The Beginning of the World in the Middle of the Night

by Jen Campbell

  ‘People’s lives don’t end here,’ the woman said, looking puzzled. ‘There just comes a point when they hear a strange voice, and they feel compelled to follow it. They pack their bags and leave and, for some reason, don’t come back.’

  The man jumped for joy. He bought a house for his family, and wrote a letter to them, asking them to come and find him in this new, exciting place. He hadn’t seen them for years, and had missed out on most of their lives. But, he figured, if no one died in this strange place, then they had lots of time to make that right.

  They lived happily together, and many years went by.

  Then, one day, the man’s wife sat up straight at the kitchen table.

  ‘Can you hear that?’ she asked.

  ‘Hear what?’ asked the man.

  ‘It sounds like my father.’ She stood, her chair clattering to the floor. ‘It’s my father’s voice, and he’s calling me. He wants me to come and find him. Where do you think it is that he is calling from?’

  The man’s blood ran cold, as he realised Death had cheated him.

  He hurried to the front door and bolted it shut.

  He locked all the windows and smashed his wife’s phone.

  ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘This voice is a trick. You must not follow it. Just pretend it’s not there.’

  But his wife could not pretend. The voice was so loud, and her body felt so small. She cried and tore her hair. She searched for tools to break the locks. She kicked the door until her feet bled. Then she screamed and clutched her skull.

  Soon, the man simply couldn’t take it any longer, for his wife was threatening to jump from the roof of their house.

  ‘OK,’ he said, his hands shaking. ‘But please just remember. Once you’ve found your father, you must come back home to me.’

  He unlocked their front door, and his wife ran out into the evening.

  He watched her pelt across the fields … and she never came back.

  ‘Did she call for him, though?’ Mr Henderson interrupts. ‘Later, years later, when it was his turn to die?’

  ‘Yes,’ I smile quickly. ‘She came back to get him. She clasped him by the hand and whisked him away.’

  Both Trevor and Mr Henderson lie back with a sigh.

  I tuck them in, hammer in the nails, and sing a lullaby.

  Once I hear Mr Henderson breathing deeply, I open the bottle of rose-water and spray it through the air vent. I select different sounds of the sea, and put them on a loop. Then I filter these into his coffin through a secret speaker on the side.

  ‘There are different sorts of magic,’ Aunt Libby always tells me. ‘There is hope, and there is suggestion, and there is listening to the hurt.’

  I hear footsteps running along the corridor outside.

  Mr Henderson snores.

  Yawning, I make my way out of the room. Aunt Libby’s upstairs, singing badly in the shower. I find Cerberus in the kitchen, his tail between his legs.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I beckon, but he refuses to come closer. ‘Are you sulking because you’ve been left here all alone?’

  He whimpers and moans, and then hides under the table.

  ‘Have it your way,’ I tut, turning towards the window, and I jump so violently the rose-water smashes on the floor.

  Outside, in the dark, just inches from the house, are the red lights from the woods. But they’re moving on their own. They wave like a scarf. They flicker and they glimmer. They bang against the window, frantic on the wind.

  ‘Ankaa!’ Aunt Libby calls. ‘Did you leave the front door open?’

  Then there are footsteps close behind me, and Cerberus is howling, and all I can smell is roses on the air.

  Sea Devils

  We spent that summer killing crabs.

  ‘They ain’t natural,’ Tabs said, eyeing their sideways walk through her grandfather’s monocle. ‘They’re bad, see. They gotta go.’

  I took Tabs seriously. It was the way she chewed on old fishing nets, flossing all day so she’d have a smile fit to be in the movies with. I reckoned she could make it, see. Her hair was this black slate, a cloak for vampire fights, and the only reason she hadn’t sailed off to Hollywood yet was ’cause she was in love with Wayne Cross from school. He’d morphed his parents’ tractor into some kind of motorbike. Tabs said he was like a foreigner.

  We went fishing for crabs twice a week and killed like we were warriors. Rolled our trousers up, peeled our socks off and tucked ’em into our knickers. We caught the monsters, standing barefoot, hauling in our nets.

