Keep Quiet - 3. The shape in the dark

The first time I saw Charles after his return to America, I was so surprised that I doubted it was him. I was walking through the campus, hurrying to a lecture on differential equations, when I saw a slender young man walking purposefully along the arches which led to the library. I would not have known that this young man was Charles but for the fact that he resembled his father so strongly that there could be no doubt as to the family connection.

I called out his name as he walked by, just a few paces away.

He never even looked at me. He kept walking, books in hand, a frown on his face.

I cannot say that the slight did not sting, but I was quick to rationalize it by thinking that maybe Charles had not recognized me or had simply been too preoccupied with whatever was on his mind at the time to pay attention to a random person calling out his name. Nevertheless, I could not help but feel that perhaps it was his way of signaling that whatever connection we might have had in the past was, as far as he was concerned, over for good. This impression was further strengthened by the fact that I caught sight of him twice more throughout the week, and both times he ignored my greeting. Granted, on both occasions we did not make eye contact, as he appeared to always walk with a book in one hand, eyes glued to whatever he was reading, but surely he must have at least heard me and elected to pretend he had not.

It was not a pleasant feeling to know that my childhood friend was now acting thus, particularly since I soon found out that Charles Wentworth had registered at the same faculty as me, and we would therefore inevitably take classes together at some point in the future. I could not really explain why, but I had hoped that, when I saw him again, we might have had… Some sort of closure, perhaps. We had been so young when the tragedy had happened, and then he had left so soon. He had never replied to my correspondence, and to this day I did not know how badly the event might have affected him, what he thought of the entire affair, or even what his standing in the family business now was. My father would have never discussed particularities of the Wentworth family with me, fiercely professional attorney that he was, and although I knew that Charles had managed to retain control of most of the family fortune, I did not know whether it had been a bitter fight against relatives which had resulted in his victory in the end. I had also thought that my friendship might have meant more to Charles somehow. He had meant a lot to me. Through the years, and all through the vacillations of adolescence, I had often thought of him – it appeared that, for his part, he had not.

It was only after the term exams were over that summer that I finally spoke with Charles face-to-face, and it happened in my house of all places.

It came as a complete surprise. My father announced during dinnertime that he had invited Charles for dinner and that he had graciously accepted and would visit the next day. My mother immediately began planning as sumptuous a meal as she could think of, and my younger sister Melinda made sure to go to the coiffeur the next morning, dragging me along to chaperone her while she picked out a new dress downtown. She wondered idly whether Charles might be thinking of marrying yet and, although I normally enjoyed her company very much, that day I found listening to her relentless stream of conjectures and strategies to capture Charles’s attention quite annoying.

I told myself that I was not nervous, but I wore my best clothes for the evening and it was I who opened the door when Charles rang. I was on edge, prepared for anything from curt acknowledgment to downright dismissive oversight on his part. Given his behavior at the university, it was not completely outside the realms of possibility that Charles had grown haughty in Europe to the point where he now considered himself far above socializing with ordinary people such as myself. I greeted him politely, with a neutral tone, and offered my hand for a handshake.

Charles rushed forward and embraced me.

Out of all the possible reactions of his that I had been expecting, this one had never entered my mind. I returned the hug awkwardly, breaking free of it as soon as it was socially acceptable to do so, flustered although I could not have said exactly why. Charles looked magnificent in a tailored suit of evident French cut which fit him perfectly. He was wearing a discreet but tasteful cologne, which I had scented as we hugged, with sharp notes of citrus and aromatic woods. On his wrist there was a magnificent watch, and the spectacles he wore were delightfully old-fashioned, a pince-nez with golden accents which made him look intellectual yet youthful.

Nevertheless, the thing that drew my attention towards him more than anything was his smile. It was genuine, of that there could be no doubt. In seeing him, I saw my childhood friend standing in front of me, and all of the idle thoughts laced with negativity which had occupied my mind ever since I had seen him in America again dissolved, vanishing like mist under sunlight. He offered his hand for me to shake and, as soon as I mirrored his gesture, clasped my right hand in both of his.

“Danny,” he said, using the childhood diminutive that only my mother used by then, “I’m very happy to see you again.”

“I – I am too,” I replied. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, and it was only when the silence between us stretched into an awkward pause that I realized I had forgotten all my manners and kept the guest standing at the threshold. I immediately invited him to come in. My mother greeted him graciously and mentioned that dinner would be ready in an hour or so. She led us both into the smoking room, which servants had already prepared for us. Then she excused herself, mentioning that my father was still upstairs but would be down momentarily.

This left us both alone in the room.

“Can I offer you some seltzer water?” I asked him, gesturing to the decanter on the table. “Father had it imported from Europe.”

Charles frowned and appeared to want to say something, but he remained silent. I blinked, and repeated my request. Again, silence. Puzzled, I asked whether anything was the matter.

Charles shook his head.

