The Between Years

for disaster. Seeing is believing, he decided, so he meant to show her what had been going on inside his grandparents' house so she would take him seriously and never accuse him of insanity.

    He climbed upstairs and figured he should crawl into bed and enjoy a few hours of comfortable sleep before he contacted Carol. When he reached the top step, he noticed a tiny knot in the wall. How had that appeared? He wondered. The hole was half-again the size of a quarter, so an accident while moving furniture was unlikely. He inched towards it with the caution a caveman might have taken with fire then slid his finger through it. On the other side, he felt nothing. He would have expected his finger to have been stopped by dry wall at least. Next, he ground his finger in farther to widen the hole.

    Randy then crouched, stared into the hole and saw darkness. The darkness is endless he thought. That was a nonsense phrase he decided, and didn't understand why he'd thought it. Maybe he really was beginning to lose it? But he wasn't crazy. He could see the hole in the wall as plain as day and surely something must exist on the other side-or within! And yet the wall's insides seemed to stretch on forever, so far as he could tell.

    That was how Kenny moved in and out so quickly, he decided. The hole allowed him to move as quick as a flash and disappear without a trace! Any time something traumatic happened, he could vaporize and escape into the walls and be safe. Inside those walls, time could mean nothing, and he returned from his reprieve a few years older every time.

    The more he reflected on it, the more rational it sounded to Randy. Now the question was how to lure him out.

    “ Kenny!” Randy shouted at the hole. “Kenny, are you in there? If you are, I want you to come out right now, you hear me?”

    Nothing.

    Randy wanted to widen the hole enough so he could wiggle through, but he calmed himself before he acted on the urge. He didn't want to enter into something he didn't understand, much less a place he might not return from.

    Suddenly, he felt more helpless than he had when he hadn't known what to do to stop Kenny's aging. At least then, he could have considered it human if highly abnormal, but he could do something to stop it. Now, he knew there was nothing he could do, and it dashed his every hope. He was too scared to try anything lest it backfire the way all of his well-intentioned actions had.

    And how long had that damn hole been in there? He wondered. Could he have strolled past it in the last few days and simply not noticed? He refused to believe that he'd been oblivious to it for years. But maybe the hole itself meant nothing in the greater scheme of things, he decided. What lay beyond the hole was of a greater interest to him not to mention a world (for lack of a better term) that could go on forever.

    If that was the case, that world could have been there as long as the house had stood. And how long had that been? They'd found no official record, but Bupa had said that the house had been built around 1830. It had served as the town's general store with an apartment upstairs for the family. Had anything happened when the house was built? That was worth a search through old microfilm archives at work, he decided. Then he wondered if this otherworld had been part of the design from the ground up.

    Whatever it was, Randy was convinced it was as much a part of the house as the bricks and the floorboards. As was Kenny for that matter.

    Had Nana and Bupa ever found tiny holes around the house? He wondered. Did they know about what existed beyond the house? Older people often liked to keep those things secret, but they couldn't keep secret the fact that the house was strange. From others he'd heard the house's ghost stories-as had half the town-but he'd never seen anything there himself. Then he paused and reminded himself that that wasn't entirely true.

    He'd heard about what he'd experienced at a family party, which was an event that he'd never understood. At three years of age, a family friend named Denise had taken him upstairs to use the washroom. When she'd closed the door, the noises began. Denise opened the door and checked the hall, figuring Randy's mother had come upstairs to take over. What she did find was a man who'd floated down the hall and disappeared into the bedroom (coincidentally the same bedroom in which Randy now slept).

    Denise had been startled enough to slam the bathroom door and