He slept only fitfully, but the night passed without incident.
He didn’t actually expect trouble until the early-morning hours of May fourth.
Of course, the strange spectacle might never be repeated. In fact, he hoped he wouldn’t have to witness it again. In his heart, however, he knew what his mind could not entirely admit: that events of significance had been set in motion, that they were gathering momentum, and that he could no more avoid playing a role in them than a condemned man, in shackles, could avoid the noose or guillotine.
As it turned out, he didn’t have to wait quite as long as he had expected. Because he’d had little sleep the night before, he went to bed early on May second—and was awakened past midnight, in the first hour of May third, by those ominous and rhythmic pulsations.
The sound was no louder than it had been before, but the wave of pressure that accompanied each beat was half again as powerful as anything he had previously experienced. The house shook all the way into its foundations, the rocking chair in the corner arced back and forth as if a hyperactive ghost was working off a superhuman rage, and one of the paintings flew off the wall and crashed to the floor.
By the time he turned on the lamp, threw back the covers, and got out of bed, Eduardo felt himself being lulled into a trancelike state similar to the one that had gripped him a month earlier. If he fully succumbed, he might blink and discover he’d left the house without being aware of having taken a single step from the bed.
He snatched up the Discman, slipped the headphones over his ears, and hit the Play button. The music of Wormheart assaulted him.
He suspected that the unearthly throbbing sound operated on a frequency with a natural hypnotic influence. If so, the trancelike effect might be countered by blocking the mesmeric sound with sufficient chaotic noise.
He raised the volume of Wormheart until he could hear neither the bass throbbing nor the underlying electronic oscillation. He was sure his eardrums were in danger of bursting; however, with the heavy-metal band in full shriek, he was able to shrug off the trance before he was entirely enthralled.
He could still feel the waves of pressure surging over him and see the effects on objects around him. As he had suspected, however, only the sound itself elicited a lemming-like response; by blocking it, he was safe.
After clipping the Discman to his belt, so he wouldn’t have to hold it, he strapped on the hip holster with the .22 pistol. He retrieved the shotgun from under the bed, slung it over his shoulder by its field strap, grabbed the camcorder, and rushed downstairs, outside.
The night was chilly.
The quarter moon gleamed like a silver scimitar.
The light emanating from the cluster of trees and the ground at the edge of the lower woods was already blood red, no amber in it whatsoever.
Standing on the front porch, Eduardo taped the eerie luminosity from a distance. He panned back and forth to get it in perspective to the landscape.
Then he plunged down the porch steps, hurried across the brown lawn, and raced into the field. He was afraid that the phenomenon was going to be of shorter duration than it had been a month before, just as that second occurrence had been noticeably shorter but more intense than the first.
He stopped twice in the meadow to tape for a few seconds from different distances. By the time he halted warily within ten yards of the uncanny radiance, he wondered if the camcorder was getting anything or was overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of light.
The heatless fire was fiercely bright, shining through from some other place or time or dimension.
Pressure waves battered Eduardo. No longer like a crashing storm surf. Hard, punishing. Rocking him so forcefully he had to concentrate on keeping his balance.
Again he was aware of something struggling to be free of constraint, break loose of confinement and burst full-born into the world.
The apocalyptic roar of Wormheart was the ideal accompaniment to the moment, brutal as a sledgehammer yet thrilling, atonal yet compelling, anthems to animal need, shattering the frustrations of human limitations, liberating. It was the darkly gleeful music of doomsday.
The throbbing and the electronic whine must have grown to match the brilliance of the light and the power of the escalating pressure waves. He began to hear them again and was aware of being seduced.
He cranked up the volume on Wormheart.
The sugar and ponderosa pines, previously as still as trees on a painted stage backdrop, suddenly began to thrash, though no wind had risen. The air was filled with whirling needles.
The pressure waves grew so fierce that he was pushed backward, stumbled, fell on his ass. He stopped recording, dropped the video camera on the ground beside him.
The Discman, clipped to his belt, began to vibrate against his left hip. A wail of Wormheart guitars escalated into a shrill electronic shriek that replaced the music and was as painful as jamming nails into his ears might have been.
Screaming in agony, he stripped off the headphones. Against his hip, the vibrating Discman was smoking. He tore it loose, threw it to the ground, scorching his fingers on the hot metal case.
The metronomic throbbing surrounded him, as if he were adrift inside the beating heart of a leviathan.
Resisting the urge to walk into the light and become part of it forever, Eduardo struggled to his feet. Shrugged the shotgun off his shoulder.
Blinding light forcing him to squint, serial shock waves knocking the breath out of him, evergreen boughs churning, a trembling in the earth, the electronic oscillation like the high-pitched squeal of a surgeon’s bone saw, and the whole night throbbing, the sky and the earth throbbing as something pushed repeatedly and relentlessly at the fabric of reality, throbbing, throbbing—
Whoooosh.
The new sound was like—but enormously louder than—the gasp of a vacuum-packed can of coffee or peanuts being opened, air rushing to fill a void. Immediately after that single brief whoooosh, a pall of silence fell across the night and the unearthly light vanished in an instant.
