Behold the Void

by Philip Fracassi

  He was so relieved he didn’t notice that the lifeguard hadn’t leapt down, hadn’t run to the locker room to save his sister.

  He had also not heard the lifeguard speak, so great was the distraction of his sister’s danger. He never heard the words, “Sweet Jesus,” come out of the lifeguard’s mouth, right before the world opened and hell broke free.

  Under the water, young Tyler saw something his brain simply could not process.

  There was a hole. A hole in the bottom of the pool. And now, now that he saw it, he noticed long, jagged black cracks running from each side of the hole, like thin tentacles, racing to the far-off pool edges.

  As he stared at the hole, currently no bigger than a softball, it fell inward upon itself, widening its mouth to over a foot across. Tyler could actually feel the suction of the water as it raced downward... down to where? he thought.

  With his arms and legs he pushed away from the ever-widening darkness, but not so far that he couldn’t see, not so far that he would miss whatever was going to happen next.

  Martha sat upright when she heard the whistle blow. Once. Twice. Quick, staccato bursts. She took off her sunglasses, looked toward the sound.

  My god, she thought, when did it get so dark? She looked up and saw the gray, ominous storm clouds above, resurfacing the sky. A cumulonimbus cloud city, as if seen from the bow of an approaching ship, she recalled, a fragment from a story she read long ago, in a different life. She shook when she heard a low, deep rumbling coming from the clouds... thunder?

  She rose to her feet, suddenly anxious, suddenly wary. She searched and spotted the young lifeguard who had blown his whistle. She waited to see if he was going to dive into the pool, save someone.

  Gary, she thought with a stabbing panic. She took two steps but then saw Gary standing under the lifeguard stand—a small frail boy looking up at the blond lifeguard who wasn’t looking back at him. Gary was crying, she saw that. Had he fallen? No, he was scared. Terrified. A mother knows.

  Abby. She tensed again. What the hell was going on? The lifeguard was staring at the pool, his eyes wide in shock. She looked at the water, expecting to see a floating body, a cloud of blood, something horrible, something to give her nightmares.

  “Gary,” she said out loud to no one. “Abby,” she said as weakly, as inconsequentially.

  She saw that a few of the children were screaming, splashing away from... something. Something in the middle of the pool, she couldn’t see. Other parents were yelling now, waving for their kids. Another lifeguard, this one much closer to her, blew her whistle and yelled something, the panic obvious.

  Martha watched with wonder, stupefied, senseless. The children in the water were flowing in a circle, their arms thrown out toward their screaming parents, flailing to swim to the edges of the pool.

  How are they moving like that? she thought. A few adults were running and then—at that moment—instinct took over, and she darted toward her son, not noticing when she knocked down another woman who was kneeling and tugging at her hair; not hearing the new screams, the screams of terror that were replacing the sounds of life like a spreading fungus, like the way the clouds had stretched across the once-sapphire sky, a gray-fisted storm consuming the sun.

  Gary turned toward the water, saw only twisted shapes of peach and brown stuck within a smeared pallet of blue. The world was blurred with his tears.

  Tyler was spinning now, dizzily so, along with eight or nine other kids. A couple of them, he noticed as he spiraled around, were laughing. He tried to turn his body away from the whirlpool as the water drained, but was suddenly jerked backward, as if a giant invisible hand had grabbed him around the midsection and tugged.

  His body twisted and he was underwater. He clamped his mouth shut, saving breath. There was a chaos of limbs and bodies. He noticed with no sense of wonder or shame that one boy’s suit had come off, the bright yellow cloth sucked down into the hole like the last inch of spaghetti when you sucked it into your mouth, something he used to do as a game when his parents took him to the Olive Garden on the occasional Saturday night outing.

  The swirling current held him tight as he circled and he couldn’t breathe but was holding his breath okay, for now. He saw the water wasn’t all that blue anymore, not by the hole, not by the funnel. It was dirtier, like parts of what was below were mixing with the water. He saw a large boy, likely trying to impress his friends, actually swim toward the hole. He was within a foot when he went headfirst into it as if yanked on a rope. The suction was tremendous but it abated as the boy’s large body got wedged in the gash, his legs kicking, his torso beyond sight. Blood spat upward from the jagged edges of the hole, mixing with water and dirt as the boy thrashed wildly, as if he were being eaten alive by something down below.