“You don’t know,” he said slowly. His words, I now noticed, were said with great care, with a slight thickness that I could not quite place, and their volume was slightly too loud for the quiet study in which we were sitting.

“Whatever do you mean?”

He pointed towards his right ear. “I can’t hear, Danny. Well, I can, if it’s loud – but mostly I just read lips.”

Understanding crashed down on me. The bolide. I had lost a reasonable portion of my own hearing, and I had a very hard time understanding people at parties or other social events with lots of background noise. Nevertheless, I could still hear and understand other people for the most part. Charles, however…

“It was that night,” I whispered. Then I recalled that Charles could not have heard me. “It was that night,” I repeated more loudly.

He nodded. “Is it okay if I sit closer to you? My left ear is the good one.”

He said it with a self-effacing grin that indicated it was a joke and I could not help but smile. I made space for him next to me, and… We talked.

It was slow and I had to repeat myself many times, but I told him about my life in very broad strokes. I mentioned also that I had problems hearing and he nodded with evident understanding when I said that I had found it had isolated me from people somewhat. He told me that he had been to many therapists in London, Paris, and Zurich, where he had learned how to modulate his voice even though he could not hear it himself very well, and how to read lips – not only in English, but in French and Latin as well. I was impressed and told him so. He smiled bashfully and I was very forcefully reminded of the awkward boy he had been. It appeared he had not changed very much in terms of personality, and I found that the barriers of politeness which the years had erected between us gave way rather precipitously to familiarity which I found reassuring and strangely comforting.

He had just started talking about why he had moved back to New York State when my father arrived. To my utter surprise, my father’s greeting to Charles was completely silent. He gestured in slightly halting sign language and Charles answered with practiced fluency, accompanied with audible words.

“I have so much to thank your father,” Charles told me as we were heading for dinner. “He saved me. But for him, my father’s fortune would have been snatched away by relatives and I… I shudder to think what would have become of me.”

That dinner was somehow awkward and yet one of the most enjoyable social occasions of my life. My mother and sister quickly found out that, seated as they were on either side of Charles, maintaining a conversation with him was rather challenging due to his limitations. I was sitting right in front of him, so he could read my lips more easily, but it was with my father that the majority of the conversation was held. I still could not believe that my father had had the initiative to learn sign language simply for the benefit of one of his clients, but the realization made me respect him even more. Charles also spoke at length of the many ways in which my father had helped him, from leading the fight in the legal tangle that became the many conflicting claims to the Wentworth fortune to ensuring that Charles himself was well provided for and appropriately cared for by private tutors whenever he was not attending his Oxford boarding school.

Eventually, the topic came around to why he had decided to come back. Curiously, however, whereas for most of the evening his demeanor had been friendly, open, and unquestionably earnest, as soon as this topic was reached I sensed a definite hesitation about him which he had not had when he had been about to discuss the topic with me while we were alone. In the end, he merely told us that he had some matters to attend to in America which required his presence, but that his priorities lay in his academic endeavors. He hoped to be able to marry the two in the form of a project which was still in the very early stages of development and of which he, unfortunately, was not at liberty to speak of yet.

I was curious, but I did not pursue the matter further and contented myself with enjoying the rest of the evening. Before Charles left, he invited me to visit him at his mansion, which he was occupying again. I agreed to go, of course.

It was odd, but I found that, for the length of entire next day, I could not stop smiling.

***

Charles and I very quickly became close friends once again after that. The summer break came upon us, which freed both our schedules from the rigorous demands of study at the University. I visited Charles most evenings, and not only did we learn much about each other’s lives during the intervening years, but we also discussed our academic interests in great detail.

I realized that my childhood impression of Charles as a precocious academic had not been in error. He had studied mathematics in England and was now pursuing his second degree in physics. Whereas my own interest in the science of physics had always been rather broad, Charles’s focus was squarely directed at astronomy. He was fascinated by the laws governing the motion of planets around stars, and of stars around galaxies. He shared with me the conviction he held that understanding the universe around us was the key to understanding our own humanity. As part of his own efforts to understand things which back then were a mystery to all of us, he had developed complicated mathematical models which were magnificent in their elegance, simplicity, and, I later came to understand, their correctness.

Charles’s mastery of mathematics went far beyond anything I could ever hope to attain. To my amazement, he revealed to me that he not only thoroughly understood what he called traditional maths, but that he had been forced to develop his own mathematical formulae, symbology, and logic structures in order to properly represent facets of the nature of the universe, gravity, light, and time, in the way which he saw all things interacting. I shiver even now in recalling his genius. Charles would have put even Einstein to shame, for, where Einstein faltered in his recognition of the ‘fault’ in his famous theories which eventually led some to believe that the universe was populated by more than one kind of matter, Charles had, from the beginning, taken this into account and the result was breathtaking. Through night after night of talking with me, or rather of writing with me on the many blackboards and slates which made up his study at the mansion, I came to grasp a significant portion of the logic behind Charles’s theories. The mathematical minutiae eluded me, but concepts such as time dilation and what would later would become known as relativity were made clear to me more than two decades before they became clear to that other great visionary of the human race.

