain and then feel free to ask questions. I’ll answer anything you like. Do you understand? You may nod if you do.”

  Becky nodded.

  “OK,” said the old man. “Here’s the long and short of it. We take no pleasure in wiping your kind out. It’s not usually our way. We’re doing this for the greater good of the universe. Somebody has to do it, and since we’re the most culturally and morally advanced and have the most cutting-edge technology, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to do the deed. Believe me, it’s not without the consent, no, approval, of the other civilizations. Even the reptile people were unanimously for it.

  “You see, we’ve all had to deal with your kind before. And what I mean by your kind is, you have a distinctive aberration in your minds that can’t be healed or manipulated or fixed. And that one small mistake, that single knot in the works, so to speak, makes your species so dangerous. We’ve seen the results. You’re not sophisticated enough yet to be a problem to the universe at large, but who wants to let things get to that point?

  “Your defective brains persist to insist, with a faulty mathematics that makes your error magically vanish, that the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter is an endless number. You no doubt had heard of pi in school? The ratio, in reality, is simply three, but your lack of sense dares to claim it is a number with endless decimal places. It would be funny if it weren’t for what we know peoples who have this deviant pycho-structure are capable of. How can anything be endless in a limited universe? Dangerously delusional. So we’re going to ease you out of existence. Questions?”

  Becky could barely follow what had been said. She thought she was having a stroke or that Tim had dropped a hit of acid into her coffee before he left for work. All she managed to get out was, “What can I do?”

  “Well,” said Uncle Gribnob. His image wavered in and out. Finally he vanished from the glass, and she could see clearly into the backyard where the wind was blowing end of summer leaves. The necklace continued to glow and his voice continued to sound in her head. “You can do me a favor and listen to this story.”

  She did and that night at dinner she told it to Tim and the kids. Becky noticed her younger daughter’s eyes shone with pleasure at the descriptions of gunplay. A few days later, the whole family shut down within a few hours of each other, and a few days after that the alien squadron drifted in for a landing at the Home Depot parking lot.

  The Bookcase Expedition

  I started seeing them during the winter when I was at death’s door and wacked out on meds. At first, I thought they were baby praying mantises that had somehow invaded the house to escape the ice and snow, but they were far smaller than that. Minuscule, really. I was surprised I could see them at all. I could, though, and at times with great clarity, as if through invisible binoculars. Occasionally, I heard their distant cries.

  I’m talking about fairies, tiny beings in the forms of men, women, and children. I spotted them, thin as a pin and half as tall, creeping about, running from the cats or carrying back to their homes in the walls sacks full of crumbs gathered from our breakfast plates. Mostly I saw them at night, as I had to sit upright in the corner of the living room couch to sleep in order not to suffocate. While the wind howled outside, the light coming in from the kitchen illuminated a small party of them ascending and descending the dunes and craters of the moonscape that was my blanket. One night they planted a flag—a tattered postage stamp fastened to a cat’s whisker—into my knee as if I was undiscovered country.

  The first time I saw one, it was battling—have you ever seen one of those spiders that looks like it’s made of wood? Well, the fairy had a thistle spike and was parrying the picket legs of that arachnid, bravely lunging for its soft underbelly. I took it all in stride, though. I didn’t get excited. I certainly didn’t go and tell Lynn, who would think it nonsense. “Let the fairies do their thing,” I thought. I had way bigger problems to deal with, like trying to breathe.

  I know what you’re thinking. They weren’t a figment of my imagination. For instance, I’d spotted a band of them running along the kitchen counter. They stopped near the edge, where a water glass stood. Together, they pushed against it and toppled it onto the floor. “Ya little bastards,” I yelled. They scattered faint atoms of laughter as they fled. The broken glass went everywhere, and I swept for twenty minutes only to find more. The next day, Lynn got a shard in her foot, and I had to burn the end of a needle and operate.

