Meanwhile (in a sense)…

  Elsewhere…

  Thrimp

  Wiltshire

  United Kingdom

  Earth

  -Lee-

  If Lee had known these were his last moments on Earth, he would not have chosen to spend them in the potato aisle.

  He had eyeballed each variety in turn, to little effect. He was frustrated: frustrated by the unreasonably wide range on offer, frustrated by his ignorance of which was the right variety, and frustrated by how this entire debacle accentuated his perceptions of his own inadequacy in general. He refused to ring his mum to ask what kind were the right kind of potatoes. Consumed by bitterness and bloody-mindedness, he selected some long, knobbly, organic ones that were almost definitely the wrong kind, but looked interesting.

  He was being unkind to the self-checkout machine, which accused him in formal yet compassionate tones of placing unexpected items where he oughtn’t. This further inflamed him, and he was suggesting under his breath other places where unexpected items might soon be found. The machine’s persistent mechanical refusal to respond to his threats increased his agitation, to the point that he was pressing the on-screen buttons with slightly more vigour than necessary. It was at this tense juncture that Mr. Upstairs appeared on the other side of the barrier separating the queue from the machine-users, took in the scene, and climbed over the barrier, causing raised eyebrows.

  ‘Alright?’ said Lee, self-consciously.

  Mr. Upstairs enjoyed a good relationship with the self-checkout machines. He lifted the potatoes off the scale, pressed something on the screen, then deftly scanned them.

  ‘Can never get these stupid things to work,’ Lee grumbled.

  Beep, said the machine, passive-aggressively.

  Mr. Upstairs gently lowered the potatoes into the bagging area and looked at him.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Why you are buy this vegetable?’

  ‘For dinner.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Mr. Upstairs. ‘This vegetable is a meal.’

  ‘Er. Well not just this, obviously,’ said Lee.

  The big man nodded knowingly.

  ‘How to cook this?’

  ‘Dunno,’ said Lee. ‘Probably just boil them.’

  Mr. Upstairs’s eyes widened.

  ‘I’ve got a peanut sauce,’ Lee added.

  He paid and put his potatoes into a bag-for-life that he’d brought with him, then regretted the move and wished he’d just carried them by the bag they came in, which was a lot smaller. Feeling foolish, and with the under-burdened bag-for-life brushing annoyingly against his leg, he walked the proper way out of the self-checkout area and then all the way back around to join Mr. Upstairs, who had climbed back over the barrier and rejoined his own trolley in the queue. The trolley contained three birthday cakes, a six-bottle multipack of the supermarket’s own-brand cherryade, and 24 tins of cat-food, still in the manufacturer’s cardboard tray and plastic wrap.

  ‘Having a party?’ asked Lee

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Never mind. That’d be cheaper online you know. The cat food.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  After an unproblematic checkout, excepting a twenty-pound note that took three tries and a confusing discussion about why Mr. Upstairs didn’t have a bank card, they stood in companionable silence waiting for the lights at the zebra crossing to change, Mr. Upstairs carrying his bulky shopping without bags or any apparent difficulty.

  An unfriendly-looking woman in tracksuit bottoms was smoking in the shade under Tesco’s awning, far enough away from the door as to be ostensibly making an effort to smoke away from the main thoroughfare, but not far enough away that her smoke didn’t still blow all over the passers-by, as well as onto people waiting to cross the road outside.

  Lee considered making a show of clearing his throat and wafting smoke away from his face. Probably best not to, he thought. He’d seen people on the news being punched to death for that sort of thing, and the woman looked unpredictable. She was definitely best ignored.

  The occasional car passed, too few to justify the signal crossing. Lee would have just crossed if he’d been by himself, and he suspected that Mr. Upstairs would have done the same; but, together as they were, neither of them did. Lee considered mentioning the unreasonableness of the red man or the smoking woman, but then decided to relax instead. Pigeons pigeonned around. The sun sunned. It was a nice day. There was no need to be grumpy. Smoke and red lights and pigeons were the backdrop to his entire upbringing; he was at home among them, and it wouldn’t achieve anything to start objecting to them now. And, if he was perfectly honest, he quite liked the smell of cigarettes. They reminded him of something or other that he couldn’t quite remember.

