Patreon Exclusive Fiction: The Becoming by Sasha Ravitch

No one remembers when the Hole in the sky appeared. Round and conical, its tip tapering skyward and perforating the clouds...

By Sasha Ravitch

No one remembers when the Hole in the sky appeared. Round and conical, its tip tapering skyward and perforating the clouds. A Stygian circumference carved from liquid obsidian, a mouth made of pure night. The Hole is a perfect pockmark in the heavens: cerulean sky erased and leaving something blacker than black, deeper than deep. It seems to go on forever in its inky, two-dimensional shallowness. It has never looked another way.

Like all strange fulcrums through which mystery circumambulates, like all curious noumena in the environment of the mundane, the teenagers are the first to accept it. Sweaty palmed sweethearts gazing up at the anti-arc of the sky, gulping. Salivating. Using adrenaline from the unknown to intensify their arousal. They make out beneath The Hole, an unblinking witness to their eager fumbling whose silence makes their bumping teeth echo louder. The Hole becomes the scenery for which the most meaningful moments of their pubescent lives transpire. A quiet sentinel and an archivist of experience.

*

Tommy Carmicheal has only been released from St. Patrick’s adolescent psychiatric unit for a week and a half, replete with new psychopharmaceutical routine, before The Hole begins to speak to him. His nimble fingers unlatch his bedroom window, a wiry boy snaking his way down the garden trellis and wandering westward toward the voice in the sky. It does not take him long to arrive. It never takes anyone very long to arrive. The Hole is always where you need it to be, never more than fifty paces from the house of any youth in pursuit of it.

Tommy gazes up at the looming abrasion of blackness, distinguished from the night surrounding it by its conspicuous omission of stars. The Hole speaks to him, and Tommy listens. The Hole speaks to him, and Tommy understands. The Hole Speaks to him, and Tommy nods. The Hole speaks to him, and Tommy returns home.

*

Of course everyone in Sunnyside Heights remembers the day the children disappeared. The journalists refer to it as a “mass event.” The news stations eventually turn their suspicions on the parents of the town after many months of investigation resulted in no legitimate leads. Lindy Carmicheal no longer speaks to the reporters who come calling. Jane Winters (mother of Eddie Winters) publicly accuses Lindy’s son, Tommy Carmicheal, of using his mental illness to form a cult. After this, Lindy lashes out in a spectacular, electric fervor at a local news anchor. It was not her son, she screams on live television, it was that damn Hole. The townspeople of Sunnyside Heights agree that the Carmicheal apple doesn’t fall far from its tree.

Six months later, a documentary team shows up to interview residents about the “Pied Piper of Sunnyside Heights” and the disappearance of the 23 children on September 03. Video footage captures the closed gingham blinds of the Carmicheal residence, through which one can hear shrieking maledictions coming from Lindy’s mouth.

*

Tommy stands beneath The Hole. His arms are outstretched, the muddy green of his eyes rolled back into his head, his jaw slack, and his tongue lolling out of it like the foot of a mollusk. Drool gathers at the corners of his taut lips, sticky and sparkling beneath the light of over two dozen cell phone flashlights. A low chorus of croaking sounds emerge from the back of his throat, an illegible conversation obscured behind his tonsils. The croaking moves above the heads of all the children. It comes and goes like an oscillating fan, like a thurible in a cathedral.

When Tommy falls to his knees, they mirror him. When Tommy stands and gestures upwards, they copy. When Tommy tells them where they are going, they follow.

*

On the decennial anniversary of the disappearance of the children in Sunnyside Heights, the local news station comes to cover the memorial. Hundreds of small electric vigil candles flicker as if their plastic carapaces are subject to the capricious choreography of the breeze. Carnations and stargazer lilies spray upwards like erupting springs beside handmade wreaths of spruce and pine. Each wreath is framing a blown-up yearbook photo featuring a fake smile, or a fresh haircut, or an awkward stare.

Jane Winters stands on the platform of a small veranda, eyes occulted by fat tears threatening to roll down her face, frail fingers clutched desperately around a cordless microphone. She reads aloud a poem Eddie had written for her as a Mother’s Day gift. She makes perfect, unblinking eye contact with the camera. She announces that she has fundraised enough money to hire a team of former-NASA scientists and researchers to investigate The Hole.

*

Liquid mandibles of dark and loathsome light unhinge themselves from where they once remained still and watchful. The Hole has come to life, just like Tommy has told them it would. Fluid night, with its many shadowy secretions, unfurls from the mouth of The Hole and smothers Tommy in hydrousness. Tommy does not make a sound as his body atomizes into something quite the opposite of starlight. Tommy does not make a sound, but all the children scream to watch his body evaporate into nothing but soft floating pearls of black memory.

It is beautiful, even in its terribleness, and the children understand they are witnessing a miracle. They are witnessing a becoming. Many of them speculate about what happens after the becoming. Then the blackness silences their thoughts.

*

Sunnyside Heights no longer exists, but The Hole does. It waits. It watches. It appeared from somewhere else those centuries ago, and someday it will choose to appear elsewhere. Then, after those centuries of stillness, the great black thing in the sky prolapses. It belches out a round head covered in dirty blonde hair. Muddy green eyes open, and a wiry body wriggles its way out of the opening of the dark mouth, landing on the ground below. Tommy Carmicheal brushes the wrinkles off his flannel shirt and begins to walk toward the ruins of the town.