Strange Attractor

by Andrew Burdon

June 2009

“So what do you think?” Dale pulled a chair from the table and sat down. “It’s perfect, isn’t it?”

From an original stained glass window, bright patches of red, blue, and green light fell upon Nicky. She leant against the breakfast bar feigning indecision. He knew what she was thinking; she could bank on having the final say in making their own mark on the place if she didn’t agree too readily.

Dale didn’t mind. Not as long she let him upgrade to the 48” plasma TV he needed, which the new living room would easily accommodate. And besides, the decor of their current apartment was gender-neutral and all Nicky’s doing. He’d be in no danger of flowered bedspreads, window valences, or pink anything after the move.

They had taken a last look through the apartment—Dale wiggling like an excited puppy—while the realtor waited outside. Built in the 1940s, the two-story house had been sympathetically renovated and much of its character restored. The ground-floor apartment was spacious, comprising two bedrooms, a reception room, and a large kitchen-diner. Ownership of the small back yard was included in the deed, and it was only a short hop down route nine into Jersey City. Best of all; they could afford it.

“I guess we could be in before I pop,” Nicky said, one hand resting absently on her rounded abdomen. She shivered. “It’s cold in here.”

“Thank God,” said Dale. Not small to begin with, he’d put on more pounds in the last eighteen months than he liked to admit, and the balmy weather was killing him. It was hot throughout most of the apartment, but pleasant in the kitchen.

“Maybe there’s a ghost,” Nicky said.

Dale forced a laugh. Some weeks previous a full disclosure conversation with the realtor had lead him to do some of his own digging on the Internet.

The property had an unsettling history. The widower who’d lived and died in the building had turned down a small fortune offered by developers in the late ‘90s—quirky, but nothing worrisome. Then he’d found a blog from the previous owners, who had ‘lost’ two dogs and heard ‘noises’, and on a news site discovered that in 2004 a three year old girl had vanished from the ground-floor apartment in the middle of the night. The original owner’s son—some nut job who was even mentioned regarding harassment in the previous owners’ blog—had been implicated.

He’d asked the realtor not to say anything to Nicky. It was the last thing he wanted to worry her, what with the baby on the way. She was already fascinated by the awkwardly-angled wall of solid concrete removed from the middle of the kitchen during its renovation in 2001.

The house had had a run of bad luck was all, and he’d resolved to install top-of-the-line home security the day they moved in. There was simply nothing on the market that could hold a candle to this place. Not in their price bracket.

“Well?” Dale asked.

Nicky came near and draped her arms across his shoulders. She planted a kiss on his forehead. “I know the perfect spot for the Christmas tree.”

March 1965

Something had gone wrong.

Doctor Bill Bryson drew a tentative breath and waited. Forthwith he scraped together the mental fortitude to commit all his observations to memory. Whatever had happened, should he return, his colleague Doctor Sörensen—a peer on the project but twenty years his senior—would expect a detailed report. Bryson tugged up his sleeve and pushed a small button on his imported Chinese wristwatch, an expensive Christmas gift from his dear wife. The tiny blue hand on the chronograph began ticking away the seconds. He looked at his unexpected surroundings, his scientific mind cataloguing the data.

He stood in long hallway. The walls, floors, ceilings—nearly everything in sight—was a uniform primary red colour. Dozens of panelled red doors lined the hallway, all closed shut against their red door frames. The corridor that stretched either side of him was perhaps a hundred yards long and ended at blank walls. The doors spaced equidistant on each side were very close to one another, and could not conceal rooms any larger than a janitor’s closet. Twin rows of jet-black doorknobs drew the eye down one side of the hallway and back up the other. Room numbers or door signs were completely absent. The strangest thing was there was light enough to see by, but no discernible light source. It was neither warm nor cold in the hallway, and the still air held no scent he could detect.

Bryson wished for any number of the recording equipment contained in the laboratory. Sörensen had a Super 8 home movie camera locked away somewhere, but what he wouldn’t give for a Dictaphone Travelmaster, or the Canon FX sat in his desk drawer. Even a humble notepad and pencil would have been useful. Alas, they simply never conceived the need.

Presently Bryson perceived a change of sound. Indeed, the barely audible sound—the muffled murmur of conversation, he realised—was so commonplace that only when it changed to singing did he become instantly aware of it.