  The sun warmed him and the general vrooming and chirruping of the suburbs tickled his ears; a pleasant little breeze ruffled his hair, and there settled upon him a happy realisation that there was nothing wrong in life that he couldn’t fix by just doing the right things. He recalled the clarity of the cold shower and unwound a little, breathed in deeply, and—

  —Somewhere incomprehensibly far away, a Creator said, ‘Now!’—

  —Lee felt a mild little zing in the brain area and his vision briefly flashed white, a bit like hitting the back of his neck with a cupped hand, which he did sometimes when he was bored. That’ll be serotonin, he thought, blinking rapidly to clear his vision. Or dopamine. Or one of those sorts of things.

  When his eyes refocused, the world wasn’t there anymore and everything was deeply, horribly wrong.

  A sense of things ending overcame him, like the background music of the universe abruptly switched off and harsh fluorescent lights turned on, except that instead of light they cast hollow darkness.

  The feeling of sun on his skin, the breeze, the sounds and smells of the city; they were all gone. There was no more city. Everything was gone, replaced by a hungry black void that stretched… not as far as his eye could see, because there was no ‘far’ anymore. It was both inches from his face and infinite, all at once. Reality simply ended. Where the sky and the clouds and the streets and the grass and the trees and the houses had been was a sunless blanket of depthless nothing that sucked foully at his eyes.

  The part of his mind that told him what to do next suddenly went silent. It had no response for this, and so, for lack of anything more fitting to do, he blinked, but the infinite void did not respond; it remained, overwhelming his eyeballs with the challenge of focusing on nothing.

  Instinctively, he looked away; his gaze turned downwards and he saw that his feet were on the inside edge of a boundary between light and darkness, his legs and shoes and his bag-for-life illuminated by a bright light that came from behind him and cast shadows forwards into the void. An inch or so beyond his toes, the light faded to grey and grew dimmer; a further two feet beyond that, it faded entirely to black. Beyond that was black. The street he had been about to cross, and everything beyond it, was gone, replaced by incomprehensible, infinite black.

  Looking to his right, he found Mr. Upstairs. He stood as still and solid as a statue, staring directly into the void, his expression hidden in the depths of his beard. Lee slowly reached a shaking hand toward him, then cried out and pulled it back as the pale white of the man’s face and neck were splattered with a thick, dark liquid that splashed onto Lee’s arms. It was warm. Mr. Upstairs fell to one knee, dropping his shopping. The multipack of Cherryade burst open and highly-pressurised plastic bottles skittered over the pavement. He raised his huge hand raised to his neck, smearing the blood there. It welled between his fingers; he looked down at it with a frown as Lee’s hands flew up to his mouth. At the same time, something thrashed wildly in the air above them. Hearing the sound, Lee ducked instinctively just as a grey mass hit the ground behind him with a wet splat like a boot in thin mud.

  He span round in terror. There, on the ground, was slightly more than half a pigeon. It had been sliced across the body so that the head, chest, and most of both wings remained; the legs and tail were missing. Where it hit the ground it rolled, gouting blood from its unsealed thorax onto its own wings and spraying it around wildly as it thrashed and tumbled along the pavement, leaving skid marks of blood and viscera in its wake. Lee gawked uncomprehendingly as, screeching, it spasmed and rolled and paddled its way across the pavement.

  Lee hadn’t realised pigeons could screech.

  When it reached the boundary at the edge of the of the light, its colour faded and its movement slowed as though underwater, its lunatic screaming deepening to something more like whalesong. Lee stared as it continued further on into the grey, its movement slower and slower, growing darker and darker as it approached the black on the other side, until its mangled body and demented eyes were gradually swallowed by the emptiness beyond, with a final, low rumble like the yawn of a mountain.

