Chapter 6

He was hovering low above a sea. Green water laced with foam surged and plunged around him and spread away to a remote horizon in a heaving whitecapped expanse. A glittering white line rimmed the horizon and the sky was a raw blue.

Wastes of time bore down upon him. The scene was primordial. He was an alien insert, unprecedented, bereft. He felt a wrench within as though his life were being sucked out to feed a ruthlessly acquisitive young world; his soul’s tether stretched to attenuation then snapped. Desolation fretted the husk of him that was left, that had been alive, but was now waste . . .

Bel jolted awake in his blanket. It was still night, but the overhead foliage was inflamed and splashes of bright crimson wavered around him among glooming gore-spattered trunks. He was derelict with loss. He wanted to act, to establish a foothold here, or he would be yanked back to . . . where?

It had been Earth. He was certain. But the remoteness of the time he had trespassed on was terrifying. He had read once that Earth was 300 million years old but hadn’t believed it, couldn’t comprehend such an immensity. Now he thought that even a billion years wouldn’t span the duration since that ocean.

Bel sat up and looked around. Westward through the tree canopy he saw the Inferno globe, flushed as by a venomous fever and blotched with scars and putrefaction. However the slaughterhouse reflections of its glare on trees and undergrowth glittered with an ashen glaze. The heavens were weirdly illumined. There was something else in the sky.

Nervous, curious, Bel arose. Foreboding compressed his chest as he emerged from the trees. Perhaps it was just the eerie light but he sensed danger. He peered into a silent gloom that felt more oppressive out here, although it was lighter now that foliage no longer strained the bloodshot glare. The grass at his feet was dusted by hues of rust and ash and alive with furtive glints.

He felt a presence behind and above. He began to turn, but was stopped by a distant scream. Human and female. It cut off. Silence resumed, isolating the scream and adding loneliness to its terror. A boyhood memory came of awaking in the dark feeling that something horrid lurked under the bed, then lying so paralysed by terror he could neither flee nor look beneath. A longing gripped him to return to his blanket and he felt ashamed. He was a man, and one who had confronted musketry and cannon. With an effort of will dismissing the threat until it could be identified, he raised his head, turned around, and saw . . .

Nothing.

Stunned, uncomprehending, Bel felt an impact in his chest as if his heart had started from its mountings. Splintered prayers fell from his mouth. Voided, he gaped up.

In a titanic portal that spanned the sky from horizon to horizon, an arch of light reared to the zenith. The semicircular vault stood so broad that Bel had to turn his face from one side to see the other, and it towered so high he had to lift his face to see its peak. The arch was a frozen river of light made of shining streams that were compacted and aligned on its inside but frayed into curls and splashes on the outside. The threshold was a horizontal shining band above the trees.

Yet this colossal portal that eclipsed half the sky was itself half engulfed by the shadow of something yet greater emerging from beyond it. For while the portal’s brilliant eastern arc glazed the sky and dazzled the eyes, the western was dimmed by an immense shadow thrown from inside the portal. The river this side was shaded to a bronze glow and spattered as by impacts.

The portal laid the world open to the root of all nightmares: the concentrated black of all blackness. Nothing.

Inside the portal loomed utter negation. At first Bel thought the portal led into a diabolic temple larger than heaven. But then his perception pivoted the portal interior to a bottomless Abyss. It was a Pit into which all Creation plunged. Bel hovered at the brink like a twig on the crest of Niagara Falls. It was black obliteration. It was Hell.

Bel heard a groan emerge from himself so laden that it might have funnelled through him from all of history. He clasped his head and fell to his knees, then pitched forward until his brow hit the earth. For an interval he bowed there, overcome by despair. In the face of this monstrous obliteration nothing had meaning. All value, striving, love and life led but to the Abyss. He felt tears slick his cheeks; wished for a rock on which to bash himself insensible.