  Tyler, feeling the pull of the current lessening, ripped off one of the blue wings keeping him afloat, then the other. He let them go, watched them swirl away, then kicked as hard as he could for the surface.

  He broke free and the world exploded into his senses. Rain poured from the dark sky and it seemed the air itself was screaming, the cries of kids and parents reaching a crescendo of terror. As he gulped in oxygen he saw kneeling bodies lining the pool, arms reaching inward. One lifeguard dove into the water, began swimming toward them.

  Tyler began kicking for the edge, hoping the body of the boy jammed into the crevice would hold a few moments longer.

  Gary heard laughter behind him. He turned and saw Ted and the fat kid leaving the locker room. They were alone. Ted was tying the string of his suit, a giant smile on his face. Both of them walked to the edge of the pool and looked in. Ted, not realizing who Gary was in relation to the violence of what he had just done, nodded toward him.

  “The fuck’s going on?” Ted said.

  Gary looked at the swirling water, then at the two kids. The big fat kid with the cow eyes looked nervous now as he stared at the siphoning water. No, he looks scared, Gary thought. Scared enough to shit himself.

  “Not sure, you should check it out,” he replied evenly, raising his voice over the screaming of children and the parents ringing the pool, some of whom had dove in, frantic to reach their own. “Unless you’re scared,” he said.

  Ted looked stunned for a moment, then laughed loudly. But the big dumb kid backed away, his eyes never leaving the dark funnel of water in the middle of the pool. Without a word, he turned and walked. After a few steps, he was running.

  “Pussy!” Ted roared after him, then took a step toward Gary, meeting his eyes. His smile was gone, and for a moment Gary thought he was going to say something to him. But then he just smiled that dangerous smile, and jumped in. Gary watched calmly as Ted waded deeper into the pool, then began swimming hurriedly toward the center.

  The wind was picking up, whipping Gary’s hair. The rain fell harder. Thunder rumbled overhead, high above in the pulsing deep of the gray heartless sky.

  Gary heard the locker room door open and close behind him. He did not turn around.

  Tyler swam harder than he’d ever swam in his life. The effort seemed impossible. He reached for the edge, now only a few feet away. The pull at his legs was strong once more, and he felt as if he were kicking in thick, heavy syrup. It had nearly exhausted him. He looked up, panting, saw a man he didn’t recognize. A stranger. The man was wearing sunglasses with yellow-tinted lenses. He was bearded and had a large, black head of hair streaked with gray. He stretched a hand toward Tyler.

  “C’mon kid!” the stranger yelled. “Grab my hand!” Tyler lifted an arm out of the water, reaching.

  Behind him came a sound like a crack of thunder followed by a whoosh sound, as if all the life and energy around him had been snatched away by God's hand. The world went mute.

  Tyler spun around one last time, hoping to see a glimpse of his mother’s red suit, her face...

  He didn’t see her, he couldn’t see anything but water and terror and chaos. He tried to scream but water filled his lungs and he was sucke
d backward and down.

  The hole had opened.

  Gary watched blankly as the funnel in the pool fell open into a black abyss. He saw the willowy underwater forms of two kids get simultaneously sucked through the dark drain of the whirlpool and disappear. He looked up at the lifeguard, who stood rigid, motionless, his mouth slack and open.

  What had only moments ago been slowly drawing children toward it, creating a whirlpool effect, had torn completely open, like someone had punched a hole in a bag of grain, emptying its contents in one great vacuous, volcanic downward expulsion.

  Gary could only look on in numb horror as a pretty blonde girl held tightly to the buoy-lined dividing rope. The rope—as old as the pool itself, Gary imagined—frayed, then snapped. The pretty girl yelled something to someone, a last torrent of words he could not hear, as she and the end of the rope vanished. The rest of the long rope quickly followed, the buoys slipping down into the funnel like a long centipede burrowing with naked speed through a hole into the earth.