It was an odd sort of awe-inspired joy for me to witness the workings of the mind of a man so gifted and yet so young, his boyishly handsome features at odds with the sometimes unfathomable complexity of the concepts he attempted to share with me. He posited things such as the existence of cosmic background radiation and an expanding universe before Nobel prizes were awarded to others for their discoveries –or rather, rediscoveries- of such things. However, the topic that appeared to fascinate him the most was the existence of intelligent life in the universe.

How clearly do I recall the dozens of nights he and I would spend together, the electric light burning over us in the sumptuous library of his mansion, while he discussed the fascinating conclusions he had arrived at through the exercise of thought experiments alone.

“Are we alone in the universe, Danny?” he asked me once.

“I doubt it,” I responded, enunciating clearly and slowly so he would understand me with little difficulty. I had already begun to study the fundamentals of American sign language so I would be able to communicate with Charles more easily, but at that time I knew very little still and had to rely on the spoken word. “According to your own calculations, the stars in our galaxy alone are so numerous, and the planets around them even more so, that the probability of intelligent life is rather high, I would say.”

He smiled, nodding slightly. His entire demeanor radiated contentment and enjoyment of the activity he appeared to relish the most: thinking. “If this is so, then… Why have we never seen or heard of life from another star?”

“Well, the distances themselves are vast. Humanity is trapped on Earth, for example. There is no question of our intelligence, and yet not once have we reached out beyond our planet. Perhaps it is the same elsewhere.”

“You are right in one regard – mankind has yet to travel beyond our planet. Nevertheless, our technology advances at an incredible rate. Very soon indeed, we might discover the means to produce enough energy to propel a vehicle beyond the atmosphere, and into orbit. In a few hundred years, we might unlock the secrets to interstellar travel. Simply look at the rate of technological advancement – it is a geometric progression.

“If intelligent life is indeed so plentiful in the universe,” he continued, “then perforce there must be lifeforms which have existed for much longer than we have. These lifeforms must therefore have developed correspondingly advanced technological prowess, which would enable them to travel between the stars. The distances are vast, as you say, but they have had hundreds of thousands or perhaps even millions of years to travel throughout the Milky Way. This is more than enough time for the earliest intelligent civilizations to have spread to every solar system in the galaxy had they wanted to do so. And yet we have seen no sign of them.”

“Perhaps they do not want to travel?” I posited. “Perhaps they merely wish to remain within the confines of their own solar system?”

“Ah,” Charles said, sounding satisfied, as if I had uttered the argument he had been hoping I would say. In the total quiet of his library in the late-night hours, he was able to modulate his voice much more naturally. His speech was more confident than what it was during the daytime. “There is a distinct possibility that they do not have the human zest for exploration and discovery, certainly. Nevertheless, the second law of thermodynamics holds true for them as it does for us. The irrepressible entropic progress of their surroundings will eventually force any sort of ordered life form to seek out additional resources in order to maintain its own high level of complexity. The natural resources of planets and even stars are finite. Energy dissipates, spreading out evenly over the immeasurable distances of the ever-expanding universe. In the end, the distance between individual fragments of matter will be so great that stellar fusion will become impossible. The kinetic energy of every particle which makes up our reality will decrease more and more as it approaches nothingness – the temperature of the universe will draw ever closer to absolute zero.

“If an intelligent race wishes to exist for as long as possible, then they will be forced to leave their own solar system in order to inhabit others with younger stars. Over millions of years, this will force them to colonize their galaxy simply because it is the only way to procure more energy with which to stave off entropic decay. I therefore declare your prior argument, that if ancient intelligent forms of life have not reached is because they do not want to, to be invalid. They will have had, out of necessity, to have reached this solar system long since.”

“Well, perhaps we have not heard of them because there are no more intelligent life forms.”

Charles shook his head. “I sincerely hope this is not the case, because then it would mean that there is something out there, some force or agent, which destroys life before it can attain the necessary complexity to survive the peril this agent poses. It could be anything – a natural hurdle of some kind which all intelligent life fails to overcome, or, perhaps more horrible… A conscious agent which exterminates life before it can rival its own complexity.”

I shuddered at the thought. Not wanting to pursue that line of reasoning, I suggested the last argument which came to me. “Maybe intelligent life other than ourselves has reached our solar system, but we have not detected it because we do not have the means. How can we hope to find an alien life form if it is out in space, so small that our telescopes can never see it?”

Charles smiled from ear to ear. He leaned in closer and clapped me on the shoulder. “Exactly.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“I think it is high time,” he told me, taking a small notebook out of his jacket pocket and proferring it to me, “that I told you about my project.”