Then above his sinkhole darkness appeared a gradual lightening, and he grew aware of a cockcrow presence, a warm and hopeful little arising, and a memory assembled like fragments turned to a mosaic. He seemed to recognise the presence as it cohered . . . then it flared into form, and Emmeline was there. It was the last time he had seen her, on the day of the muster. Now she stood before him with the vividness of life: his ungainly gawk of a sister with her wry horse-like face and sidelong inspections; a woman with few but devoted friends amid a multitude who proclaimed her a kindly soul and accepted her courtesies but rendered a mean return.

Emmeline was giving advice on surviving the war. With her head tilted birdlike behind an admonishing finger, between enjoining that he spare no expense in the maintenance of his footwear and refrain from disputation with the officers, she said, “And when you confront the great Nothing, remember that any something, no matter if it want one millionth of the size, will out-press the most Brobdingnagian nothing. So do you hold fast to a ballast of faith.”

Dearest Emmeline. Of all his family and friends Bel missed her most acutely. The Tuttles were not a demonstrative family: jocular endearments, offhand acts of consideration and decorous hugs on appropriate occasions sufficed to demonstrate their familial affection. But on that final morning Emmeline and Bel had clasped fiercely and long, and for the first time in his life he had said, “I love you.”

He had promptly dismissed her ‘great Nothing’ remark. Even by Emmeline’s standards it was inscrutable, a random surfacing of an accumulation deposited by obscure and eccentric currents.

But now for a moment their parting filled his awareness; not as a memory nor even a reliving, but as the event itself. Just as he’d seen the field the previous evening, he stood now with Emmeline — not again, but there, for the first and forever time. And she said that crazy thing.

And he said, “I love you”. And then later he would say it again — for the only other time — to Price.

Bel grew aware that his knees were aching and that despite the suck of the Abyss he remained rooted in the earth. He pushed himself erect then climbed to his feet. Turning from the Abyss, he looked west.

The Inferno globe, scarred by impacts and magma and gouged as by giant reptilian wars, bore now the aspect not of Hell but of a companion at the edge of extinction. The reflection of that monstrous portal laid an ashen glaze over the globe as it did this world as they teetered at the brink. He realised the globe was nearer to this world than either were to the Abyss. The Inferno was, after all, just a planet.

He must face the Abyss to return to his camp.

More screams in the distance. A tormented chorus, abruptly cut short. His heart faltered. But now the familiar rage flared that had been ignited by incompetent generals and invasions by slave-owning rebels, and took fire now against the destiny that had abandoned him here and the Abyss that was unmanning him.

Bel turned to confront it. His heart staggered in the face of that apocalyptic negation. In the suck of its hunger he felt the edges of his being peel off into nothingness. The appalling majesty of the Abyss relegated to a mere rim the colossal portal of light that framed it. Bel drove himself erect, to stand as a soldier. Gathering his self to a point to commit first one foot then the other, he began to advance upon it. His legs shook but with each step grew stronger. By the time Bel reached his blankets he felt abraded down to nerve, bone and brute persistence but his mind had gained a foothold on certitude. Consume his body it might, but the Abyss would not defeat him.

With no further need for physical uprightness to buttress his will, he bent to pick up firewood and carried it outside the trees to build a new campfire. Drawing his bayonet from the scabbard, he fitted it to his musket and sat at the fire, alone on the veldt, waiting for whatever it was that was killing people.

Time passed. Nothing came. Slowly the portal rolled overhead to eclipse the heavens and progress north, trailing the Abyss after it like a smothering black shroud. The portal proved circular so that what had seemed its threshold was actually its diameter. As the leading semicircle of the Abyss dipped inverted toward the northern horizon the trailing semicircle filled the southern sky. Around its black massed compaction and its frame of light, that was brilliant on its eastern arc, overshadowed on the west, the only stars visible lay in wan straggles near the horizon.

It occurred to Bel that the Abyss was crossing the sky like Earth’s moon only on a different ecliptic. Fortified by this insight, he drew out his Bible and read by firelight, concentrating fiercely on the dim lines of text. When eventually he heard the first birdsong the portal had become a low arch to the north.

