For as long as I can remember, people have called me crazy, they have laughed at me, ridiculed my theories and papers. I witnessed the impossible, or so they thought. I can’t have been any older than 5 when the unfeasible happened.
I was playing with my red dumper truck under the tree at the bottom of the garden. How I loved that thing, shovelling dirt back and forth. It was the early 2000s, and back then, the streets must have been pretty safe. People used to just leave their children in the garden to play and not think twice about it. We lived in a two up, two down, terrace, somewhere along the middle of the row. The garden wasn’t particularly large, I realise that now, but when I was 5, I thought it massive. It had big wooden fences towering all around, and a little gate to the alleyway that ran round the back. I know what you’re thinking, but things really were different then, people didn’t fear their neighbours.
It was a day like any other I guess, grey, dull and fairly uneventful. I remember it so clearly, every second burnt into my memory. I had cheese and tomato sandwiches triangles with the crusts cut off for lunch on a Thomas the Tank Engine plate. I was sat under the tree when it happened. I must have just started eating.
A bright light crackled in the alley. It was like a million lightning strikes were all hitting the same spot. I couldn’t see. It was so bright my eyes stung and watered. Slowly, blackness filled the light, emanating out from the centre in a slow ooze. Finally, all the light was black. Then the blackness came. It rushed forward, pouring through the gaps between the fence slats, thick and sticky goblets dripped through. It pooled as it fell, slowly surrounding me. The sky began to fade further away, and the details left the garden around me. Slowly, my world blurred into whiteness. In front of me there stood two men, one near, one far. The former was rather rotund. His fat sausage hands reached out and grabbed my arms. His piggy round face filled my vision as he leant into me. His breath was hot and moist and he laboured over me. He held my gaze with a coldness I had never seen before.
“He will do” the fat man rasped.
Silently, the second man turned over the page of his clipboard, and began furiously scribbling, as if awaking from a trance. He was a thin elderly man, his face drawn and gaunt, his hands frail and ribboned with blue veins. He did not look up and meet my eyes. Not once. He continued scribbling away as though his very life depended on it.
The fat man lumbered around me, and began to guide me forward, propelling me through the strange, thick air of this bright place. A doorway loomed dark in the brightness. I began to struggle. I remember trying to dig my feet in, but there was nothing there. I started to panic. I tried to make a sound, but the silence hung deafening over my empty scream, smothering me in its blankness. He laughed. The fat man laughed at me, his face twisted into a contorted, horrifying, silent laughter. He pushed me onwards, towards the dark. I tried to turn, to get away, but my body didn’t move. My eyes darted around, frantically looking for a way out of this strange place. They fell once more on the frail old man, his hands danced furiously over the clipboard, making constant notes.
Just for one moment, just one split second, he looked up at me. His dark eyes were filled with such sadness, such regret. My insides turned, ice crept up my throat, closing it tight and stealing my words away. Something about the way he looked at me, it sent such a shiver down my spine. Looking back now, I wonder if I knew. In a flash, he eyes darted back down to this clipboard. His expression like stone, he inched forward, keeping his distance.
As we grew closer to the doorway, the fat man began pushing me ever more furiously. Pinprick beads of sweat began to form on his forehead, and fall in fat, heavy splatters on my head. I could feel each drop hit, followed by the slow trickle as it made its way down among my hair follicles.
His fat swollen hands held my arms so tightly I thought they would break. Before I could stop it, we were at the doorway. The darkness seems punctuated with vague shadows and shapes. With an effort I could never know, the fat man pushed me across the threshold. The blackness engulfed us and I was blind. A strange sensation of weightlessness overtook me, it felt like floating. In a few moments, the sensation left, and I felt myself resting on a large cold slab. I could not tell if the fatman still held my arms, or if it was simply the memory of his touch, but the pain in my arms became the only thing I could think of. I tried to move my hands, to touch, to feel, to tell what my eyes could not, but they lay as still as death and all the will I had would not move them.
Although I could not see it, I could sense a closer darkness over me. A being. Something deep inside me, somewhere, sensed a being. Straps snaked up and held me down. My body went numb, and my head felt like swirling fog. I became aware of a clenching sensation inside me. A pain I could not comprehend shot through me as a strange, deep heat. Somehow, through the heat of this pain, I began to make out forms in the darkness. A huge looming, heaving, lumbering form laboured over me, its hot stale breathe danced across my cheek. The fatman. At my foot, I could just about make out a second form. A wisp of a figure, frail and somehow unthreatening, it simply lingered there, never stirring as the hot pain seared deep inside me.
