The Void

The Void

Michael Bray and Albert Kivak

Copyright © 2015 Michael Bray and Albert Kivak

The moral right of Michael Bray and Albert Kivak to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13:978-1522786467

ISBN-10: 1522786465

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CONTENTS

Forward

ONE LONG YEAR IN THE MAKING:

It began as an idea in much the same way the sinkhole was conceived on Maple Street. Small at first, but then it grew larger and larger. Back in February of 2013, Michael and I first talked about writing a story that could encompass all of man’s basic fears regarding the unknown. We asked ourselves what scared people? We agreed that spiders, darkness, and height were the basic foundation of the fear trained adrenaline pumped into our glands. I’m personally afraid of heights. Michael has a profound fear of darkness and spiders. What could summarize all this in one literal and symbolic image? Why, a sinkhole, of course.

Thus began the gestation process, and we gave birth to the Void. This book slowly came alive like an apron. Cutting off a flab of skin we molded and melded and stitched the flesh, surprising even us. We were doing our best to outdo each other, with every chapter we exchanged; making sure the story was intact, that sight was never lost. Keeping in mind a long thematic undercurrent had to run through the story, I built an arc which represented the hidden motivations of our characters and a deeper meaning as to why the characters acted the way they did—homicidal, maniacal despots. One does not kill just for the sake of killing.

As we reached the end, Michael concluded the story with a tragic, almost human touch which caused me to blink back tears, no doubt. I hope you enjoyed this ride as much as we have creating it. I hope this story had an equal measure of thrills, chills, elation, tragedy, jaw-dropping action sequences which you’d never seen before. Most of all, I hope you remember this ride because Michael and I are at a construction site next door, building another one… drilling the cement… and hammering the nuts and bolts, hoping you will ride with us once again.

There would be no coasters without the riders.

You are our riders. Thank you for giving us a chance.

-
Albert Kivak June 10, 2014 -

When I think of the creation of this story, one particular conversation early in the process always comes back to me. It went something like this.

Albert: How long do you think the story will be?

Me: I don’t know. Fifteen, maybe twenty thousand words?”

Albert: Are you sure it will be so long?

Me: I don’t really know, let’s just write it and see where it takes us.

More than a year later, with around sixty thousand words and numerous edits and revisions behind us, I look at the story and I can’t help but smile. By rights, this shouldn’t exist. The process of writing was incredibly organic. We went in with nothing but the idea of a sinkhole opening in a suburban street and a boy with special abilities who knew all about it.

That’s it.

No outline, no chapter ideas.

We worked by each writing a chapter or chapters, getting to a point where it felt like a natural place to stop, and then handing over to the other, who would read what had been sent and then pick up the story without any prior discussion. I think now such a way of working would frighten the hell out me, however something just clicked, and it enabled us to push and feed off each other creatively in a way that was incredibly exhilarating. The end result is the story you just read.

Our aim was to present to you, the reader, a story which was thrilling, frightening and thought provoking in equal measure.

As Albert alluded to earlier, this isn’t the end of the Void story by any means. At the time of this writing we are deep into developing a sequel (This time properly plotted out!) which we hope to make bigger, better and more intense in every way.

All that’s left to say is a huge personal thank you for the continued support, and a giant thanks to everyone who donated their time to edit, beta read, provide feedback and give us honest advice during the creation of the story, particularly during the editing process.

Believe it or not, it’s support like this which makes us continue to try and push the boundaries and deliver the best work possible.

Thank you.

-
Michael Bray
-
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The sinkhole formed just outside Brewster’s house. At four feet in diameter and growing, the asphalt crumbled and collapsed in on itself, as the fragments of broken tarmac pattered down the ever widening hole. Seven days later, what was once mistaken for a pothole became a safety hazard.

A car coming down the street veered off sharply and hit a fire hydrant, sending a wall of water twenty feet into the air like a geyser.

Nine-year-old Morgan Brewster stepped out of his white house and crossed the immaculately mowed lawn. He strolled to the edge of the street. Two yards ahead of him he saw the opening in the earth. In his arms, he clutched a glass jar, taped on the outside with masking tape. Morgan stooped down on his knee in prayer and lifted the container, appearing as if he were about to drop it into the hole, but before he could, his mother banged out the front door.

“Morgan!” She yelled as she ran towards him and picked him up and hoisted out of harm’s way. Meredith shook her son’s shoulder, hard. “Are you insane? Do you want to get yourself killed?”

“Mom, it’s just a little hole.”

“A little hole?” Meredith cried out, visibly shaken. “Are you blind?” She pointed at the sinkhole, and Morgan’s piercing blue eyes tracked the aperture. “How can you call that little?”

