Chapter 9 The Hole in Nothing #2
Valentina set an unhurried pace. The path forked many times, but she never hesitated in choosing the way.
Green fell back and noticed how strange and easy it was to share comfortable silence while walking through the trees.
He didn’t feel a need to fill the quiet.
There was so much to see, to smell, to hear in the pulse of the living woodlands.
Here, a burst of crisp sound as two chipmunks raced through the branches of a fallen sweet gum.
There, the drumroll of a downy woodpecker hunting for his lunch.
And always the soft march of Valentina’s footfalls while she ducked beneath a storm-tilted trunk or strayed from the path to touch a feathery hemlock bough.
He began to mirror her, stepping where she stepped.
Touching what she touched. As he did, he realized that there was an entire vocabulary of new textures to learn along with the sounds, scents, and sights of the woods.
It was nearly 11 a.m. when they arrived. Valentina halted at a small clearing like a castle moat surrounding an unremarkable stand of gangly young pines in the center.
“We’re here,” she said. “The Hole in Nothing.”
Something about that phrase made Green tingle with recognition, but he couldn’t quite place it.
“Muir’s doorway between two pines?” he asked.
“Exactly.”
He stood beside his teacher.
The first thing Green noticed was the litter.
Sun-faded beer cans gleamed silver from the drifts of leaves.
A gold condom wrapper and a smashed liquor bottle marked the boundary of the little clearing.
He stepped over them and studied the area.
There was a small fire ring made of sooty stones with evidence of a recent burn.
It looked like a not-so-secret hangout for high school kids.
Valentina scowled.
“This place has become more popular since I last visited.”
“It’s kind of…filthy.”
“It is profoundly dangerous so, of course, is appealing to young people. It resonates with their feeling of immortality. The same reason they are drawn to abandoned quarries and condemned houses.”
Green walked forward and crushed a can into the soft soil. There was something about the pines in the center of the clearing. He couldn’t quite tell what was off about them and it was like an itch he couldn’t reach.
“Careful, Mr. Green. Do not go wandering until you see it.”
He scanned the trees. A barricade made of branches lashed together with twine blocked the way to an arch where two bent pines met. A cartoonish skull and crossbones done in Sharpie on a white plastic cafeteria tray hung from the barricade. “Hole in Nothing” was scrawled beneath the skull.
“I assume that’s it.”
“That’s it. What do you see?”
“I see the nothing, but I don’t see the hole.”
It looked like a regular space between regular trees. Regular nothing. Only…not quite.
A soft breeze rolled through the clearing, sizzling in the dry leaves and snack wrappers. The pines swayed and softly knocked together where their trunks crossed to form the archway. An electric expectancy ran a current down the back of Green’s neck.
“Take a closer look. It won’t leap out and grab you, but don’t get near the trees.”
Green walked forward and stood by the barrier.
His throat tightened.
He looked at the crossed pines and imagined an ambush predator on a sandy seabed, camouflaged by a million generations of evolution, resembling nothing but a jumble of volcanic rock with two faint eyes betraying a living symmetry.
He could just make out something there. Not a hole exactly, more of a filter or lens occupying the archway between the trees. The light was different beyond the two pines, tea stained, a quality of sepia tone.
“I think I can see it.”
It was such a minor distortion, but looking at it was like scraping the pad of his thumb perpendicularly along the edge of a razor, feeling its cutting potential poised and waiting for a change in direction, a shift from scrape to slice.
“Stand there and watch me, Mr. Green.”
Valentina stood at Green’s side, then paced a wide circle around the arch, heading for the far side of the trees.
He watched her pass behind the first bent tree comprising the left-hand side of the archway.
She did not emerge on the other side of the trunk.
A moment later, she leaned around the right-hand tree and smiled.
He felt something that wasn’t quite a giggle dance through his chest, the butterfly-stomach sensation of standing at the edge of a tall building. He’d thought madness was something that crept in and spread like mildew, not something you could hike to in a few hours.
Valentina ducked back behind the hole and was gone from view again.
“Join me on this side,” she said, a disembodied voice from beyond the hazy archway.
Green left the barricade and rounded the trees. From beside the arch, Valentina was perfectly visible, standing with her hands on her hips, watching Green with placid interest.
“Now stand where I stand,” Valentina said.
Green did.