I opened the notebook after taking it. I saw page after page crammed with notes, diagrams, equations, and schematics. One such schematic in particular caught my eye: a drawing of a three-dimensional paraboloid, a dish, which featured a large antenna at its center.

“I wish to reach out beyond the confines of our planet,” he said to me. “I want to build a device unlike anything the world has ever seen. It will use electricity to generate pulses of energy by means of electromagnetism. It will beam out these pulses of energy at the speed of light, and I will modulate them in such a way that they carry a very simple yet undeniably intelligent mathematical message. It will be a beacon, a signal to non-human intelligent life that we are ready to establish communication with them. At the same time, this device will listen. If the idea of transmitting information through space in this manner has occurred to me, then it will have also occurred to representatives of life from other planets. Perhaps space is already threaded by such communications, and it is only because we lack the necessary technology that we have not heard their own call.

“This is the real reason why I came back to America, Danny. I want… I want to build an observatory, but it will be much more than that. I want to build an entire research facility. This dish that you see, it will be both transmitter and receptor of electromagnetic information. It will have to be huge in order for it to have the necessary sensitivity to pick up transmissions from non-natural sources. It will have to be isolated from outside interference so that the study of the information both transmitted and received can be carried out properly. And it will require an enormous amount of money and many years to build according to the way I have envisioned it.”

“Where would you build this observatory?” I asked him, but even as I uttered the words, the answer came to me.

“You know where. It is the place no person has visited since the terrible tragedy occurred. It is isolated and it belongs to me. Part of the infrastructure is even already in place, since the ruins of what was going to become my father’s Grand Hotel will now be repurposed to become the foundations of my observatory.”

“But, the expense… An entire observatory?”

“I have my father’s fortune,” he answered, and by the firm set of his eyebrows and his jaw I knew that his mind had been made up long before and that he was completely serious about the matter. “I will put it to good use.”

“How would you even begin? Nobody has visited the place in years, as you said. What if it is not suitable for an observatory? And where would you even build this enormous transmitter you propose? Would not a survey of the property be required before anything else?”

“Yes, and this is where my proposal comes in.”

“Proposal?” I asked.

“Danny, I want to travel to the Hotel site this summer. I will perform the very survey you mentioned now, take stock of what there is to be seen, draw up blueprints and diagrams for the people I will eventually send their to build my observatory… And I will also pay my respects to the dead. Going alone is dangerous, but for this first trip to that place I would not want to be accompanied by a stranger. I would like to travel there in the company of someone who knows what happened, someone who experienced it with me – you. What do you say? Will you go on an expedition with me this summer? Preparations have been made. If you agree, we leave in one week.”

I agreed, of course. Not only was I genuinely curious to travel back to the site of the greatest tragedy I had ever lived through, but I was also quite flattered that Charles thought my company valuable enough to offer me the chance to go with him when nobody else would do. We left for the mountains within a week, just as he had said, traveling in considerable comfort. Charles had purchased a motorcar which had been especially outfitted to be able to traverse the winding roads which led to the old Hotel site. It took us no more than a day and a night of driving to reach the edge of the property, at the main gate of which a swarthy man named Timothy Johnston greeted us with the keys to both gate and Hotel complex. He was Charles’s groundskeeper, for lack of a better term, tasked with watching over the perimeter of the property. He lived in a small shack at the edge of the road which bordered the imposing gate which barred access to Wentworth property. Although polite enough to his employer, Johnston nevertheless struck me as somewhat odd and fidgety. He exhibited a nervous tic which appeared to compel him to half-glance to the left every few seconds, over his shoulder, almost as if he were expecting to see someone, or something, approaching from behind. I was glad to bid him farewell and, together, Charles and I drove through the gate, up a rather treacherous and very long dirt road through the seemingly unending evergreen trees of the mountainside, and finally down into the valley which I had visited so many years ago.

I had underestimated the emotional import of going back to the ruins of the Hotel. As soon as Charles stopped the car and we stepped out into the summer air, I could not repress very vivid memories of that horrible night and everything which had happened before it. The valley was as I remembered it, majestic and serene, even though it had been wintertime when I had last come. Now, the mountainsides which hemmed the valley in were not covered in white but in green. The air was hot instead of chilly, and the ground underfoot was soft, vibrant and inviting instead of being frozen and icy. Nevertheless, the place was the same and I very clearly remembered many things I had suppressed for years.

Charles and I walked together to the massive but neglected hulk of the main Hotel building. I was surprised to see it such a dilapidated condition. I had been expecting it, of course, but seeing it in person and contrasting it with my memories of sumptuous luxury was still jarring. Nearly every window was broken, and the ground around the building was covered in wild verdant growth and detritus. The erstwhile gardens built to emulate Versailles had been reduced to rampant wilderness in their abandon. The artificial lakes had disappeared, swallowed by muddy ground long since. The silence that reigned everywhere, interrupted only by the faint chirping and buzzing of insects, gave the entire valley a distinct sense of aging decay which made the ruins appear to be much older than they really were. In fact, had I not known for a fact that the place had been abandoned for scarcely more than a decade, I would have definitely guessed that the derelict buildings had been standing in such a state for at least half a century if not more.

