Immediately after that single brief whoooosh, a pall of silence fell
across the night and the unearthly light vanished in an instant.
, Eduardo Fernandez stood in stunned disbelief under the crescent moon,
staring at a perfect sphere of pure blackness that towered over him,
like a gargantuan ball on a cosmic billiards table. It was so
flawlessly black, it stood out against the ordinary darkness of the May
night as prominently as the flare of a nuclear explosion would stand
out against the backdrop of even the sunniest summer day. Huge.
Thirty feet in diameter. It filled the space once occupied by the
radiant pine trees and earth.
A ship.
For a moment he thought that he was gazing up at a ship with a
windowless hull as smooth as pooled oil. He waited in paralytic terror
for a seam of light to appear, a portal to crack open, a ramp to
extrude.
In spite of the fear that clouded his thinking, Eduardo quickly
realized he was not looking at a solid object. The moon-glow wasn't
reflected on its surface. Light just fell into it as it would fall
into a well. Or tunnel.
Except that it revealed no curving walls within. Instinctively,
without needing to touch that smooth inky surface, he knew the sphere
had no weight, no mass at all, he had no primitive sense whatsoever
that it was looming over him, as he should have had if it had been
solid.
The object wasn't an object, it was not a sphere but a circle. Not
three dimensional but two.
A doorway.
Open.
The dark beyond the threshold was unrelieved by gleam, glint, or
faintest glimmer. Such perfect blackness was neither natural nor
within human experience, and staring at it made Eduardo's eyes ache
with the strain of seeking dimension and detail where none existed.
He wanted to run.
He approached the doorway instead.
His heart thudded, and his blood pressure no doubt pushed him toward a
stroke. He clutched the shotgun with what he knew was pathetic faith
in its efficacy, shoving it out in front of him as a primitive
tribesman might brandish a talismanic staff carved with runes, inset
with wild-animal teeth, lacquered with sacrificial blood, and crowned
with a shock of a witch doctor's hair.
However, his fear of the door--and of the unknown realms and entities
beyond it--was not as debilitating as the fear of senility and the
self-doubt with which he had been living lately. While the chance
existed to gather proof of this experience, he intended to explore as
far and as long as his nerves would hold out. He hoped never to wake
another morning with the suspicion that his brain was addled and his
perceptions were no longer trustworthy.
Moving cautiously across the dead and flattened meadow grass, feet
sinking slightly into the spring-softened soil, he remained alert for
