Chapter 1
There is no book so bad…that it does not have something good in it.
- Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
Dear L,
You have already begun reading, but it is not too late to stop. I wouldn’t blame you for putting this whole mess aside and never thinking of it again. But Mr. de Cervantes, quoted above, speaks the truth; every story has something good in it, even a story like ours. So please, trust me. This is the last time.
Everything is on fire now, which is more or less a worst-case scenario in a library. And the color of the fire is purple, which, as you know, is among the worse colors for fire. This is the end. A closed book can be reopened, but a burned book is gone forever. It was your idea to call this the ‘Rough Draft,’ remember. In life, there are no do-overs, not even for us. You get one chance, and only one, every minute of every day. You were right.
Apologies; my mind wanders. It must be the smoke. Getting rather difficult to breathe. Since you are still reading, I take it you are still interested. Good. Pay close attention, then. Everything here is important. Maybe when this is all over, if you and I are still around, we can get some ice cream.
Your Veracious Friend, Dearly,
DC
Isaac Milton
April
A man is a very small thing, and the night is very large and full of wonders.
- Lord Dunsany, The Laughter of the Gods
He lay in yellow stubble, prickly and cold, and the clear silence of a wintery night hung all around him. Snow-dusted fields stretched away into the darkness. Frost gleamed in the faint starlight, sketching a capricious topography of ghostly hills. The lights of Pikeston clustered to the east like a fallen galaxy. Cloud shadows darkened the foothills in the other direction, where vague suggestions of form and shape in the distant earth soared up to become mountains barely visible as hulking forms against the starry horizon.
Isaac Milton lay alone in the quiet, cold starlight. He was a tall, thin boy with a pale pimply face, short brown hair, and dark eyes enlarged by thick rectangular glasses rimmed with blue plastic. He wore battered tennis shoes that let the snow in to dampen his socks, khaki shorts because it wasn’t really all that cold, a black T-shirt with a minimalist depiction of various dice on it, and a faded denim jacket that he thought was cool primarily because it reminded him of Dwayne Hartman. He laced his fingers behind his head as he gazed up at the stars, which caused his already notable ears to flare out like wings. It had been suggested to Isaac on more than a few occasions that he utilize these organs for flight.
“I don’t see it,” he said to no one, squinting up at the stars.
A faint breeze rustled the snow for answer. Isaac breathed steam at the glittering path of the Milky Way and watched it vanish to nothing.
He sat up, dusted himself off, and turned to the telescope he had hauled two miles from home out to this field. This particular rise, on this particular pasture, provided an excellent vantage point of the entire sky and surrounding landscape, with minimal interference from nearby sources of light. An ideal location for Endeavors of Astronomical Significance. The downside was that the reflector telescope, as big around as a can of paint and four times as long, was drawn to the planet Earth by a gravitational bond of significant strength. Isaac’s journey out of town and up the hill had taxed his limited reserves of muscular power, but it was worth it. It was always worth it to sneak out with a telescope at eight o’clock on a school night, trespass on Mr. Paulus’s field (he wouldn’t mind), and get cold and wet. It was also worth it to open colorfully wrapped packages from his friend Kate, even if they only contained a cracked circular lens. It was not worth it to ask why she would mail him such a thing, because she would only provide some typical cryptic answer. It was Kate; she might mail him a live squid next time.
The lens had puzzled him until he had chanced to aim it at the sky. Now, with a thermos of lukewarm coco and ears red from cold, he bent to take another look through the telescope. “It’s moved,” he told his imaginary assistant, affecting a stern, professional voice. Ship’s captain. Space Fleet Commander. Many chevrons. “Or rather…the stars have moved. And it’s gone right along with them.”
He removed the lens from the viewport of his telescope, where he had fastened it by employing the advanced engineering technique of Use Duct Tape. He held the cracked lens up to one eye, imagining it as a monocle and snickering for a moment at the thought of himself with a twirly mustache.
An irregular flaw ran across the lens, a normal crack in the glass, possibly incurred during its journey by post across the Atlantic and most of America. But when Isaac looked through it at the northern sky, he saw another crack which shone with faint illumination like a solid line of distant stars. It was a flaw in the sky itself, or so it seemed. It shimmered, phasing through a variety of colors in slow succession, as if it was an aurora compressed into a sharp line. And now Isaac knew that, while the stars moved across the sky in accordance with the rotation of the Earth, this line moved right along with them.
He traced its path from one horizon to the other. It zigged and zagged like a single long fracture in a pane of glass. At some places it feathered out into spreading fans, which could be more clearly seen through the telescope. It began in Virgo in the east, moved up through Bootes, curved through Draco and Ursa Minor, directly through Polaris, down through Cassiopeia, and then right across the Milky Way. It vanished at about the point that the Rocky Mountains to the west dwindled into shadows on their northward march to Canada.