Cautiously he crept down the corridor, ears straining past the soft clunk his leather Oxford shoes made on the hard surface. He found the door, unremarkable among its counterparts, and pressed his ear against the frame.

#

Doctor Christoffer Sörensen sat in the control booth. A large computing machine (rented at phenomenal expense to the university) stood behind him, its buttons and dials, along with a desk lamp angled low over the instrumentation panel were the only sources of illumination. He stared unseeing through his dim reflection in the thick leaded-glass window.

Four shining red circles stared back at him through the glass.

Sörensen drew three staccato pulls then a long lungful from the tobacco pipe clamped in his teeth. His gaze flicked at the clock then returned to the pair of barely visible large metal cylinders that dominated the dark laboritroy. Twin plumes of thick acrid smoke issued down from his nostrils as he slowly exhaled. Portholes no bigger than a saucer, two in each pod, cast their baleful glow into the laboratory.

Almost half an hour had passed.

There’d been the near-blinding flash through his safety goggles, but readouts showed Pod 2 had remained inactive, and Doctor Bryson was… gone.

Sörensen had wanted to rush into the lab and check thoroughly, but he didn’t know what would happen if the pod door was open when Bryson returned. Besides, the porthole placement confirmed the pods were empty.

They’d tested the system again and again before escalating to human trials. Each time the subject—first inorganic, then organic, and finally the mice—had undergone the instant transport unscathed. He doubted even the Soviet cosmonaut in the news this week had enjoyed such rigorous safety measures. Although they’d both been eager, the two scientists had followed every possible precaution.

The first time, Bryson had transferred instantaneously between the telepods, though he had sworn to a vertiginous sensation and an awareness of three to five seconds passing. A repeat experiment yielded the same objective and subjective results. This was their third experiment.

Bryson had not reappeared.

The man had a family—a wife and son. The boy was only four. What was he going to tell them? There wasn’t even a body.

The police would get involved, and the ethics committee. They had been treading a fine line, showing enough progress to warrant their government funding, but not so much that the project was taken out of their hands. They were years away from human trials, is what they’d been saying. He and Bryson had altered the results and fabricated setbacks in papers sent to the girl in the typing pool. It was repugnant, but they felt vindicated in the wisdom of such a course. Only last week had 3,500 U.S. Marines been dispatched to South Vietnam, marking the beginning of a ground war whereby Sörensen believed America’s institutional bellicosity made escalation inevitable. And there was that whole sorry mess down in Alabama the international media had termed “Bloody Sunday.” Sörensen and Bryson believed in Johnson’s Great Society, and believed the President could make it happen, but the sabre-rattling in Southeast Asia threw the heinous possible applications of their own project into stark relief.

A commotion outside intruded upon Sörensen’s meditations. He dropped his pipe in the ashtray, opened the door and was astonished to greet a breathless Bill Bryson.

“I came out inside the movie theatre on 12th—the singing was from The Sound Of Music! I heard it behind the door!”

“William! William, my dear boy!” Sörensen forgot himself and embraced his colleague. The young man was damp with perspiration.

Sörensen had a hundred questions. He knew not where to start, but Bryson was already talking.

“We’ll have to rethink the entire superposition principle,” Bryson gesticulated animatedly. “The coefficiency of the voltage increase must have triggered a variable in the Hilbert space somehow. Minkowski was wrong!”

Sörensen tried to assimilate this information. “But the mice—”

“It’s the mind!” Bryson said, “The human mind! It must be! Ask those levitating monks in Nepal.”

Sörensen’s scientific rationality applied the breaks. “Slowly, slowly. Take a breath. That’s it.” He guided Bryson to the small office they shared. “Sit down and gather your thoughts. I’ll go and get us some coffee. And a Dictaphone…”

May 1965

“Sherry!” Buddy Bryson sobbed and banged feebly on the pantry door. “Sheeeh-rryyyy!”

A chink of light under the door lit the puddle of wee that he stood in. His throat was sore and his hands were sore and his nose was running. He needed a handkerchief. If he wiped the snot on his sleeves he’d be scolded, and he’d already be in trouble for wetting himself. Worse thing was he desperately needed a number two and didn’t think he could last much longer.

“Sheeeh-rryyy!” The shill wail trailed off in a hiccoughing moan.

A loud crash made Buddy jump and set his heart pounding. The pantry door flew open, and Buddy cowered in fear.

