Keep Quiet - Prologue. Prologue

A full moon is coming, and I fear its gibbous one-eyed gaze. Throughout the years I had managed to bury my doubts and most of my memories concerning the horrific events which surrounded the ostensible death of my colleague and friend, Doctor Charles Wentworth. I had even managed to convince myself that some of the things I witnessed during that final night had been nothing more than hallucinations wrought by frayed nerves and physical exhaustion. As far as the police were concerned, my testimony sufficed and my alibi was bulletproof. Their final report stated that Dr. Wentworth had wandered off into the woods which surrounded his observatory and had never been seen again. After a few halfhearted attempts at search and rescue, which were made logistically and financially demanding by the remoteness of the location, the official stance was that he had been probably killed by a bear or some other large predator. The possibility of recovering his remains, wherever they may lie, was considered too remote to warrant further expense of manpower and the case was considered closed. I was initially suspected to have had a hand in Charles’s disappearance, but both the testimony of the many servants and the fact that I all but abandoned my promising career in astronomy as a result of evident grief convinced people eventually that I was innocent of any misdeed.

If only they knew. I was the last person to see Charles and, while I had no active part in his disappearance, I also had no active part in preventing it. The terror of that night paralyzed me when action on my part could have perhaps changed the outcome of events, and it has followed me ever since. It is the reason why I cannot bear to look through a telescope anymore. It is the reason why, to the dismay of the national astronomy community, I retreated from active research and destroyed all of my records and Charles’s notes. I have often wondered if I acted correctly – after all, in pursuing the quiet life of a tenured Physics professor which I now lead, I have essentially acquiesced to slow down the intellectual progress of humanity by the mere fact that I have kept from it the fascinating conclusions that the mind of Charles Wentworth arrived upon, decades before Einstein became a household name.

Charles was indeed a genius. Though we were formally colleagues, I often felt more like an assistant in that mine was the responsibility of day-to-day logistics while he dedicated his days to fascinating sessions of pure logical thought and his nights to feverish experimentation and observation which could prove him right. Had he not disappeared when he did, his findings would have been published and our understanding of the universe would have been advanced by at least two decades. His gifted mind appeared to be uniquely suited to peer through the often opaque veil that separates the inner workings of the universe from the understanding of the human mind. Using nothing more than mathematics and logic, he predicted certain things about the nature of what is now called space-time which would only later to be experimentally proven. Grimly do I remember the day I learned that Einstein’s concept of gravitational lensing had been proven by an observer on a ship out at sea during a total solar eclipse a few years ago. It had been possible, the article said, to see the light from a star directly behind the sun, because the sun’s mighty gravitational field bent the space around it such that light traveled in a straight line across it, but along a curved path from our perspective. Charles had predicted such a thing a long time ago. He even had a trip planned to Africa in order to witness a solar eclipse for himself and see whether his mathematical models were correct or not. He would have done it… Had that night never happened.

It is odd, I must confess, to suddenly be casting my mind so far back into a past I thought I had buried forever – and odder still that it is not the first time I have gone through such an experience. I am astounded by the clarity with which the memories come forth upon being summoned by my mind. It has been almost forty years since Charles disappeared, and I daresay nobody living now remembers him but me. As the years went by after his case was laid to rest, my own life settled into a mundane yet comfortable routine through which I managed to forget everything that he and I had learned and discovered when we were still young men. I had made peace with the past. In burying all knowledge about the events which separated us forever, I was preventing similar horrors from happening elsewhere in the world. In keeping my silence, I was protecting not only myself but every single human being on this planet. As long as the knowledge remained lost to obscurity, we would all be safe… Or so I thought.

But now my hands tremble as I write these lines, and I cannot help but shiver at the knowledge that the stars are shining in the night sky outside my home. I have drawn all the windows so as not to catch even the slightest hint of a sliver of hated moonlight coming from the bloated orb which even now rises over the horizon. Hiding as I do, however, a frail and terrified old man, will do little to stop the horror that is coming. Silence is no longer safe, and so I have decided to publish these memoirs in the hopes that there is still enough time for us to rally, to do something before it is too late. I doubted the signs for too long and every day, every minute, is now precious. I had to make sure of my conclusions, however, and my frantic correspondence with my erstwhile colleagues leaves no doubt. Observations around the world confirm the minute and seemingly meaningless signs that would of course never attract attention on their own… but, when taken together by someone who understands their true significance, paint a terrifying picture that is beyond my capability to truly comprehend. The arguments are quite theoretical; the portents subtle, complex, and mathematical in nature. They cannot be ignored, however. I tried with varying degrees of success - until last night.

Now, I cannot sleep. I received a message which leaves no doubt whatsoever as to its terrible, unbelievable source, but even that pales in comparison to its horrible import. It is little wonder, then, that my colleagues have noted something is amiss. My niece, Anna, bless her heart, commented on my erratic emotional state this morning after her daily visit. I tried to make light of it, ascribing my mood to the expected vagaries of age, but I fear I may have only aroused her curiosity as to the true source of my discomfort. After all, how could I ever explain the petrifying fear I now feel of the open sky? I dare not leave the house and expose myself again to that yawning chasm of blackness, not even in the morning time because I know things that make those other spheres beyond our fragile little world loom like ravenous titans about to pounce over us all. I cannot hide my anxiety from others anymore.

Certain of my so-called quirks have been accepted by my family over the years, of course. This latest bout of terror on my part could easily be justified by it being but the latest in a series of odd particularities about myself. My sister and her children have all come to terms with the fact that I suffer not the slightest bit of mold anywhere in the house, for example. I am so fastidious about keeping things clean, both in my personal abode and in my office at the University, that I have twice been approached by representatives of the psychiatry department with offers to perhaps talk about the reason behind my obsession with cleanliness. On both occasions, I politely but firmly declined. If only they knew… But what does a psychiatrist know of the terror microscopes inspire in me? And how can a biologist understand my primal fear of exotic metals like iridium? And how can a geologist ever hope to comprehend the fact that meteor showers send me scurrying into the depths of the cellar, so that I may be as far away from that horrid cosmic spectacle as possible?

There is only one other person who understands, but he is gone. At least, I thought he was. Now I know differently, and only after I have recounted the full measure of events which have led to this day will others be able to understand why I am beside myself with anxiety bordering on panic at finding out he still lives.

These pages offer no solace. In their wake, there will only be hopelessness. But the truth must be told when there is still time. We may yet be able to do something… Even if the only thing we find out we can do is pray for some kind of miracle which may spare the most urgently endangered species on the surface of planet Earth: humans.

Thank you very much for reading! I look forward to your comments