Extinction Event (3) "It'll get the school before it gets your house." Ray commented companionably. Andy was sparked "It'll get your place first. You're closer to the park than we are. An' old man Hanley's shop, that's right opposite the park. That'll go." Ray grinned sourly. Old man Hanley was a grumpy old git who owned a tatty newsagents just around the corner from Ray's house. Hanley wouldn't let the kids in unless they came one at a time and there were curly edged notices stuck on everything telling them not to touch the magazines, the cheap toys, the sweets or the drinks unless they put their money on the counter first. The loss of Hanley's shop would not be grieved over. Unless, of course, you were leaving for ever in which case it would have been nice to be able to think back and reflect that everything you knew was still there even if you weren't! "Reckon your Mum knows something everyone else doesn't." Andy said at one point and Ray stopped playing F1 Racing for a second so that his Ferrari disintegrated messily against the tyre wall and the race was stopped. "Whaddaya mean?" He was looking for offence, but only because he was pissed off at life, not at Andy. "Don't have a cow. I didn't mean nothin'. Just, if you had to pick a time to go to the other side of the world, you couldn't have chosen a better one than right now with the town about to be swallowed by a black hole. Guess your Mum must be psychic." Ray grinned. His Mum was the least psychic person he had ever met. It was blind misfortune, that was all. This was possibly the most exciting thing to ever happen to the town since the steelworkers strikes of the last century. And he was going to miss it all. "You reckon its a black hole then?" He asked, returning to the game where the restart was happening behind the pace car. Andy nodded. "There's this chat room for physicists I use, if you ask them questions then they send you an answer. Anyhow, I asked if a black hole could open up anywhere in the universe, even in the park and they mailed me back and said, Yeah, they didn't have to just exist out in space. They could just start anywhere. So then I asked them if they thought the whole world could fall in to the hole and there's this guy, Stuey who always writes to me and he reckoned it could happen. Just like that. So I don't think the council are gonna be able to do much about it. Do you?" Ray didn't answer. It didn't matter what they did about the hole, this time next week he would be on the other side of the world and this place would be history. How was that for perspective? He chucked the joystick to one side and stood up. "I'd better get going. Mum'll want me to pack up the rest of my stuff. The shippers are coming to take it in the morning. "You playin' tomorrow?" Andy was referring to the school team who had a home fixture the next day. Ray nodded. "Yup. S'gonna be a tough game. We win this we make the regional finals." Neither of them voiced the immediate realisation that Ray wouldn't be here to play in the regional finals. It just kept getting worse and worse. Andy broke the tension. "Well you'd better make sure you lose then." 0There was quite a crowd for the home game up at the school and once or twice Ray was sure he caught a sight of Andy amongst it, which was pretty unheard of because Andy didn't like to stand out in the cold and watch football. It was often hard to get him to watch it on the TV, so Ray could barely believe that he might have come up to watch and when he went to look for him after the game, a 2-Nil defeat of the strongest local opposition, he didn't find him, so he was sure he must have been mistaken all along. Walking home after, Ray passed by the Park and saw that most of the trees were now gone. The hole, now surrounded by high barricades and raised tarpaulins, overhead lights blazing onto the site as though they might help the gathered suits see where it went to, was getting bigger by the hour. At this rate, the whole Park really would sink into the ground. And the streets beyond....? Further along there was a battalion of press photographers on ladders and Ray skirted them, stepping over wires, piled metal boxes and arc lights in spiky stacks, his dirty kit weighing down his shoulder, regret weighing down his joy at winning. He stopped opposite the gates, looking between shoulders at the brown morass which had once been their football pitch. He'd been playing out there for nine years. It just wasn't right. He went over to his Dad's the next day and they kicked the ball between them in the little park opposite his dingy flat. No mention was made of reprieve and Ray went home more depressed than ever. The news was on when he got in and he sat with his mother and watched it helplessly. After tomorrow, even the local news readers would be different. The news reader was showing footage of the Park filmed from over the fence. There was nothing to see but blue tarpaulin. So far, no one knew what the hole represented and seismic activity of some kind seemed the most likely possibility. The police were asking for calm. No one in the local community need be affected. The emergency services were doing all they could to ensure that the hole did not pose a threat to the area beyond the Park. "What measures?" He snorted derisively. His mum looked at him sharply and he felt compelled to explain. "Andy thinks its a black hole, just opened up somewhere in space and we happen to be where it is. There's no way they're gonna be able to fill it in." "Then it's a good thing we won't be here to worry about it isn't it. You should go on up to bed Ray. We've got an early start tomorrow." Was her answer. Then the doorbell rang. The excitement did get to him in the end, but he was on the plane before he felt it. Looking out of the oval window at the runway tarmac, he felt a moment of guilt that he hadn't managed to say a proper goodbye to his mates. A round of last minute visits by grandparents and other relatives had kept them busy until almost midnight and they had turned the