by Dan Rix
I chewed my fingernail. “If I could get Megan to stretch it around something . . .”
“Stretch it around what? Herself? That’d be a cute mess to clean up, having your body teleported inside her body. It can’t just be a surface, either, like a balloon. It has to be a three dimensional volume. But last I checked, your cell phone—which might have been able to make a call to Earth—was in the room that just vanished. Not to mention the fact that we were guided here. We had help from Dark. I have no idea what kind of nightmare it would be navigating a wormhole. You might end up on Earth. Maybe. More likely, you’d end up in the center of a black hole, where there’s plenty—I repeat, plenty—of dark matter to fall through.”
“You’re not helping,” I said. “Just FYI.”
“Oh, boo hoo.” She slapped the blast door, making a clang, and pushed off back toward the stairs into the kitchen.
“It’s not over,” I spat, following her. “We still have your water extractor. When the sun rises, we can make water.”
“What about food?” she said. “I can’t exactly electrolyze a loaf of bread.”
“Gandhi lived for forty days without food. We can survive. One day at a time. Your words, remember?”
“It was twenty-one days. He fasted for twenty-one days. Get your facts right.” Swinging the lantern, she barged through the kitchen, checking all the blinds again—too little, too late.
I chased her. “Look, all I’m saying is let’s not give up yet. We still have water. And water’s the most important thing, right? You were the one who said that. We can find more food. Ashley had a stash, maybe she had more. We can find more food.”
“We’re the food, Leona.
“I don’t care,” I hissed through gritted teeth. “I don’t care if my soul gets eaten, or if it already got eaten, I need to get back to Earth.”
“Yeah, me too.” She finished her inspection of the kitchen.
“Sarah, I need to go back.”
“Why don’t we step back and look at the facts?” she said, heading into the dining room. “We’re stuck on a dead planet with a hostile alien life form orbiting a black hole fifty quadrillion miles from Earth—”
Sarah halted, and I ran into her back.
She raised the lantern and let out a low whistle.
I stepped out from behind her. The lantern’s white glow fell across the dining room table, and my jaw went slack.
We’d been downstairs for five minutes. In that time, the dining room table had been set for a feast—twinkling silver, glinting china, neatly folded linen napkins. My eyes gravitated to the platters stacked in the center of the table, and I stifled a gasp.
A turkey the size of a beach ball bubbled in a porcelain dish of juices, golden skin braised to perfection. Next to it, butter ran in yellow rivulets down a steaming mountain of mashed potatoes. And it all smelled amazing. One breath left my head spinning, like I’d inhaled a drug. Wisps of heavenly scents steamed from the flaky crusts of a dozen fresh baked pies. At the back, countless pumpkins and ears of corn overflowed from a cornucopia and spilled onto the floor.
It was like a scene out of a myth.
The voice in my head said, You will eat what I have provided you, Leona.
And suddenly, inexplicably, I was starving.
I scrambled over Sarah and beat her to the nearest plate, but she seized it in a tug of war, wrenched it free. Frantic, I clambered to the next one. While she yanked off a drumstick the size of a log and doused it in a gallon of gravy, I piled buckets of mashed potatoes onto my own plate, half a pie, corn on the cob. We switched places, shoving and elbowing each other, and I sawed off a slab of meat the size of a suitcase and slopped on gravy, which splashed across my shirt and dribbled down my thighs.
I crashed into a chair and dug in, shoveling it into my mouth in heaping spoonfuls. The food hit my tastebuds like a jolt of ecstasy, and a moan rose in my throat. God, it tasted sublime.
I piled more in before I could swallow, dizzy from the rush of endorphins. Too much. My cheeks puffed out as I chewed, bulging like a chipmunk’s. I couldn’t chew it fast enough, couldn’t swallow fast enough. I wanted to skip that part and inject it straight into my veins like a drug.
Like a drug . . .
A tiny thought niggled my mind.
This can’t be real.
My chewing became less voracious. I glanced at Sarah, who had downed her first plate, burped, and was now licking it clean. My teeth continued to mash together, but now the food pulp took on a chalky texture, like cardboard. Slowly, I surfaced out of my daze. Not real . . . it’s not real.
Don’t eat the food, Ashley had said in her diary. It changes you.
Using all my willpower, I leaned over my napkin and spit it out. A gummy gray lump landed on the fabric and promptly crumbled into a pile of ash.
I gaped at the blackened pile. “Spit it out, spit it out!” I cried, rising to my feet. “Sarah, spit it out, it’s not real!”
She glanced my way, still chewing like a dumb cow. “Huh?”
“Spit it out!” I ran to her side, pried open her jaw, and reached my finger down her throat.
She coughed and spit up on my hand, and then she jerked away and barfed on the floor, bubbling black puddles. I held her hair and rubbed her back while she retched.
The vial around her neck swung back and forth.
Groaning, she straightened up and wiped her mouth. “Eugh . . . thanks,” she muttered, the crazy finally fading from her eyes. “The food, it’s . . . it’s getting more convincing.”
