Behold the Void

by Philip Fracassi

  13:22:02... 13:22:01... 13:22:00...

  There was sound coming from the intercom. Breathing, I thought. Heavy breathing. And... giggling? Like my parents were playing a game. I almost smiled, but realized that it didn’t make sense. Not at all.

  “Hello? Can you hear me?” It was Mother’s voice again, coming through the intercom. There was light static, her voice sounded far away, thin and nasally. Like she was transmitting from the moon. I felt frozen. I forgot to breathe. “The red intercom light is on in here, so I think you can. Honey, if you can hear me, I need to tell you something. Listen carefully, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said out loud, even though I knew she couldn’t hear me.

  “Your father is in here. He’s... he’s hurt. But I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me. It was an accident. I’m...”

  There was a pause, then a scratchy sound. It sounded like whispers.

  “I’m fine. I’ve turned back and I’m okay. So it wasn’t that. He had an accident. He came in, and he fell, and he hit his head. He needs a hospital I think. Okay? You understand?”

  I yawned, looked desperately at the blank monitors. I waited, hoping they would turn back on. The light, I realized. There’s no light.

  Mother’s voice came again, louder, as if her mouth was pressed right up to the microphone. “Baby,” she said, her voice a harsh whisper. “I need you to open the door.”

  * * *

  Later, I went up to the kitchen to look for food. I was upset, confused, but also hungry, and so very tired. Sleeping on the couch had been uncomfortable, and I had woken a bunch of times to the sound of Mother’s horrible pleading, demanding voice.

  I thought about calling Father’s friends. The men who had taken Mother before we built the room, who had handled her. But I didn’t want to call them. I just needed time to think. A man made his own decisions. Even the hard ones.

  I split a bagel, put it on a plate and into the microwave, heated it for thirty seconds, then slathered peanut butter on both open halves.

  There was half a jar of orange juice, and I poured myself a tall glass.

  I felt better. I chewed on the sticky bagel, washed it down with cold juice, and debated my options.

  I knew what Father would say. Father would say to let it ride. Wait for the gas. The gas would kill them both, and then I would be safe.

  I would also be alone.

  I have no other family. No relatives. I don’t go to school. I have no friends from the neighborhood. My parents give me lessons every day, teach me science and mythology, math and languages.

  There was no one to turn to. No one at all.

  I finished breakfast and went to get dressed.

  * * *

  The basement was cold, and I was bored.

  It was late afternoon now, almost a full day since Mother had been locked inside. Time was running out.

  I sat at the desk, watched the timer ticking down. 03:34:46... 03:34:45... 03:34:44...

  The intercom had been silent, the cameras showed nothing, the monitors black as empty space. Anything could be happening inside the room.

  On one hand, my parents could both be alive and well. Trapped, perhaps injured. But themselves. It was possible.

  Or Mother might have turned, and not turned back. It usually took at least a day before she became herself again. But there was always the possibility it would be forever. I couldn’t trust her not to pretend. Not to trick me.

  I watched the timer. My stomach rumbled. I was about to get up and find more food when Father’s electric voice came through the intercom.

  “You there, Son?”

  I froze. My mouth went dry. My eyes fell to the top of the desk. I was angry, anxious, scared. I ran a finger along the grooves in the tired old wood. My spine was itchy.

  “I’m okay, Son. I was... hurt. I’m still hurt, but I’m awake now, and feeling better. Much better in fact.”

  Father’s voice sounded ragged, his words coming too fast. His breathing was heavy. Irregular, he would say. Abnormal.

  “Listen, I have a feeling our time is growing short in here. I don’t... according to my watch, anyway, I’d say we have only a few hours until the gas releases. Is that right?”

  I looked at the timer. Getting close now. And it’s almost my birthday.

  I was having a hard time thinking, my brain felt fuzzy, and I was so very tired. I rested my head on the desk, my ear flat against the rough wood, feet kicking air.

  “Son. Please. We’re fine. We...”

  More whispering.

  “Your mother is still restrained. The keys... I don’t know where they are, but your mother is still restrained. And I’m hurt, not badly. But… I’m okay, you understand?”