Eduardo Fernandez stood in stunned disbelief under the crescent moon, staring at a perfect sphere of pure blackness that towered over him, like a gargantuan ball on a cosmic billiards table. It was so flawlessly black, it stood out against the ordinary darkness of the May night as prominently as the flare of a nuclear explosion would stand out against the backdrop of even the sunniest summer day. Huge. Thirty feet in diameter. It filled the space once occupied by the radiant pine trees and earth.
A ship.
For a moment he thought that he was gazing up at a ship with a windowless hull as smooth as pooled oil. He waited in paralytic terror for a seam of light to appear, a portal to crack open, a ramp to extrude.
In spite of the fear that clouded his thinking, Eduardo quickly realized he was not looking at a solid object. The moonglow wasn’t reflected on its surface. Light just fell into it as it would fall into a well. Or tunnel. Except that it revealed no curving walls within. Instinctively, without needing to touch that smooth inky surface, he knew the sphere had no weight, no mass at all; he had no primitive sense whatsoever that it was looming over him, as he should have had if it had been solid.
The object wasn’t an object; it was not a sphere but a circle. Not three dimensional but two.
A doorway.
Open.
The dark beyond the threshold was unrelieved by gleam, glint, or faintest glimmer. Such perfect blackness was neither natural nor within human experience, and staring at it made Eduardo’s eyes ache with the strain of seeking dimension and detail where none existed.
He wanted to run.
He approached the doorway instead.
His heart thudded, and his blood pressure no doubt pushed him toward a stroke. He clutched the shotgun with what he knew was pathetic faith in its efficacy, shoving it out in front of him as a primitive tribesman might brandish a talismanic staff carved with runes, inset with wild-animal teeth, lacquered with sacrificial blood, and crowned
with a shock of a witch doctor’s hair.
However, his fear of the door—and of the unknown realms and entities beyond it—was not as debilitating as the fear of senility and the self-doubt with which he had been living lately. While the chance existed to gather proof of this experience, he intended to explore as far and as long as his nerves would hold out. He hoped never to wake another morning with the suspicion that his brain was addled and his perceptions were no longer trustworthy.
Moving cautiously across the dead and flattened meadow grass, feet sinking slightly into the spring-softened soil, he remained alert for any change within the circle of exceptional darkness: a lesser blackness, shadows within the gloom, a spark, a hint of movement, anything that might signal the approach of…a traveler. He stopped three feet from the brink of that eye-baffling tenebrity, leaning forward slightly, as wonder-struck as a man in a fairy tale gazing into a magical mirror, the biggest damned magical mirror the Brothers Grimm ever imagined, one that offered no reflections—enchanted or otherwise—but that gave him a hair-raising glimpse of eternity.
Holding the shotgun in one hand, he reached down and picked up a stone as large as a lemon. He tossed it gently at the portal. He more than half expected the stone to bounce off the blackness with a hard metallic tonk, for it was still easier to believe he was looking at an object rather than peering into infinity. But it crossed the vertical plane of the doorway and vanished without a sound.
He edged closer.
Experimentally, he pushed the barrel of the Remington shotgun across the threshold. It didn’t fade into the gloom. Instead, the blackness so totally claimed the forward part of the weapon that it appeared as if someone had run a high-speed saw through the barrel and the forearm slide handle, neatly truncating them.
He pulled back on the Remington, and the forward part of the gun reappeared. It seemed to be intact.
He touched the steel barrel and the checkered wood grip on the slide. Everything felt as it should feel.
Taking a deep breath, not sure whether he was brave or insane, he raised one trembling hand, as if signaling “hello” to someone, and eased it forward, feeling for the transition point between this world and…whatever lay beyond the doorway. A tingle against his palm and the pads of his fingers. A coolness. It felt almost as if his hand rested on a pool of water but too lightly to break the surface tension.
He hesitated.
“You’re seventy years old,” he grumbled. “What’ve you got to lose?”
Swallowing hard, he pushed his hand through the portal, and it disappeared in the same manner as the shotgun. He encountered no resistance, and his wrist terminated in a neat stump.
“Jesus,” he said softly.
He made a fist, opened and closed it, but he couldn’t tell if his hand responded on the other side of the barrier. All feeling ended at the point at which that hellish blackness cut across his wrist.
When he withdrew his hand from the doorway, it was as unchanged as the shotgun had been. He opened his fist, closed it, opened it. Everything worked as it should, and he had full feeling again.
Eduardo looked around at the deep and peaceful May night. The forest flanking the impossible circle of darkness. Meadow sloping upward, palely frosted by the glow of the quarter moon. The house at the higher end of the meadow. Some windows dark and others filled with light. Mountain peaks in the west, caps of snow phosphorescent against the post-midnight sky.
The scene was too detailed to be a place in a dream or part of the hallucination-riddled world of senile dementia. He was not a demented old fool, after all. Old, yes. A fool, probably. But not demented.
