by Tim Curran
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Whatever happened in Hinton. It’s here now.”
“That calls for an explanation.”
“Yeah. Later.”
“This afternoon.”
“Tomorrow morning.”
Another long hesitation and a sigh. “Shoot me those pictures. Today. Now.”
“I will.”
He put his phone away and downed the last of his drink. He contemplated a third, but a lingering shred of reason dissuaded him. The bartender’s little hyena eyes remained fixed on him.
“So what do people talk about here?” he asked.
“Black holes.”
Blair barely kept his jaw from hitting the counter. “Black holes?”
“Yep.”
“Have you seen a black hole?”
“Nope.”
Blair leaned closer, the back of his skull buzzing. “So who has?”
“Nobody who claims to have seen one ever comes back.”
He barked a laugh. “Well, I tell you what. When I find out what I aim to find out, I’m going to come back in here and have a drink. That, my young friend, is a solemn promise.”
“I could use the business.”
Two Summers Ago:
Footsteps echoed from somewhere beyond his room, and then the door burst open and four men entered, all dressed in sweat-soaked fatigues. Blair raised his hands, but they waved him down, speaking rapid gibberish that sounded reasonably friendly. At least they didn’t seem intent on separating his head from his shoulders, he thought with some relief. One man was much taller than the others and had very dark skin, but bright blue eyes. Another one carried a primitive-looking radio-transmitter set, and he sat down on the floor, slipped on the headset, and began speaking in Arabic into the mouthpiece.
The two youngest, barely past their teens, pointed excitedly out the window to the approaching storm; the tall man, however, was watching it with grim fascination. The one with the radio seemed to be having trouble reaching his intended contact and finally shut it down, giving it a disapproving frown. Then he glanced at Blair and said in halting English, “Stay there, my friend. We find help for you after the storm goes.”
Blair nodded and mumbled “Thank you,” trying but failing to suppress his escalating anxiety. Outside, the great brown smudge had grown to cover the entire horizon, and he could now hear a faint, rumbling whooshing sound that grew gradually nearer and louder.
The man who had spoken turned, picked up his radio set, and disappeared through the door, his footsteps clattering away into silence. The others continued to gaze out the window, transfixed, as the thunderous rumble grew deeper and more menacing.
Soon, Blair could see the huge wall of brown sand and dust bearing down on his window: an endless series of huge, roiling columns that ascended into the sky and then collapsed, kicking up more sand, which, in turn, grew into towers, swirling and crawling and melting into an increasingly chaotic mass. In the center of the great cloud, a huge, black oblong appeared and seemed to expand slowly, like a mouth gaping wide to swallow anything and everything in the raging storm’s path.
The two youngest men turned to face Mecca, knelt, and began to pray aloud, as if aware of the reek of evil that surrounded their little room. Their frenzied voices only added to Blair’s apprehension. The air now felt charged with some dreadful electricity, and he detected a hideous odor—a nauseating mélange of sulfuric acid, ammonia, and rancid meat.
The tall, blue-eyed man remained standing and, if anything, appeared more captivated than concerned. Ignoring Blair altogether, he stepped closer to the window and began to speak softly, so softly that, at first, Blair could make out nothing he said. The words were guttural and ran together, but when they did become more or less clear to him, they sounded like “Ee-eye-ee-eye-oh, cuckoo who’ll fool you, foe tag again, glue a gnarly toe tap.”
Within two minutes, the winds died and the sandstorm collapsed upon itself, leaving only a few slowly rising columns of dark dust several hundred yards from their vulnerable window to mark its violent passing.
Without a word, the tall man turned and left the room, while the two young Iraqis shakily rose to their feet, exchanged shocked glances, and stared out at the now-empty desert. Finally, with what he took to be pitying looks at him, they followed the tall man out the door. Once again, he was alone in some tiny chamber in the middle of a God-forsaken land, feeling as if at any moment he might be struck down by the hand of some dark, unknown—unknowable—deity.
Now:
“Oh, God. It is a baby.”
Debra’s face was chalky as she handed the camera back to him.
“And nobody cared. It took the police forty-five minutes to get there, and then they wouldn’t talk to me. No questions, no interviews, just a curt ‘go away.’”
“That’s awful. Horrible. But why do you think this is related to the other killings?”
He didn’t want to tell her that God had said so in a message, or that God was looking more and more like a spindly black dancing thing that dropped from a hole in the sky. “Well, I had an interesting interview with a bartender. Where this thing shows up, people die.”
“This thing. This thing that I can’t see. That nobody can see—except for some people a bartender told you about.”
Coming from her lips, it did sound ridiculous. “Something like that.”
“You don’t think the bartender might have been having a good one on you?”
“No.”
He went to the sliding glass door to the Afterdeck and gazed at the afternoon sky. The sun blazed behind a thin layer of clouds, but an ocean of twinkling stars glittered across the azure backdrop. Overhead, Ursa Major and Polaris looked down at him with disdain, and closer to the horizon, Cepheus and Cassiopeia danced lewdly together in the sun’s vain glare.
He snapped a few shots, wondering if the lens might deign to pick up more than it had when he’d photographed the hole in the sky. It didn’t.