The observation tower still stood not far off from the main building, and both Charles and I were drawn to it as if by a magnet. Its walls were covered in vines, although the greenery did not reach all the way to the top, to the flat observation deck from which we had witnessed the bolide explosion.

Charles and I exchanged a single glance and, through tacit agreement, set our packs on the ground and made our way to the tower before anything else. I could not repress the memories I had of the night when we had sneaked out in the snow to watch the stars. I realized that, over the years, I had distorted some of the specifics related to the memories. I remembered the observation tower as being much further away from the main complex than it really was – I suppose that, to a ten-year-old child, the scarce half a mile distance would have definitely appeared much longer than it was to an adult. The tower itself was also rather short and squat, although I distinctly remembered it as tall and imposing. The heavy door which had barred entry to the place so long ago was easily dislodged by my hand, although I remembered that both Charles and I had had to pull on it to open it the very first time we had entered.

The inside of the tower was also far more cramped than I recalled. Nobody had bothered to remove any of the implements and half-finished furniture which it had contained to begin with, and it was like stepping back in time. As first Charles and then I ascended the spiral staircase leading to the deck, I found myself shivering slightly despite the heat. Sweat beaded on my brow as I followed Charles out into the open, onto the deck itself, from which we had witnessed the events of that horrible night.

I gasped when I finally looked around the valley from our new vantage point. Not only was the scenery breathtakingly beautiful, but it was also a trigger for my deeply repressed memories of the pain and anguish I had gone through. It took me a moment to compose myself enough to look at Charles with concern. If my own mind was experiencing turmoil, it was nothing compared to what he must have been going through. The expression in his eyes was enough for me to realize that he was relieving trauma far more terrible than mine had been. Charles’s unblinking gaze swept over the landscape, his mouth slightly open, tears brimming in his boyish face. I had a very vivid flashback of going to him as a child, right after the explosion, when we had both been standing in this very same place. He had been unconscious then. I had feared the worst. As for him… The worst had indeed come to pass. His entire family was lost in a single night.

I believe we both looked at the exact site of the tragedy at the same time. I heard Charles’s repressed gasp of pain mixed with surprise, and my own reaction was quite similar. From where we stood it was impossible not to see the blasted ruins of what had once been the Great Hall.

The explosion must have been much more powerful than I had initially thought, judging by the magnitude of the imprint it had left on the ground. Of the Great Hall there was nothing left but the gaping maw of its foundations. Ceiling, walls, windows, even the fountain in the center – everything had been obliterated. It was indeed horrible to look upon the serene and overgrown desolation while simultaneously remembering what it had been like to walk through those ruins when they had been on fire, smoking – and of course, to remember the corpses. There had been corpses everywhere.

The most striking aspect about the view now spread out before me, however, was not the fact that the Great Hall had been destroyed, but the massive shallow crater that spread out from what had been the largest lake on the property and whose edge had engulfed the Great Hall site on its southern edge. The lake was gone, swallowed by a crater which not only covered its mile-long extension, but which also spread beyond what the lake had been and onto the forest all around us. On the western shore of the lake, which had been heavily wooded originally, felled pines still littered the ground like fallen matchsticks, their trunks blackened or turned ashen gray by the explosion which had gone off with such force that I marveled at the fact that any of us had survived at all. The observation tower had been relatively far away from the epicenter, it was true, but never had I seen such destruction. Of particular note to me was the crater itself. Although shallow, it was large enough to suggest that there had actually been an impact with the ground – that the bolide had actually been a meteorite, or maybe a complex falling body which had broken apart a few moments before colliding with the ground.

Standing next to me, Charles was crying silently. I was not sure what to do so I simply stood beside him. The crater drew my eyes to its symmetrical contours. Distracted as I was with thoughts of everything that had happened, it was not until nearly an entire minute of observation had elapsed that I began to realize that my attention had been captivated by the crater not only because of what it represented, but also because it was… Strange.

The depression was completely devoid of water, a factor odd in itself, since the groundskeeper had clearly mentioned that it had been raining on and off for some time over the last few weeks. The edges of the crater, as I had already noted, were very symmetrical indeed. It was the surface of the crater itself, however, which was strangest.

It was smooth. Flawless. It was hard to make out in detail since we were relatively far away, but its entire surface was covered by what appeared to be either grass or some kind of moss, emerald green and strikingly beautiful. That in itself was not too noteworthy, but the fact that no other plants grew anywhere on the shallow bowl of the crater was unusual. Whereas the ground all around it was overgrown with plants, vines and even saplings of various sizes, the surface of the crater itself was not. It reminded me of a carefully-manicured lawn kept trimmed to a minimal size by a diligent and careful gardener. What kind of object could have, upon impact, created such a perfect scar on the surface of the Earth? Had it been an impact at all, or just such a powerful explosion, triggered so close to the ground, that it merely looked like a meteorite impact?