  I slipped down from the chair, walked to the room’s steel door. I pressed my ear against the cold metal and listened, but I could only hear the sound of my own blood rushing through my ears. I closed my eyes. My blood sounded like waves, like wind. Like the inside of a seashell.

  I banged a fist against the door. Once, twice. Father’s voice came screaming over the intercom.

  “That’s right! Oh, thank god! Son, listen, you need to turn off the gas. Do you understand? Or...”

  Mother’s voice interrupted him. Loud, insistent.

  “Do you want us to die, baby?” she said, sounding more and more like the eagle, high-pitched and scratchy. “Do you want to be alone? If you don’t open the door, we will die. We will die and you will be totally alone. I don’t mean to scare you but that’s the truth. Please, do you hear me?”

  Then there was silence. They were waiting.

  I couldn’t think. I didn’t want to think anymore. I didn’t want this to be happening. I’d never felt more alone. I pressed my palm against the cool steel door. I didn’t want to make any hard decisions, didn’t want to be an adult.

  I missed them so much.

  I laid down at the foot of the door, curled into myself, and cried.

  * * *

  There is no time now.

  I’ve waited, watched the timer tick slowly down.

  00:02:13... 00:02:12... 00:02:11...

  There is no way to stop the gas other than the green box. Opening the door, I know, will not stop it. The only way to stop it is by turning the little knob and resetting the timer, or shutting if off completely by flipping the small black switch. I take a deep breath. My decision is made.

  I have no intention of stopping it.

  I walk away from the table, cross the chilled air of the small basement toward the steel door, toward the room.

  There is loud pounding from the door at the top of the stairs. Men yell savage curses.

  I look to the stairs, toward the yelling. There must have been another fail-safe I didn’t know about, one that alerted Father’s friends. For a brief moment I panic, then relax. The door leading from the basement to the house is locked, reinforced, bolted. No one can get in without breaking it down, and it’s thick, solid. It would take time, and tools.

  I take a deep breath. My parents have been quiet for the past hour or so. Waiting, I know. Hoping. I don’t know what’s inside the room. I have some ideas, some possible outcomes, in my mind.

  Mother, hideously pale skin streaked with blue veins. Anger and flaring nostrils, yawning jaw. Her teeth, her eyes...

  Father, poisoned by her, but alive. Reborn in monstrous flesh. Waiting, biding his time. Pacing frantically, his amped-up nerve endings flexing for the very first time, the air around him feeding energy into his altered bones, his sensitized flesh. A six-foot-tall rabid dog.

  If I open the door they will run at me, grab me. Tear me apart.

  But I imagine other options.

  They are lying in there dead. Human or monster. Maybe half-turned. Maybe half-eaten.

  Or maybe the room is empty.

  Or maybe the room is gone.

  What do I believe?

  I want to believe it will be my parents, alive and human. Just Mother and Father, tired, perhaps injured. Hu
ngry not for flesh but for freedom. Air, food, water. They will run to me and hug me. Kiss me on the face, wipe away my tears, rub my back soothingly. Sing to me at night. Take care of me. Protect me.

  Everything will be like it was, and we will be together again.

  Once I open the door, once I go inside...

  I put my fingers on the smooth black panel that releases the heavy bolts of the lock. My face is burning, there is a throbbing pain behind my eyes. The men scream and pound. I can’t wait for the end. I’ve been counting down the numbers from the screen in my head.

  ...sixteen...fifteen...fourteen...

  I’m tired, but I smile. I’ll be thirteen soon. I will change. One way or the other.

  ...nine...eight...seven...six...

  I hear the faint sound of frantic scratching on the other side of the door. I can hear it through the steel. Desperate, monstrous. My parents clawing for life, maybe. Or something else. Something I haven’t thought of.

  I love them so much.

  ...three...two...one...

  I push the large black button, feel the click of the release vibrate up my arm. Metal slides on metal, the heavy door hisses.

  I pull it open. The room is pitch black. Silent.

  I step inside, ready for whatever waits.

  There’s a shushing sound. The darkness is total. I move deeper into the room, confident.

