by Ian Rogers
The last was deemed the most likely explanation . . . that is, if Cooper really did have a brain tumour. The jury was still out on that one, and would be forever. His remains had never been recovered.
“Nobody knows what happens when those suns come up,” Fydenchuck said. “All we know is that when the sky starts to turn pink, then it’s time to pack your bags and get the hell out of there. If you want to kill yourself, you run a warm bath and find a dry-cleaning bag, or you swallow a bunch of sleeping pills. You don’t travel out to the borderlands of death and say, ‘God—or whoever—please take me!’ I don’t buy it for a minute.”
“Maybe that’s why he did it,” Klein said in a low voice. “Because it wasn’t a sure thing.”
“Please.” Fydenchuck shook his head in annoyance. “Cooper was a romantic. He thought he was Christopher fucking Columbus. He wanted to stand importantly on the shores of Death and look off into the distance as the suns come up. Well, he did it, and he paid the price for it.”
Stanton nodded at the remote control in Klein’s hand. “Play it again, Sam. But kill the sound, if you would.”
“Yeah,” Fydenchuck said, sliding down into his seat. “I don’t need to hear that broomhead screaming. I hear it enough in my dreams.”
“Take a knee, boys.”
Fydenchuck and Klein got down on one knee. Stanton stood over them, holding his helmet in the crook of his arm. They were on the dais in the broadcasting chamber. The seal door was maglocked and the air had already begun to change. There was a charged calm in the air, like the buildup before a powerful thunderstorm.
In a solemn voice, Stanton recited: “O Lord, guide us through the shadow lands which lie before us.”
“Lord, guide us,” Fydenchuck and Klein said in unison. Their voices were a soft, hissing murmur inside their face masks.
“Show us the truth of your design, the mortal coil, the ribbon of life and death.”
“Lord, show us.”
“Keep us from the rifts between us until the time of our natural end.”
“Lord, keep us.”
“And bring us home safely.”
Stanton extended his free hand and Fydenchuck and Klein covered it with one of their own.
“Lord, bring us home,” they intoned.
Stanton put his helmet on, locked it in place, and flashed a thumbs-up at Finley standing at one of the gallery windows.
He pressed a button on the back of his gloved hand and Bill X’s frequency thumped into life. An electronic heartbeat. A death knell in stereo surround sound.
The three men activated their transmitters.
The sky was a deep, velvety blue. The landscape was dark and featureless in every direction.
Klein unholstered his telemetry wand.
Fydenchuck took out his little shovel.
Stanton watched them for a moment, then looked off toward the bleak horizon. He stared at one spot for a long time. He took the Zeiss-Ikon binoculars slung over his shoulder and raised them to his eyes. He adjusted the focus-knob, stared a bit longer, then lowered them. He cleared his throat, and spoke into the hands-free microphone that was recording the audio portion of this trip (video was running, too, but for reasons unknown, it didn’t always turn out).
“Looks like we’ve got something on the horizon,” he began. Fydenchuck and Klein looked up from what they were doing.
“It appears to be a dome-shaped structure. Can’t make out any external features.” He added: “Going to get a closer look.”
They stared at him for a long time.
“All right, boys, let’s go for a little run.”
They stood up but they didn’t run. They were loaded down with too much equipment, including the thirty-pound oxygen tanks strapped to their backs. But they went along at a steady trot, their breath hissing loudly through their respirators.
Ten minutes later they stopped to catch their breath. The dome-shape was closer now and more clearly defined: it was the same cobalt blue as the soil that Fydenchuck so assiduously took samples of. Except where the soil was rough and gritty, the dome was as smooth as a freshly laid egg.
Stanton started off again, and the others followed, keeping pace a few steps behind him, their eyes staring fixedly ahead. They reached the dome and walked slowly around its circumference in a tight group, almost stepping on each other’s feet in their subconscious need to stay close together.
The dome was about forty feet tall, Stanton judged, and about the same in diameter at its base. He looked over at the others. “What do you think?”
Fydenchuck shook his head. “Could be a natural formation, I guess.”
Klein shot him a cynical look. “Give me a break. We’ve been to dozens of rifts and never seen any formations, natural or otherwise.”
“It’s dark over here, in case you didn’t notice. Maybe we just never saw anything until now.”
“You don’t think this is unusual?” Stanton asked him.
Fydenchuck shrugged. “It’s weird, but everything over here is weird. There’s no wind—no air currents of any kind. Somehow I find that weirder than this.”
Klein looked at his wrist computer. “Neural frequencies are breaking down.” He looked over at Fydenchuck. The young man’s face had paled considerably in the last few seconds. “Station’s going off the air, and fast.”
Stanton glanced at his chronometer, then turned his eyes up to the sky. It was growing lighter at an alarming rate. It was like watching a nuclear bomb go off in slow motion.
“This is new.”
“I hate new,” Fydenchuck said, a little frantically. “New is highly overrated.”
“Agreed,” Klein said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“All right,” Stanton said, “I guess this concludes our broadcast . . .”