“I didn’t think returning would be so… Hard,” Charles said next to me, snapping me out of my idle ruminations.

I looked at him and his eyes met my own. They were brimming with tears which he evidently felt no shame in hiding. A wave of guilt washed over me: here I was pondering largely inconsequential thoughts when my closest friend was probably reliving the horror of the day which had changed the course of his life forever.

“Are you… Are you okay?” I asked, hesitant.

Charles shook his head. He appeared to be on the brink of losing his composure. A sob racked his body with visible violence and it was painful to watch.

I placed my hand on his shoulder, intending to perhaps give him a reassuring pat.

He instead rushed forward and embraced me.

Although stunned by the suddenness of his action, my surprise was nevertheless not entirely unpleasant and I did not move away. Charles’s arms were clasped around my back and he squeezed with surprising strength for a man who very rarely exercised at all. I returned the hug somewhat less forcefully, not really knowing what to say. Charles was crying freely now, his face buried in my chest. I felt both deep embarrassment at his outburst and also pain at seeing him hurt so. He had always been so stoic whenever he had spoken of his family. He was always so collected, so self-assured, that part of me had perhaps believed that the loss of his mother and father had not affected him too much. I had been mistaken. Charles cried in my arms for a very long time, shaking, not looking up once. He appeared to be lost in traumatic memories and soon I was crying softly as well, out of empathy for his suffering. What if it had been I who had lost his entire family that night? What would I have felt at seeing my father’s corpse out on the snow, burnt and mangled, the way we had found Mr. Wentworth?

Eventually, Charles calmed down. Evidently flustered and perhaps a little ashamed, he announced that we needed to decide on a place on which to set up camp for the duration of our visit. He asked me to remain on the observation tower while he went back to the car for some of the things we would need to begin working. I said nothing, knowing full well that it was a mere excuse to be away from me for a while so that Charles would be able to compose himself.

It took him nearly an hour to return, but I used the time well. I explored the tower thoroughly and concluded that it was a good place for camping, away from ground level and all the swarming insects of summertime, and yet offering moderate to good protection in the downstairs levels should the rains come back at one point or another. When Charles returned with some water and a couple of sandwiches for us to share, I told him that I believed this could very well be our base of operations while we surveyed the region as he wanted. He appeared relieved.

“It’s a good idea, Danny,” he told me. Although his eyes were reddened, he was back in control of himself and appeared reticent to meet my gaze. “I had thought of maybe staying in the main building, but all the windows are broken, and besides…”

His voice trailed off. I understood. That place was too big, too empty. Too full of ghosts and memories.

“It will be better to stay here,” I told him. “I have already thought of where to set up our tents. We can use the shelter provided by that wall over there, store our food over here so it will be out of reach of animals…”

We spent the remainder of that first day carrying most of our gear from the car up to the tower and working on making the space somewhat habitable. It was a helpful distraction, and when night came we had already set up a tent on the deck. The night was hot, but we had positioned the tent so it would be exposed to the wind as much as possible and therefore cooler than it would have been at ground level where there was no breeze. Inside, it was barely big enough for the two of us and our sleeping bags, but although the close confines exacerbated the summer heat somewhat, they also provided protection from the relentless assault of mosquitoes and gnats and so we were both quite happy to escape into its shelter as soon as the sun set.

I was quite tired after having spent so long in the car the day before, and the fact that most of the afternoon had been taken up by physical labor was now also making its presence felt by means of an indistinct but unmistakable soreness in my back and shoulders. Resting on the relatively hard surface of the sleeping bag was not easing it in the slightest, and therefore I spent the better part of an hour tossing around uncomfortably, trying to sleep but being unable to, even though I was so tired. It was annoying, and unpleasant, particularly because I had to be very careful not to make too much noise because I did not want to wake up Charles, who, after the emotionally taxing day, needed his rest more than I did.

It was therefore with no small measure of surprise that, after shifting position for the hundredth time within the narrow space, I heard Charles’s voice in the dark.

“I can’t sleep either, Danny.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked him, although I could very well guess.

There followed a relatively long silence over which my words hung, unanswered. I waited patiently, knowing that Charles had not gone back to sleep.

“The guilt is the worst part,” he replied at last, his voice soft and laced with audible sorrow. “Coming back here… The memories are so vivid. I remember the explosion and what happened afterwards. I remember seeing – I remember so much. But most of all I cannot help but recall the thought that I had that night, and the morning after, and for days, weeks, maybe months after that. I thought, I’m glad it wasn’t me. I’m glad I’m okay. You know?”

He gave an odd sort of choked-up chuckle that betrayed his precarious emotional state. I could feel him trembling next to me.