  The air filled with the smell of thick, rancid sulfur, and Gary could not turn away as several more bodies struggling in the swirling water were simply sucked away. Down, down into nothing.

  The waterline was getting noticeably lower. The opening was now the size of a small car. Gary heard horrible cries from around him and someone knocked him down. He hit his head on a step of the hard white metal pole that held the lifeguard stand aloft and a flashbulb popped like a pistol-shot in his brain.

  Lying on the ground, he forced his eyes open. Blood from a cut in his forehead slid into one of his eyes, turning the world a blurry crimson as he tried to blink it away.

  A wave of nausea swept over him and it felt like some invisible force was squeezing down on his chest. His eyes rolled back into his head and he felt his body lift off the ground, rising into the air, higher and higher, shooting like an arrow into the sky. Or was he falling? The earth and the sky had switched places, and Gary wasn’t sure which direction he was looking anymore. Up at the pool, now so very far away? Or down at the stormy, dark gray clouds, rushing up at him from below?

  He tried to tilt his perspective, look down at the pool. He saw it now as a bird would, the entire blue rectangle, a cancerous hungry sphincter wide and open in its middle, sucking everything down into it. He watched tiny bodies disappearing into the dark. In the next instant, the hole doubled in size, devouring everything within its reach, including Ted Mattola, who went down screaming.

  Gary continued to watch from high above and, as the mouth widened, his vision sharpened. He could see, miles below the surface, a large stone slab, rough and stained. The bodies of children were splattering against it, and crouched down in that darkness was a creature, a large black beast with stiff limbs, each long and bent but quick. The creature’s elongated, twitching head danced atop its insectoid torso as it skittered from one end of the slab to the other, gathering the broken bodies of the children as fast as they were falling, enwrapping them, keeping them alive, keeping them for its own sake.

  Some of the bodies the thing caught before they struck, some he caught as pieces. Others, Gary felt sure, it was somehow pulling down from the surface, ethereal tentacles reaching miles upward to claim fragile souls.

  Gary’s stomach lurched and bile roiled into the back of his throat. He felt cold rain on his skin and felt something shaking him savagely.

  He heard his name, “Gary!” and tried desperately to open his eyes, to focus.

  His mother’s drawn face filled his vision, her expression a mask of terror and pain, madness. She clutched him to her, and he was limp in her hard, bony arms. Over her shoulder he could see the hole had doubled yet again, the waterline of the pool visibly lower as the water was swallowed, suctioned down and down into the earth. He watched as two more bodies slid away down the funnel. Some of the kids, those in the shallow end especially, were now standing on dry ground, their parents or the parents of other children holding them, clutching them tightly, lifting them out of the pool.

  Gary’s mother pushed him to arm’s length, looked at his face.

  “My god, you’re bleeding!”

  Before Gary could respond, she shook him, her eyes wide, her hair falling wildly. He noticed her suit had broken at the strap and one of her breasts was exposed. He wanted to be back in the sky.

  “Gary, where’s Abby? Where’s Abby?” his mother yelled, right into his face, shaking him again.

  Remembering his sister and the events that had transpired prior to this new madness, he turned and looked toward the locker rooms.

  Abby was walking toward them.

  Her dress was gone, but her suit was still intact. She limped slightly, Gary noticed, and had a large smear of blood on her leg and a cut on her face that leaked even more blood down her cheek and neck.

  “Abby!” Martha screamed. But Abby kept walking, calmly, her head held high. Gary thought she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. The rain spattered against her skin, the wind rippled her hair. She continued on straight, determined, taking no notice of her family or the chaos around her.

  She walked until she reached the pool. At the edge she paused, took in a deep breath. She looked downward into the maelstrom. Then, softly, she turned her head and looked right at Gary. Met his eyes.

  “Abby,” he said.

  She smiled crookedly, and gave him the Wink. Then she jumped headfirst into the pool.

  Gary heard Martha’s scream but couldn’t see if Abby had actually made it to the hole or just hit the bottom.

  He yanked himself free of his hysterical mother and, kneeling, looked down into the hole. Abby was gone.