He was cut off by a sharp cracking sound. It seemed to come from all around them, loud enough to make all three men fall on their knees and clutch their heads in a futile attempt to block it out.
“Go!” Stanton yelled. “Break transmission now!”
He looked over at Klein and Fydenchuck. He blinked and they were gone. He pressed the button on the back of his glove, and just before he shifted, he looked up at the dome and saw where the sound was coming from.
The perfect smooth curvature of the dome was marred by a long jagged crack.
Klein and Fydenchuck were sitting on the floor of the chamber when Stanton appeared on the dais.
“What in the sweet hell was that?” Fydenchuck said, taking off his helmet.
“I don’t care,” Klein replied. “So long as I don’t hear it again. It felt like my skull was being split open.” He put a hand to his head, as if to make sure it was still there and in one piece.
Stanton stepped off the dais. “I don’t like it,” he said.
Fydenchuck glanced at him. “What’s to like?”
“That dome . . . how quickly the suns started coming up . . .” He shook his head. “I can take one surprise, but not two.”
“What do you think it means?” Klein asked.
“I think it means something’s changed,” Stanton said cryptically. “Something big.”
Before Klein could ask him to explain, Finley came in, his lab coat billowing out behind him. “What happened? What did you see?”
“No video?” Stanton asked.
“Nothing. Not even static. Bill’s condition deteriorated unexpectedly fast.”
“We noticed,” Fydenchuck said shortly.
Finley was about to say something when the intern’s frantic voice came over the chamber intercom.
“Dr. Finley,” he said, “I’m getting some extremely unusual telemetry up here.”
“What is it?”
The intern’s voice squeaked over the intercom again.
“Receiving! We’re receiving!”
All heads turned to the dais. At first it seemed as if nothing had happened. Then Stanton saw it. H
e thought it was an optical illusion at first, one that confused the eyes until the brain finally caught up and made sense of it.
There was one more shadow on the dais than there should have been.
Staring at it, Stanton thought of Peter Pan and his runaway shadow.
That’s what this is. A runaway shadow.
Except that wasn’t entirely accurate, he realized, as the shadow took a soundless step forward. It turned to acknowledge the four men staring at it in silent awe.
It was a shadow person. A three-dimensional silhouette.
“What is it?” Finley rasped. He turned to Stanton with an almost accusatory look. “Did you bring it back with you?”
Stanton ignored him and took a tentative step forward. “Cooper?” he said. His voice was tentative, too.
The silhouette turned to face him. It seemed to consider him for a moment, and then slowly shook its head.
The shadow person walked over to one of the other experiments—a vase of flowers standing atop a stone pedestal. It extended a hand that looked as normal as anyone else’s except that it was jet black, and ran its fingers delicately across the petals. They immediately curled and blackened and turned to dust.
“What is it?” Finley repeated.
The shadow person backed away from the pedestal. It looked almost chagrined.
Stanton had a pretty good idea what it was, but he didn’t say anything. They’d been exploring death for so long they thought it was a one-way street. They were wrong. Now the shoe was on the other foot. The rifts had responded to their unspoken challenge. The proof stood before them. Death had sent its own explorer.
Stanton took a step toward the shadow person. He wondered if the others would ask the same questions of him they had asked about Cooper. Was it a death wish? Was there something wrong with his brain? Or was it just plain curiosity, that desire to push the boundary, to reach out to something wholly new and wholly alien.
Another step forward. They were less than twelve inches away from each other. He thought about all the patients waiting beyond the corridor, waiting for death, waiting to see what was on the other side in a way he would never be able to until his own ticket was punched. Six inches now. The emissary’s hand moved. Stanton waited.
VOGO
There’s nothing to do in Moose Paw on a Friday night. Ryan suggested driving over to Chelmsford—he knew a girl who could hook us up with some weed—but Alex shook his head, which immediately nixed that idea. We were cruising in Alex’s car, and even if we weren’t, he was our unspoken leader.
“I’m not going to chance getting busted just for some shitty Ontario green.”
“Then you pick something,” Ryan groused.
“I will.” Alex put one finger to his lip, like he was thinking deeply, and that made me spit out the beer I had just sipped. I had snagged us a couple six-packs of Bud from my old man’s beer fridge. Alex turned his head and looked at me thoughtfully. I thought he was going to punch me in the throat for spilling beer in his car, but he grinned instead.
“We’re going to steal a boat.”
We headed down to the docks and found a rowboat no one would miss for a few hours. After frigging with the knot for a few agonizing minutes, Alex finally cut the line with his Swiss Army knife and told us to hop in.
Ryan and I each took an oar and we paddled out onto the lake. Alex sat back and barked orders at us. “Row, droogs! Row!” That’s what he was calling us lately. He was on a Clockwork Orange kick. Said it was the funniest movie he’d ever seen.
By the time we reached the middle of the lake, Ryan was already whining about going back. “I don’t like it out here,” he said. “It’s too dark!”
“Don’t be such a nancy,” Alex snapped. “What are you afraid of? Vogo?”
