#ShortStorySaturday: “The Nothing” by Steve Rouse

Please enjoy this Short Story Saturday submission from Steve Rouse.

The Nothing

By Steve Rouse

During the times of the early earth, before people, one of the thunderous giant lizards that roamed the countryside greedily ate the lush plants. The lumbering beast stripped one spot and swung its head across an empty space toward another clump of greenery. It never got there, having crossed a spot where there was nothing.

An eon or so later, in exactly the same spot, though the earth had changed, a primal clan of hunters crept up on some grazing stag-moose. They spread out at the signal of the group’s chief in practiced silence. When within range, the chief’s son stood and threw his spear, piercing the side of the nearest animal. The wounded giant grunted and lurched to its side, immediately vanishing from sight. The hunters stopped short and their whooping cheers faded into the forest along with the rest of the herd.

The confused hunter strode ahead to retrieve his spear. Not seeing it, he swept the grasses with his foot. On the third sweep, it crossed over a bare spot. He vanished before the disbelieving eyes of his tribesmen. The chief screamed out, “The gods are angry!” in his own guttural language and they ran, never to hunt there again.

A few millennia passed. The earth’s topography again had shifted but the nothing remained, always constant. Working hard to control his ragged breathing, Red Shadow of Moon stopped at the end of the gulley. The blue coats hunted him. One of their bullets had shattered his shoulder. His brothers were already dead. He knew he would not last long.

He set his limping horse free with a slap to its haunch. He had his knife. At least one blue coat would taste its steel before he breathed his last and flew to his ancestors. When three of the horse soldiers reached him, a defiant Red Shadow of Moon stood his ground.

The senior officer grinned and nodded to his squad. He dismounted and drew his sword. The lieutenant advanced on his quarry and passed into the nothing. In the confusion that followed, Red Shadow of Moon escaped and the two remaining cavalry soldiers fled, fearing the Indian magic that had taken their commanding officer.

The earth orbited the sun another one hundred-fifty times as the Earth’s surface lifted and eroded.

Janice Pruitt bought the haunted house because it came dirt-cheap. As a new associate chemist to the Fort Collins, Colorado-based Hopeful Hops mini-brewery, she had to pinch her pennies. According to the tale the realtor elaborated on, the abandoned house had a reputation of people disappearing including three members of the crew that built it and two tenants over its fifty-two year history. The realtor warned her that all of the vanishings had occurred in a second floor bedroom. Ten years ago, the homeowners brought in a priest for an exorcism, but then decided to board up the room anyway. The realtor’s forced laughter managed to only wear on Janice’s nerves.

As a scientist, she had never been bothered by superstition. She’d handily dismissed the stories and moved in. After a year in the home without incident, she tore down the planking that sealed the doorway and opened the room. Janice cleaned it out with no spirits accosting her and the room became storage space.

Following a promotion and raise at the brewery, Janice put the house up for sale, desiring a more modern abode. No realtors would take on the sale. In fact no one even came to see it when she offered it on her own. So, she decided to remodel and, in her self-reliant, penny-pinching style, decided to do the work herself. Over the next seven months, the kitchen, bathroom, and living room were modernized with new appliances, windows, flooring, furniture and paint. She took a break for the holidays, but then the upstairs was next.

Her bedroom and bath, office, the hallway and stairs suffered under the same remaking strategies and soon glistened squeak-free from the remodeling. Her two-story home gave her unlimited joy having been reworked by her according to her own style and all at a very decent cost.

Janice sat in the kitchen one night when a strange thought struck her. The “haunted room” had yet to be touched. Every other room was done. Was this some sub-conscious response of hers to its history? Did she actually fear the possibility?

In defiance of her doubt, she downed her beer and marched up the stairs and into the room, which had become cluttered with items relocated there during her other renovations. She walked about the room until she’d covered its entirety. Not surprisingly, she had not disappeared. She then noted the still unused closet.

Janice jerked it open, gawking about for some demonic presence. Nothing. She reached in and yanked the chain, turning on the hanging light. The bare bulb’s glare showing raw studwork and unfinished lathe and plaster walls, showing clearly that nothing haunted the space. In a self-debasing huff, she nabbed the closest box and slid it into the closet’s corner. Satisfied, she then placed a second box atop the first. It promptly vanished.

In disbelief, she added another box, then a bag, and then a suitcase. Nothing changed. All vanished.

Janice, convinced there was nothing supernatural about this, settled in to the challenge of discovering what the hell was going on. She was a scientist for Christ’s sake, so she set up a camera to photograph her efforts. She was determined to first define the limits of what she termed the anomaly. A blank notebook swiftly filled with notes and speculation.

She worked carefully, finding an unexpected exhilaration in her quest. Nothing happened around the items she offered it. But an item, no matter its size, would vanish completely in an instant. She took a ‘victory’ break after finding that this thing existed within a square inch’s space at a point twenty-one inches up from the floor, four inches from the opposing wall stud and eight and a quarter inches from the adjoining wall’s lathe work.

Janice then brought up a box of spaghetti from the kitchen and, using a makeshift scaffold she’d hurriedly constructed, passed a tied bundle of the uncooked noodles toward the anomaly. Three strands disappeared. She approached the space from every direction with similar results. From all this, she meticulously documented that this mystery existed within a two millimeter cubed area. She felt powerful in the acquired knowledge.

It was late, but thoughts of sleep never entered her mind. The sparse equipment she possessed – a compass, refrigerator magnets, and a circuit tester – revealed nothing about the anomaly.

She studied the photos and movies she’d taken, but could not come up with a satisfactory hypothesis as to its nature.

She downloaded the videos onto her computer. Over the course of the next hour, frame-by-frame, she watched each item appear to be drawn into some kind of dimensional straw, all within about a third of a second. The mass of the item made no difference to the speed in which it was drawn in to the anomaly.

What was it? How did it work? How long had it been there? Unanswerable questions burned through her brain for the rest of the night. But more pressing than any other was, ‘Where does it go?’

Dawn found her still writing, reviewing, and conjecturing. Her frustrations showed by the scattering of crumpled papers around her.

At eight o’clock she called work, claiming an illness, and then returned to the closet. Leaving her notes, computer, camera, and a letter, she breathed in a long slow breath, slowly reached out and touched the nothing.

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About the Author

I’ve always loved words. However, crafting them into a viable story that carries the full weight of emotion, action, or scene description to the reader that resided in my brain at the time of its writing is another thing altogether. I whittled away at this craft while teaching middle schoolers to love words and stories, too.

Now that I’m retired from teaching, my wife and I enjoy quiet times at home in Northwestern Wisconsin. She with her recipes, me with my stories. The love of kids, grandkids, pets and an occasional zoo trip fills the void.