But it was Daddy! Buddy felt relief, but the look on Daddy’s face was so angry it felt like a slap. A whimper escaped his lips.

Daddy reached into the pantry, lifted Buddy into his cold arms, and yelling loudly, marched out of the kitchen.

Daddy never yelled, and it scared Buddy. He was being squeezed tight, but he didn’t dare wriggle an inch.

In the living room Sherry was frozen on the edge of the couch. The babysitter’s usually pink face was white. Both Buddy and Sherry flinched as Daddyloosed an arm from around him and grabbed the girl’s wrist. Yelling all the while, dragged her to her feet and out of the room.

Between the jostling, the noise, and Daddy acting so different, all Buddy could do was cling to Daddy’s shoulder. He couldn’t help the frightened howl he was sure must be making Daddy even more angry.

The front door was flung open and Sherry ran out the house. Daddy slammed the door shut.

He felt Daddy’s hand pat his head. “Sh-sh-sshhh. It’s alright, son. It’s alright.”

They stayed by the door a moment, Buddy being slowly swayed in Daddy’s arms like when he was very little. Then Daddy juggled him out to arm’s length, looked down at the damp patch on his shirt and jacket, and at Buddy’s wet pyjama bottoms. Buddy felt terribly ashamed, and began to cry.

“Don’t worry, Bud. It’s alright,” said Daddy, giving him a soft cuddle. “It’s alright. Let’s go get you cleaned up.”

June 1965

The noise of the toilet flush gurgled loudly into the bedroom. Right on cue, Buddy’s panicked shouts rang down the hall. Linda sighed with sharp exasperation. She flung away the covers and slowly sat up on the edge of the bed. She squinted, blurry-eyed at the radio alarm clock on the nightstand. Great.

Linda passed her husband in the dark doorway, ignored his whispered apology, then felt a twinge of conscience. She supposed she couldn’t blame him for forgetting, since Bill it didn’t often get up; it was she who had to visit the necessary at least once during the night.

She turned the corner on the landing and yawned. The blue-yellow glow of Buddy’s reinstated night light made a silhouette of his bedroom door, left ajar. He called again for her.

“It’s okay, darling,” she said softly.

Though her tone was calm and soothing, her thoughts were anything but. The situation was deeply frustrating, and she blamed herself for the trauma her son had suffered at the hands of that evil little bitch. Linda hoped never again to cross paths with that despicable girl—she couldn’t trust what she might do. She’d had it out with Sherry’s mother, and surprised herself as much as she’d shocked Bill when it nearly came to blows.

A few days later Buddy began to refuse to even enter the kitchen, screaming and crying when she tried insisting. She didn’t like him eating in front of TV, but she felt so guilty. Then the noise thing started as well, which at least only seemed to bother him in bed.

Linda paused at the door and unclenched her fists. With conscious effort she relaxed her frown. “It’s okay, sweetheart,” she said. “Mommy’s here.”

It took around half an hour and a bedtime story for Buddy to fall asleep.

She climbed into bed and snuggled up to the warmth of her husband’s back. Bill raised his elbow as she slid an arm round his chest.

“Was he wet?” Bill mumbled.

“No.”

She was just drifting off when a loud clatter sounded downstairs.

#

After Bill left for work she’d called an exterminator who put her onto Animal Control Services. The man promptly arrived an hour later.

It was a warm morning, already 74 degrees according to the radio, and though it didn’t feel quite that hot, Linda had opened the windows to invite in what little breeze stirred outside. The beautiful stained glass was high on the list of reasons she’d fell in love with the house.

The first and only thing the Animal Control Officer noticed about the windows was the fact they were open, and he told her to shut them.

“My husband said he heard a rattling,” Linda said, lowing the last window. “The trash can under the sink there was tipped over and the garbage was spread all over. I don’t know if we even get rattlesnakes here, but…” She trailed off.

“Well it’s not unheard of,” he said. “You did the right thing by calling, ‘specially with the little guy.” The control officer nodded down the hall to where a nervous Buddy watched from between the banister rails. “You’ve got a hell of a draft in here, so there’s likely an in. And if there’s an in, rats and snakes’d follow.”

“Rats?”

The skinny man looked amused. “Lady, this is New Jersey. And you got the train yard just a few miles down the road.”

“Oh,” Linda blushed, feeling every inch the dumb American housewife.