“It doesn’t hurt as much as what’s inside our house,” Morgan said, not missing a beat. “Could you put me down now?”

His mother carried him back to the front porch of their terrace and parked him below the awning. “You stay here now. It’s dangerous down there.”

“Calm down. I wasn’t going to kill myself, Mom.”

“Don’t ever do that again, young man—
ever
.”

“I’ll do whatever I want.”

“It’s a hole!” Meredith breathed, scatterbrained. “You could’ve gotten yourself killed.”

“It’s not a hole.”

“That’s enough. Not one more word.”

Morgan Brewster played with the jar, lightly tapping his fingers on the glass. Then he clicked his fingernails on the smooth surface. He watched his mother move to the corner of the street along with crowding pedestrians, their necks craning to see the carnage of the car wreck.

The Maple Street residents had never seen anything like this before. The person behind the wheel moaned as he lay in the driver’s seat, his face bloody. Nobody came to help. Everybody whispered amongst themselves on what was causing the anomaly of the hole.

II

Brian Embry rolled out of bed and felt pain. He tried to piece together the fuzzy, jigsaw mess of the night before and like every night; it was lost in the remains of another alcohol-fueled daze. He stumbled to the bathroom, glancing in the mirror above the sink. All signs of what he was sure would be a killer hangover was present and correct: the sunken, darkly rimmed eyes, the pale waxy complexion, and the splitting headache which raged and bounced behind his eyes and made him shy from the hazy morning half-light.

He opened the mirror’s cabinet, popped the lid of the aspirin and dry swallowed a couple of pills, then shuffled back to the bedroom, curious to see what all the noise was about. He pulled the curtains open, wincing as the golden light of the day streamed through his window, further aggravating his headache. He sighed and leaned on the window frame, resting his forehead against the cool glass and watched the people mill around on the street. Some were residents, people he recognized. There was the old man from number fifty-three, and across the way, he could see the Jones woman sipping a steaming coffee cup and talking on her mobile phone pressed against her ear, mouth in overdrive.

There were quite a few more strangers, he noticed, certainly more than the last few days. He supposed they had been attracted by the car crash, or maybe it was the sinkhole which he noticed had grown larger.

He grimaced, noting that the hole was now almost right up to the edge of his lawn. As overgrown as his garden was, he didn’t want to see it disappear into oblivion. He grabbed the frayed pack of cigarettes and his lighter from the end table, hands acting automatically.

He popped the cigarette in his mouth and flicked open the lighter, igniting the Pall Mall and inhaling deeply as he watched the crowd point and stare at the wreckage from the crash. Scattered pieces of charred plastic and shattered glass still shone like jettisoned jewels in the shimmering heat. There was also blood. Of course, there was, Embry thought with a sigh. It wouldn’t be a worthy of such attention without blood.

Embry inhaled, dragging in the toxic concoction of chemicals and letting it billow out of his nostrils, the smoke temporarily blocking his view of the street below. When it cleared, he saw the Brewster kid from across the street staring into the hole with one of those damn jars of his.

Embry frowned. A young kid like that should be happy and smiling and out eating ice cream or riding bicycles with his friends, doing normal things kids of that age did. Not the Brewster kid, though. He reminded Embry of one of those old men who would sit on the porch and watch the world go by with eyes that were ancient and knowing beyond his years. Embry smoked and watched, trying to figure out what the hell the damn kid was doing.

He was crouched at the edge of the hole, peering into its depths, apparently oblivious to the yellow tape that had been erected to keep the curious at bay.

Embry let out another hazy breath as he watched the child get up and run back into his house. Embry nodded. He was a strange one, all right. He remembered trying to talk to the kid once when he found him dawdling around the porch. Embry had asked what he was doing and, instead of crying and sobbing as he expected most kids would do when challenged by an adult. He had looked at Embry, blue eyes deep and fearless, skin pale.

“I’m looking for spiders,” he said simply as if Embry had asked the most ridiculous question in the world.

“I don’t see any, kid.”

“It went inside your home, mister,” Morgan chirped, looking beyond Embry to the open door.

“I’ll take care of it. You go on home.”

“But he’s in there.”

Not it—a he.

“Huh? How do you know that, kid?”

“I know,” was his response—just a simple, I know.

Embry inhaled and coughed, trying to figure out just what it was that freaked him out about the kid Maybe it was Embry’s fear of all things arachnid or the fact that the kid reminded him of himself when he was the same age, always full of question and curiosity about life and its meaning. A curiosity that never abated until the day the life in question turned around and kicked him firmly in the balls. Either way, he had bigger problems than the Brewster kid and the hole in the street.

