Dark Matters
by Kirsten Campbell
part 1 of 2
David Fielder galloped around his mother’s bed then out of her bedroom and headed for the stairs in the hall. Once there, he decided breakfast could wait. It was playtime in his world. He took off as fast as his little legs could carry him, racing across the long hall, plunging downward to the freshly waxed wooden floor and skidding full force into the baseboard of the hall linen closet.
“Aw, nuts... No towels,” he whispered.
Usually, several brightly colored towels fell off the shelves when he hit the back wall or the baseboard of the linen closet. He’d pick them up and choose the lucky towel he’d use for his superhero cape of the day. This time, not one towel fell. He frowned. David knew he had to have a cape. In his mind he was a super soldier out to rid the world of scary monsters, and super soldiers wore capes.
David got up and brushed himself off, then shrugged and took off for his mother’s bedroom once again. “I know what, I’ll go faster than ever before,” he murmured. He closed his eyes and in his mind he saw himself running then skidding across the wooden floor as fast as he could. His feet hit the base board of the closet full force and three bright red towels fell to the ground. He laughed out loud as the vision faded and once again he readied himself. A few seconds later, David Fielder took off down the hall, running as fast as he could. He dropped to the floor and skidded towards the hall closet at a fantastic speed.
* * *
“He’s coming in fast, Captain,” Alix Clump said while stabilizing the cylindrical canisters on his lab station. He grabbed the glowing dimensional field strips and stretched them over the equipment to prepare for the impact and then he braced himself.
“Impact imminent! Prepare yourselves,” Dinn Russ Jarrin said, his statement washing throughout the super sensitive interior skin of the Mosmeiver, his omni-dimensional spacecraft. He pressed through the myriad of dimensional waves in the seventh quadrant of the vessel and moved quickly to thrust himself away from its interior skin, but he wasn’t quick enough.
Though the little human boy named David Fielder was in the third dimension, he somehow managed to slam into the omni-dimensional lab station of the Mosmeiver, igniting a small tremor in all the dimensional quadrants of the huge vessel, sending Dinn Russ Jarrin, the captain of the Mosmeiver, and all his omni-dimensional replicates flying forward to the vessel’s temperamental skin. The Mosmeiver reacted violently, shuddering and quaking within, reacting to the temperament of its Captain, who by then was quite agitated.
“This is disturbing to say the least,” Jarrin said.
“I agree. This is quite disturbing, Captain. Quite disturbing, to say the least,” his replicates said in their high pitched tones, tones which quickly switched to a bored synchronized lull, as if being shifted within their particular dimensions was an everyday occurrence.
“Has everyone recovered?” Jarrin asked and stretched out slowly. He sent out empathic tendrils to each quadrant of his craft and they came back bright and clear. Everyone recovered quickly, so he reached through the gel-like environment of the seventh quadrant of his space craft and ran his fingers gingerly across the iridescent inner skin; sending feelings of calmness to the Mosmeiver’s super-sensitive reactors, letting it know that everything was once again secure.
Jarrin moved slowly within his environment and once again ran his hands through the controlled stream of quantum waves, every once in a while seizing groups of neutrinos, encasing them in inter-dimensional envelopes of dark matter to transport them to the third quadrant of the Mosmeiver, the lab area, for fuel.
“Sir, the lab can’t take another hit,” Alix said to the Captain.
Jarrin frowned. In those few seconds he’d all but forgotten how very important the lab was to the Mosmeiver, the lab being the very reason the Mosmeiver had fuel to remain intact within several dimensions at once. The lab housed the dark-matter canisters, cylindrical canisters that held billions of neutrinos in dark matter.
Jarrin focused on the lab for a moment, pictured his friend, Alix Clump as he desperately tried to stabilize a two-foot-tall dark matter canister balanced over a soft ion field, with all four of his arms.
“This has become a regular occurrence, Captain. Perhaps we should move the lab.”
“No. We moved it the last time. Anyway, I’ve dealt with children like David before. They’re usually very intuitive and smart. David’s particularly curious, but his curiosity will be his undoing.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Let’s give him a reason to be curious.”
“What do you suggest, sir?”
“I’ll send him the darkness. You know, Darkness One. Let’s see what he’s made of.”
“But, he’s just an insignificant human, sir.”
“Insignificant? So insignificant that he caused a tremor in several dimensions at once? No, Alix, you’ve got this one all wrong. He’s not insignificant. I’ve been watching him for a while and I’ve decided we should keep ahead of him and his development. He’ll get stronger as he gets older and then he might push us out of this quadrant altogether. Eventually he might even figure out what we’re doing and what’s going on with his area of the third dimension. And that’s something we really don’t want to happen, right Alix?”
“Right Captain. We promised their government we’d remain anonymous.”
“Exactly.”
“So, when will you send him Darkness One?”
“In a matter of seconds. I’ll send in Darkness One, he’ll get scared and leave that area of the third dimension alone. Just give me a chance to concentrate and then watch the show,” Jarrin said and fell back slowly in his space craft. He relaxed, closed his eyes and smiled. Jarrin, an omni-dimensional, was an entity that had the ability to be in every dimension at once, wherever and whenever he wanted. He also had the innate ability to create an inter-dimensional window in the shape of his physical form, revealing any part of the cosmos to anyone at any time or place.
It took a lot of energy for that type of maneuver, energy that he sifted from the Mosmeiver, which then put his vessel in jeopardy of total omni-dimensional destabilization. Unfortunately, it was a chance he had to take. The lab was the heart of the Mosmeiver, so it was vital that it remained stabilized.
Jarrin’s pale, handsome face crinkled and his smile faded as he leaned back, floated about in the seventh quadrant environment. He calmed himself while remembering the last time the lab had been hit. It was a little girl named Edna with what Earth dwellers called ‘psychic abilities’.