  A few feet of water remained, and now many of the kids still moving around inside the basin had stopped, breathing heavily where they sat or stood, their parents yelling, beckoning.

  One younger boy dangling at the edge, who had been desperately holding on to his mother’s hand, appeared to simply... let go. As the churning water carried him, he turned to face the hole as he slid toward it, and then he lifted his arms. Like a waterslide, Gary thought.

  The boy disappeared feet first.

  Gary looked up in time to see his friend Billy Marks, whose birthday party was next week, the invitation for which was taped to the fridge at Gary’s house, run to the edge of the pool and leap. He didn’t quite make it to the opening, smacking against the concrete a few feet from the jagged slurping edge. There was a loud snap as one, or both, of his legs broke beneath him. The water, racing downward, acted as a lubricant for Billy, who crawled toward it, dragging a bleeding, bent leg behind him. Finally, mercifully, the water built up around him and carried him down.

  Gary felt light as air, his vision turned hazy. In his decaying vision he saw other kids jumping, diving, running for the hole. Some lay unmoving where they landed, having hit wrong, the water now so shallow. Others were caught in the remaining current and taken down. Insane mothers and fathers clutched at their children, no longer protecting them, but subduing them, holding them back, keeping them from following the others down into the abyss.

  The sounds of the world sharpened and condensed to a high-pitched throbbing tone, and Gary could now hear what the other children were hearing—that ancient voice—and he knew what lurked in the deep, gloomy below, where the voice kept house, waiting for them. He knew he was already gone, already broken, but it was sweet. So very sweet...

  Martha wrapped Gary in her arms and he jolted against her, writhing. Desperate to follow, his arms reached for the edge, for purchase, his feet kicking, the pads of his feet and bones of his ankles scraping and pushing against the concrete, smears of blood from his ripped skin mixing with the gray rain, snaking out in crimson rivulets.

  Martha screamed and held him. With everything that remained inside of her she squeezed his wet thrashing body to her naked chest and wailed into the driving wind for all that had been lost as the rain fell in torrents and the children strived for escape. The pool swallowed all those willing.
/>   The living knelt along the edge, their arms frantically reaching, screaming prayers.

  The Horse Thief

  PART ONE

  Widowmaker

  Gabino the horse thief stumbled through the large arena’s ankle-high waves of soft earth. He picked his way toward the long barn, the only light coming from a low-slung moon the color of a blood orange, sagging in the night sky as if hung from a string knotted in heaven. His steel-toe boots twinkled and the turquoise rhinestones of his broad belt buckle glittered in the half-light, otherwise he was a desolate shadow, half a mile from the two-lane road and a quarter mile from the Marshall home, where owner Will Marshall, his wife, and their teenage equestrian daughter slept soundly.

  Gabino was a short barrel of a man, with a large moustache, a bright smile, and bushy black eyebrows that his darling Mariana—God rest her soul—referred to affectionately as his caterpillars—the same caterpillars that were now slick with sweat as he huffed the last hundred yards of what had already been a considerable middle-of-the-night walk through windless, humid, Floridian air. Gabino thought of Florida as a pale, fat, sweaty old woman, baring her leg to the world like a bar dancer, her broad head crawling with the lice of her inhabitants—the old and young, poor and very wealthy, desperate, drunken and exotic. A land stripped of itself and re-laid with the locales of its patriots, every one of them creating their own tightly-woven version of the blank wet state.

  Gabino’s version of Floridian days were choked with heartbreak, heat and dust, and he damned the nights for being more of the same.

  Deep in his heart, he knew he was getting too old for thieving, but ranch work near Naples was hard to find, and the black market had boomed in recent years. He could make five hundred dollars on a mare that was of no more use than a sack of old grain, and more than two thousand on a good-sized warmblood. The nicer ones were tricky, of course—better accommodations, better security. But Gabino was careful, and he studied his targets, worked out everything beforehand. He always found horses that were stabled far from any major road and far from their owners. The large Florida ranches, like this one, a private barn that did not rent space or give lessons to rich white girls, were especially easy.