She rounded the arch and stood behind the barricade. Green could see her just fine.
“Like a two-way mirror?”
“It’s more of a door than a mirror. Though, of course, it is fundamentally different from any doorway I know of. For example, if you were to walk through the arch to me from that side, nothing would happen.”
“I think I’ll pass.”
Valentina ignored the comment.
“Yet,” she continued, “if I passed through from this side, I would be…affected. It’s unidirectional.”
Green walked back around to stand next to his teacher.
“I don’t like being near this thing.”
“As I said, it will not leap out and grab you.”
“You mean because it hasn’t done that yet? I’m also the first person to see the horned wolf. And how many people did you say have seen that glowing deer?”
“Mr. Green, don’t spend your imagination inventing worst-case scenarios. We have plenty to do in our work with the dangers we can confirm with empirical data.”
He eyed the hole. It felt like a vicious dog on a very thin tether.
Something clicked and he recalled why “Hole in Nothing” had a familiar ring.
“Wait a minute. I think I saw a flyer about this place at the gas station.”
“That would be absurd.”
“Yeah, it would,” Green agreed. “But I’m pretty sure I did. Maybe Alf made it.”
Valentina sighed.
“Usually, the folks around here have more sense than to poke around this sort of anomaly. There is no shortage of oddities in Appalachia.”
“Well, somebody left all this trash and made that sign on the barricade. I’m guessing you didn’t doodle that little skull. Maybe it was them. Do you think anyone has gone through it? The hole, I mean.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because they almost certainly wouldn’t have returned alive and I hear about that sort of thing.”
Valentina took off her pack, knelt, and began unloading empty jars and sample bags.
A dull pain brought Green’s attention down to his right hand. It was clinched in a rigid claw around the acorn in his pocket, so tight the muscles in his forearm burned. He released the nut and crossed his arms.
“Wait, does this count as cryptonature? Why can people see this thing?”
“Again, it’s a spectrum, not a binary.”
“So, where does it go? You called it a door earlier. Doors lead somewhere.”
“That’s a complicated question. It is not as simple as a matter of where, unless we use that term very broadly to refer to outside our reality.”
Green felt his skin crawl.
“Huh. I hate that. Can we shut it? I mean, we need to shut it, right? I don’t like how this place feels.”
“I don’t disagree. Yet, in this instance, it isn’t an easy matter. The most reliable known method for closing such a doorway involves stepping through.”
“Wow, I think I hate that even more than your last answer. Why would going through that thing shut it? And couldn’t we…I don’t know…just toss a mannequin through or something?”
Valentina smirked and continued organizing her sample bags.
“If only. It’s a gap in the skin of reality, in our time-space.
One feature of reality here in our universe is the transformative power of a subjective viewpoint, the presence of an active observer.
A sapient being making a willful choice can bring their reality along with them and shut such a rift.
Tangible matter and intangible will acting with a unity of purpose to reassert a cohesive, unbroken border of what is real.
In short, you step into the gap as something akin to a living embassy of our reality and, under those auspices, you intend the doorway shut.
Such is our current working theory of the mechanisms at play. ”
“In short? That’s the short version?”
“Exactly.”
Green looked to the hole and back to his teacher. He felt like he was hanging on to the conversation by his fingertips.
“So, if that’s the proven method, why haven’t you done it yet?”
Valentina stood, turned, and looked around the clearing.
“Here, help me with this branch. I’ll demonstrate.”
Green took one end and helped her carry it to the barricade.
They swung it three times and tossed it through the archway.
It vanished without a sound. The space rippled slightly, like a leaf touching the surface of a still pond.
Valentina rounded the pines and searched the ground.
“No. Nothing. It has fully exited. Let’s try again.”
At the edge of the clearing, he spotted a forked three-foot log like a stubby Y. He grabbed the forked end, found it heavier than expected, and dragged it to the barricade, leaving a long, loamy scar in the leaf litter the color of dark chocolate.
The two of them hefted the log and repeated their experiment. The Hole in Nothing swallowed the second log with another ripple. He heard a soft plunk and a rolling skitter.
They walked to the far side and, this time, Valentina found what she was searching for.
“Here. Look here, Mr. Green.”
She returned holding a weathered shard of wood.
“This one made it back.”
“That’s the log?”
“It is.”