Isaac checked the time. He had been out here for an hour already, charting the fracture. He had accomplished his first objective: to see if it moved with the sky. It did. It rotated with the starry firmament as though affixed to it. This worried Isaac. It didn’t seem right. What was he looking at? Radiation? He had a list of questions to look up when he got back to his room. No cell service in this field. And Kate; he should talk to Kate about this.
His reflector telescope could not pick up the bizarre occurrence at all. He had aimed it dead at Polaris and searched in vain for the silvery thread. Nothing. The sky checked out, according to his normal telescope, unaugmented by the lens.
He sat down in the snow, then fell onto his back. He gazed at the place where the crack existed. Where he knew it existed, although he could not see it.
“Most likely,” he said, “it’s some kind of electromagnetic wavelength that can’t be seen with the naked eye.” He held up the lens, passed it back and forth over his eyes, watched the shimmery crack in the stars appear and vanish. What on Earth was the lens made of? Not glass, for sure. But if he had seen this phenomenon, then certainly at least some astronomers in the world had noticed it as well. He would check the forums and astronomy news sites when he got back. It moved with the stars. What could that mean? Was it an atmospheric phenomenon moving against the Earth’s rotation?
Isaac didn’t think he could glean much more information out here. But the night was still brilliant. Jupiter hovered in clear view over the mountains. He reminded himself that all the stars above him were just ancient light, photons that had traveled countless millions of miles through the void of space, spawned years ago by the raging plasma fires of distant suns, only to end their journey in his retinas.
Well. It was getting late. High School tomorrow and all that. Math quiz. He considered the mysteries of pre-calculus as he packed away the telescope and tripod into their case and hauled it up onto his back. Isaac clicked on his headlamp just long enough to inspect the area, making sure he had not forgotten anything. The afterimage blazed in his eyes when he clicked the world back into darkness.
When his vision returned, he began the long trudge back through the snow to town. Isaac felt that this newfound astronomical phenomenon merited discussion, but it was getting late. He could bother his friends another day. It could wait.
He pretended the telescope case was a bulky astronaut’s backpack, life support systems and thrust jets. He imagined himself traipsing through an alien landscape, an easy task in the snow and starlight and silence. It also helped to imagine that the case on his back had a mass equal to several times its current weight, and that he was simply hauling it through a low-gravity environment.
Gradually, he entered in among the lights of Pikeston, the great Montanan metropolis of nearly one thousand citizens. He dropped the case with a crunch onto frosty gravel and paused for a breather by the radio tower, stamping his feet to work some warmth back into his wet toes, watching his breath swirl away. A familiar sound came to him through the night: the coughing sputter of a terminally ill pickup truck. Isaac grinned at the sound, dragged the case to the side of the road, and raised a hitchhiker’s thumb as the feeble headlights slowed.
The vehicle wheezed to a halt. The engine shut off, but Isaac could not tell whether that had been intentional. A series of ticks and rattles sounded from under the rusty hood like a tiny and terrible percussion ensemble. The passenger window in this vehicle did not exist, so the driver had no trouble leaning over and thundering into the night. “Need a ride, son?” His voice was glorious, the way that an enraged grizzly bear up close, in person, would be glorious.
Isaac heaved the telescope case into the debris-filled bed of the pickup truck. He peeled the passenger-side door open, ignoring its squeal of protest, and he struggled to pull it shut again once he had positioned himself on the coarse nappy foam that had once been a seat. He didn’t bother with a seatbelt. There wasn’t one.
“What are you doing out here?” Isaac asked, though he thought he knew the answer. Dwayne had come to pick him up.
“Just goin’ for an evening drive,” replied Dwayne Hartman. “And what about you? Star gazing? Don’t ya got school tomorrow?” He grinned, teeth shining in the streetlights. The beard and coat, the tattoos on his massive hands, and the simple dark bulk of him there in the driver’s seat all conspired to lend Dwayne an air of menace and mystery. The enigmatic stranger at the start of a fantasy novel. Dwayne smelled faintly of cigarettes and beer, but this was a fine smell to Isaac, like apple pie, or autumn rain, or fireworks.
Dwayne endeavored to start his pickup, but the engine was reluctant to catch. Isaac decided not to tell Dwayne about the crack in the sky, not until he knew more. Not until he had something solid to report. So instead of Astronomical Phenomena, he went for Paternal Ambiguities. “So it seems like the state of Montana,” he said, “has no idea what happened to my dad, or even who he was, really.”
“He was a strange man,” Dwayne agreed. His voice resembled the guttural growling of a beast. “Always off somewhere.”
“I don’t think he’s coming back,” said Isaac, trying to reassure Dwayne that he didn’t have any childish fantasies in that regard. “I mean, it’s been years. But you’d think there’d be some kind of public record. Or something.”
