The Between Years

down since the fit he'd thrown last night. But Randy noticed the echo that he'd heard when he'd shouted his name. The air seemed to carry his voice on forever, as if he'd shouted into the Grand Canyon-or a pitch black Grand Canyon as the case may be.

    Randy thought that there might be no one or nothing inside that hole, and if he climbed in to try to find Kenny, he would wind up walking in darkness forever. He could try to turn back and never be able to find the way. Worse, he realized he might never find the boy as if the massive void had gobbled him up. Randy would be fair game to be consumed too, he knew.

    The rip in the wall flapped as though the wind were blowing through. Randy approached the hole and felt a gentle breeze on his hand. But that can't be right, he thought. The other side of the wall should have been his bedroom, not the outside, or whatever place existed inside the walls. If it really were outside, there should at least be streetlights and cars passing by. But there was nothing, just the sound of the wind. Randy thought it sounded as lonesome as the desert.

    If Kenny was in there, he could have been long gone, and he worried he would never be able to find him. Then, Kenny moved in and out of the walls, expertly, he thought. Certainly, there must be a way to enter the darkness and find your way back. If Kenny knew that he was there, they could reunite and he could help him return to the house safely. The moment required him to think fast and make a decision, but he had no idea what move would be sensible. Certainly, he couldn't just stand there and wait for Kenny for come out. Wherever he was, he worried that Kenny would not allow himself to be found, or want to help lead him out of the darkness.

    How could anyone have missed this? Randy wondered. Did this void exist in 1830 when the place was built? If it had, certainly the contractors must have been subjected to it. And if that was the case then they would have had to figure out how to build the house around it. Just thinking about that drove Randy crazy because he didn't need to be trapped in a brain teaser right now.

    To him, the void seemed like one of the best-kept secrets of mankind, but he quickly doubted it had been there since 1830. They had created it, he thought. And by 'they', he meant that generations of his family had created a deep and dark place covered by a facade.

    If the void had been created, it could be destroyed, he decided. And now that he had begun a job, he knew that he must finish. He could never leave the house with a gigantic hole in it. The hole was one that he could never repair and opened the door to a world of nothingness. His relatives would be in even greater danger than him because they knew nothing of the history that led to this. So he swung the pickaxe again and tore out another chunk of wall. Having decided that he didn't need the tool anymore, he used his fingers to tear the rest of the wall clean off the frame.

    A giant block of darkness now consumed the hall from the middle bedroom to the bathroom. Each time he crossed back and forth, he didn't find himself physically harmed, but he did feel overpowered, like the void possessed a magnetic force to consume him. He was also unable to see anything. He was reminded of the way one tried to see at night and knew that this was different. In the real world, one can at least see something, even without streetlights. A person's eyes or teeth were indicators that someone or something was present. But this darkness was all-consuming and blanked out every trace of light.

    As much as Randy wanted to understand what lived behind the walls, he knew he had no time. He rushed downstairs and gave the living room walls the same treatment as the upstairs hall. Like the upstairs hall, he felt a magnetic force, and he pushed himself away from it, but he felt like he was swimming against the current. He expected the walls to miraculously self-heal, like a starfish with a severed limb, or any living, breathing creature. That or anything that fully intended to be eternal, he thought.

    After all that he'd suffered through, he wouldn't let the walls or the house defeat him, nor would he let it hold his son prisoner. The darkness itself was something he couldn't destroy no matter how many times he swung his pickaxe at it. It was intangible like air itself. He struggled to climb upstairs, lifted the pickaxe once more, and positioned himself in a spot in which he hadn't torn