  It’s almost my birthday.

  Something moves toward me. I lift my chin, spread out my arms.

  No matter what comes…

  I close my eyes tight.

  …I will be a man.

  Mandala

  PART ONE

  The Cove

  Clouds parted like curtains, revealing the Earth beyond.

  Two boys ran along the crest of their world, a blue expanse filling the frame to the left, acres of tall grass and country lanes to their right. The sun hovered carelessly in its early morning position, waiting with eternal patience for the Earth to continue its steady rotation, a slow-spinning blue ball in a forever dark sky watched by a gaseous, uncaring god a hundred million miles away. You could almost sense the sun stifling a yawn as the two children ran madly, bronzed mini-gods of summer. They yelled and whooped and jumped, pleaded for more energy, dared the heavens to try and slow them down.

  They reached their destination. A small, tight cove tucked into the rocky beachline, no more than twenty yards wide and fifty yards in length from beach to the main body of ocean. A tadpole-shaped inlet that had only one easy entry point—by land, anyway. The sea could access the cove anytime it pleased, and it liked to do so on a regular schedule.

  Yes, the tide. Regular as the sun and kept in check by that other heavenly body, the moon – the sun’s ugly, pale, pock-marked sister. She was a wicked old thing, the moon. A prankster if there ever was one. Liked to pull and tug at mankind. To make waves. Made men crazy when she was at the height of her powers, her full breadth shining like a hot silver dollar; controlled the comings and goings of the massive bodies of water that covered the blue planet; made animals howl and witches eager to conjure. Brought werewolves to blossom, if one believed such things.

  The little cove was as subject to the moon’s desires as the rest of the world. Every twelve hours or so the ocean would swell in toward land, fill the cove with the first high tide, the water reaching five or six feet high, pushing against the circlet of heavy rocks that surrounded it.

  And that’s just the first go-around.

  The next time the big blue lady comes for a visit, you can tack on a few more feet to that last number. Like clockwork, she fills back in again. Comes in nice and slow, obeying the whispering moon hiding off-stage, behind the Earth’s blue atmosphere, whispering to the water, commanding it while smiling on her dark side, the side she hides from the sun god, the side she hides from man. When the moon is at full strength, the ocean pushes in even more, filling the cove nearly halfway up the rickety, rust-patched steel staircase built many years ago into the base of the steep, horseshoe-shaped rocks. That’s a tidal range of more than eight feet from low-to-high. But then, like a lover’s sigh, the water drains out once more, offers low tide, which likes to show you a bit of coastal leg. There’s even a fingernail of sandy beach spilled from the walls of jagged rocks when she’s pulled herself completely out. But there’s always a next visit. Always.

  And so came the two boys, huffing and bare-chested. They stopped at the top of that steep metal staircase and looked down at the tiny harbor below, saw it was low tide, the water retreated back into the body of the great ocean, mad currents jerking beneath the surface like frenzied eels beneath a giant’s flesh, waiting on the moon’s command to thrust itself forward once more, in toward the rocks.

  “Let’s swim,” said Mike, a blonde haired boy with blue-gray eyes. Mike was small for his age, but wiry and fast like little kids often are. His hands were on his knees, catching his breath from the run. His bare feet were itchy from the clumpy grass of the high beach that crested the stretch of water. Both boys came out in suits but forgot towels, an absent slip of the mind Mike would greatly regret in the hours to come.

  “We already swam back by my place,” said Joe, a little bigger and heftier than Mike, wispy brown hair to match his eyes, a small belly that would grow and absorb his chest in later years. “That’s a way nicer beach, anyway.”

  Joe was not Mike’s best friend, but he was his best summer friend. Driven more by geography and circumstance than by any real bond, similarities of personality, or interests the two boys shared. But when you spent a month or more at a summer house, and the only other twelve-year-old within ten miles was the kid who went to the same school as you did and had a passing knowledge of baseball trivia, you played the hand you were dealt. Or you played alone.

  “Fine. What should we do?”