He seemed to take pity. “Don’t worry. We’ll plug up them holes and take care o’ the whole thing. I can quote you today and you give us a call after speaking to your husband.”

She managed a glazed smile. “Thank you.” Dear Mrs. Friedan…

The man spent the next hour poking around her cupboards with a flashlight. Without asking permission he removed the skirting near the back door and even lifted a few floorboards that revealed only desiccated rodent droppings and one disintegrating rat skeleton. Linda watched him the whole time, determined to keep him honest. Finally he admitted defeat. With a grubby hand braced on her counter, the animal control officer lumbered to his feet and shook his head.

“There’s a draft coming from somewhere but blow me if I can find it,” he said. “I can’t account for your trash can, but you definitely ain’t got no snake.”

July 1965

Bryson hadn’t anticipated feeling so tense. He appreciated why Sörensen insisted he locate the nearest public telephone without delay upon his returns, now that the shoe was on the other foot, so to speak.

The past five weeks had been, for want of a better description, revelatory.

They had almost abandoned scientific method in the zeal of discovery, eager to experience layers of reality hitherto unimagined by man, except perhaps in dreams. That one could go from here to there, travelling miles with just a few steps—and steps in such places!—was simply astonishing, and deserved immediate exploration. They would formulate the hows later, Bryson was confident of that.

Bryson had made nine subsequent missions from the telepod. After the last, Sörensen had surprised him with the firm declaration that in spite of their agreement, he would go next. He was uncharacteristically obstinate in his insistence, and Bryson had no choice but to capitulate. Only now, with worry, and yes, perhaps, a touch of jealousy gnawing at him, did Bryson fully understand how difficult it was not being the one to go, and he achieved new respect for his colleague.

The telephone rang. Bryson snatched the receiver to his ear, mindless of the perpetually tangled cord, and the dial base jerked onto its side with a chime of protest. “Hello?”

The tinny yet unmistakable accented voice on the other end was jubilant, but something—a subtle quaver in Sörensen’s tone—dissolved Bryson’s grin.

“Christoffer,” he interrupted, “What are you not telling me?”

#

It was on the landing. Buddy could hear it.

Careful not to make a sound, Buddy slowly—slowly!—dragged the comforter over his head. He lay there, stiller than the clothes-statues in Bamberger’s, almost not breathing.

There was another one on the stairs.

His eyes were wide as tom bowlers beneath the comforter. His greatest fear was if the light went out. They didn’t like the light, and he loved the night light on his bookshelf—loved it dearly—for keeping them away. But deep down Buddy feared the light wouldn’t always keep him safe. They were getting used to it.

They were getting closer.

August 1965

Bryson eased the car, a Ford Mercury Comet—his pride and joy—to a stop on the drive. The last rays of the sun lit the porch as he turned off the ignition. He felt wretched. He’d spent a long day at the laboratory, destroying evidence. The project had been mothballed. There were no longer any grand accolades or a Nobel Prize in his immediate future. Maybe not ever. He thought himself despicable for mourning this loss in like manner to mourning his colleague.

In under two hours after returning to the lab Sörensen, pale as a ghost, began vomiting and suffered severe diarrhoea. The V-700 confirmed the symptoms and Sörensen was admitted to hospital with acute radiation sickness. Within two weeks his friend was dead.

There was a coroner’s autopsy though the cause of death was unmistakable. The body had been released and, because its high radiation activity prevented any suitable period for radioactive decay, was cremated immediately. The remains were sealed in a shielded urn now awaiting shipment by special freight dealing in hazardous materials. They would not be received in Sweden for another six weeks. Sörensen’s niece, Helena, and her husband were due to fly back tomorrow.

Bryson was glad. He didn’t like her. After she arrived he’d see her every visiting hour, her eyes sad, foolishly ignoring she was forbidden to touch her uncle, or even sit too close, and he pictured Linda doing the same for him.

If truth be told he didn’t really know what to think of Helena Ingerman. Her English was good, but some of the things she said, or the way she said them, gave him the suspicion she knew more than she was letting on.

It was an uncomfortable thought.

After such a disagreeable day, Bryson was glad to be home. He closed the front door behind him and hung up his jacket. In the kitchen the table was set for one.

“Honey?” he called.

“Your dinners plated up,” Linda replied from upstairs. “Turn the stove to one-seventy and I’ll be down in a minute.”