Debra joined him at his side, eyeing him thoughtfully. “So what’s up?”
“Ever see a sky full of stars in broad daylight?” he asked.
“Is that what you see?”
He had never lied to her, but he could hardly stand to tell her the truth. “I wish I didn’t. But I see stars, yes.”
“So, what makes you—and those others—see things the rest of us don’t? That the camera doesn’t?”
“If I knew that, I’d know the rest of the story.”
“Are you going to write this one?”
“Just now, I have nothing to write. I am now what we officially call investigating.” He gave her shoulder a squeeze. “At least you haven’t called me a liar.”
Deep shadows surrounded her eyes. “I know you’re not a liar. I wonder about your senses, though.”
“I’d wonder too—if it weren’t for those dead. Those were no hallucination.”
She glanced distastefully at his camera and shook her head. “No.”
He turned away from her and switched on the television, flipping through several news channels to see if any of the reports struck a familiar chord with him. They didn’t. He needed to find others who had seen these things before he could start piecing together an even marginally cohesive theory. The bartender’s revelation had bemused him, but beyond that, he hadn’t been much help. But Blair at least had a location.
Eastward.
The camera’s eye apprehended the bodies of the dead, but not the black hole or the stars in the daytime sky. The dead were real, all right; they just seemed barely to register to most human witnesses.
Blair noticed that Debra still stood with her eyes locked on the sky, so intently that he wondered whether the afternoon’s stellar display had finally revealed itself to her. But when she turned away, her eyes barely held his, and her sad, heavy sigh indicated that she was vitally worried about him.
He spent the rest of the day trying to interview detectives at the Belmont D
istrict Headquarters, but after three fruitless attempts to see Lieutenant Ingram Trotter—usually one of his most reliable contacts at the department—he threw up his hands, went back to Wrigleyville, and walked the streets for two hours. With no sign of the hole in the sky or its attendant black dancer, he returned home, only to find an empty apartment and a note from Debra that she had gone out with her friend Sharon for the evening.
A night out with Sharon meant some serious commiserating, which often lasted until the following day. Chances were he would be sleeping alone tonight.
He dutifully flipped through the news channels, checked websites, every social media outlet, hoping for even a hint of some vindicating report. A story about the higher-than-usual number of random murders in Chicago and elsewhere raised his hopes slightly, but in the end, it was little more than a footnote to the major international news of the day. Then something drew his attention to the television screen during a report about corruption in the Justice Department, and his chest immediately constricted so that he could barely breathe.
A few blocks behind the cheerful-looking young woman narrating the story, a building was burning, and neither she nor the cameraman were paying it one moment’s attention. And not a fire truck or other emergency vehicle anywhere to be seen. As the segment ended, the fire appeared to be spreading, while the news crew and a dozen or so bystanders went blithely about their business.
That was in Washington, DC.
Blair shut off the television, rose from the couch, and made himself a drink, barely able to comprehend the scope of what must be unfolding out there. Then, when he glanced out the window, he saw the stars: a billion of them, their jeweled faces flashing with sinister light behind a nearly opaque layer of haze. He automatically reached for his camera, before his brain had a chance to remind him of its futility. He paused, but then took the camera from the kitchen table, removed the flashcard, and plugged it into his computer, suddenly fixated on the fact that he had not bothered to examine his photographs except via the small preview pane.
Once he had brought the images up on his monitor, he selected the first shots he had taken of the sky—which by all rights should have pictured the black-hole thing—and began to study them at various zoom levels. In one, he now saw a faint oblong shadow hovering above the distant buildings—a vague suggestion of some airborne object that almost registered but didn’t.
As if it had cloaked itself from the camera’s eye.
He brought up a more recent shot of the afternoon sky and zoomed in on the seemingly empty field of blue, only to find an abundance of scattered pixels of slightly different hue than the rest of the backdrop. Then, by meticulously tracing the patterns of some of the off-colored dots, he was able to discern the shape of Ursa Major.
It was all there. Indiscernible to anyone who wasn’t specifically looking for the signs in the sky, but there nonetheless.
A low, foreboding voice in his head told him that the source of the phenomena simply wasn’t ready to reveal itself to a global audience. But it would be. Soon.
What the hell would happen then?
A little later, he went out to the Afterdeck with a fresh martini. He saw several fires in the distance but didn’t hear a single siren.
Blair had only been asleep a few minutes when the creaking of the bedroom door drew him back to consciousness. His eyes opened only reluctantly, but when they found their focus, he saw Debra’s naked body in front of the window, limned with electric blue. She slid onto the bed next to him and leaned down so that her hair spilled over his face. She kissed him lightly on the mouth.
“Surprised to see you,” he mumbled.
“Wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“How about you? You all right?”
“I’m okay.”
“Did you cry on Sharon’s shoulder?”
“You know better than that.” Her eyes sought the ceiling. “But she …”
“What?”
“She saw something. Just like you.”
He bolted upright and gripped her bicep with a taut claw. “What? What was it?”
“Stars,” she said, grimacing. “Stars, during daylight.”
“I’ve got to talk to her.”