“Come on, let’s throw it away.” I took a corner of the tablecloth and dragged it over the feast, overturning half the desserts. “So we won’t be tempted.”
She hesitated and eyed the food with something like lust, licked her lips.
“Sarah . . . Sarah! Don’t even look at it,” I said.
She snapped out of it. “Sorry, I . . . I just . . . never mind.” She seized the opposite two corners of the tablecloth and hoisted them up, meeting me in the middle. Together, we dragged the heap off the table, hauled it to the front door, and dumped it out on the porch.
I slammed the door before she could relapse.
“It was the voice,” she said quietly. “It told me to eat. I felt like I had to eat.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” she muttered. “I am so thirsty right now. I couldn’t have put one fucking bottle of water somewhere else?”
“It’s just one night,” I said, tugging her away from the door. “Just ten hours. The moment the sun rises, we’ll use the machine to make water.” I licked my own dry, flaky lips, knowing it was a lie.
I didn’t plan on staying the night.
The moment I heard Sarah’s snoring, I reached down her shirt, pinched the vial on her necklace, and slid it out slowly, watching her like a hawk. She didn’t stir.
We’d made the bed up in the master bedroom and now lay side by side on the king size mattress.
The vial came free. I twisted out the tiny cork and tilted it over my palm. A cool, invisible droplet hit my skin . . . and began spreading.
Dark matter, like I’d thought.
My heart gave an uneasy thump.
I resealed the vial and shook it next to my ear, making sure I’d left enough for Sarah, then draped it conspicuously across my pillow so she would know how I’d escaped.
As the dark matter crawled over my hand and crept up my wrist, I tried to calm my breathing. This part I hated.
Set into the side of the battery-powered lantern, a faintly glowing analog clock kept time. Ten p.m.
Time to go home.
In the morning, I would wake up in my bed on Earth. It would work. It had to work. If dark matter could teleport me here, then it could tel
eport me back. Sarah hadn’t done it right. She hadn’t wanted it badly enough.
Once she saw that I was gone—that it had worked for me—she would try it and it would work for her too.
Tendrils of chilly liquid clamped over my mouth, sparking a flash of alarm before I gasped and inhaled it deep into my lungs, all the way to the bottom, where it fused to my insides. I squeezed my eyes shut and waited, fighting the needle-like pricks of panic.
The cool liquid trickled down my back, raising goosebumps.
Then dark matter swallowed me completely, and I was invisible, untouchable . . . travelling back to Earth inside a wormhole.
Chapter 16
The sensation of falling jerked me awake as I pitched forward into blinding white light and my stomach rushed up my throat. I squinted against the glare, disoriented at first. The whiteness stretched to infinity.
It was working . . . it was actually working!
Just like last time, when dark matter had teleported me to the dead world, but in reverse. In a few hours, I would rematerialize on Earth.
A few hours I could wait.
Suddenly giddy, I relaxed my body and enjoyed the fluttery sensation of weightlessness.
Sarah hadn’t done it right.
Like before, the hours crawled by, blurred together, leeching away my excitement until only mind-numbing boredom remained—that and the annoying itch on my elbow I couldn’t hope to scratch.
My hands passed right through me.
Time flowed like honey, each moment passing seamlessly into the next. But I knew what to expect this time. I wasn’t scared. At some point, I sank into a sleeplike trance, neither conscious nor unconscious. Just here. Watching. Waiting. Going home.
I counted, but couldn’t focus. Lost count.
Was I there yet?
I yawned and scanned the mist ahead of me for shapes. Nothing out there. Craning my neck, I looked straight up, and straight down—nothing but the same silvery glow—and behind me.
For a moment, a speck winked in my periphery before vanishing in the gray sea. I blinked and tried to find it again, but I’d lost it. My pulse thrummed in the silence.
What the hell?
I twisted my body in midair, awkwardly thrashing against air resistance to face behind me. Nothing there but empty silence.
Had I imagined it?
Then it winked again, clearer this time—a gray dot floating on the horizon. The back of my neck bristled. It’s Earth . . . I’m just seeing Earth . . .
As I watched, the dot grew into a tiny rectangle, drifting closer . . . coming right at me. My eyes narrowed, straining to make sense of it.
Wasn’t everything out here invisible?
Sixty feet out, the shape snapped into clarity, and my jaw went slack.
It was a piece of paper.
A simple, ordinary piece of paper. Huh?
What was that doing out here?
As it floated closer, I made out writing on it—some kind of weird blue ink that glowed. My pulse ratcheted up. One edge was ragged, as if it had been torn out of a notebook.
It floated even closer, hanging motionless in the air. Thirty feet . . . twenty feet . . . then ten.
Without thinking, I reached for it as it passed. My invisible fingers grazed the paper and sent it fluttering away.
Wait, I’d touched it.
Lunging again, I stretched out in midair and caught it before it slipped out of reach. Somehow, I could touch this piece of paper, but not myself. I confirmed that fact by waving my hand through my opposite elbow. Yep, couldn’t touch myself.
Now what did it say?
The paper hovered in front of my eyes.
Staring at it, I felt the air whoosh from my lungs.