With relief he watched the lightening sky absorb the last latitudes of the Abyss and the portal’s radiance. The Inferno globe remained on station, but as the sun rose a dark curtain drew across it. He felt that he had survived a battle and gave thanks to God.

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Three hours after dawn he was reading Nuttall’s Ornithology with coffee on the boil.

The aboriginal inhabitants of the country dread his boding howl, dedicating his effigies to their solemnities, and, as if he were their sacred bird of Minerva, forbid the mockery of his ominous, dismal, and almost supernatural cries.

He heard a noise, looked up and there she was, striding towards him.

“Hi.” Masking her pleasure with a brisk theatre of casualness, Izzie threw herself down. “Do I smell coffee? Would you believe Ursula doesn’t have java? The lady who can do anything. Who knew? So I’m back.” She gave what was meant to be a casual grin but he saw the relief in her eyes.

He took the cup off the fire and placed it before her on the grass, turning the handle toward her. “You must have left early.”

“At dawn. I didn’t say goodbye.” Izzie shrugged and grimaced. “She played the hostess pretty well. Nice meal — shit coffee, though, decaf instant — but healthy herbal teas. And a comfy bed in my own room. Halcrow was in Wonderland; I mean, all those toys. But . . . I don’t know; I wasn’t comfortable.”

She picked up the cup, watching the coffee surface tilt and swirl. Bel waited for the verbal gush to run dry. He wanted her to raise the Abyss.

But Izzie was ruminating on the cloudy nature of language, its definite outer form subverted by a vaporous interior; how words could simultaneously be honest and deceitful. Her words to Bel had been true, yet untrue. She didn’t know how to speak the truth. She couldn’t convey how the meeting had included a group meditation and she’d been shocked at how quickly individuality died. It had taken Ursula just a few trite words. When the audience left the meeting their faces were like masks. Personal expressions were overcast by a communal glaze of otherness, their originalities masked in a corporate mandate. It had been creepy as hell. It had been like Dawn of the Dead. The crowd advanced on her behind a prow of insensate menace and the snoutish masks projected savagery, for the wearers were relieved of individual vulnerability and empathy for anything outside the pack. They had no responsibility. They were absolutely certain. Their lives were no longer theirs.

Chris had turned to Izzie as he passed and produced a smile that was just a little too late to be sincere — not fake exactly, but as if the part of him that gave the smile did so only after seeking permission.

Izzie hadn’t the least idea how she could explain this to Bel and so she’d spoken of coffee. But she knew what Bel wanted to talk about and eventually she looked at him. “Did you see it?”

He nodded.

She took an unsteady breath. “Late last night, after the clouds cleared, Ursula took us outside. Halcrow and I. She didn’t warn us. The bitch.” She lowered her head until locks of hair flopped across her face. “How did you keep from going crazy, Bel? Out here? Alone.”

“I’m not sure I did. For a while my thoughts were . . . confused.”

She flicked hair aside to look at him. “Seeing the elephant, eh?”

He nodded.

“Well, I freaked. Big time. It felt like that fucking great thing was sucking my wits out through my gaping mouth. I tried to look away, but it owned me. That was a before-and-after moment if ever I had one.”

She gulped at the coffee. “Scientists know about those things, but what they don’t know is how fucking scary they are.”

“Is it always there,” Bel asked, “beyond the clouds?”

“Every damn night. This world and that planet up there, like Halcrow said, they keep the same faces to each other as they turn. Like dance partners. Together they orbit a sun and the sun orbits the black hole. During the day it’s the other side of this world that has the pleasure of facing the big sucker.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“A black hole.”

“I can see that, but what is it?”

“It’s black,” she said, “and a hole.” Seeing his perplexity, she relented. “They’re cosmic drains. Everything goes in, nothing comes out: suns, planets, moons, light, space, gravity — even time. Everything. God knows where it all goes.”

“What did Ursula say of it?”

“Little that I heard. I was sort of excluded by then. She told us we had to go inside because after dark the dragons come out.”