“Calm down. It’s late. But she’s going to come over tomorrow. You can compare notes then.” Debra delicately extricated her arm from his grasp. “She’s afraid.”
“She’s seen something else, then?”
She shook her head. “No, that’s not it. Not really.”
“Did you tell her what I’ve seen?”
“Not everything. Just about the stars. And the dead. That’s what really got to her—the dead.”
“Fires. Did you see any fires?”
She blinked questioningly. “Fires? No. What do you mean?”
“Buildings. Cars. Anything burning anywhere?”
“Not that I can remember.”
He shook his head, his eyes moving to the window. “I think we’re going to.”
“You’ve got me worried now. And Sharon … I’ve never seen her like that.” She searched his eyes for a long time. “What do you think is happening, Owen?”
“Something unprecedented.”
“What? From where?”
He inhaled deeply and caught a faint whiff of sulfur. “A very dark place.”
She pressed close to him, and he lay back, pulling her with him, cradling her head in his arms. He could hear his own heart clanging and feel Debra’s pulse thudding in her neck. Still, her presence was calming, even as blood and adrenaline raced recklessly through both their bodies.
Finally, once her hand began to move down his chest, past his stomach, and then lower, the fires in his head went out for a time.
At some point, sunlight replaced the electric glow beyond the blinds. Blair opened his eyes and found himself alone in the bed, but he could smell coffee brewing in the kitchen, and he felt a warm rush of relief to know Debra was still here. Somehow, he feared she might have gone off again.
The coffee called to him, so he tugged on a pair of boxer shorts and set out on his quest. As he entered the dining room, he was surprised to see Debra standing in front of the sliding door to the Afterdeck, her head craned back slightly, her brown eyes reflecting the ten o’clock sun.
“Christ, Sibulsky’s going to have my head,” he muttered, moving toward her, wondering what caught her interest. But he stopped as she lifted a hand and pointed toward the door.
“I see them,” she said softly. “God almighty, I see them.”
His heart lurched, but he could only watch as Debra opened the sliding door and stepped out to the Afterdeck, her eyes never leaving the sky. He felt a faint twinge of unkind amusement, for she had only been out there once before, and that was with stark terror.
But the stars in the mid-morning sky had snared her completely, and now he saw them, ten times more numerous and far more brilliant than the day before.
They must be almost right by now, he thought, wondering where that peculiar idea had come from.
Right for what?
She slowly turned to look at him, her face drawn, defeated. “I see them,” she said softly. “Are you happy now?”
For a moment, the omnipresent breeze seemed to dwindle and die, for the world went unnaturally quiet. Then, with a sharp bang, one of the bolts in the wall snapped, and one end of the Afterdeck dipped abruptly, pitching Debra off-balance. She threw out a hand to steady herself, but a second later came another bang and then a scraping sound, and the iron platform, railing and all, simply disappeared. He had been looking right into Debra’s eyes, but now he was facing only sky—a vivid blue, nightmarish canopy splattered with millions of twinkling stars, like speckles of fiery blood hurled from a sun laid open by a vast, sweeping scythe. At the edge of his vision, something huge and black was hovering in the blue.
“Debra?” he said to the sky. “Wait. No!”
He lunged forward, gripping the door jamb to keep from following her down, just
in time to see her fall terminate on the Oak Street sidewalk, his trusty old lounge chair following and shattering a half-second later.
There were several passersby on the street, but none of them stopped to look. One old woman did glance briefly upward, as if she might have felt a stray drop of rain, before continuing on her eastward shamble.
“No,” Blair said again, as an odor like sulfur, ammonia, and rancid meat drifted to his nostrils. “She doesn’t go out there. She just doesn’t.”
The odor intensified, and he stepped back into the room, pulled the door shut, and locked it, half-afraid he might forget and walk out there before it registered that his favorite retreat had collapsed into ruin.
The sun’s light failed to reach into the living room, and there, shadows swirled like living, dancing thunderclouds. As the terrible smell burned sharper and more menacingly in his nostrils, he saw, standing before him, the black silhouette that had yesterday danced on the sidewalk in front of the old church. That was all it was—a silhouette, shaped vaguely like a man but with disproportionately long arms and legs, an elongated, misshapen bulb that might have been its head, and some kind of horn-like protrusion curling outward from its torso. It was tall. So tall it had to stoop to clear his ten-foot ceiling.
The voice sounded like mighty stands of timber splintering. “Until the stars come right, only a few shall spy us, and those only dimly.”
As if it had merged with the swirling darkness around it, the silhouette lost its contours, became a shadow of a shadow, and Blair felt a frigid, oily wave rush past him, battering his face, drenching him with cold brimstone, and in that moment, he expected to be scattered to the four winds, swept into oblivion.
His lungs struggled for air, and it was with some shock that he realized the hideous odor had dissipated. His skin, however, felt coated with vile slime, and the unnatural darkness in the room only slowly gave way to light from outside.
Unsteadily, he made his way to the bar and poured himself a glass of straight gin. He threw it back, poured another, and then went to the sliding door to peer into the well of empty space that had swallowed the only things in the world that actually meant anything to him.