  The seaweed got stuck under our toenails and turned ’em violent green.

  ‘Wash ’em off – you’ll get gangrene,’ Tabs said, tipping a whole load of crabs into a veggie box she’d dragged along the sand.

  I stared at my feet. ‘Will it make me a mermaid?’

  ‘It’ll give you two left feet,’ she grinned, ripping an arm off the nearest crab. ‘And then you’ll have to serve drinks at the church fayre instead of dancin’.’

  ‘I ain’t good at dancin’.’

  ‘Neither are these,’ she said, kicking the box. ‘Drunken devils, all of ’em.’

  The crabs were bad ’cause they were the devil in disguise. Crabs, we’d been told by Gracie’s older sister, was a disease you got when you were bad with a boy.

  ‘They’re blue in the sea, and red when they’re cooked,’ Tabs said. ‘They’re red when they’re shown the fires of hell, see. That’s their true colours. Crabs are the devil and the devil wants us to rant and rave. He wants us to take off our knickers and lay down with him on the cliff tops. He wants us to throw out our souls like stinkin’ rubbish. And then we can’t ever go to Hollywood.’

  I nodded at this logic.

  ‘If you’re unclean with a boy, you have to drink the blood of a cat and pray for forgiveness.’

  ‘Ain’t it a bad thing, cat killin’?’ I asked. I was worried for our cat, Feda, who was out half the night.

  ‘Not in the eyes of the Lord,’ she said, angel-like. ‘Not when the blood’s for cleaning souls.’

  We crossed ourselves hard and looked to the sky.

  ‘One day, there’ll be a path, or a ship or summat,’ Tabs said, skipping along the rocks. ‘And then w’can run away, see.’ She slipped on some seaweed then and her blood was the colour of burnt anemone. She cursed and threw her face into the water, yelling down at whatever was in there. The waves swallowed the sound and changed it into bubbles. Tabs came up spitting, choking, yelling her rehearsed words of war.

  It’s hard work, see, chasing devils out of our kingdom.

  Me and Ma live two streets away from Tabs. We live in a house with Frank. He ain’t my dad though, see, my dad was a pirate – he was probably famous and everything but Ma doesn’t like to talk about it. He was killed by a sea-devil what swallowed his ship. Frank ain’t nothing like a pirate; he’s a wuss. He collects bugs – all kinds of ’em. He traps ’em, gasses ’em and carries ’em around in a mauve leather suitcase. Once, he whipped out a giant silk moth and said it reminded him of Ma.

  He spends most of his time in our greenhouse, polishing the windows.

  I reckon if our house was flooded by a sea-devil, Frank’s suitcase would swell up and pop open and all the paralysed bodies of the butterflies and luna moths and woolly bear caterpillars would drown, ’cause they don’t know how to swim good. I wouldn’t though, see. I’m the best swimmer on our street. Ma says you’ve got to know how to swim good when you live on an island.

  She says an island’s just an atom, waving at the sky.

  ‘Let’s play pretend,’ Tabs said.

  Those days never ended well.

  That time she reckoned we should play Houdini and strap ourselves to chairs – throw ourselves out from the rocks and flap our legs like dancers. Cross ourselves and whisper prayers and hope we didn’t drown.

  ‘Like them witch trials,’ she said, peeling a starfish off her bucket.

  ‘We ain’t witches, are we? ’Cause
witches ain’t good people.’

  ‘Witches is devilry,’ Tabs spat. ‘They get to wear nice clothes in movies, but in real life they’re evil-bad. Movies is where people can act out the Bad Stuff, ’cause movies is only pretend.’

  Then she made me strap her to a dining-room chair and throw her out to sea.

  The month Wayne Cross got a video camera, Tabs did a lot of Bad Stuff. She’d go visit him in the afternoons when she was supposed to be egg-collecting. She met him in the barn beside his parents’ cattle shed; told me she was halfway to Hollywood, and I was left to catch crabs on my very own, scraping all my hair up high so as to watch the tide better. Sometimes it can sneak up on you quick, see, like it’s stealin’ the crabs back into its mouth.