He returned his attention to the doorway again—and suddenly wondered what it looked like from the side. He imagined a long tube of perfectly nonreflective ebony leading straight off into the night more or less like an oil pipeline stretching across Alaskan tundra, boring through mountains in some cases and suspended in thin air when it crossed less lofty territories, until it reached the curve of the earth, where it continued straight and true, unbending, off into space, a tunnel to the stars.
When he walked to one end of the thirty-foot-wide blot and looked at the side of it, he discovered something utterly different from—but quite as strange as—the pipeline image in his mind. The forest lay behind the enormous portal, unchanged as far as he could tell: the moon shone down, the trees rose as if responding to the caress of that silvery light, and an owl hooted far away. The doorway disappeared when viewed from the side. Its width, if it had any width at all, was as thin as a thread or as a well-stropped razor blade.
He walked all the way around to the back of it.
Viewed from a point a hundred and eighty degrees from his first position, the doorway was the same thirty-foot circle of featureless mystery. From that reverse perspective, it seemed to have swallowed not part of the forest but the meadow and the house at the top of the rise. It was like a great paper-thin black coin balanced on edge.
He moved to take another look at the side of it. From that angle, he couldn’t make out even the finest filament of supernatural blackness against the lesser darkness of the night. He felt for the edge with one hand, but he encountered only empty air.
From the side, the doorway simply didn’t exist—which was a concept that made him dizzy.
He faced the invisible edge of the damned thing, then leaned to his left, looking around at what he thought of as the “front” of the doorway. He shoved his left hand into it as deeply as before.
He was surprised at his boldness and knew he was being too quick to assume that the phenomenon was, after all, harmless. Curiosity, that old killer of cats—and not a few human beings—had him in its grip.
Without withdrawing his left hand, he leaned to the right and looked at the “back” of the doorway. His fingers had not poked through the far side.
He pushed his hand deeper into the front of the portal, but it still did not appear out of the back. The doorway was as thin as a razor blade, yet he had fourteen to sixteen inches of hand and forearm thrust into it.
Where had his hand gone?
Shivering, he withdrew his hand from the enigma and returned to the meadow, once more facing the “front” of the portal.
He wondered what would happen to him if he stepped through the doorway, both feet, all the way, with no tether to the world he knew. What would he discover beyond? Would he be able to get back if he didn’t like what he found?
He didn’t have enough curiosity to take such a fateful step. He stood at the brink, wondering—and gradually he began to feel that something was coming. Before he could decide what to do, that pure essence of darkness seemed to pour out of the doorway, an ocean of night that sucked him down into a dry but drowning sea.
When he regained consciousness, Eduardo was facedown in the dead and matted grass, head turned to his left, gazing up the long meadow toward the house.
Dawn had not yet come, but time had passed. The moon had set, and the night was dull and bleak without its silvery enhancement.
He was initially confused, but his mind cleared. He remembered the doorway.
He rolled onto his back, sat up, looked toward the woods. The razor-thin coin of blackness was gone. The forest stood where it had always stood, unchanged.
He crawled to where the doorway had been, stupidly wondering if it had fallen over and was now flat on the ground, transformed from a doorway into a bottomless well. But it was just gone.
Shaky and weak, wincing at a headache as intense as a hot wire through his brain, he got laboriously to his feet. He swayed like a drunkard sobering from a weeklong binge.
He staggered to where he remembered putting down the video camera.
It wasn’t there.
He searched in circles, steadily widening the pattern from the point where the camcorder should have been, until he was certain that he was venturing into areas where he had not gone earlier. He couldn’t find the camera.
The shotgun was missing as wel
l. And the discarded Discman with its headphones.
Reluctantly he returned to the house. He made a pot of strong coffee. Almost as bitter and black as espresso. With the first cup, he washed down two aspirin.
He usually made a weak brew and limited himself to two or three cups. Too much caffeine could cause prostate problems. This morning he didn’t care if his prostate swelled as big as a basketball. He needed coffee.
He took off the holster, with the pistol still in it, and put it on the kitchen table. He pulled out a chair and sat within easy reach of the weapon.
He repeatedly examined his left hand, which he had thrust through the doorway, as if he thought it might abruptly turn to dust. And why not? Was that any more fantastic than anything else that had happened?
At first light, he strapped on the holster and returned to the meadow at the perimeter of the lower woods, where he conducted another search for the camera, the shotgun, and the Discman.
Gone.
He could do without the shotgun. It wasn’t his only defense.
The Discman had served its purpose. He didn’t need it any more. Besides, he remembered how smoke had seeped from its innards and how hot the casing had been when he’d unclipped it from his belt. It was probably ruined.
However, he badly wanted the camcorder, because without it, he had no proof of what he’d seen. Maybe that was why it had been taken.
In the house again, he made a fresh pot of coffee. What the hell did he need a prostate for, anyway?
From the desk in the study, he fetched a legal-size tablet of ruled yellow paper and a couple of ballpoint pens.
He sat at the kitchen table, working on the second pot of coffee and filling up tablet pages with his neat, strong handwriting. On the first page, he began with: