When the Sky Fell on Splendor(63)

Maybe we couldn’t close any of them, right from the very beginning.

When Mark was painting the Milky Way on my ceiling for my birthday, he told me something: Black holes were like punctures in the fabric of space-time. If you dove into one, you’d cross its horizon at the same moment as everything else its gravity had ever pulled there.

You’d see it all, every single bit of time and energy and material the black hole had ever experienced, its entire life flattened. No order, no causality, just a bunch of shit.

Everything, all at once.

That was what the accident had done to Splendor. As soon as we’d crossed that event horizon, we’d been doomed to everything our shit-town’s gravity could pull into itself.

Remy opened the door, and Arthur led the way down the rickety stairs, and I followed.

It had always been like this. Every time we’d opened a door, it had been this door. Every time we’d followed him down, it had been this set of stairs.

Now we would finally see where we’d been going.





TWENTY-THREE



EVEN OUR FOOTSTEPS SEEMED to whisper as we descended, making no more noise than the faintest scuff of rubber on concrete.

We felt our way down the stairs. Remy’s flashlight clicked on, swinging back and forth like a light saber until it caught on the metal racks that lined the right and back walls of the room. On the left, rusted metal hooks held tools aloft: axes, snow shovels—guns. Lots of them.

An immense, wood-and foam-dusted worktable occupied the center of the room.

Something metallic clinked and rattled as Remy’s flashlight caught on it: a single bulb and chain mounted in the ceiling beside the worktable. Arthur tugged it, and sallow light unfurled like a blanket across the table. There was an industrial-strength lamp clamped to the edge, and some kind of saw mounted on the other side. The surface was sprinkled with both wood and metal shavings.

“He’s building something, all right,” Arthur said.

My spine crawled. “Or he already built it.”

Remy picked up a twisted piece of steel, six inches long. “Maybe there are blueprints.”

There was a leather-bound folder on a shelf beneath the tabletop, and he stooped to grab it. Arthur set the bolt cutters down and walked along the racks, examining the mix of extension cords and dusty soup cans, oversized water bottles and small generators, fans, lanterns, blankets.

“Maybe he thinks he can survive whatever that thing does, down here,” Arthur said. “Maybe he thinks if he builds this thing, they’ll let him live.”

He stopped and ran his fingers over a toolbox. “If we could just find our alien, this would be so much simpler.” He turned back to us. “Where could it have gone?”

Another cramp went through my center. I stepped back and gripped the edge of the metal rack on either side of my legs.

“No idea.” Remy’s eyes darted to mine then back to the leather folder in his hands.

I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth, fighting the white trying to overcome me.

“Fran?” Cast in stark light and shadow, Remy looked like a woodcut of himself. He lifted an oversized sheaf of paper and held it toward me.

Arthur perked up with interest. He grabbed it before I could, and his expression transformed.

As far as I knew, my brother wasn’t afraid of anything, except maybe dying in a particularly boring way. But his body had gone rigid, and the tan leached out from under his freckles.

“Are there more of these?” he said huskily.

Remy’s mouth juddered, but no sound came out. He’d gone as pale as Arthur, who pushed him aside and started flipping through the stack of papers on the table.

“What is it?” I asked, stumbling forward.

Schematics?

A journal about his time with the alien, or a confession that he’d loosened the hook block at the steel mill?

A Why I Did It letter?

Arthur tried to block my way as I came forward, and that was when I knew it must be something worse. Something horrifying, something I’d never unsee.

My phone buzzed, and I heard Arthur’s chirp—Remy’s had probably gone off too—but neither of them reacted. They were quickly sifting through the papers, spreading them out across the tabletop in a mania, all while Arthur kept his back to me, all while he tried to block me out.

I pushed past him. This time, I knew, I couldn’t afford to look away.

At first I was so stunned by the light, careful lead sketch that a bubble of relief rose through my chest. It was just a drawing. A portrait.

Then I pieced together the thick wavy hair, the unruly eyebrows and speckled cheeks and bony shoulders.

It was me.

The phones chirped, buzzed, soundlessly vibrated, and we ignored them.

My throat felt like it had collapsed. I couldn’t speak. Blood rushed past my eardrums, and a forceful buzz went through me. The lights overhead stuttered, but I was too dazed to reel back the energy pouring off me.

Art and Remy were both flipping furiously through the papers, the images in them blinking in and out of view beneath the flashing light.

Me.

Me.

Me.

Droog.

My parents, I realized. Mom twice more, then Dad, then Droog and me. A drawing of Arthur, before his tattoos, before he’d cut the bowl-like mop of blond hair off. Another of me. There were dozens, easily. Drawings of me perched on the propane tank, minus the mustachioed penis. Sketches of Mom looking through the telescope she used to keep on the balcony outside her and Dad’s room. Dad lying on his back on a blanket in the grass, and Droog jumping over him.