Bigger problems indeed.

He returned to the bed and collapsed face-first onto the messy tangle of sheets, leaving the world of too-bright sunshine, freaky neighbors, strange kids, and a hole that never stopped growing to its own devices.

III

He dozed for another couple of hours, in the fuzzy limbo between sleep and consciousness. He could still half hear the commotion from outside as he tried as to make a decision to either get up and be done with it or try to sleep on. Knowing the latter option would never come, he rolled onto his side and sat up, surveying the bedroom. His eyes locked on its target, and he picked up the bottle of scotch from the floor, noticed it was empty, and tossed it aside with a grunt. There was no sign of the crowds dispersing and taking their noise with them, and so he got out of bed, knee joints groaning in protest as he walked towards the en suite bathroom.

He leaned one hand on the wall and emptied his bladder, grimacing at the sight of blood spraying against the porcelain. Not only was Embry an alcoholic, he also had terminal cancer.

He had read stories about others in his position that had gone to great lengths not to let the disease beat them, but he didn’t go in for any of that shit. He was a realist and knew just how much of a motherfucker the big C was.

It had been five months since he was first diagnosed, which roughly coincided with the time he stopped giving much of a shit about anything. The doctors, of course, fed him the party line, told him it was treatable. However, he could see the truth in their eyes. He always thought it would have been better had the doctors been straight with him from the start. He would have respected them more and maybe wouldn’t have outright declined any form of treatment.

If they had said to him: “Sorry Mr. Embry, I’m afraid you’re fucked. If you’d have come to us sooner when you first noticed the blood in your urine, then maybe we might have caught it. Instead, your stubbornness has cost you your life. Sorry about that.” He might have understood, he might even have tried to put up a fight. Instead, they fed him with false hope. He wasn’t at all bitter about it. Life had a habit of throwing shit like this at people. He had decided right there in the doctor’s office to give fate the proverbial middle finger, and do everything he could to speed up the death process with a steady diet of drink and cigarettes.

He felt like shit and thought the odds were still roughly fifty–fifty as to which would kill him first, the booze or cancer. Flushing away the bloody water, he moved back to the window again to see the sinkhole A cold seam of condensation covered the glass, and Embry swiped it away with his hand, lighting another cigarette.

Someone was at the edge of the hole. A woman in a white dress stood at the rim, looking down below. She glanced in his direction, and his heart seemed to freeze for a split second.

Hanna?

It certainly looked like her. He couldn’t quite tell because of the crowd and the angle at which she was standing. If not her, the woman was eerily similar. He was even half convinced she was wearing the dressing gown he had bought her for her birthday.

The woman who may or may not have been his wife took a step and lost her footing. His cigarette fell from his lips.

He ran to the front door, unlocked the deadbolt, and sprinted out into the cool morning, pushing his way through the crowd towards the hole. He reached it and gazed in.

The darkness gazed back at him, swallowing the light. It was so dark down there; he could barely see more than a few feet down the hole. He swallowed, almost unleashing a scream at the thought of her falling into those inky depths.

“Hey, are you okay?” someone asked from behind. He turned, looking the podgy, blue-haired female stranger up and down.

“My wife—I thought she...” He cleared his throat and returned his attention to the hole, unable to collect his scrambled thoughts or articulate what he was trying to say.

“Brian?”

Embry whipped his head around and saw her standing by the barricade. She was chewing her bottom lip the way she always did when something was troubling her.

“Are you okay, honey?” she asked.

Embry struggled to formulate words. “I—I thought I, I mean I thought I saw you jump into the hole,” he stammered.

A small crowd had gathered around him, and he realized he had become the second act of the morning’s entertainment.

“You weren’t in the house,” he added, glancing at the Middle Eastern man and the Asian woman who both lived further down the street.

“I was sure it was you,” he uttered.

“Is everything okay?” the Asian woman asked.

“He thought he saw his wife fall into the hole,” the Middle Eastern man said, a small half smile on his lips.

“I’m sure it was just your imagination,” the Asian woman said. “The thing gives me the creeps, I’ll tell you that.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Embry said, not at all sure it was his imagination. He suspected it could be the cancer. Maybe it had finished ravaging his insides and had moved up into his brain to see what kind of damage it could cause up there. Either way, he had developed a definite dislike for the sinkhole. There was something unnatural about it, something… sinister.

“Come on, back to the house,” Hannah said, hooking her arm through his and leading him away from the watching crowd. Embry allowed himself to be led, trying to decide if what he’d seen was real or a trick. He glanced into the crowd, and saw the Brewster kid from across the street, staring and holding another one of those damn jars of his
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