She saw his point. Weirdness was relative. Diana and West were the strange invaders from another dimension, as bizarre and inconceivable as Vom and Smorgaz.
West knocked on a door, and another pale thing answered. It was as featureless as the other residents except for a single eye in its head. It was dressed in a similar, if not quite identical, manner to West. But its disheveled appearance was close enough that, even with their physical differences, it was obvious they were kindred souls.
The creature squealed and barked.
“Yes, yes, this is the one,” replied West.
The creature yipped. Once.
“Well, there wasn’t much time to find another,” said West. “You make do with what you can, right?”
The creature sized up Diana. It circled her once, tried to take the bucket of chicken from her, but she pulled away. It glared and growled.
“I doubt she’s a virgin,” said West, “but does that really matter?”
“It’s tradition,” said the creature.
Although it hadn’t said that. It had clicked, growled, and hissed as before. Diana had just understood it this time. Its inhuman language was suddenly laid bare. It shouldn’t have been possible. The syntax and grammar were so strange that a master linguist could’ve spent a lifetime deciphering a handful of sentences, only to realize that to truly understand the language would require having heard the first word uttered by the first gray sludge that slithered upon the shores of this world.
But she understood.
“It is written that the Great Thing prefers virgins,” said the creature.
“The Great Thing will take what it can get,” said West.
The creature snorted. It stomped away into its apartment.
“What’s going on here?” she asked.
“Just hold on to that chicken,” West said and went inside.
She hesitated. Maybe boring, predictable reality wasn’t such a bad thing. A glance behind her showed that the denizens of the building were watching her from the safety of their doorways. She doubted the frightened creatures would get in her way if she retreated to her own universe.
But she’d come this far, and her own building in her own sphere of existence wasn’t much of a shelter when it came to weirdness.
She followed West.
The apartment was normal. A bit cluttered but otherwise unremarkable. West and the creature stood across from each other. They were busy moving the furniture from the center of the room, including a rather large and heavy coffee table.
“Need some help?” she asked.
“Just hold on to the chicken.” West strained to drag the table to one side. “Your part is almost here.”
“And mind the throw rug,” said his pale, one-eyed equivalent.
The table must’ve been even heavier than it looked. It took them several minutes to drag it out of the way. When they finally pushed it up against some bookshelves, a hot gust of wind blasted from under the huge square throw rug that occupied most of the floor. It stank of that same sweet decay.
West and the creature stood on either side of the rug and rolled it away. Underneath was an inky hole that took up most of the floor. It didn’t bother her that the heavy coffee table should’ve sunk right into the hole while sitting on the unsupportive rug. Those sorts of physics didn’t mean much to her anymore. She certainly didn’t take them for granted.
But there was something down there. She couldn’t see it, and the air was dreadfully still. Yet in the darkness… there was… something.
The Great Thing.
She gazed into the abyss. It didn’t gaze back, being indifferent to her presence. Its apathy was hypnotic, consuming. This hole was the universe. Deep, unfathomable, and disinterested. It threatened to swallow her up. It wouldn’t have to do anything. It wouldn’t stalk or tempt her. It would just wait with endless patience until she cast herself into its hungry jaws.
“What are you waiting for?” asked the creature. “What is she waiting for?”
“The human mind grapples with the incomprehensible,” said West. “Give her a moment.”
Diana stepped away from the hole, and the world quaked.
“The chicken, Number Five,” said West.
Her feet slipped out from under her. She fell slowly toward the ground. When she finally hit the floor, she bounced and floated. The furniture hovered a few inches off the floor. Everything did. Except West and the creature, who managed to remain earthbound.
She threw the chicken into the hole. Tried to. It was difficult to do when things had stopped falling. Diana kicked off the wall, grabbed the bucket, and threw it into the pit. It drifted into the abyss. She floated aimlessly while the bucket disappeared into the dark.
“Is it working?” she asked.
“I told you we needed a virgin,” said the creature.
“Just give it a minute,” said West.
She stared at the void beneath her. If gravity came back right now, she’d be in for a long fall.
“Give me your hand, Number Five.”
West reached out for her. She took his hand. His skin was scaly, cold. Her first instinct was to pull away, but she ignored that.
A cold wind blasted out of the hole, and she was falling. She clung to West with a desperate grip, but there was no way he could keep her and himself from falling into oblivion. But he didn’t budge and, with a single tug, he pulled her to safety.
“Would’ve worked faster if she’d been unspoiled,” said the creature.
“It worked,” he replied. “Does it really matter?”
West and the creature unrolled the carpet, covered the Great Thing, and dragged the coffee table back into place. It all seemed perfectly ordinary, business as usual. Visit another dimension, feed a bucket of chicken to a big hole, fix gravity, go home. West exchanged a few words with the creature in private while Diana waited in the hall. West assured her she could go back without him now, but she had a few questions.
She started with “What the hell ='27'>
“What’s in the hole?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“That guy back there called it the Great Thing.”
“There are some who believe that a cosmic something dwells at the center of all realities. It does something important there. There are those who worship it as a god, although why anyone would worship a god they all agree couldn’t give a damn about them always escapes me. But that’s the Great Thing. While I don’t know what’s down in that hole, nobody else does either. I’m skeptical, though, because there are a lot of holes in this universe and while one of them might lead to the heart of everything, I have to figure most don’t.”
“Well, something has to be down there, right?”
He shrugged again. “Don’t know about that.”
“Something ate the chicken.”
“That’s an assumption. All I know is that there’s a hole and every so often, it’s necessary to throw a bucket of chicken into it to keep everything from floating away. What happens to the chicken, where it goes, if something eats it or if it just sits at the bottom of the hole with a thousand other buckets of fried chicken, these are things I don’t know, most probably never will, and don’t really concern me.”
“But why chicken?” she asked.
“You’ll drive yourself mad if you don’t stop asking unanswerable questions.”
“Bull.”
West stopped. He turned slowly with a genuinely perplexed expression.
“I’m not like you,” she said. “I can’t just go with this. I think about this. I know I can’t understand it, but it doesn’t stop me from wondering about it. Curiosity isn’t a sin, and asking unanswerable questions is something