Dwayne kept waiting for the engine to turn, patient, confident. “Don’t put too much of yourself into this, Isaac,” he said. “Whether he’s dead or run off, your life is up to you. Not him. Here we go.”
The truck finally came to life, evidently against its own will. They chugged through the mostly empty streets of Pikeston, in silence save for the horrific gasping rattle of the truck. It was the best kind of silence, as each of them worked through their own thoughts.
Dwayne broke it at last with a teacher’s query about piano. “How’s the Bach?”
“Complicated,” Isaac replied. “I keep messing up the modulation.”
Dwayne nodded his huge, shaggy head. “Take it slow. One phrase at a time. Stay loose on those runs.”
More comfortable silence.
“I saw a dead eagle,” Isaac said as the truck heaved itself to a stop in front of the house he lived in. “Just in the ditch. On my way out.”
“Hm. Cause of death?” Dwayne’s voice sometimes actually rattled the remaining windows in the truck.
“Circumstances precluded an autopsy,” (Sherlock Holmes voice.) “No evidence of foul play.” The unintentional pun cracked him up, as did his subsequent realization that it hadn’t really been a pun at all since eagles aren’t fowl.
Dwayne raised a bushy eyebrow.
“Thanks for the lift, Dwayne.” Isaac threw his shoulder against the passenger door, bruised his shoulder, tried again. “Thursday?”
Dwayne smiled and nodded. “Thursday.”
Minutes later, Isaac crept into his room with the telescope, fairly certain his return had gone undetected by the Stocker family. Not that they really cared if he was out on a school night with a telescope.
Lights on. Isaac Milton entered his domain. His bedsheets depicted the planets of the solar system, as did the upper border of the wallpaper in his room. His bed lay unmade, littered with lavishly illustrated glossy-paged rulebooks and dice of varying colors and shapes. In one corner of the room: an expensive keyboard, the keys hardly visible beneath a flurry of staff paper scribbled with notation or barely legible text. On the many bookshelves: an assortment of science-fiction and fantasy novels ranging from contemporary to classic, and from mainstream hits to pulp paperbacks. On the nightstand: a journal, a Bible, a spare pair of thick rectangular glasses, and more random dice. On the desk: a laptop, more novels, notebooks, pens and pencils, and a CD with the words “ Curative Remedy for Loser-ness ” written in black sharpie. On the walls: a fleet of sticky-notes; posters depicting astronauts, NASA, and rocket launches; several colorful paintings of considerable artistic quality. On the floor: more sheet music; free sheets of notebook paper rife with maps, charts, and blocks of text; stale potato chips crushed into the blue carpet. On the ceiling: glow-in-the-dark stars, arranged into a rough approximation of the night sky from this location at midnight on the winter solstice. He had chopped up the plastic stars and used their fragments in order to achieve the desired level of detail. He liked them better that way, just little shards of light instead of the full star-shaped stars.
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He shoved the telescope into his closet. He stood for a moment, not tired. Excited. A real mystery!
He opened his laptop, recorded his notes from the evening’s observations, closed his laptop, read one paragraph from three different books, scribbled a handful of notes for a Pathfinder game, sat down at the piano and took a crack at the Bach, gave up, opened his laptop to check astronomy sites and see if any of them had noticed a crack in the sky. Nothing. He opened the short story he was working on and spent ten minutes staring at the last line. He was sure he would finish this one. He just didn’t know how. If he did finish, he would have to let Eric read it. A promise was a promise. But that also meant the pressure was on, because the story would have to be good. It would absolutely have to exhibit as few loser-like qualities as possible. Just to be on the safe side, he would write while listening to the Curative Remedy . No decisive evidence yet as to its efficacy, he had recently told Eric, but for the sake of scientific progress, he would keep trying. “Good man,” Eric had responded. “I’ll know it works if I never have to read one of your shitty stories ever again.”
Finally, Isaac decided that he had to talk to somebody. Eric and Jim would be asleep. Kate was across the Atlantic. Elizabeth was, what, two time zones ahead? Or just one. But she stayed up late. Worth a shot. He opened CHIME on his computer.
IM: Hey Elizabeth
She replied almost at once.
EE: Hello Isaac.
IM: Did you hear about the man whose left side was cut off?
EE: Goodbye Isaac.
IM: Wait, don’t disconnect!
EE: Why should I not?
EE: I have no interest in your low-grade humor this evening.
EE: And are you aware of the time here?
IM: This is important!
IM: Or at least, it is Very Interesting
EE: Doubtful.
IM: So don’t go away!
IM: Stay tuned!
IM: We’ll be right back after a word from our sponsors!
IM: ...
IM: Still there?
EE: Unfortunately.