key in the front door lock for the last time at 5.30am that morning. Understandably not many of his mates were hanging around right then. They had been driven to the airport by his Mum's little brother Alan, travel bags piled high in the boot, their individual pretensions gone now. His mother looked pale and scared as though she was only just realising what she had done and as they turned out of his road and along the perimeter of the Park Ray saw her glance across to where the tarpaulins still cloaked the hole and the lights blazed above it. There was activity going on up there as the workers moved the boundary out yet again. His mother's grim look became replaced by one of relief and certainty. Ray knew that, in her mind, she was rescuing her son from a world that wanted to devour him. That spreading hole was just a manifestation of her fears for his future. A second later, the car spun by and the Park and the gloomy suburb it bordered was behind them. As the plane accelerated off the runway, Ray swallowed his regrets and let the bubble of excitement he had been holding below them burst. This time tomorrow he would be in Australia. It was summer there and he could look forward to a land filled with leggy women who wore really funky bikinis, drank frosties and fought crocodiles. Now was that really so bad? The plane gained height over the cold grey suburbs of the black country towns beneath. Ray had a second to wonder if his house might be below them right now and then they were up through the clouds and out in the brilliant blue beneath the sun, all views of England cloaked for ever. Ray wondered if they played soccer in Australia. As Ray made his intercontinental escape, his little hole was just beginning to affect the consciousness of some very important people. The Prime Minister was told about it on that Tuesday morning and a special task force was immediately despatched to take over the operation. The Prime Minister wasn't a man given to spontaneity but this turn of events had him worried. A bottomless hole with no explanations for its appearance or its consequences sounded too much like the current economic circumstances. He began to prepare a statement for the House based on what he knew and it wasn't much. There was an election coming. He didn't need this right now, but perhaps it would provide a diversion from the real problems the country was facing. As long, of course, as they managed to solve this one. A dozen physicists were at the Park by the middle of the week, as well as several other specialists from miners to potholers as well as experts in seismology and plate tectonics. Whatever went down the hole unattached to terra firma disappeared for good. However far anyone or anything was lowered, the bottom of the hole was never found. Nor was it, inside, like a bore hole or a normal crevasse. The inside of the hole was dark and airless and the 'sides' were smooth and, somehow, not there. There was nothing to retrieve, no samples to be brought out, no walls to breach or test. The hole did not provide a vent to the core of the planet, it just seemed to descend without limit into....where? They sent down a drone camera but the picture gave them nothing. The hole was an empty nothing. After fifty miles, the picture just ceased, but there were plenty of other things going down that hole too, so it might have been destroyed by a falling rock. They sent another one. The same thing happened at around fifty miles. So they dropped down a cable that was sixty miles long but it was still falling when it reached the end of the reel. So they dropped down a cable that was 100 miles long. The same thing happened. No one had the faintest idea what was going on. At this stage, almost a week after they had begun measuring the hole, another realisation came to them. The hole wasn't increasing in size at a comparative rate, but exponentially. To put it simply, the bigger it got, the faster it grew. One of the physicists had an answer about that which was offered to the media on the Friday. "Given this factor, which we are beginning to believe is an important feature of this phenomenon, it would seem possible that this hole..... This 'spatial vortex' if you like.... has always been there, perhaps since the beginning of time. Except that it was so tiny, it was not visible to humanity and the rate of its increase was so slow that no being could ever be aware of it before now. Once it established sufficient size to expand at a relevant rate, it finally became detectable by humans. And so it has become this." And he waved a hand towards the blue tarpaulins for theatrical effect before continuing. "At this moment in time, we are busy working on a solution to this problem and we feel confident we shall find one before very much longer." The press conference continued but the news was immediately sent around the world and on Friday night when the perimeter fence of the park was swallowed and a row of abandoned houses along the top road followed shortly after, the decision was made to evacuate the estate and the International media went ballistic. Ray woke up in a sunny room, barely able to remember the late night dash from the airport to this dark apartment in an anonymous town. He rolled onto his back and looked at the white ceiling, enjoying the way the sun dazzled across it and made the whole room almost iridescent in gold. His window was partly open and pale curtains fluttered softly. Beyond there was a blazing sky, the deepest blue he had ever seen, and the heat was already rising outside. There was a sound beneath the city hubbub, a rhythmic rush and hum that was completely unfamiliar and, for one terrible second, Ray imagined that the hole had chased them right round the world and even now was eating up the pavement outside his bedroom window. He swung out of bed and staggered across to look out, his heart shuddering in his chest but something quite unexpected met his gaze. The apartment was in a block overlooking a long white beach and what met him was the azure