  As Lee stared at the trail of red mess the stricken animal had left, he felt a heavy hand on his shoulder and yelped in surprise. Mr. Upstairs had made a poor job of wiping pigeon blood off his face with his sleeve. He pointed wordlessly upwards, to where the rear portion of the pigeon hung in midair, bleached to colourless grey in the space directly above the boundary-line on the pavement, twisting and tumbling slowly downwards towards them as though sinking through thick transparent oil. As it fell, it left a vertical stream of splashes and drops of dark fluid hanging in the air behind it, glooping like the wax in a lava lamp.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  They stared in horrified amazement as the twitching mass of flesh and feathers and bird-legs sank, slowly taking on colour and speed as it fell downwards out of the grey boundary-zone and towards the light in which they stood. Horribly, inevitably, it escaped the grey and dropped out of the air at full speed, as though casually thrown by a child, thudding softly onto the pavement where it lay still, dribbling blood.

  Lee and Mr. Upstairs stood and stared. Lee’s mind was frantically searching for an appropriate reaction to the situation and coming up blank. What’s going on? just seemed unutterably trite in the circumstances.

  'Are you fine?' asked Mr. Upstairs. There was no sound other than his voice. It didn’t echo, but filled the silence for a moment—deep, warm and round—then disappeared.

  'I don’t know,' Lee said truthfully. 'Are you?'

  'Yes', said Mr. Upstairs.

  Lee nodded.

  ‘I think everything else might not be fine,’ he said, stupidly.

  Mr. Upstairs nodded. Gently, he took Lee’s hand and led him away from the boundary, away from the darkness, back towards Tesco.

  ‘Please one potato,’ said Mr. Upstairs, holding out an open hand.

  ‘What?’ said Lee.

  Mr. Upstairs reached over and took the bag that Lee had forgotten he was still holding. He ripped the cellophane and extracted a single long, nobbly potato. He held it up meaningfully for a moment, then tossed it forwards, towards the boundary.

  It arced through the air, following the normal ballistic trajectory of a vegetable, until it reached the grey boundary. On reaching it, the potato slowed, spinning in dreamlike fashion as it continued along its path but at perhaps a tenth of its previous speed. Like the pigeon when it hit the boundary, the further it went, the more it slowed, and the darker it grew. When it was barely visible and almost completely still, Mr. Upstairs took out another potato and threw it vertically upwards.

  A few feet above them, it did the same as the previous potato. It slowed, still travelling upwards but with less and less speed, as though sinking in reverse, and darkening.

  ‘No touch this grey things,’ Mr. Upstairs said, his eyebrows furrowed. ‘This grey things very, very kill you.’

  Lee nodded again. It seemed a sensible instruction.

  ‘This grey things… one minute.’ Unbelievably, the man got his smartphone out and started looking up a word. It was still tethered to its battery pack.

  For a complete lack of anything else to do, Lee stood and looked around.

  In contrast to the gaping void that had replaced the world across the street, behind him Tesco itself blazed with brilliant light, like a sun at the centre of a tiny solar system. The light they stood in, he realised, was at the edge of a circle—no, a dome—of illumination, bordered by the grey boundary, with its centre…

  Lee looked up then, and saw it.

  Erupting through the roof of Tesco was a burning column of light, as thick as an oak tree and too bright to look at directly. It rose to a few metres above the building, where it abruptly ended as though chopped off. Within the dome surrounding it, there was colour and movement: green leaves on trees, the grey-brown industrial functionality of a supermarket roof. Lee realised how close he was to the edge and took a few hurried steps inwards, towards Tesco. At the edge of the dome was the grey boundary, which slowed things down—slowed them so effectively it had held onto the back half of a fast-flying pigeon as its momentum carried its front half forwards, Lee realised—and beyond the grey boundary…

  ‘Chronostasis’ said Mr. Upstairs.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Crow. No. Stay. Sis.’

  Lee didn’t have the mental resources for playing what’s-Mr.-Upstairs-trying-to-say right now.

  ‘Look, what’s that?’ he asked, pointing at the column of light. Mr. Upstairs was already looking at it and nodding.

  ‘This one the, maybe, mmm this one a….’ He looked down at his phone. ‘Middle. Crux. Focal point.’

  ‘Focal point? Focal point of what?’

