Voices in the Dark: Part Nine

Part Nine

The ground wasn’t rolling or jolting back and forth like in a traditional earthquake.

Instead, it quivered with a constant hum, like a strummed guitar string.

Dust and splinters from the dilapidated treehouse rained down on their heads.

Lily screamed.

The tree swung violently back and forth. The girls tried to climb down, but the intense

vibration made it impossible to get a secure footing. Both of them slipped and fell eight feet to

the ground below.

Lily had the wind knocked out of her. Addy bit her tongue, the taste of blood filling her

mouth. Other than that, they were okay, or at least well enough to start running towards home.

Shackleton Woods was only six blocks from their house. Yet now, as Addy and Lily ran

down their street toward home, the distance felt impossibly long. The vibrating ground made it

feel like they were running through soft beach sand, every step slipping, their legs working twice

as hard for half the progress.

Still, step by step, they drew closer.

Finally, panting, slick with cold sweat, they reached a point where they could see their

house.

Apparently things had unfolded exactly as Addy had foreseen. The Howler and Mr.

Gower both lay sprawled in the middle of the street. A gun rested a few feet away. It, along with

several spilled bottles and cans, jittered and danced across the pavement as the ground hummed

beneath them. Through the darkness, Addy could just make out the bullet hole in her kitchen

window.

It must have worked.

She had saved Lily!

The gun had gone off and Lily was still alive.

But what was all this?

What was happening?

Then came a deafening bang and a massive crack appeared in the pavement. Addy

couldn’t be certain, but she would have sworn the rupture began with the tiny fissure in the

sidewalk directly in front of her house. The crack glowed from within, as though lit by a

subterranean blue neon light. She watched as it split in two directions. One end snaked across her

front yard and directly beneath the house. The other slithered across the street, passing under the

sprawled body of Mr. Gower, who now resembled a turtle stuck helplessly on his back.

Then, many things happened at once. The blue glow intensified, shooting upward from

the crack toward the sky with such brightness and heat that it momentarily looked less like light

and more like a solid blade. This jagged curtain of neon energy sliced through everything it

touched like a hot knife through butter.

Addy’s house was cleaved cleanly in two. The cut ran straight through her bedroom,

through the hallway, and through the bathroom beyond. Electrical sparks burst from severed

wires. Water sprayed violently from broken pipes.

The humming vibration of the ground surged into the jerking, rolling motion of a full

earthquake. Before her eyes, the crack widened, opening into a deep chasm and forcing the two

halves of her home apart. The widening ravine spread until the two sides of Chestnut Avenue

stood nearly ten feet apart.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun… Everything stopped! If Addy could have thought of a

word that meant even more than “everything,” she would have used it to describe just how

completely everything had stopped.

The curtain of light vanished.

The ground fell still.

A silence descended over the world… a shroud of quiet that somehow felt louder than

any noise she had ever heard. It was so complete she could hear her own heartbeat, like thunder

inside her ears.

She heard nothing else.

Nothing.

water hanging in midair.

Looking at the shattered remains of her house, she saw sparks of electricity and bursts of

Frozen.

More horrifying still, she saw her parents.

Her mother stood on the southern side of the ravine in the living room. Her father stood

on the northern side in what remained of the hallway. They had been reaching for each other.

Both were frozen in place, arms stretched across the chasm that had split their home in two.

Shock and terror were locked permanently on their faces.

Addy suddenly remembered Lily standing beside her. She turned. Lily too was frozen.

Still as a statue. Addy’s breathing quickened. Her heart raced.

My heart is racing, Addy realized with a rush of relief and confusion. She took in the fact

that her heart could indeed still race. She wasn’t frozen!

Turning slowly in a circle, trying to make sense of what she was seeing, Addy faced the

other side of the street. The Howler lay on his back on the far side of the chasm. Half of Mr.

Gower lay beside him. The other half, his torso, arms, and head, remained on Addy’s side of the

ravine. His face was frozen in an expression of almost comical surprise. His right hand was still

reaching toward the gun lying a few feet away. The cut that had split him in two was impossibly

clean. No blood had spilled. No organs had fallen free. Instead, Addy could see the

cross-sections of his intestines, liver, and other organs, perfectly intact, neatly sliced and

displayed like diagrams in the anatomy textbook she had used the year before.

A part of her knew she should be screaming, crying, or running away. Instead she felt

almost nothing. Too much had been drained from her… mentally and physically. All she had left

was numb observation.

Above her, the stars began to fade. Remembering that stars are not supposed to fade,

Addy wondered if she was blacking out. But other lights remained. It was just the stars that were

fading out, as though someone were slowly turning a cosmic dimmer switch. The stars faded

from bright white points to faint specks… and then disappeared entirely… and then the sky

disappeared too!

One moment she had been looking at the inky darkness of a moonless night sky. The

next, she realized she was standing beneath a massive white dome. It was as though the sky had

been projected onto a gigantic curved screen, and now the projector had been switched off. It

reminded her of a visit to an observatory in San Francisco, where a show about the constellations

had been projected onto the inside of a domed ceiling.

The white surface above her was crisscrossed by thin black lines that looked like delicate

electrical wiring, or maybe more like the thin red blood vessels that sometimes appeared in

sleep-deprived eyes.

Seeing a ceiling where the infinite sky should have been made her instantly

claustrophobic. The surface felt far too close.

Then a voice rang out, echoing through the enormous chamber that had once been the

world.