“We were children back then,” I said, slowly and clearly. “I doubt we were able to fully comprehend the magnitude of the tragedy. It is normal to be glad to have been spared. There is nothing wrong with that.”

“You don’t understand. I was never too close to my family. Always private tutors, servants, trips. I barely saw my father at all, and my mother was always busy, off on this or that social event. So when I lost them forever, I was sad but… Not as sad as I should have been. At the funeral everybody mentioned how strong I was for not breaking down and crying, but in reality I did not feel like crying at all. I was mostly scared for myself, not knowing what would happen to me. Then I moved to England and it was like leaving my parents behind for good. My life started again, in a different way. But I never felt grief the way it was expected of me. I feel guilty about this. Am I a bad person? And, if so, what can I do to change?”

“You are not a bad person,” I reassured him. I made sure to continue to enunciate very clearly, since he could not read my lips in the darkness. “You are brilliant scientist and now you have this project, which I am sure will benefit humanity and advance our understanding of the universe. I believe your father would have been proud of you.”

Another long pause followed. I wonder whether Charles had fallen asleep, but then his words came as a whisper, shaky, as though said through great effort.

“I should have warned them.”

“What?” I asked.

“I had seen the comet. I should have warned my family, everyone. We should have left.”

“Charles, there was no way you could have known. Do you remember what you said to me? That you expected the object to come close to the Earth but not impact? How could we have known?”

“I should have been more careful. I should have refined my calculations. I would have saved dozens of lives.”

“Stop,” I said, and I reached for his shoulder. Exerting gentle pressure, I made him turn around so we would be facing one another. “Stop doing that to yourself. We were children. How could you have been expected to predict such an event? Even if there had been a collision course, the planet is vast. What are the odds that the bolide would have exploded precisely where it did? You could not have known. You are not to blame for what happened, understand? You are not to blame.”

“Danny…” he whispered, sobbing. “Do you really mean that?”

“Of course I do. You’re a good man, Charles. I am happy to call you my closest friend.”

“You… You are my closest friend too,” he said, his voice strangely husky. Then he reached for me and pulled me close for an embrace while he cried. I patted his back awkwardly, half-tangled in my sleeping bag, slightly embarrassed at the fact that Charles was being so emotional. I did not know what to say, and the entire situation made me feel uncomfortable in a way I could not quite place.

“It’s okay,” I whispered, although Charles probably did not hear.

“Thank you for being here with me, for coming all this way,” he said. “Danny, I…”

He drew back slightly and I could tell his face was very close to mine despite the total darkness. I felt his shaky breath on my cheek.

Then he leaned forward and kissed me on the lips.

I bolted upright so fast that I banged my head against one of the support beams of the tent.

“What are you doing?” I asked him, shocked.

“I…”

My heart was racing. “You are not well,” I said loudly, perhaps a little bit too loudly. “You are not thinking straight. We should sleep now, gather ourselves. Tomorrow will be a busy day.”

I laid back down but turned my back to him so there could be no mistaking my reaction to his completely unexpected advance. Charles muttered something once or twice, but eventually settled down as well. My mind was in complete turmoil. I was angry, confused, even scared. Why had Charles done that? Had I ever given him reason to believe…

No. Surely it was just that he was very vulnerable psychologically. He was misplacing his affection. His hearing loss had isolated him from others, and so he was latching on to me as his only friend in what was essentially a foreign country to him, since he had lived away for so long. That, combined with the shock of coming back to the site of the tragedy that had robbed him of his family, was enough to confuse any man. In the morning, he would probably apologize and everything would go back to normal.

I did not realize I was trembling as well until I had spent perhaps ten minutes trying fruitlessly to relax and fall asleep.

It was because I was angry, I decided.

Not because I was confused.

Not because I could not stop thinking of the warmth of Charles’s kiss.

***

Sleep found us eventually – after all I, at least, had been really tired. I had troublesome dreams and woke up intermittently as the night wore on. My dreams tangled themselves into strange shapes, but one of them in particular has burned itself into my memory and I have not been able to forget it, even through the intervening decades.

At least… I hope it was a dream.

I dreamt that I woke up inside the tent next to Charles, still in the dark. At first, I did not know why I had opened my eyes. I felt groggy and somewhat sore from sleeping on my left side for so long so I would be facing away from my companion. Perhaps that had been what had woken me up, and I considered switching sides or perhaps even sitting up for a little while, but the thought of the awkwardness of what might ensue were Charles to wake up as well kept me where I was.

I almost drifted back into unconscious territory. However, it was then that I heard the sound.

It was a strange noise, faint but certainly not part of my imagination. I could not tell the exact direction it was coming from, but it sounded like rough scrabbling, some scratching of something hard on something even harder, and – well, like heavy breathing.