  Mike was hoping it was nothing stupid, because stupid ideas were sort of Joe’s specialty. Typically, they were ideas that tended to get one or both of them in trouble or—as happened a few summers ago—badly hurt. Joe had the particularly dumb idea of skateboarding down a water-cratered driveway that was steeper than the first hill of Mike’s favorite roller-coaster, the Blue Devil at Cedar Park. Mike had gotten away with a couple scrapes, but Joe had broken two fingers and banged his knee hard enough that it swelled up like a blackened baseball. Mike’s father figured there was no point grounding him since Joe could barely walk, and so the boys spent the next three weeks of summer playing every half-ass, pieces-missing, raggedy-box-topped board game they could get their hands on. Joe’s dad, a state trooper, who was always on call even during holiday, and whose interaction with the boys seemed constrained to steely glares and the occasional grunt, chastised Joe briefly but shrugged it off as a “boys will be boys” moment.

  So when Joe’s eyes brightened, Mike almost groaned out loud at the mischievous look twinkling in their brown centers.

  “Let’s do cops and robbers,” he said, and although Mike thought it a bit silly-sounding, he was also relieved. Plus, part of him was interested in making up a game where he might get to shoot Joe a few times with a finger gun.

  Mike shrugged, feigned indifference. “I guess. How do you wanna do it?”

  Joe thought a second, tapped his chin dramatically, then brightened. “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. We’ll switch. I’ll be the robber first, you be the cop. When you catch me, you get to put me in jail and it’ll be your point. Then I’ll be the cop and you have to try and get away from me.”

  “Or shoot you first,” Mike said, catching on.

  “Right. And you have to admit it if you get shot, no crying about it.”

  “Fine.”

  Joe turned and started to walk back toward his house, a red-paneled country house with a wraparound deck and a cool attic with a window facing the sea. Joe and Mike would huddle up in that attic sometimes, sneeze the dust out of their noses and play poker with imaginary rules, betting buttons and nickels, clothespins and whatever else they could find on f
orgotten shelves and inside musty boxes. Mike’s house was much smaller, almost a cabin, really, but he didn’t use it nearly as often as Joe’s family used their home. Mike and his dad usually only stayed about four weeks before they’d start going a little stir crazy. The beach town, a ten-minute drive away, had little to offer other than swim shops, bars, and a diner that usually closed by eight o’clock every night. There was once a bookstore, their stock mainly used paperbacks, that they’d visit when he was younger and his mother was still alive, but it had since closed down, the owner having sold it a few years past. Mike made a point to seek it out last year when he and his dad made their initial supply run after opening the place up, hoping the bookstore might have magically returned, a banner reading UNDER NEW OWNERSHIP hung over the shop’s front window. Much to his disappointment, last summer it had reopened, but as a tourist shop filled with knick-knacks, keychains and t-shirts that read DOVER POINT across their chest in ugly orange and yellow.

  “Where are you going?” Mike asked, running to catch up to his friend, who was walking fast, bony tanned elbows pumping, his brown mop of hair bleached hazel from constant exposure to the sun.

  “Just going into town for supplies, Tex!” he yelled over his shoulder in a fairly standard drawl, and though Mike felt the line was a better fit for Cowboys and Indians than Cops and Robbers, he fell, unquestioningly, into pace behind his best summer friend.

  * * *

  Mike waited outside Joe’s house, beating his fists in rhythm against the wooden rail that ran the length of the porch, the heat already beginning to warm his skin. He figured he should get sunscreen from home, but it was a hike back to the cabin and his dad might be busy. He told Mike at the start of the trip that he’d be holed up a lot, writing an article for some big medical magazine. His dad was a surgeon, but the last few years he’d done more studying than operating, trying to create an “academic profile,” whatever that was. Mike thought his change in focus was something else. Something that happened when his mom died. Like a switch in his dad’s brain had been flipped off, turning out the lights in the part of him that was driven, that cared about the world. He was still good to Mike, still loving, and tried to be there for him, but even during those times—at a soccer game or out for pizza or playing a hand of cards together—there was a pervading absence about his attentions, an emptiness in his smile. Mike sensed he was faking it most of the time, pretending to be happy, pretending to love his son, careful to say the right things. Fake fatherhood.