“Dragons?”

“Dragons. I wanted to ask about that, but she and Halcrow went off like old mates. I went to bed.”

“I heard screaming.”

“God, Bel.” His statement seemed to puncture a bubble she had enclosed herself in. Her shoulders curved inward and she brushed his gaze with a furtive upward glance as her eyes butterflied away. “How did you stand it out here? I heard them too. I was safe behind walls and I freaked.” She managed a smile. “Did you grab your musket?”

“And my bayonet.”

“So it really was serious.”

“Will the black hole swallow this world?”

“Nope. We’re . . . hold on.” She thought, converting kilometres. “Seven billion miles away.”

“Seven billion?”

“Yep.” She began mustering facts to subdue her feelings. “We’re one-and-a-half times further from it than Neptune is from the sun. The thing has eight hundred million times more mass than the sun. Its diameter equals the distance from the sun to Uranus.”

Bel was caused to reflect on the uncertain relevance of facts to the truth. Izzie’s numbers were as extraneous to his experience of the Abyss as a computation of the numbers killed at Gettysburg would be to having seen Horrie Lathrop’s head rolling at his feet.

He grew aware of Izzie looking at him expectantly. She wanted his approval for these irrelevant facts. He said, “And it sucks the life from the universe.”

“Well . . . I suppose it does, kind of. Like a big-ass mosquito.”

“Why would God allow such a thing?”

Her face stiffened. “Perhaps you should ask next time you see him.”

Bel had guessed that she was an atheist and accepted this, but her disdain triggered an anger he needed a moment to clamp. He thought of the screaming.

“What are the dragons doing to people?”

“I don’t want to know.”

“And why only at night?”

“It’s traditional,” she said with that abrupt flip to flippancy he found amusing, exasperating or poignant according to his mood. “Dragons, zombies, vampires, they work the night. Feeding off our ancestral fears.”

They looked at each other. She took another swig of coffee. Bel guessed that it wouldn’t occur to her to share it.

“I don’t suppose you have anything to eat?” she said.

He reached for his knapsack and dug inside.

“What are we to do, Bel?”

“We’ll find someplace to hole up tonight.”

“I might keep it together one night, even two, but what if we’re stuck here the rest of our lives?”

Bel had no answer. His fingers reached an issue of The American Sentinel retrieved from an Emmitsburg ditch that now wrapped the salted fish.

“If worse comes to worst we could go knock on Ursula’s door.” She didn’t sound hopeful.

He drew a fish and his attention from the knapsack and extended both to her. “You think she’d turn us away? Or is it that her company’s intolerable?”

“Both . . . No, that’s unfair. She’s not ghastly, just unsettling. I don’t want to give her control over us — you know?”

A silence gathered while he passed across his dented tin plate. She lay the fish abstractedly on the plate, then picked up the cup only to put it down. The silence grew heavy.

“What is it, Izzie?”

She looked up guiltily, then took a breath. “Bel . . . it’s kind of sunk in. I’m . . . well — I’m dead.” She ducked her face. “Damn.”

He longed to hold her, but thought the intimacy inappropriate on such brief acquaintance.

Knuckling her eyes, Izzie produced a handkerchief and noisily blew her nose. She brandished the scrunched cloth. “I stole this from Ursula.” With a satisfied air she put it away. “You believe you were killed, don’t you? That soldiers shot you.”

“I don’t recall being shot. Only that a second later I would have been.”

“I just remembered standing on the sidewalk across the street from Fungus’s house. I didn’t see how I could have died doing that, so I was sort of in denial. But then this morning when I woke up there was more. I remember starting across the street. I heard a car coming, only it was hidden behind a parked van, and I was preoccupied.”

She looked at him, her dark eyes moist and the corners of her mouth sagging. “That’s all I remember. But it’s pretty clear what happened. I went out past the van and . . . Bang.”

“I don’t believe this is Hell or Purgatory,” he told her seriously.