I recognized the handwriting. How could I not? I’d been poring over her handwriting for the last two days.
Ashley’s.
One of the sheets torn from her diary.
This will be my final attempt to communicate. If there is anybody receiving this, please tell my brother I love him and miss him, and tell my family I’m sorry. I wasn’t as strong as you thought I was, and I let the monster in, I unleashed it. It was my fault. But I will never give up, and neither will you. I’m writing this down because I think I can keep a memory of myself alive that way. Find my diary, and you will know what to do. I don’t know exactly how much time has passed—there is no light here, only darkness—but I estimate it is now July first. If you are receiving this, then hopefully I am already dead. Bye, Emory. Avenge me.
My grip tightened, and my sweaty fingers slipped on the paper, smudging the ink.
I’d heard this before. Every word.
Ashley had appeared to me and delivered this very message while I was wearing dark matter.
It was some kind of recording.
How she’d accomplished it, I had no idea.
She must have ripped the page from her diary and wrapped it in dark matter, thus inserting it into this in-between space, where for the next three months it had wandered like a piece of driftwood until it was received by the next person on Earth who put on dark matter—me.
She’d figured out how to communicate from the other side.
I lifted my finger, and some of the neon blue ink came away in a glowing strand. It felt sticky, like spiderweb. And warm.
Lip curling, I wiped it off on my leg—and only then realized I could touch myself again. I lifted my hand to my face.
Where I’d touched the ink, the pink tip of my finger hovered in midair, plainly visible. As if being burned away, the invisibility retreated down to my knuckle. For a split-second, the edges flared a dazzling blue-white before shrinking away to bare skin.
This was no ordinary ink.
It was stripping dark matter off me.
I glanced around, suddenly frantic. But we weren’t there yet.
A weight slammed against my back, and suddenly I wasn’t in free-fall anymore, but pinned to a bed, limbs too heavy to move. All around me, the white mist drained off a dark bedroom. I rolled over, gasping and choking on vertigo.
My fist still clutched the page from Ashley’s journal, crinkling it against the mattress. The words no longer glowed.
Hovering in the blackness next to me, the lantern’s dim analog clock told me that more than four hours had elapsed since I’d put on dark matter.
But I hadn’t moved an inch.
“Didn’t believe me, huh?” said Sarah.
Right back to lying in bed, fidgety and wide awake. The bitter failure swirled around my dry mouth. There hadn’t been an opening on the other end, on Earth, so it had looped me right back to my starting point.
That was why it hadn’t worked.
Just like Sarah said. For a wormhole to exist, there had to be a hole in space at both ends. And they had to overlap.
Since Major Rod Connor didn’t have a bathtub full of dark matter sitting on his bed in the exact place where I’d been lying, there’d been nothing to connect to.
No wormhole had formed.
It was hopeless.
I stared at the clock, trying to will it to move.
Quarter till three.
“Is that accurate?” My voice came out raspy.
“Insofar as I set it yesterday morning at sunrise, which on Earth occurs at exactly 7:08 on October twentieth, it’s accurate. But the days here aren’t exactly twenty-four hours. It gains time pretty quickly.”
“I can’t believe you just used the word insofar. Who are you?”
“There was so much good information in my statement, yet all you heard was the first word,” Sarah said. “You have the attention span of a goldfish.”
“I heard the rest,” I mumbled. “I’m just trying not to think
about water.”
“And you just had to remind me.”
“Why does it matter what’s on the other end?” I asked. “Like what if we made a wormhole that went from here to Earth, but ended up in Hawaii? We couldn’t do that? I mean, what’s so special about this exact spot on Earth, about right here—” I waved my hand over the bed, “since we’re on a different planet anyway.”
“It’s how space is folded,” she said. “This planet and everything on it exactly corresponds to where Earth is, which I suspect is why it’s here.”
“Oh, yeah? Explain this—I was at Emory’s house when I vanished from Earth, but when the wormhole spit me out here, I was in my bedroom . . . miles away.”
“You must have drifted laterally inside dark matter.”
“You have an answer for everything, don’t you?”
She snorted. “I wish.”
I shifted, earning another crinkle from the diary page folded in my back pocket. The only part of Ashley I had left.
“She sent a message to me,” I said. “When she was here. She did the same thing the voice did . . . you know, using dark matter to get in my head. She was playing it at its own game.”
“Mmm. Too bad she lost.”
“She didn’t lose,” I said hotly. “In fact, I think she’s still fighting.”
“She’s dead, Leona.”
We fell into silence, punctuated only by our nervous breathing.
“So first it takes our food,” I mumbled, “and then it gives us fake food.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“How does it do stuff like that?” I said.
A pause. “I have no idea what either of those pronouns refer to.”
“How does the voice do stuff like make a room disappear and conjure a feast out of thin air?”
“Magic.”
I sighed. “Why do I even talk to you?”
“It’s this planet,” she said. “There’s such an abundance of dark matter here, it can probably add or delete things at will simply by opening and closing holes in space. That’s why everything you wrap in dark matter ultimately ends up here—there’s always an opening on this end.”