  I broke the crabs apart from their bodies so the devil couldn’t reincarnate. Then I lit a fire in the back of the cave with a match I’d stolen from church. God wouldn’t mind, but the vicar might, so I didn’t tell him. Crabs don’t really go up in flames ’cause the devil is resisting. They go red and then – later – they go black, like the colour of their souls. They smell bad, too, like fingers on fire.

  It was a long summer, crab-killin’. My skin got red and my hair went wild. Some days Tabs came, and some days she didn’t. When she did, she had a fire in her eyes, like she’d danced all night. She’d stopped chewing nets and started chewing tobacco. One day she said she felt butterflies growing fast in the centre of her belly and I threw the net over her head, joking-like. She rolled around in the dirt and said she was like buried treasure. Then she laughed so hard I thought she might explode.

  Mostly, she lay on her back and let me do all the work. She talked about how she was starring in films that were selling in a shop far, far away. The only shop I know of is Martha Graham’s greengrocer’s, but I kept quiet ’cause sometimes Tabs likes to play pretend. She’s full of stories, she is. A tank full up to the brim with hundreds of words that all mean different things.

  ‘My cat’s missing,’ I told her. ‘You haven’t seen Feda, have you?’

  She stared straight past me and pretended not to hear.

  ‘I’m saving up,’ Tabs said. ‘One day, I’ll swim out into nowhere, and then I’ll be everywhere, see.’

  I nodded, as though I knew what she meant. But all I could think of was dark holes and nothingness. Like when you close your eyes tight and see strange fireworks there.

  Feda had been missing for three days when I found him. It was late at night and he’d bled out from the neck. His fur was all matted, and his body was swollen. I found him floating in a rock pool down by the bay. I tried to hunt for his cat-soul but I didn’t know what it would look like. So I just patted his broken head and looked out to sea.

  One day, I thought, a huge wave is going to come. And I’m the only one who knows how to swim.

  I could hear her then, Tabs, up on the cliffs. The whirr of a video camera. Grunts in the dark. Wayne Cross angling her bones to the light. Tabs burying her way to Hollywood, smiling all the way.

  Human Satellites

  To the north-east of our galaxy, there’s a planet called The Hours.

  Time migrates there from other superclusters; it’s where atoms flee to retire.

  The Hours is composed of soundbites from across the universe. Snippets of time and space pulled in by some foreign gravity that lines them up like jigsaws.

  Like moving conveyor belts.

  Like films.

  When astronauts fly past it, their very atoms stir.

  The surface of The Hours is obscured by the half-lives and faces contained in the snippets of time and space that live there. Those flickering stories with no stars to power them. The half-lit half-light.

  They take turns showing themselves, advertising life. Creatures we can barely imagine and oceans that aren’t made out of water.

  Microbes dancing microscopically.

  The planet folds in on itself and expands, kicking at its skin like a baby bump.

  Scientists pore at the surface, taking samples to try and carbon date each square inch. Inexplicably, some pieces are from the future and so are yet to exist.

  Physicists fumble at these half-empty spaces that are not really empty, cupping the future, terrified that they will see into its murky depths and witness something that they do not want to witness. And terrified that they might accidentally alter the course of history.

  They hear butterfly whispers and disembodied voices calling to them in their sleep.

  But what is sleep? people start to ask. And there is silence.

  Back on Earth, there are banners, protests, wars to STOP EXAMINING THE HOURS. To leave the planet alone in the cosmos.

  Some things, a news reporter says, shivering outside the White House, some things are meant to be left in the dark.

  Christian sects declare that The Hours is God. Hunched up and morphing in the depths of Dark Matter.

  Some say we should run away. Some say we should go forth.

  Some start a petition to bring the planet’s water home to sell as holy water. To bathe in God. To consume him.

  The Pope launches an online campaign to send priests into space.

  A Seer says he has visited The Hours in a previous life.