We laughed, perhaps a bit too hard. Everyone in town knew about Vogo, although I didn’t know anyone who’d ever seen him. Sometimes a tourist passing through town would take a picture of something he claimed to be Vogo, but it always turned out to be a log or an otter. There had been no major sightings since the 1950s. If there ever was a Vogo, he was long dead.
We sat in the middle of the lake for the next couple of hours, finishing the six-packs (Alex called them our “stores”) and watching the moon make its way across the sky.
It’s hard to describe what happened next. I want to say something came up out of the water, but that’s not exactly what happened. One moment our boat was bobbing in the water, and the next a great silvery shape came rising up next to us. Breaching, I guess you would say, considering the size of the creature. It was as big as a whale, but that’s where the similarity ended. I didn’t know what it was. I’d never seen anything like it.
It had a long, tapering neck, which I at first took to be a tentacle. Then it turned toward us. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. A long silvery appendage with two coal-black dots on the tip. Then they blinked and I realized they were eyes. I had never felt so small as I did at that moment, sitting in that boat, out in the middle of the lake, on that dark night. So very small.
The creature continued to rise out of the lake, as if in slow motion, leaving the water long enough for us to see the fins on the sides of its luminescent body. Each one was as big as a man. Then it came back down, like a shimmering torpedo, and disappeared into the water.
That’s not the strangest part, though.
Whatever it is that lives in Hob’s Lake—Vogo, I guess—I don’t think it’s alive.
You see, the creature that rose up next to our boat never disturbed the water, not even a single ripple. And when it left the water, when it hung for a moment in mid-air, I could see the moon.
I could see the moon through its body.
THE CAT
Brenda said the dead mouse was normal.
“They’re always doing stuff like that,” she said. Her voice sounded cool and calm, but John could tell by the look on her face that it still grossed her out. “They bring back dead animals to show that they’re protecting the family. It’s how they show love.”
“Fair enough,” John said. “But remind me never to let the cat make us dinner.”
He looked down at the big, lean tabby, standing in a wide bar of sunlight coming in through the kitchen window. The tabby looked up at John for a moment, then began licking his paw and using it to bathe the top of his head.
“What are we going to name him?” Brenda wondered aloud.
“I don’t know,” John said. “Nothing stupid like Patches or Muffin. Something original—but not too original. We don’t want people to think we gave the cat some deep and meaningful name just as a conversation piece. I hate people who do that. There is such a thing as being too clever.”
“You’ve never had that problem, babe.”
John ignored the jibe. “Grey cat . . .” he said thoughtfully. “How about Thunder?”
“How about Greybeard?” Brenda said.
“Maybe we should let Sally name him.”
“If you do that, the cat will definitely be named Patches or Muffin.”
John turned to her. “I thought she was still going through her angsty-teenager stage.”
“She is,” Brenda said, “but she’s focused mainly on skipping meals, staying out late, and hating her parents.”
“She doesn’t hate us.” John looked concerned. “Does she?”
“It’s normal. She’ll grow out of it.” She looked down at the cat. “How about Hunter?”
“As in ‘hunter-gatherer’? How about H.G.?”
“H.G. Wells?”
John winced. “That’s getting into deep-and-meaningful country.”
“How about just plain Wells?”
John tilted his head side to side, weighing it over. “Not bad.”
“You’re taking this awfully serious. I mean, it’s just a cat.”
John frowned at his wife. “Cut me some slack. I’ve never had a pet before. My parents didn’t eve
n let me have a goldfish. Do you want to give it some stupid name like that mutt next door?”
The neighbours in question were Dave and Petra Robichaud. They owned a Chihuahua that weighed perhaps five pounds soaking wet—and that included her pink glitter collar. Her name was Rambo.
Brenda giggled. “God no.”
John sighed. “This could take awhile.”
They stared at the cat as it continued bathing itself in the sunlight.
The next day the cat—still unnamed—left a dead bird on the back porch.
Three days after that, he left a dead garter snake.
John started keeping the dust-bin and a garbage bag next to the screen door.
One night a week later, John woke up to the sound of a dog yipping outside their bedroom window.
The sound cut through his head like a band saw. It was those high-pitched barks that could probably make a man sterile if he listened to them long enough. Cheaper than a vasectomy, he thought drowsily.
The dog continued barking. It went on and on without taking a breath. John recognized it as the not-so-dulcet tones of Rambo the Wonder Mutt.
He rolled over and looked at the clock on the night stand. 4:07 AM. That was just great. He had to be up for work in less than two hours. Fucking Rambo. Why didn’t Dave or Petra take her inside? How could they not hear that? Were they so tuned out to that yapping that they could actually sleep through it undisturbed?
The answer: yes, apparently so.
John let out a heavy sigh and turned on his side. Brenda was still asleep, her breathing soft and even. John felt a strong urge to wake her up. Misery loved company, didn’t it? He reached out to pinch her arm and—
Something landed on the bed.
John almost screamed; his mouth fell open but nothing came out.