Author: Timothy Goss
I awake with a start, like something bit my toe. Its dark, early hours of the morning when sound if muted and amplified simultaneously. I sit up and gently shake my head while caressing the sore appendage. My mouth is dry and thick with yesterday’s dreams; moving slowly I reach the kitchen and fill an empty cup with water. Droplets cling onto beard and moustache and I stare absently out of the back window into the darkness of the railway sidings. They are pitch-black at this sunless hour and strange reflections hover on the glass, a shadow play where foxes howl, or whatever foxes do. The houses on the other side of the railway yard are large, semi-detached; our back gardens face each other over the debris ridden wasteland, some three hundred metres apart.
There are lights during the evening, family homes like light, usually they are orange or white, sometimes red, but now they are green, an unearthly green pulsating ever-so slightly. Something in its glow, in its pulse, its wavelength, it’s rhythm, and things change shape without motion or motive, fizzing and popping as they mutate. A silhouette, unconscious, controlled or blindly obedient, stands naked in the thickening atmosphere, I can see it clearly over the distance, sexless. I can taste something, smell something too, not unpleasant but wrong, something is wrong, something that doesn’t belong here and now.
Above the house, above the trees, a spherical distortion warps focus and an empty space, like a missing pixel on a cinema screen, barely perceptible to the eye, but our senses are fine tuned, becomes the focus and the silhouette rises toward it, up and up, through the build and beams in a point of pale green photons. I trace its path, take a sip of water and darkness congeals around me; then, for a millisecond only, the sphere focuses upon itself and rips the silhouette from here to there, forcing a square peg through a round hole. The sudden release of energy is blinding and the darkness melts the world around us.
Something enthralling – focus locks for eternity, or it is perceived – Things change shape and a silhouette unconscious, controlled – atmosphere thickens and I can taste something, smell something wrong, something that doesn’t belong – A sphere warps and focuses, hung above the house, the trees, and the silhouette rises through the building guided by congealing ether like dark matter everywhere – It finally tears us from here to there forcing hot portals to drop in and mop up – and my cup is empty and I move to fill it again…
The displaced sphere is gone, disappeared long before I register it leaving, imperceptible, like the blending of sea and sky. And then the house is dark and the distance is as it should be, everything turns black and grey, and dull and finaly vanishes, like the sphere, into the grey black shadows of the approaching day.