“What is it?” he asked, even though it was Sunday and a pan of gravy sat on the range top.

“Roast beef.”

Dressed in his favourite pyjamas, the pair with pictures of biplanes and spitfires, and with hair still damp from his bath, Buddy was allowed to stay up for an extra half hour of TV with his father. Since the funeral Bryson tried hard to spend more time with his son, but things at the lab made heavy demands on his time.

Linda appeared in the doorway, looking beautiful.

“Time for bed, little man,” she said.

#

Buddy’s screams tore through house.

Linda was out of bed and running before she was awake. “Buddy?”

She ran down the hall, aware of Bill’s urgent footsteps thudding behind her. The door banged against the wall as she flew into the room. 

The sight of her son on the blood-spotted bedsheets turned her guts to ice-water. He was writhing on his back, legs kicking in the air as if to divest himself of the comforter bundled on the floor. His pyjamas were ripped and scratches covered his chest and belly in long red lines. The arms held protectively over his face were criss-crossed with deeper gashes beneath the torn fabric.

Linda collapsed to her knees beside the bed. “Buddy! Darling!” She didn’t know if she was pleading for him to be okay, or tell her what happened, or to stop the screams that pierced her heart and gave her goose-flesh.

“Buddy?” He didn’t hear her. She took him by the shoulders but he flailed out his fists and struck her face. She grabbed his wrists and struggled to keep him still. “Buddy! Buddy! It’s Mommy, darling. It’s Mommy!” His eyes were wide and vacant, his screams a repetitious blair.

She felt a sob in her throat and blinked away tears. How could she help him? What should she do? “Bill?” She craned her neck up to her ashen-faced husband.

Something darted from corner of the room and out the door. Linda caught only a fleeting glimpse of it, small, grey and hairless. What was that! Not a cat. Surely not a monkey?

Bill had visibly jumped, startled as she was by the thing. He hesitated a moment then lurched into motion chasing after it, leaving her to struggle alone with their screaming child. “Bill!”

#

The thing had vanished! Literally. Bryson had ran after it on instinct, not thinking what he was going to do. He heard it’s scrabbling as it rounded corners just out of sight. He got to the kitchen door and there was just enough light from the street to glimpse the animal bolt across the floor and vanish in the middle of the room. It just blinked out of existence. With a lead weight on his heart, that was when Bryson knew the attack on his son was his fault. Yet he and Linda must have walked through that spot a thousand times since that night. Three damned months had passed, and all that time…

He told Linda to lock herself and Buddy in the bathroom. Armed with a baseball bat, Bryson checked every room, then turned all the downstairs lights. If any well-meaning neighbours perchance heard the commotion, all they would see was a house back to normal, everyone in bed.

He didn’t know how to fix it, not without Sörensen. Not without research. Though he couldn’t reverse what he’d done, he nevertheless had an idea that would at least keep his family safe.

Consequently he retrieved a old can of paint from the garage, stowed it in the car along with the bat, and, at 3:10 in the morning, made an urgent telephone call.

#

Helena Ingerman watched the rapid approach of a car’s headlights. The dark-coloured sedan pulled up to sidewalk where she and her husband waited under a street lamp.

“Doctor Bryson, this is highly irregular. We have an early flight to catch,” she said.

“Missus Ingerman, Mister Ingerman, than you so much for coming,” Dr. Bryson said, climbing out of the drive’s door holding, of all things, a can of paint and a baseball bat.

Helena swapped a concerned look with her husband.

“If we are to be decorating, perhaps brushes would be more useful,” she said.

Dr. Bryson smiled distractedly. “I realise how strange this must seem. I promised you an explanation, but I’m not really sure where to begin. And time is a factor.” This was said as he trotted up the sidewalk to the wide gate in the wire-mesh fence. He juggled the can and bat to dig a large bunch of keys from his jacket pocket.

Helena looked at the foreboding factory building sprawling in the gloom beyond the street lamps.

Her husband stepped forward. “Please allow me,” he said, carefully divesting the other man of the odd pair of accoutrements. Her husband wasn’t as tall or as broad across the shoulders as the doctor, but she felt better his having possession of the baseball bat. The American’s behaviour was…peculiar.

The gate swung open with a creak and the couple dogged Dr. Bryson’s hurried steps to the factory door where he fumbled with a second padlock.

“I’ll speak plainly, Missus Ingerman,” Dr. Bryson said, “But I assure you everything I’m about to tell you is true.”