IM: (the sponsor, it’s you)
IM: (say something)
EE: I would not sponsor your program.
IM: bummer
EE: I understand, though I do not condone, your efforts to inject comedy into our conversation.
EE: However, I urge you to consider the lateness of the hour as we proceed with our thus far scintillating repartee.
IM: Noted, I guess
EE: So...
IM: So what?
EE: Am I to assume that you have messaged me out of sheer boredom? I really am about to go to bed.
IM: Heavens, no!
IM: Well, there is that *interesting* thing I mentioned earlier, but first, I just remembered, I have another book recommendation for you!
EE: Go on.
IM: Wait that’s it?
EE: That’s what?
IM: No clever remark about my lowbrow tastes in literature?
EE: Have I mentioned that I am tired?
EE: Also I am a little distracted at the moment.
IM: With what?
EE: Callie.
IM: awwwwww
IM: your blind demon ghost bobcat is so cute!
EE: Agreed.
EE: Anyway...
IM: It’s called The Worm Ourbros
IM: Hang on
EE: I believe you mean “Ouroboros?”
IM: Yeah that
IM: How’d you know?
EE: The Ouroboros, a depiction of a serpent biting its own tail, symbolizing infinity or cyclicality, appears in various religions and folklore the world over.
IM: haha “our bros”
IM: Anyway it’s by E.R. Eddison
IM: I didn’t just think of you because your initials and last name are the same
IM: It’s really good!
EE: You can do better than that, Isaac.
IM: It’s unique, vivid, and stylistically interesting
IM: and it, uh, appeals to sensibilities somewhat foreign to the modern reader
EE: Genre?
IM: Fantasy
IM: BUT
IM: It’s a classic. It’s like a hundred years old at least
IM: It predates all the tropes and clichés you hate so much
IM: And best of all,
IM: It’s really hard to understand what people are saying!
IM: Using all archaic language and stuff
EE: And stuff as well?
IM: You know it. So much stuff
EE: Very well. I will investigate further.
IM: Just like that?
IM: geez I could really go for a scathing lambast of my literary interests
EE: Fine.
EE: *ahem
EE: Although you are but an irremediable wretch in the realm of literary taste, I shall deign to inspect this scum you have likely dredged from the cesspits of hackneyed narrative detritus in which you so indiscriminately wallow. Perhaps at the least it will afford me a modicum of amusement, whilst slaking somewhat my insatiable thirst for a sense of superiority over my fellow man, and more specifically, you.
IM: YES! Keep going
EE: That is enough for this evening.
IM: Oh
IM: Are you feeling okay?
EE: Sure, fine.
IM: Okay, good.
IM: I love how you can always tell when someone is actually fine because they say “sure, fine” when you ask them
IM: Really convenient
EE: It is nothing.
EE: This big old house just feels empty after having you guys out here.
IM: Yeah a few weeks and it already seems like a long time
IM: Hey! Jim’s birthday is coming up
EE: True.
IM: Have you thought of a present for him yet?
EE: Thinking of a present for Jimothy is like attempting to determine where to place another star in the sky.
IM: Woah deep
IM: But yeah, I know what you mean
IM: You could give that guy a like a random rock and he’d be actually thrilled
IM: It’s like he’s happy with anything but you don’t want to give him just anything, you know?
EE: And speaking of unexpected gifts, how is the ravenous turtle doing?
IM: Didn’t we agree to not talk about that?
EE: April Fools was only days ago, Isaac.
EE: None of us have forgotten.
EE: You will pay for your crimes.
IM: ANYWAY
IM: I’ve been thinking
IM: Maybe we can all get together for Jim’s birthday like we did for yours.
IM: And maybe this time Kate can come
IM: So the rest of us can finally actually meet her!
IM: Seriously stop hogging our cool friend all to yourself
EE: I would like that.
EE: Now, your next message had better be about that interesting thing you mentioned or we are done here.
IM: Oh yeah, I found a crack in the sky.
EE: Elaborate.
IM: oh haha it took me a minute to figure out you were using that word as an imperative rather than an adjective
EE: Stay on track, Isaac.
IM: Kate mailed me a lens and when I look through it I can see a glowing crack in the northern part of the sky.
IM: It moves with the stars.
EE: Is that all?
IM: Whaddaya mean ‘is that all!?’
EE: Well, what do you expect me to know about it? Talk to Kate.
IM: I have an Ominous Feeling!
EE: Go to sleep, Isaac.
IM: Maybe I will!
IM: Say goodnight to Callie for me.
EE: Done.
EE: Wait.
EE: Tell me the answer to your joke.
EE: I know it’s going to be stupid, but it will bother me if I don’t know.
IM: You mean about the man whose left side was cut off?
EE: Yes.
IM: Well, don’t worry about him.
IM: He’s all right now!
IM: ...hello?