Chaos

by Mary SanGiovanni

  “Dr. Edwards,” he began, the overwhelming gratitude leaving him at a loss for sufficient words.”

  She smiled at him. “That’s why I’m here. Now go on; you’ll be late for work.”

  He offered her an appreciative smile and then headed out to his car. Although Derek had his doubts, the doctor seemed convinced the damage was not irreversible. He hoped for that. He really did.

  The fire and the unexplainable collapse of the apartments on the hill the day of that freak electrical storm had been enough to convince the corporation that rebuilding there would bad idea. They claimed that a third attempt at construction would only be a money sink, but more likely, it was the discovery of the tenants from apartments 2A and 2B, found buried under the rubble of the apartments, necks snapped and bodies and skulls crushed by debris, and the subsequent bad publicity for the corporation that decided them. The land would be turned over to the town to establish a park or some other shared community space. It was rezoned as nonresidential. Everyone thought that was best.

  As Derek drove to work, he passed the old hill. He deliberately gave it no more than a passing glance. That land could rot right down to rock for all he cared, and take its ghosts and demons with it.

  On the hill, the ruins of the Old Ward’s foundation poked out of the season’s first snowfall. A blanket of white covered the remnants of the parking lot, the sweeping lawns, the walkway. To look at it, one would find it difficult to imagine the chaos that had consumed the area only three months prior.

  Of course, the deep split in the earth where the Bridgewood Estates apartments had once stood served as proof, though. What was left of the debris of the building still filled it in like a rushed and slipshod grave. Snow had filled in the indented tracks of the heavy digging machinery that had sifted through a good portion of the debris already, before the weather turned the ground too hard to dig the building’s remnants out.

  There was no sign of movement or life, no sound of laughter or chatter. There was only silence beneath a slate gray New England sky, a crisp chill in the air, and a sensation, too faint to even crystallize like a puff of winter breath, that nothing mattered and anything can happen. It was the remnant of wild abandon, the last of the abyss’s germs of insanity strangled from their source and dying in the cold air.

  At the bottom of the hill’s chasm, the tenant of the slipshod grave buried deep beneath glass and brick, was a single small pool of black sludge reflecting a pulsing blue light from somewhere in its depths. It was folding in on itself, though, its physical and metaphysical asymmetry unable to support its structure. Surely nothing could crawl through the collapsed gate now; it was unstable.

  The long hand with the pointed fingers feeling its way around the edge of the gate would soon discover that, surely. There were other gates besides, and other worlds.