“Temporal abstraction 4538–7 B has triggered an emergency fail-safe. All systems

temporarily paused, pending Overseer inspection.”

The announcement repeated twice more. Addy couldn’t help but notice how similar that

voice was to the one that came from the Ring Light.

Utterly baffled, frightened, and even slightly amused by the absurdity of it all, Addy

simply tried to breathe and make sense of what her mind insisted couldn’t really be happening.

What frightened her most wasn’t the shattered earth, or the frozen people, or the vanished sky. It

was the overwhelming feeling of aloneness. The terrifying sensation that she might be the only

real thing left in the universe. That she could begin walking this very moment and wander

forever without ever finding another living soul.

Her legs gave out. She collapsed onto her knees, then sank down onto the pavement near

the edge of the chasm. Her headache, her hunger, the blood soaking her jeans… none of it

seemed to matter anymore.

After what might have been five minutes or five hours, Addy realized she had drifted

somewhere far away in her mind. Her cheeks were wet. She didn’t remember when she had

started crying. What finally pulled her back was the sound of voices… men’s voices echoing

from somewhere. Addy listened carefully. She couldn’t tell exactly where they were coming

from.

Then it slowly dawned on her. The voices were coming from the crack in the earth. From

deep beneath the ground. Until now she hadn’t looked down into the chasm. In fact, she realized

she had been avoiding it. She didn’t want to know what was down there. But the possibility that

she wasn’t utterly alone in the universe pushed her forward.

Slowly, she crept toward the edge and looked down.

What she saw nearly shattered her sanity.

She wasn’t looking into a pit. She was looking into a hallway… a long corridor, like one

in a fancy office building. But she wasn’t looking down at it. She was looking into it. It was

directly in front of her. It existed on another plane, rotated ninety degrees relative to her own.

The sight made her dizzy.

Gravity still pulled her downward toward what she knew as the ground, yet it also felt as

though she could simply step forward and walk straight down the corridor stretching out beneath

her.

At that moment her body and mind finally gave up. Her vision darkened around the

edges. Her head spun and she pitched forward, fainting and falling headfirst into the chasm.

Instead of the bone-breaking impact she might have expected, she was jilted back to

consciousness by the gentle slap of cold marble against her cheek. As if she had gently laid down

on the hallway floor, and not fallen down a seemingly bottomless chasm.

She slowly got to her feet and looked behind her. The opening she had “fallen through”

now appeared as a long crack running up the wall behind her.

Her neighborhood and the white dome of the “not-sky” were still visible through the

crack, tilted sideways and stretching into an impossible horizon. The voices were louder now and

curiosity pulled Addy’s attention back down the long marble corridor. The men sounded angry.

They were arguing over something. Addy followed the sound. Each footstep chased by dozens of

echoes. She passed rows of closed doors and carefully arranged potted plants until she reached a

door that stood open. Peeking around the frame, she saw a conference room with a long table

under an array of lights. Several old men in black suits stood around it, arguing while examining

something lying on the table. They prodded it with strange instruments Addy didn’t recognize.

They were so absorbed in their work none of them noticed her. Then one shifted slightly. Addy

finally saw what lay on the table.

The body of Captain Simon, still folded in half and covered in spots of dried blood, lay

beneath the bright lights. Tubes filled with glowing liquids flowed into and out of him while the

men measured and weighed him.

Addy let out an involuntary gasp and one of the men turned. He stared at her with mild

annoyance and spoke sharply in a language that sounded utterly inhuman. The others looked up.

Some laughed. Some sneered.

The first man marched to the door, shaking his head, and slammed it in her face. She

heard the lock click, and inside the room, she could hear them going back to their strange work.

Down the hallway, another door opened. Two men in white coveralls stepped out, tool

belts jangling. They were speaking English!

Addy followed them quietly. When they reached the crack in the wall, one of them

whistled.

“Well, son of a bitch,” he said. “This one’s huge.”

The shorter man looked up at him.

“Would this be considered a Class Five?”

“Five?” the taller man said. “Nah. If it were a Class Five they wouldn’t have sent me with

an intern to train. No offense.”

“Oh. Right.”

They climbed through the crack and into Addy’s world.

Addy followed and again felt the dizzying shift of gravity as her body crossed between

the two planes.

The men seemed to notice her but ignored her as they got to work. They looked just like

the sort of repairmen the city might send to inspect a busted sewer pipe. Addy sat on the curb

and watched. The taller man spoke into a walkie-talkie.

“This is Bill reporting a Class Three rupture. The abstraction has gone into auto fail-safe.

Sky is not rebooting.”

“Oh shit,” the intern said suddenly. “That’s fucking disgusting.”

He had discovered one half of Mr. Gower and was shining a flashlight at the exposed

viscera.

“Yeah,” Bill said casually. “We get those sometimes. Poor bastard. Wrong place, wrong

time.”

“Ewe. That is nasty,” the intern said. “Can we fix him?”

“Yep. But first the rupture.”

“Right. The rupture.”

Addy looked up at the frozen statue of her sister.

“I’m sorry, Lily,” she whispered. “I tried to save you, but… I just don’t know what to do.

I’m your big sister. I’m supposed to know what to do… but I don’t. Not anymore… I’m sorry. I

love you.”

She lay back on the sidewalk and stared up at the blank white dome. After several

minutes she heard footsteps approaching. She sat up and squinted down the sidewalk.

Someone was walking this way… no, not walking… Prancing!