After a doubletake she burst out laughing. Then she registered his shock. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to diss your beliefs. No, I don’t think this is hell either.”

He felt offended that she could so easily dismiss something that had so tormented him, and they sat in silence while she started on the fish. During a digestive pause she gave him back the cup. It was empty.

Finally he said, “I had an experience last evening. Perhaps fancy fabricated it, but I believe not.”

She laid down the fish. “Tell me.”

He described his vision of home.

Izzie resumed eating. Bel scanned their surroundings. Gulping down a chunk to clear her mouth, she said, “There’s three possibilities. One: you dreamed it. Two: the arch is some kind of portal and just spontaneously opens sometimes. Or three: you opened it by how you were thinking. Are you sure it was your home?”

“Not exactly my home, but I know the field well. It’s at the end of our street.”

“I wonder if you could do it again.”

“I’m leery.”

“Nervous, you mean? Why? What with black holes, dragons, medieval killers and whatever Ursula’s up to, any chance of a fast-track home sounds good to me.”

“I don’t reckon the danger but the defeat of my desire. At least in unknowing I can entertain hope.”

“Hope won’t get you home,” she said practically.

Another silence fell as Izzie resumed eating and Bel admitted that his fear owed to superstition. This man-sized portal was a diminished rendition of the Abyss’s world-consuming portal. A doorway spanning time and space felt like a lure to forbidden realms. He would be giving himself to the supernatural. He would return from the dead.

After she finished eating he packed his knapsack then rose and strapped on his gear although he hadn’t decided on a course of action. “Maybe you should try to open the portal.”

“Me?” He watched her grow accustomed to the idea. “All right then. I’m game.” She got up and hesitated. “What if it should open?”

“Then go, and best were done quickly. It lasted but a moment. I’ll follow.”

They walked to the arch. Both held it only in intermittent view, having to regain its image when habit returned their eyes to a physical focus. Once captured and held, it was a vaporous ring, white with hints of colour, the bottom third of its circumference underground.

Izzie gave it a challenging glare then turned to Bel. “So what did you do, exactly?”

“I was absent of thought.”

“Not one of my skills. I had a go at meditation once: five seconds without thinking was a stretch.” She took a preparatory breath. “But I can do it.” She nodded with decision. “Definitely. Wish me luck.”

She squared up to it and he watched her go inward. At first her face was vacant but then her brow furrowed in concentration. That wasn’t right. The event had happened after he let go of self-awareness, not gathered and braced himself as to a task. He wanted to tell her, just surrender.

She opened her eyes. “Sorry. Can’t do it.”

“It’s a fearful thing.”

“Fear isn’t my problem. I just don’t love home enough.”

They studied the arch as if even while their perceptions bounced off it something deeper in them remained caught.

Bel said, “What do you mean?”

“Oh, I like the place. Christchurch. It’s nice. I have friends, my family. But — well . . . what I dreamed of was to get away. You know, have adventures, get stuck into the great task of discovering myself. In a way, being here would be ideal — I mean, what a trip — if it weren’t that it looks like I might never go back . . . and I’m dead.” A laugh burst out of her that a supercharged shrillness took charge of until it threatened to fly off on a wild trajectory. She restrained it with effort.

He wondered what she’d meant about discovering herself. Bel had never imagined such a project. He was one of the Elmira Tuttles and had followed his family history into the mercantile trade. Although if he ever returned home he might look for something more suited to his inclination, perhaps teaching. But who was he now?

Bel said, “Maybe I experienced a hallucination.”

“One way of finding out: try again.”

“And if the portal opens?”

“Then enter.”

“But I can’t leave you here.”

She shot him a glance and looked down. “Your success will incentivise me. I’ll work it out.” She looked up again, catching and holding his eyes, and his fear reawakened. But then an idea came that he might be able to help Izzie find her way home, and the fear subsided before his duty to her as a girl in his care. She was right. He must try.

“Bel.”

He accepted her gaze.

“There’s no future here for us.”

Bel nodded and turned to the arch. He let the feeling of home arise.