At the edge of the clearing, he spotted a forked three-foot log likea stubby Y. He grabbed the forked end, found it heavier than expected, and dragged it to the barricade, leaving a long, loamy scar in the leaf litter the color of dark chocolate.
The two of them hefted the log and repeated their experiment. The Hole in Nothing swallowed the second log with another ripple. He heard a softplunkand a rolling skitter.
They walked to the far side and, this time, Valentina found what she was searching for.
“Here. Look here, Mr. Green.”
She returned holding a weathered shard of wood.
“This one made it back.”
“That’s the log?”
“It is.”
Valentina handed him the pale, spongy thing. It was smaller than his forearm and seemed to weigh nothing at all. The outer wood was a jumble of insect damage and discoloration from what he imagined were countless varieties of mold and fungi. Part of him wanted a magnifying glass. Part of him wanted hand sanitizer.
“Okay. So, what? The hole rots things?”
Valentina studied the remains of the log.
“Hmm, I would suggest time and detritivores rot things, but we’re just getting started.”
She began gathering up several sticks and chunks of partially burned wood as she spoke, making a small pile beside the barrier.
“Observe, Mr. Green. Stand to the side.”
Green stood aside and watched his teacher. She began tossing the bits of wood she had gathered into the space between the pines.
The first throw yielded nothing.
The second throw yielded nothing.
The third sent a shower of violet sparks into the air on the far side of the hole. Green flinched and stepped back. There was a smell like burnt Styrofoam and a sudden dryness in his mouth like he had just spit out a handful of cornstarch.
He gagged.
“As you can see,” Valentina continued, “predictability is not a feature of this anomaly.”
She tossed the charred remnants of a campfire log through and this time a glob of something viscous and translucent bounced against the leaf litter. It seemed to hover for a moment, bits of twig clinging to its wet surface, before some mechanism of physics took hold and the ball of slime fell directly upward, vanishing into the sky with a whistle of sudden speed.
Valentina stooped, picked up a smooth gray stone, and tossed it through.
It landed on the other side, looking largely unchanged except for a fading orange afterglow of dissipating heat. The leaves beneath the stone smoked. Green regarded the cooling rock with suspicion for a long moment before returning his attention to his teacher.
“That, Mr. Green, is why I haven’t tried stepping through. The other cases in which that technique was employed were decidedly less severe. There’s no knowing what this break in reality would do to me. I have tried a few alternative methods of closure, but clearly I haven’t succeeded. Typically, such interruptions in the fabric of the universe resolve themselves. I was continuing to monitor it while hoping it would heal on its own. That hope seems increasingly less likely.”
“You think the wolf came through there? You think it might be a mon…creature…that tears its way between dimensions or something?”
“I don’t know. But allowing for such a connection is why we are here today. Recent events suggest that a wait-and-see approach to the hole may no longer be tenable.”
Green didn’t like the emptiness between those pines.
The more Valentina spoke about it, the more the hole seemed to have a perspective of its own. The more he felt it watching him.
“We fight fear with action and information,” he said to himself, echoing Valentina.
She nodded. “It is a powerful combination. Yes.”