Edna could feel things. In 1997 Edna felt the coldness of the inter-dimensional envelope that protected the Mosmeiver’s lab, and then she started slamming into that area of her bedroom, testing the area, just like David.
Eventually, Edna knocked the Mosmeiver out of its omni-dimensional wormhole and the triangular edge of its wing was reportedly seen in the night sky of an area on Earth known as Phoenix, Arizona. It was 1997 and several hundred people witnessed what they thought was a mile-wide space craft. They called the little inter-dimensional slip, “The Phoenix Lights.”
Little did they know, the Mosmeiver was over three hundred miles long and it stretched out through all ten dimensions at once. The tiny part that appeared in the night sky over Phoenix, Arizona was a miniscule part of a gigantic spacecraft.
Jarrin immediately contacted the government of the huge continent the humans called the United States. He was worried that the sudden dimensional quakes might cause other travesties on the small planet in the third dimension. He was relieved when told that the only problem encountered was the strange jutting wing of the Mosmeiver in the night sky.
Jarrin spoke with the president and he figured it wasn’t in the public’s best interest to realize that Earth was actually being visited by aliens — from another dimension no less. A cover-up ensued, a pact was made and Jarrin moved the Mosmeiver. He gave the government heads a taste of unusual technological knowledge, and then promised to never show his vessel in the third dimensional sky ever again.
“I’m sending in Darkness One... now,” Jarrin said to Alix and his replicas. He closed his eyes, sending a transparent inter-dimensional replicate of his humanoid shape to the third dimension, the exact spot where little David Fielder was playing in the hall closet.
Darkness One was void of any color except for the deepest, darkest matter of the night sky. It was a window to the universe, a window of the deepest darkness, a window that Dinn Russ Jarrin sent to scare the daylights out of a little boy named David Fielder.
* * *
David stood up, wiped the dust off his light blue pajamas and ran out of the hall closet to his mother’s bedroom. The forty-foot run had become the highlight of his morning for the last two months. He enjoyed running back and forth over and over, skidding into the back wall of the linen closet in his Tucson, Arizona home.
David readied himself, ran as fast as he could and skidded across the freshly waxed hard wood floor to the interior of the hall linen closet. He winced as his feet hit the back wall then slid, seemingly through the wall into a deep, cold darkness that chilled him to the bone.
A minute later, he looked down at his feet and he was there on the floor stationed in front of the base board of the linen closet. He peered upwards, scanned the shelves filled with clean red, white and blue towels. Once again, no towels had fallen. He looked around and noted that though daylight streamed through the windows and lit up the hall, the light in the closet was dim at best.
He sat up, reached out and felt the bottom of the closet. Blistering coldness.
“Hey, why’s it so cold?” he said out loud, and then shrugged. He stood up, wiped his runny nose, then wiped his hands on his pajama pants and once again headed for his mother’s bedroom.
Pssst....
David turned to a strange sound. His head tilted to the side and he stared at the closet, watched as an oily blackness grew from a tiny circle in the middle of the shelves to an eight-foot-tall inky black humanoid figure. David blinked, wiped his eyes then watched as the dark figure wiped its eyes, or at least wiped where there would have been eyes, if it were human.
When the figure’s arms went down, white sparkling eyes blinked back at David from the oily blackness and David’s eyebrows furrowed. He stared deeper and deeper into the darkness, stared at stars.
Fear crept into David’s heart, but curiosity pushed the fear back. It was as if the darkness sucked him in and he had to move forward, had to look, had to see what it was. He inched forward then squinted and his mouth dropped open. To his surprise, he saw what his little mind recognized as the stars that made up the Big Dipper, something which his Mommy showed him many times in the night sky.
“Mommy!” David yelled and took off, ran to his mother’s bedroom. He flew through her room and ran towards the bathroom then slammed into her.
“What’s wrong with you, David? Are you okay?” Mommy asked.
“I saw something in the closet. A giant ghost with glowing eyes! The ghost was dark, dark like the night sky and it had the Big Dipper in his stomach,” David said while recovering from the collision. He grabbed his Mommy about the waist and hugged her close, felt comfort in her warm embrace. “I’m scared Mommy. It was so scary,” he said.
Mommy shook her head slowly. “You and your imagination. First you say you feel something weird in there and now you see something? David...”
“But, I did see something! It was darkness, a giant man made of darkness! He was really tall, as tall as the ceiling and his eyes sparkled, like... like stars!” David said, all the while making motions with his hands.
David’s Mommy nudged him away and she grabbed hold to his little pale face, looked into his dark brown eyes and ran her hand through his black curly hair. She held him close, noted he was trembling. “You really did see something, didn’t you?” she asked.
David nodded then once again pressed his head to his Mommy’s stomach.
“Okay, let’s see what’s in the closet,” Mommy said and grabbed David’s hand and pulled him along, towards the dark open closet. Reaching past the door to the wall, she felt for the light switch and flipped the light on then peeked in. “See? No monsters or ghosts. Okay, David?”
David peeked into the closet, noted the shelving was back to its proper position and the oily darkness disappeared. He looked up into his mother’s blue eyes and frowned. “He was there. The ghost man was standing right there, but now he’s gone. Where’d he go, Mommy?” he asked in the most sincere voice he could throw.
“I don’t know, David. Perhaps he went where all ghosts go.”
“Where’s that?”
“I have no idea, young man,” Mommy said and stared at the bright red and white linen in her closet. She held David close, nudged him towards the stairs. “Let’s get some breakfast then we’ll go out,” she said.
* * *
Copyright © 2010 by Kirsten Campbell