  Mr. Upstairs looked at him reproachfully. With a wave of one arm he indicated the void beyond the dome. ‘There, chronostasis. Here… not chronostasis. The…‘

  Lee didn’t listen to the rest of what he said. He knew that when you don’t understand, the next thing you’re supposed to say is ‘what does that mean?’ but his brain wouldn’t let him. The back-and-forth of negotiating meaning with Mr. Upstairs was a thing for normal times, when everything was fine. Now the world was broken and the silent weight of the absence of the world he had hitherto existed in was making him panic.

  It was a nasty, dangerous feeling, like suddenly finding himself neck-deep in a pond; one of the still, stagnant kind where the water hasn’t moved in so long it’s turned green and started to rot. The kind the imagination populates with wriggling things. The air was… heavy, almost wet, like it was full of something that the wind was supposed to blow away, only now the wind had stopped and it was building up, sticky and cloying…

  It made his skin prickle. He needed to run, shout, scream, set off fireworks, anything to fight the stillness and silence. It was a horror, a feeling of being vulnerable and surrounded by slimy evil, like nothing he’d ever felt. Mr. Upstairs was still talking but the words passed him by, distant and incomprehensible.

  Looking desperately around for the source of the feeling, he focused on the boundary. Surely enough, like his ears picking out the source of an unpleasant sound, his gut identified the boundary. Slowly, he edged back towards it, his eyes narrowed in concentration.

  ‘Hey,’ called Mr. Upstairs, but Lee wasn’t listening. He got as close as he dared, and stared at the pavement, where the boundary was clearly visible.

  It was moving.

  Slowly, so slowly in was almost imperceptible, it moved towards him. Towards, he realised, the centre of the dome.

  Closing in.

  ‘What do you??’ cried Mr. Upstairs. ‘This grey things kill you! I say!’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Lee. ‘It’s bad. It killed that pigeon. And, look. It’s moving!’

  Mr. Upstairs crouched and stared at where Lee was pointing. Lee did the same. The two of them stared at the slowly-approaching edge of infinite nothing.

  ‘Stay here, I think,’ said Mr. Upstairs, ‘is a scary.’

  ‘We need to get away from this,’ said Lee, urgently. He looked around the shrinking circle of reality. They were trapped on the pavement between the boundary and Tesco. There was nowhere else to go; nowhere except back into Tesco.

  ‘Go to in this shop, I think, is a good.’

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Lee, and they turned towards the automatic doors. They loomed like the gates of an ancient castle, silhouetted against the pillar of light that rose behind them, suddenly huge in this tiny remaining sliver of world. Slowly, cautiously, staying close together, they crept towards them.

  For a long time, there was nothing but the shuffling, scraping sound of their shoes against the pavement and the rustling of the bag-for-life. It was so quiet Lee could even hear the rustling of their clothes. He tensed, controlling his movements, trying to move as silently as possible.

  The sudden movement of the doors startled him so badly that he jumped backwards, crying out and shielding his head with his arms. They slid open with a rumble and a hiss, moving at an unnatural speed. It took Lee a moment to realise they had opened automatically, sensing his approach. He lowered his arms and looked up at what their opening revealed.

  What he saw made his jaw drop and his eyes bulge. A frightened little wail escaped his throat.

  The main aisle stretched away from them, branching off into its various perpendicular tributaries before ending abruptly in a wall of milk. It was a familiar sight—the same Tesco entrance he had seen at least once a week in the ten-or-so years since it had opened—yet nothing had ever looked so alien.

  The light was all wrong: it blazed in fron the right-hand-side, throwing enormous shadows that were never normally there. The milk at the far end glowed so brightly Lee had to shield his eyes; the stand of discounted muffins by the entrance, by contrast, was in almost total darkness, lost in the shadow of a pillar.

  Somehow, the fact of goods under promotion not being brilliantly lit gave Lee a lurching sense of profound, fundamental wrongness.

  As he gawked, the doors moved again, sliding gently back towards one another. For some reason, they closed a lot more slowly than they opened. He had never noticed that before.

  He turned to Mr. Upstairs.

  ‘Ready?’ he asked.

  Mr. Upstairs nodded once.