  The non-religious start converting at an alarming rate.

  Celebrities talk about visiting The Hours. They bid to buy land there. The air is breathable in some parts, some of the time, some scientists say.

  There are jokes about Time Share, about Moving Into the Future.

  Nuclear bunkers are discounted everywhere.

  Astrologers band together to form a cult worshipping The Hours. They hold replicas in their hands, strange space-crystal balls that they bought online from an anonymous seller.

  Some say The Hours is the Internet in physical form.

  They say that it’s a virus and that all of us are infected.

  Google’s top one hundred questions no longer relate to anything found on Earth. Anthropologists say we have moved beyond that now.

  Some say The Hours is a government conspiracy to distract everyone from ‘problems at home.’ Journalists start asking what the word home means and where its boundaries lie, while governments bicker over who The Hours rightfully belongs to, lining up flags.

  PhD students sign up to circumnavigate The Hours: to become human satellites, so that over one thousand television stations and millions of YouTube channels can constantly stream the surface.

  #TheHours.

  Everyone watches.

  Companies flock to advertise on the side of starlit spacesuits.

  What does it want, though? a news reporter asks, huddled under an umbrella. Has anyone thought to ask it? Can it understand us at all?

  Statistics show that the world’s population is finding it difficult to sleep. People giggle-cry into their coffee. Medication costs skyrocket.

  Anti-gravity yoga classes are suddenly all the rage.

  T-shirts are being printed by the millions: IT’S WRITTEN IN THE STARS.

  The Hours Causes Cancer! headlines shout.

  The Hours: Possible Alien Life Forms To Invade?

  Some say The Hours is an optical illusion or perhaps a reality TV show.

  Some say it’s a hoax.

  Scientists sigh and shrug their shoulders, theories running round and round in orbits.

  Some say The Hours is us in the future – an us that wants revenge.

  Others say it’s an omen – that it’s the devil in disguise.

  A black hole that’s going to open its mouth and swallow us down whole.

  Bright White Hearts

  ‘The sky is falling!’ I cried. ‘It’s falling fast!’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘It’s falling into the ocean.’

  And everyone watched as the sun sank into the sea, and the moon laughed from the clouds, and the people cried until salt water came up to their chins.

  ‘The water wants our words,’ they said. ‘It can’t have them!’

&
nbsp; The alphabet ran rivers from their mouths.

  ‘Don’t fight it,’ I said, swimming between them. ‘In a past life, we were jellyfish. And just look at us now.

  ‘You’ll get used to it. Learn to float.

  Lie back.

  Take steadying breaths.

  It’s all going to be OK.’

  Welcome to the aquarium.

  I work here on Saturdays.

  Here, we like the colour blue.

  Some scientists argue that ancient civilisations couldn’t see the colour blue because they didn’t have a name for it. Then the Egyptians started to paint the sky on everything. Their blue had a luminescence, a halo. Lighting up under microscopes like fragments of outer space.

  Let’s talk about cosmic dust. As much as 40,000 tonnes of it rains down on us every year. Some of it falls from planetary rings, which would explain why I feel like I’m standing inside an orb most of the time. I stretch out my arms and touch all of the things I cannot see.

  Other people can’t see them, either. They ignore my galactic rules and invade my personal space.

  In the sea, instead of cosmic dust, there is something called marine snow. White flakes of dead fish that trickle down into the darkness to feed those below.

  Like standing out in the rain and sticking out your tongue.

  The dead skin of stars and the dead skin of Pisces.

  Hello, Aquarius.

  We are all made of starfish.

  Sometimes, people look at me strangely. They are very wary about touching the headsets I hand out to them at work, in case I’ve contaminated them somehow.

  I was born with my fingers joined together, but now they are separated. Scars scatter my hands like nets, caught by science. I’m missing some of them, too.

  Sometimes I tell people sharks ate my fingers, just to see the looks on their faces.

  I was given a written warning at work for saying that, in case customers thought that we’d broken health and safety rules.

  ‘Welcome to the aquarium, where sharks will not eat your fingers.’