They entered the building and down a series of short corridors, Dr Bryson flicking on lights as they went.

“The project your uncle and I were working on was highly experimental,” Dr Bryson said. “It may sound unbelievable, but together we designed and built a machine that achieved something most physicists would say was impossible;” He paused at the threshold of another door and looked her in the eye. “Teleportation.”

Helena held her expression carefully blank. The doctor searched her face, then resumed their march and his story.

“At first we used two telepods, theorising we needed both a transmitter and a receiver. But we discovered—quite by accident—that a single telepod can send a person great distances, via certain…places.”

They entered a small room with a large glass window and an array of unfamiliar instrument panels. Dr. Bryson moved to and fro across the room, toggling switches, pressing buttons, and adjusting dials.

“These places aren’t just metaphorical constructs, or visualised mental processes,” he said. “They’re real—physically real—however faithfully or fantastically the human mind interprets them.”

Lights came on behind the window illuminating a room housing two large metal cylinders, each bigger than a man.

From his trouser pocket Dr. Bryson withdrew a small keyring bearing a single key. He inserted into the control panel. With a click, an adjacent red button lit up, accompanied by a low vibrating hum elsewhere.

He stopped and looked from her to her husband, who stood in the doorway and whose quizzical expression indicated his mastery of English was less than hers.

Dr. Bryson’s expression was saddened when his gaze returned to her. “Out there somewhere your uncle was exposed to a massive dose of radiation,” he said. “I believe I have exposed my wife and son to something as potentially fatal—something I brought back—and I need someone I can trust to help keep my family safe.”

He held out the large bunch of keys.

Helena understood what Dr. Bryson had meant by ‘someone I can trust.’ Her uncle had worried to what morbid use his work would be put. Nobel, Einstein, and Oppenheimer, he said, all lived to regret the legacy of their invention. Helena was a woman educated in science, and had been concerned over these references. But she had always trusted her uncle’s judgement. That included his judgement of character.

She took the keys. “I will leave these—and the control panel key—for you at our hotel’s reception.”

Dr. Bryson smiled, and pointed to the red button. “When you see me give the thumbs up, press this button.”

“That is all?” she asked.

“That’s all.”

#

It was just as he remembered, with one exception.

The night they’d discovered this realm—the night he’d heard Buddy crying and pleading with Sherry, and was suddenly somehow back in his house—there had been nothing but total darkness.

Ahead of him now, like a tall frameless canvas on a wall, a dim view of his kitchen hung in the infinite blackness. The outline was the rectangular shape of a doorway, and if it was the size of a doorway, Bryson estimated the portal to be twenty to thirty feet away.

As before, cold penetrated his clothes and fleshand Bryson was sure his breath, if he could see it, steamed away into the breeze that stoked his hair and numbed his ears. Conscious now of what might be living in this lightless realm, he waited and listened, unsure if the faintest noise was real or his imagination.

Bryson tightened his grip both on the baseball bat in one hand, and the open paint can in the other.

Just get this over with.

The ground underfoot was the same; a gritty basalt rubble, hazardous and invisible in the dark. At first walking, Bryson picked up his pace, sure now he heard sounds not made by himself. He was jogging when his leg struck an immovable jagged outcrop and a grunt of pain escaped his lips as he collapsed to his knees. He dropped the baseball bat, and the emulsion sloshed in the open paint can, dribbling over his fingers. Simultaneously a familiar rattling noise sounded to the left, and not ten feet away a sickly green glow broke the dark.

Creatures crouched amongst the rocks.

They resembling small monkeys, but made more man-like by their lack of tails and hairless bodies, the feeble glow they cast gleamed on the blood and bones of some kind of carcass. Their heads held large bulbous black eyes, each pair pointed directly—terrifyingly—at him.

Bryson was mesmerised, his mind filling with nauseous thoughts; images of the creatures in his house; on top of his son…all his fault. He felt sick. One of the things moved slightly, opening a sharp-fanged mouth and let forth a menacing hiss, breaking the spell.

He struggled to his feet and all four things burst into motion. Not wasting precious time groping for the baseball bat in the dark, with the paint can in hand, Bryson bolted.

