Vote Abyss
by Barry Charman
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
Sometimes they stopped people in the street, with an abrupt hand on the shoulder, a glaring glistening eye. “Did you vote abyss?”
It was best to smile before recoiling. They seemed to appreciate that, too many people just flinched, hurried away. Jennifer wondered what they did when they went home. Where did they go? What was the rest of their lives like?
“Saw another one,” Ron said, coming in that night. “On the high street. Bloody cloak this time. These marks all over his face—makes three times this week.”
Nodding, she was already by the window, looking out. Ron turned the lights out, then joined her. “What is it?”
She pointed. Two were under the streetlamp. “Been there three hours,” she whispered as if they could hear.
“Christ.” He had a hand on her shoulder. Squeezed.
“Don’t look up,” she murmured.
They watched for a while, but the men didn’t move. They leaned towards each other, talking. Occasionally they would lift their hoods and gaze unflinching at the sky.
Ron moved away first, muttering. Eventually Jennifer joined him. They made dinner in silence, then watched some television. Not the news, of course, just whatever was on.
They double checked the doors then went to bed. Even lying in the dark, neither seemed willing to surrender their thoughts.
The middle of the night, and wind at the window, made her speak. “Perhaps we should leave?”
He might have been sleeping. He didn’t answer, either way.
At work the next day, there was a whisper in the department that Ted had joined them. He arrived late, after noon, and went into his office without looking at anyone. He came out eventually, wearing a robe he’d gotten from God knows where. He’d covered himself in eyes.
Some were ink, some were not.
Meredith got up from her desk and tried to talk to him, but she didn’t get much. No one ever did. Did you vote abyss? Have you seen and been seen? Does the soul know how to blink, etcetera. Meaningless. Vote when? Vote how?
Only last Friday, Ted had been talking, with excruciating eagerness, about his hiking holiday to Scotland. Good old reliable Ted, simple in the best possible way.
Meredith gave up on him after ten minutes. She grabbed her handbag and coat and ran out. She wouldn’t come back; they all knew that.
Events were building to a breaking point, but no one knew what to do. What to say. Over the water cooler, some of them tried to take stock. “There were only, what, a dozen of them a month ago. Right?” Eric looked nervous.
Jennifer nodded.
“Aren’t we supposed to do something?”
Wincing, Jennifer nodded upwards. Eric paled. Maybe he’d been slower than some. Maybe he’d been trying to ignore it, like he thought everything would just go back to how it was. Maybe he was right.
He started to make small talk, to fill the silence. She just nodded when he wasn’t speaking. In the end Eric went and sat at his desk. “Back to the grind,” he muttered, but he merely sat there. Thinking. Trying not to think. One of those.
Jennifer left work early. She tried not to be the first but refused to be the last. Her fingers tapped at her phone tentatively, scrolling back through some of the earliest news reports. All brimming with curiosity, all tinged with cautious wonder. The mind could contain things at a certain scale, she realised. It liked things at a certain scale. Before the scale increased, the awe was palpable. But that was before.
She found it hard to get a good signal. Did it seem harder all the time, now?
She tried calling her mother, but it kept cutting out. Had her mother’s voice seemed concerned? Or just confused?
Eyes on the puddles, Jennifer walked to the station and listened to the mood of the crowd. Such a strange tension. As if no one wanted to go first.
She wondered what she meant by that? Go.
Go where? Go how?
She held her breath and waited while everyone else did the same.
There was one on the train.
It was a woman. Jennifer watched as people parted around her, like waves. No one sat close. She just rocked in her seat. However, as more and more people got on, Jennifer found herself being pressed closer towards her. Soon she was near enough to hear the words rattling urgently under her hood. “An old toothbrush, one with green stripes, three apples hanging from a branch, two children, a compass pointing home, a red brick house on a northern street, two up two down, cat called Fluff, mother called Barbara—”
Jennifer tried to tune it out. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus.
The supermarket, at least, was as it always was. A strange vacuum sealed environment that happily ignored all the various worries of the outside world.
Jennifer loved that. It was blissful. Taking her time, she got some wine, then considered buying some steaks. Why not? A nice meal. Just the two of them. They could prepare it together. Take the edge off.
She took her basket to the least busy checkout, smiling at the checkout girl.
The girl ignored the food on the conveyor as it slowly slid towards her. She was staring down at her watch.
Jennifer coughed. “Hello?”
The girl looked up, dazed. “Did you say something?”
“Just hello.” Jennifer smiled. Poor girl, looked run off her feet.
But the girl frowned. “What? No, not you.” She stared intently into space, as if listening for something just out of her reach. Her hands were tensed claws, the varnish scratched from her fingernails.
Jennifer left the steaks and took the wine. It was red. From a Spanish vineyard that had seen a wealth of sun.
It had had a good year, at least.
She told her day to Ron, he looked numb. “It’ll pass,” he said.
What would pass? Were they going to talk about it? He went out to the shed and sat in the dark. He’d been planning to plant runner beans for months but didn’t seem interested any more.
They kept the lights off and watched the news. They weren’t talking about it, either. “They don’t know how,” Ron muttered. There were no experts, not even a trickle of advice. A reporter went off script at one point. She was looking away from the autocue, rambling in panic, and they cut away before she could pull her thoughts together.
There was no mention of the people. Not yet. These were not threads anyone seemed willing to draw together. It was nice. To pretend.
That night they heard them knocking. They wanted attention. They were getting bolder. Closer.
“What happens when people let them in?” she asked.
Ron snorted. “What about when they stop knocking?”
After that they lay in the comfort of silence.
Three days later, they stopped knocking.
There were three on the train. They talked openly, if not loudly. Their whispers snaked insidiously through the carriage. An elderly woman saw them as the doors opened and refused to get on. A hooded man stepped off to follow her. Jennifer clutched at the railing, trying not to watch.
A policeman was sitting in the corner, knees up to his chin. Shaking.
Two men close by started to discuss something banal. A cute girl they liked and what she totally liked about them. Jennifer tuned everything out and latched onto them, grateful.
The hooded men never got off. Did they stay on all day, going round and round? She had to remind herself they hadn’t done anything wrong. Yet it felt like they were all just waiting for something bad to happen.
The two men had stopped talking. A hooded man was beside them, listening intently.
One of the men noticed. “Jog on, mate.”
Under the hood, the scar tissue turned upwards, as if the man vaguely remembered how to smile. “You are trivial men,” he said, voice rasping. “You must see to be seen. You must choose.”
His arm stretched forward. Jennifer only briefly glimpsed what had become of his hand. She got off three stops early and ran the rest of the way home.
Ron was waiting outside the house, staring up into the sky.
“Don’t look,” she pleaded.
He was weeping, openly. “It is beautiful, though.”
She tried desperately to pull him inside. When he wouldn’t move, something inside her snapped. Finally, she angled her head and looked up at the purple maelstrom of bleak light that had appeared one day in the sky. A wound or a portal, they said. A freak black hole, they said. Deformed. Maimed. Getting wider and wider. The thing on the other side was looking, staring, with one great violent eye—
And its voice was suddenly there, louder and realer than anything else. It had been seen. It knew. And when her own voice, lost and receding in her head, begged her to blink, she simply elected not to.
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