  I didn’t see them constantly. Sometimes a week would go by before I encountered one. They watched us and I was certain they knew what we were about in our thoughts and acts. I’d spotted them—one with a telescope aimed at my nose and the other sitting, making notes in a bound journal—on the darkened porch floor at night when we sat out wrapped in blankets and candlelight, drinking wine and dozing in the moon glow. I wondered, Why now, as I trundle toward old age, am I granted the “sight” as my grandma Maisie might have called it?

  A few days ago, I was in my office at the computer trying to iron out my thinking on a story I’d been writing in which there’s a scene where a guy, for no reason I could recall, just disappears. There’d been nothing strange about this character previously to give any indication that he was simply going to vanish into thin air. I couldn’t remember what I’d had in mind or why at some point it had made sense to me.

  The winter illness had stunned my brain. Made me dim and forgetful. Metaphor, simile, were mere words, and I couldn’t any longer feel the excitement of their effects. A darkness pervaded my chest and head. I leaned back in my chair away from the computer and turned toward the bookcases. I was concentrating hard not to let the fear of failure in when a damn housefly the size of a grocery-store grape buzzed my left temple, and I slapped myself in the face. It came by again and I ducked, reaching for a magazine with which to do my killing.

  That’s when a contingent of fairies emerged from the dark half inch of space beneath the middle of the five bookcases that lined the right wall of my office. There was a swarm of them like ants round a drip of ice cream on a summer sidewalk. At first, I thought I wanted to get back to my story, but soon enough I told myself, You know what? Fuck that story. I folded my arms and watched. At first they appeared distant, but I didn’t fret. I was in no hurry. The clear strong breath of spring had made of the winter a fleeting shadow. I saw out the window—sunlight, blue sky, and a lazy white cloud. The fairies gave three cheers, and I realized something momentous was afoot.

  Although I kept my eyes trained on their number, my concentration sharpened and blurred and sharpened again. When my thoughts were away, I have no idea what I was thinking, but when they weren’t I was thinking that someday soon I was going to go over to the preserve and walk the two-mile circular path through the golden prairie grass. I decided, in that brief span, it would only be right to take Nellie the dog with me. All this, as I watched the little people, maybe fifty of them, twenty-five on either side, carry out from under a book case the ruler I’d been missing for the past year.

  They laid the ruler across a paperback copy of Angela Carter’s Burning Boats. It had fallen of its own volition from the bottom shelf three days earlier. Sometimes that happens; the books just take a dive. There was a thick anthology of Norse sagas pretty close to it that had been laying there for five months. I made a mental note to, someday soon, rescue the fallen. No time to contemplate it, though, because four fairies broke off from the crowd, climbed atop the Carter collection, and then took a position at the very end of the ruler, facing the book
case. I leaned forward to get a better look.

  The masses moved like water flowing to where the tome of sagas lay. They swept around it, lifting it end over end and standing it upright, upside down, so that the horns of the Viking helmet pictured on the cover pointed to the center of the earth. The next thing I knew, they were toppling the thick book. It came down with the weight of two dozen Norse sagas right onto the end of the ruler opposite from where the fairies stood. Of course, the four of them were shot into the air, arcing toward the bookcase. They flew and each gripped in the right hand a rose-bush thorn.

  I watched them hit the wall of books a shelf and a half up and dig the sharp points of their thorns into dust jackets and spines. One of them made a tear in the red cover of my hard-back copy of Black Hole. Once secured, I noticed them hitch themselves at the waist with a rope belt to their affixed thorn. I’d not noticed before, but they had bows and arrows, and spools of thread from Lynn’s sewing basket draped across their chests like bandoliers. I had a sudden memory of the Teeny Weenies, a race of fairies that appeared in the Daily News Sunday Comics when I was a kid. I envisioned for a moment an old panel from the Weenies in which one was riding a wild turkey with a saddle and reins while the others gathered giant acorns half their size. I came back from that thought just in time to see all four fairies release their arrows into the ceiling of the shelf they were on. I heard the distant, petite impact of each shaft. Then, bows slung over their shoulders, they began to climb, hand over hand, using the book spines in front of them to rappel upward.