And then it was over. I felt the straps slowly recede as the weightless sensation once more filled my body. I lay there for what must have been an eternity. The numb cold of the room drifted into my bones. The air hung still and heavy. The cold filled me, and I lay, wondering if this cold, empty, dark feeling was death itself, taking me away. I had heard people talking of a timeless place between heaven and hell where people went to wait when they died, was this it? Was I dead?
I don’t know how long I lay there, contemplating my own mortality. The cold darkness of the empty room embraced me and held me in her arms and gradually the silence became less empty. Slowly, as I sank into the nothingness, there was something. Something massive and beautiful. Strange distant echoes of sounds I could not place rang in my ears, something just out of reach. It was like all of time was rushing by me. It was too much for a child to comprehend and I sank into reluctant resignation, they had left me there in the nothingness. It dawned on me, it wasn’t nothing, for in the nothing there was everything, and everything was the nothing. I didn’t really understand then, I am not sure I really do now, but something about this vague thought gave me comfort.
It felt like hundreds of years crawled by. I often thought of my mum, I wondered if she missed me, if she was still looking for me. I wondered if she was an old lady now.
Lifetimes passed by me in as I lay, paralyzed in the timeless abyss. I began to forget. Memories once painted with vivid colours began to fade to grey, and the perfect details of long loved faces started to blur into obscurity, lost to the fog of time.
I had accepted it. A child of five, trapped in eternity, I knew there was nothing I could do.
Then, in a flash of light, it was over. I blacked out. As I came to, I found myself sat against the tree, my thomas the tank engine plate on floor, sandwiches fallen apart scattered across the garden. Slowly, my senses returned, and I felt myself shaking by the shoulders. Looking up, an unfamiliar tear-stained face was looking into mine, hands frantically shaking me.
I can't remember anything before that. The woman, I soon learnt to be my mother, always told me it was a seizure. I could remember it so clearly, I knew it was real, a tangible place I had not yet the understanding to describe.
I dedicated my life to finding it, the dark place that lay beyond the edge of time. My god, I almost wish I had never succeeded.
Years went by, I applied for every grant, contacted every benefactor. No one took me seriously, but it just motivated me even to go even further. I poured every penny I could get my hands on into the chemical compound. A thick, black liquid, that drips and shimmers in great goblets of darkness. I worked with anyone, agreed to anything, to perfect it.
Finally, and I am still not sure if I fully understand how, but finally it worked. The black goblets dripped and pooled, the darkness engulfed everything, until slowly, from a distant centre, the darkness became light. I stepped cautiously forward in the dazzlingly nothing that had become everything. Ahead, a dark doorway I have always known, stood, waiting. I felt the suffocating fear I had once felt rush back towards me, but somehow it did not overtake me. I continued on, the doorway looming until I reached the inevitable threshold. The effort it took to force my way into the darkness was immense, as I strained my muscles, they ached and pulled with the fatigue of a thousand marathons, as though in this moment, I had pushed forever.
Then I was through. The room was empty, no table with snaking straps to restrain me, but the room was there nonetheless. I didn't even think, I was so excited, so vindicated, joy coursed through me and I ran from that room as though it were the easiest thing to leave. The light gushed out to meet me, but my enthusiasm, my self righteous happiness, pushed me on without hesitation, and I found my feet stepping through that glorious light, onto my well worn laboratory floor. I was so overwhelmed. I was not crazy, I was never crazy, and finally, I could call all those people who gave me a chance, they could see it for themselves.
Yet now I find myself standing at the edge of a sickening abyss. I know the man who has entered my lab, the man my latest sponsor has sent to see this place beyond time, and inevitably, conduct his own experiments. I have known him as long as I can remember. His fat, bloated face, his pudgy fingers bulging at the joints, are etched in deep my memory.
My heartbeat becomes a pounding fist, fear, desperate to get out. I know why he is here, may be better than he himself. My insides lurch as he clears his throat to speak. Does it even matter what he has to say? How he will convince me to conduct such a monsterous experiment?
As I look down, my dark eyes glance over my frail trembling hands, ribbons of blue veins rising over the thin bones and my insides turn cold. How had I not seen it before, those frail, worn hands burnt in my memory, had always been there. Then I know, I already said yes to it all. Perhaps it was the only way I could agree to it.