glory of the sea beneath a generous summer sun. It was possibly the most beautiful view he had ever seen and the heave and swell of it all the way to the curved horizon was a view he thought, right then, that he could spend the rest of his life looking at. "This beats Musky Bodall's shithole." He muttered to himself. For most of his fifteen years he had opened his curtains every day to be confronted directly with the bedroom window of the local drugs dealer. Mortimer 'Musky' Bodall had earned the nickname because he permanently smelt of the skunk weed he grew in his back bedroom under a battalion of UV lights. The tatty edges of two towels he had nailed up as bedroom curtains had been the first thing Ray would see every time he looked across the street from his own room. Never again, he thought, turning to view the room he now found himself in. It was twice as big as the one he had left, with a walk in closet and his own bathroom. There was a TV and a stereo and a huge poster of Man United on the wall. He nodded to himself. Some of his pennants and trophies, his scarves and pictures, red curtains... Yup. This would do. Ray went to find his Mum, a smile on his face at last and nothing was further from his mind right then than the hole in the Park. He spent most of that day on the beach or exploring the city he now found himself near to. Perth, on the West of Australia was almost like heaven to Ray, who, used to dingy bricks and grey pavements, could not get over how light everything was. Many of the houses were white, the city buildings shimmering and spacious, the pavements clean and palm trees growing everywhere. He made friends on the street outside his house and by the end of that first, trouble-free weekend he had already been introduced to most of the local hangouts, to all the good places to eat and drink for boys his age, and most important of all, to a couple of lads who played for a local soccer club. He played beach volleyball for the first time in his life, was given a lesson on a surfboard and even got eyed up by several of the scantily dressed girls who continually stalked the beach. On Sunday night, exhausted and happier than he could ever have believed possible, he watched the news for the first time. Two stories from home made it round the world to Perth that night and they brought Ray conflicting feelings of euphoria and despair. Firstly, and perhaps most importantly, Man United had won twice that week, both in the League and in the European Championships. Ray was ecstatic on two counts, both the winning and the fact that the club had a high enough profile around the world for its games to be a matter of news even here. Secondly, and the story was run right at the end of the news like an afterthought, the hole which had appeared in his Park just three weeks before was now more than half a mile across and had swallowed everything around the park including the canal and all the water in it for sixty miles in each direction. The armed forces were planning to send a submersible with four men in it down the hole to see what was going on. The world was waiting with baited breath to find out what would happen next. Ray, watching with his Mum, at the end of perhaps the most perfect day of his life - he had been given a PC by his mother who started her new job the next day and would be mostly absent from his life from then on - felt a cold hard stone settle into the base of his chest. His street was gone, fuckit, Andy's street was gone! The school was gone and the swimming pool, the kids playground and most of the shops on Wilton Street and now the hole was beginning to threaten the town centre and the Football ground. Another mile and it would claim his Dad's dingy flat. Ray and his mother sat in bleak silence as the report was read. The news reader looked both amused and slightly rattled. Everyone was really starting to worry about this. No one seemed to know how to stop it. People had imagined that the end of the world might fall out of the sky but it seemed they hadn't much dwelled on the possibility that the ground might simply disappear from beneath their feet. The British government were still convinced they could handle the problem and were telling the world not to worry, this was not a nuclear explosion or a military experiment gone wrong, it was a natural phenomena and as such could be tackled. The government and all its agencies were applying all efforts to solve the problem before it spread and, lets face it, the dingy estate was no great loss from the skin of the planet. Rebuilding would improve the area once the problem had been solved and the hole filled in. People were convinced by the government claims because they were used to accepting what they were told, but even so, towns and villages around were being evacuated and there was a steady increase in departures of people from England to visit friends and relatives abroad. All in all, now seemed like a good time to take a holiday. Christmas was three weeks away and everyone should have been preparing for that great celebration but, even though many went through the motions, the hole was never far from anyone's thoughts. Even Ray, halfway round the world, spent his first four days at his new school thinking of little else. Few of the kids there were talking about it, so he was marooned in a world of worry where making new friends seemed callous when he didn't even know where half his old ones were. Andy had managed to e-mail him once he had set up his new computer and nagged his Mum for an Internet account. That had been easy really. She was buried in her new job and very happy that Ray seemed to have found nice kids to hang out with and things to keep him busy. Andy's parents had only moved as far as his grandmother's house three miles away, their own now gone along with everything in it, the garden shed, the garden and the cat. Yet still they were turning up for their shifts at the factory and had made no mention of moving to a safer distance.
Copyright © 2000 Carey Lenehan |