How I hope all of this was a dream, because if not then the alternative explanation of what must have happened, in light of everything I learned later, is almost too horrible to contemplate. The noise grew in loudness as the scrabbling approached from an indistinct direction. Eventually, there was a grunt not 10 feet away from the tent, if I’d had to hazard a guess. Something heavy was either dragging itself or being dragged across the very observation deck where Charles and I were spending the night. The motions were shuffling, uncoordinated, and they only stopped when its unknowable source had all but reached the tent itself.

Then it circled around it.

I tried to sit up and investigate. However, the more I listened to the halting dragging, the more pronounced my utter inability to move became. I could not explain it. My eyes were wide open and yet I had no control over my body. The thing, whatever it was, circled just outside the tent and yet I could not move even my arm, so great was the terror that engulfed me. I knew I had to defend myself from the intruder, to snap out of the spell which kept me bound, or at least to alert Charles to the danger of a possible robber in the night, but I could not. I grew so distressed that it felt as though I could not breathe, and the fact that I could not even gather enough air in my lungs for a scream spurred my fear to become actual panic.

I exercised every ounce of willpower available to me and managed to let out a single weak grunt.

The shuffling outside the tent stopped immediately.

I could not turn my head to look, but the sound had stopped mere inches from my head, the only thing dividing me from that unknown danger a flimsy length of tent canvas which prevented me from seeing what it was. The heat of the summer night was stifling, and yet, now that I realized it, I could not hear the insects around me anymore. Everything was quiet, deathly quiet, as if paralyzed by the same fear I now felt.

What had come crawling up the observation tower only to stop outside the place where my friend and I were sleeping? And what was this strange smell, half sweet, half foul, as of rotting algae on a stagnant lake?

Something pawed haltingly at the tent and that was when I snapped.

I opened my eyes, for real this time, bolting upright for the second time that night. I am thankful that Charles did not wake up, because I would not have been able to describe my complete confusion, fear, and anxiety. I listened intently, sweating, but I could hear nothing outside the tent.

Had it been a dream? I was familiar with the phenomenon of what some called night visitations, instances of an altered state of awareness, half between dream and wakefulness, during which some people, sensitive intellectuals for the most part, reported paralysis during the night at the same time they either sensed a stranger in the room with them or they saw the intruder itself in the form of a succubus perhaps. They were hallucinations, it was believed. Had mine been an instance of this strange paralysis?

Yet it had seemed so real.

Shaken, I climbed out of the tent to clear my mind and perhaps relieve myself. As soon as I opened the flaps, my nostrils were assaulted by that same smell. Rotting vegetable matter.

The moon was out by then, and under its unblinking gaze and tenuous silver light, it was soon obvious that there was nothing on the observation deck with us. Nothing appeared disturbed and the normal night sounds of a few late insects chirping and buzzing could still be heard. It was a peaceful summer night with nothing out of the ordinary but that pervasive, pungent smell.

I walked out to the edge of the deck, looking around with care. The dream had been realistic enough to make me doubt it had been a hallucination, but if it had not been then where was the evidence? The source of the odor could easily be explained by in any number of factors – it was the middle of the summer and we were out in the wilderness, essentially. It had been raining recently, and so it could very well be that I was perceiving the smell simply because the wind had changed direction in the night. I had spent most of my life in the city, not out in the wild. My experience of forests was severely limited.

Perhaps I was simply experiencing too much stress brought on by everything that had happened. After all, even though the burden of shock lay squarely on Charles’s shoulders, I had lived through the same experience myself. I had not lost any members of my family, it was true, but the experience had also affected me deeply and perhaps I had merely had a nightmare, a mental manifestation of my worry and unrest. Then there was also the fact that Charles had acted so surprisingly before going to sleep. I did not even know what to think of that, except for the fact that it had disturbed me more than I was ready to accept.

I sat down at the edge of the observation deck, feet hanging over the side, with a drop of several dozen feet below me. The wind had indeed picked up, which lent credence to my earlier theory of the source of the strange smell. This also had the added benefit of there being less mosquitoes about, and so I was able to sit there, thinking, undisturbed. My mind kept flashing back to what Charles had shared with me just a few hours ago. He had never been so open, and I knew it must have taken a lot of courage to speak of his loss and everything that happened afterwards on such candid terms. I also remembered, quite vividly, the way he had reached for me in the dark. I could not shake from my mind the way his lips had felt against mine, soft and warm and vulnerable. I did not understand what I was feeling and I was afraid to try because of what it might mean. Besides, maybe Charles had not been in full control of himself. Perhaps grief and stress had taken their toll and he had not realized what he had done, or how much he had –

A muffled thud immediately below me arrested my train of thought.

I looked down. My eyes had gotten used to the dim light somewhat, but the moon was a mere sliver of silver in the sky and it was therefore all but useless to see any detail more than two or three feet away.

Something was standing at the foot of the observation tower. Something which had, quite obviously, being crawling down it stealthily all this time.

I gasped – I could not suppress the instinct.

At the sound, the shape looked up.