Wide eyes fixed on the portal, and with rocks and stones sliding beneath his feet and twisting his ankles, Bryson lurched over the treacherous ground in a reckless dash. A few steps short of the portal threshold, he upended the paint can at the same time the broken ground betrayed his footing. He pitched forwards, his momentum carrying him down for the second time, and fell with a wet thud, his head and shoulder impacting the floorboards.

Pain shot through his ankle, and Bryson scrambled like a landed fish unable to gain purchase on a smooth floor slick with paint. 

Light blazed, blinding in its suddenness.

He stared back at where the wide smear of black grit and magnolia paint ended—or began, rather—in a razor-sharp line in the middle of the open floor.

Nothing followed.

Propping himself on an elbow Bryson looked round. His wife stood in the kitchen doorway staring down at him with her hands to her mouth. His son, a short way inside, leant on tiptoes against the wall with a bandaged arm upstretched to the light switch.

Buddy was shaking, his face so pale as to be almost translucent. The boy swallowed hard, and said, “They don’t like the light.”

August 2009

Nicky flicked the lamp switch and sat up, summoned from sleep by what Dale had dubbed their daughter’s ‘Tyler’ cry for Aerosmith frontman Steven ‘Demon of Sreamin’ Tyler. Crossing the room to the moses basket, Nicky thought the wailing sounded more like a granny caught in a garden shredder.

Today had been their first day home from the hospital—minor freak out; check—and this was her and Sophie’s third unsupervised feed.

She lifted the crying baby into a swinging, bouncing embrace. “Shh-shh, sweetheart,” She murmured, planting gentle kisses on her daughter’s downy head. “I know, darling.”

Nicky sank into the rocker and unhooked one side of her nursing tank top, only slightly disgusted at the squishiness of the absorbent padding.

She found a comfortable position for Sophie with one hand, letting the baby’s head fall between her thumb and forefinger, and supported her breast by cupping it underneath, like they’d shown her at the hospital, and the little one was soon sucking away, blessedly quiet.

Dale’s soft snores filled the silence and Nicky threw an aggrieved frown at her oblivious husband. He’d been overwhelmed the whole three days at the hospital, and the maternity nurses had looked after the big bear almost as much as mommy-to-be. In artless gratitude he’d flooded the nurse’s station with chocolates and treats, a gesture the staff appreciated. Recalling his utter bewilderment softened Nicky’s current annoyance. Slightly.

After eight pages of John Grisham, she wincingly poked a finger into the corner of her daughter’s mouth to release the latch. Holding her daughter to her shoulder, and patting the tiny back to encourage gurgling burps, she leaned over and rummaged a nursing pad from the coolbox beside the rocker.

Sore nipples were, however, far from top of the list of complaints in her open letter to Mother Nature; if someone had told her she’d spend the next six weeks wearing incontinence pads, or that she’d need to use a squirt-bottle after using the toilet because wiping was too painful, she’d have probably paid for a surrogate. Or just bought a kid off the black market—whichever was cheapest.

A grunting burp from Sophie sounded so like a protest that Nicky laughed and kissed her. “Mommy’s only joking, sweetheart.”

Fifteen minutes on her other breast, and Sophie was falling asleep. Nicky broke the suction, applied another chilled nursing pad, and climbed out of the rocker.

She spent a short while slowly pacing, patting and rubbing little circles on her daughter’s back. Though exhausted, with the baby sound asleep in her arms, Nicky decided a few more minutes of cuddles wouldn’t hurt either of them.

When she lay the baby down to sleep, she hovered over the basket for one last moment.

It was all worth it. She’d do it again in heart beat.

Sagging into bed, Nicky glanced at her phone charging on the bedside table. It was 11:45. Laying her head on the pillow, she hoped Dale’s sometimes-loud snoring wouldn’t stop the baby from sleeping through until her next feeding.

She stretched out her arm and flicked off the light, and jumped as an ear-splitting electronic blaring filled the apartment.

Nicky switched the light back on and Dale heaved his bulk off the bed and out the bedroom door as Sophie’s cries added to the noise. The upstairs neighbours banged on ceiling as she gathered Sophie from the basket. She heard the beep of depressed buttons and the alarm stopped.

She was comforting Sophie with gentle sways and a soft rendition of rockabye-baby when Dale returned.

“Must be an error,” he said, yawning. “Says an internal sensor was tripped. I’ll look at it in the morning.”

“Which one?” she asked.

 “Zone two.”

Nicky checked her exasperation. “Which is…?”

“The kitchen.”