The metronomic throbbing surrounded him, as if he were adrift inside the beating heart of a leviathan.
Resisting the urge to walk into the light and become part of it forever, Eduardo struggled to his feet. Shrugged the shotgun off his shoulder, Blinding light forcing him to squint, serial shock waves knocking the breath out of him, evergreen boughs churning, a trembling in the earth, the electronic oscillation like the high-pitched squeal of a surgeon's bone saw, and the whole night throbbing, the sky and the earth throbbing as something pushed repeatedly and relentlessly at the fabric of reality, throbbing, throbbing-Whoooosh.
The new sound was like-but enormously louder than-the gasp of a vacuum-packed can of coffee or peanuts being opened, air rushing to fill a void.
Immediately after that single brief whoooosh, a pall of silence fell across the night and the unearthly light vanished in an instant., Eduardo Fernandez stood in stunned disbelief under the crescent moon, staring at a perfect sphere of pure blackness that towered over him, like a gargantuan ball on a cosmic billiards table. It was so flawlessly black, it stood out against the ordinary darkness of the May night as prominently as the flare of a nuclear explosion would stand out against the backdrop of even the sunniest summer day. Huge.
Thirty feet in diameter. It filled the space once occupied by the.radiant pine trees and earth.
A ship.
For a moment he thought that he was gazing up at a ship with a windowless hull as smooth as pooled oil. He waited in paralytic terror for a seam of light to appear, a portal to crack open, a ramp to extrude.
In spite of the fear that clouded his thinking, Eduardo quickly realized he was not looking at a solid object. The moon-glow wasn't reflected on its surface. Light just fell into it as it would fall into a well. Or tunnel.
Except that it revealed no curving walls within. Instinctively, without needing to touch that smooth inky surface, he knew the sphere had no weight, no mass at all, he had no primitive sense whatsoever that it was looming over him, as he should have had if it had been solid.
The object wasn't an object, it was not a sphere but a circle. Not three dimensional but two.
A doorway.
Open.
The dark beyond the threshold was unrelieved by gleam, glint, or faintest glimmer. Such perfect blackness was neither natural nor within human experience, and staring at it made Eduardo's eyes ache with the strain of seeking dimension and detail where none existed.
He wanted to run.
He approached the doorway instead.
His heart thudded, and his blood pressure no doubt pushed him toward a stroke. He clutched the shotgun with what he knew was pathetic faith in its efficacy, shoving it out in front of him as a primitive tribesman might brandish a talismanic staff carved with runes, inset with wild-animal teeth, lacquered with sacrificial blood, and crowned with a shock of a witch doctor's hair.
However, his fear of the door-and of the unknown realms and entities beyond it-was not as debilitating as the fear of senility and the self-doubt with which he had been living lately. While the chance existed to gather proof of this experience, he intended to explore as far and as long as his nerves would hold out. He hoped never to wake another morning with the suspicion that his brain was addled and his perceptions were no longer trustworthy.
Moving cautiously across the dead and flattened meadow grass, feet sinking slightly into the spring-softened soil, he remained alert for any change within the circle of exceptional darkness: a lesser blackness, shadows within the gloom, a spark, a hint of movement, anything that might signal the approach of a traveler. He stopped three feet from the brink of that eye-baffling tenebrity, leaning.forward slightly, as wonder-struck as a man in a fairy tale gazing into a magical mirror, the biggest damned magical mirror the Brothers Grimm ever imagined, one that offered no reflections-enchanted or otherwise-but that gave him a hair-raising glimpse of eternity.
Holding the shotgun in one hand, he reached down and picked up a stone as large as a lemon. He tossed it gently at the portal. He more than half expected the stone to bounce off the blackness with a hard metallic tonk, for it was still easier to believe he was looking at an object rather than peering into infinity. But it crossed the vertical plane of the doorway and vanished without a sound.
He edged closer.
Experimentally, he pushed the barrel of the Remington shotgun across the threshold. It didn't fade into the gloom. Instead, the blackness so totally claimed the forward part of the weapon that it appeared as if someone had run a high-speed saw through the barrel and the forearm slide handle, neatly truncating them.
He pulled back on the Remington, and the forward part of the gun reappeared.
It seemed to be intact.
He touched the steel barrel and the checkered wood grip on the slide.
Everything felt as it should feel.
Taking a deep breath, not sure whether he was brave or insane, he raised one trembling hand, as if signaling "hello" to someone, and eased it forward, feeling for the transition point between this world and whatever lay beyond the doorway. A tingle against his palm and the pads of his fingers. A coolness. It felt almost as if his hand rested on a pool of water but too lightly to break the surface tension.
He hesitated.
"You're seventy years old," he grumbled. "What've you got to lose?"
Swallowing hard, he pushed his hand through the portal, and it disappeared in the same manner as the shotgun. He encountered no resistance, and his wrist terminated in a neat stump.
"Jesus," he said softly.
He made a fist, opened and closed it, but he couldn't tell if his hand responded on the other side of the barrier. All feeling ended at the point at which that hellish blackness cut across his wrist.
When he withdrew his hand from the doorway, it was as unchanged as the shotgun had been. He opened his fist, closed it, opened it.
Everything worked as it should, and he had full feeling again.
Eduardo looked around at the deep and peaceful May night. The forest.flanking the impossible circle of darkness. Meadow sloping upward, palely frosted by the glow of the quarter moon. The house at the higher end of the meadow. Some windows dark and others filled with light. Mountain peaks in the west, caps of snow phosphorescent against the post-midnight sky.
The scene was too detailed to be a place in a dream or part of the hallucination-riddled world of senile dementia. He was not a demented old fool, after all. Old, yes. A fool, probably. But not demented.
He returned his attention to the doorway again-and suddenly wondered what it looked like from the side. He imagined a long tube of perfectly nonreflective ebony leading straight off into the night more or less like an oil pipeline stretching across Alaskan tundra, boring through mountains in some cases and suspended in thin air when it crossed less lofty territories, until it reached the curve of the earth, where it continued straight and true, unbending, off into space, a tunnel to the stars.
When he walked to one end of the thirty-foot-wide blot and looked at the side of it, he discovered something utterly different from-but quite as strange as- the pipeline image in his mind. The forest lay behind the enormous portal, unchanged as far as he could telclass="underline" the moon shone down, the trees rose as if responding to the caress of that silvery light, and an owl hooted far away. The doorway disappeared when viewed from the side. Its width, if it had any width at all, was as thin as a thread or as a well-stropped razor blade.
He walked all the way around to the back of it.
Viewed from a point a hundred and eighty degrees from his first position, the doorway was the same thirty-foot circle of featureless mystery. From that reverse perspective, it seemed to have swallowed not part of the forest but the meadow and the house at the top of the rise. It was like a great paper-thin black coin balanced on edge.