  Lee steeled himself and took a bold step forwards. The automatic doors rolled open once again in response. But Mr. Upstairs’s hand had reached out and gripped his arm. Turning, Lee saw that the man hadn’t moved; he was still staring at where Lee had just been standing. Beyond it. At a spot further away, off to the side of the doors. Lee followed his gaze.

  The smoking woman.

  She was right in the grey boundary; she was a shadow, barely lighter than the darkness that threatened to absorb her. Smoke from her cigarette was floating upwards in the still air and getting stuck there, slowing as it rose and pooling into a mushroom cloud. She was looking around her in confusion, but her movements were slowed almost to the point of stillness. One hand was already dangerously close to the encroaching black. It was closing in; if they left her, she would be swallowed by it.

  ‘Oi!’ shouted Mr. Upstairs, his voice filling the eerie, still silence for a brief moment before disappearing. ‘Excuse, Mrs. Woman! You are dangerous!’

  There was no response.

  This grey things kill you… Mr. Upstairs’s words from before echoed in Lee’s head.

  Lee ran. Behind him, Mr. Upstairs roared a warning, then Lee heard thumping footsteps behind him as he raced towards the woman. It was an idiotic thing to do, but he had no choice—there was no question of leaving her to be mortally decelerated at the edge of reality—and on some innate level he was desperately glad for something obvious to do.

  As he approached he reached his right arm out to grab her, bracing himself for the impact of hitting the grey… which never came.

  He ran up to her as though they were standing on an ordinary street, on an ordinary day. As he drew nearer, colour flowed into her. Her movements quickened. She stood up completely, a gaudy multicoloured statue against the utter darkness behind her. She fixed Lee with a surprised look and began to form a ‘wh-’ with her lips. This was wrong. There should have been some kind of resistance, some kind of slowdown. Why had it been so easy to reach her?

  Not pausing to think, he wrapped his right arm around her wrist and, moving as fast as he could, turned back towards—

  —behind him, instead of the pavement he had just run across, was a wall of blazing, blinding white light.

  It hazed and roiled at him, like staring into the sun, but a sun inches from his face. He closed his eyes and screamed, blinded, turning away to shield his face. The woman behind him was surrounded by a haze of grey—the same grey as before, but up close it flicked and darted as though alive, swirling around her, clinging to her hungrily as it billowed in from from the black beyond. Lee stared past her and into the darkness and was sure he saw something, a darker black against the black background, move. He tightened his grip on the arm of the woman as he felt a huge, powerful hand grip his other arm and pull with the sudden machine force of a pneumatic drill.

  He travelled towards the pull, and realised; he had slowed down when he approached the woman. He hadn’t noticed because he was moving at the same speed as her. Close to the grey, everything was slow, including him. Further away from it, things moved faster.

  His left arm, pulled by Mr. Upstairs, was further away from it than the rest of him.

  He felt his left arm, under the traction of the giant man, pulled away from him faster and harder than his slowed-down body and his woman-gripping right arm could keep up with, and felt a moment’s worry.

  Then his shoulder began to tear. He screamed.

  It came apart with a crack as his arm, then he, and then the woman came rolling into the light and sprawled onto the pavement alongside Mr. Upstairs.

  The agony was unspeakable. His left arm dangled limply and he continued the scream, curled into a defensive ball with his head tucked into his chest. The pain was a mix of searing white and brownish-purple behind his eyes, the white a constant, penetrating, scalding heat while the brownish-purple came in waves of nauseating grind that travelled up his spine whenever he breathed.

  His body was broken. The arm was suddenly no longer a part of him but an enemy, clinging to his skeleton and hurting him. He was betrayed, made weak and vulnerable, and mindless with pain, the foundations pulled out from under his sense of himself. The wrongness of it caused his stomach to constrict and he vomited onto his knees as his body wretched and shivered and dribbled.

  The same huge, orange-haired, muscular arm that had caused the damage to him wrapped itself around his torso and he screamed again.

  ‘I need to go to hospital’, he managed to garble through strands of vomit, saliva, and tears.

  ‘Very sorry’, he heard form behind as he was hauled upwards and passed out in a blinding flash of white and brownish-purple.