The Weak Force
It was just a star, one among countless others, hanging in the night sky. Perhaps it shone a little more brightly than the rest, perhaps it had a green tinge to it at times, but it was still just a star, until the day it wasn’t.
At first, the change was subtle. It was ever so slightly bigger, night on night, its light ever so slightly stronger than the day before, but not so much you’d notice. So when Matt pointed it out to me, I couldn’t remember when it hadn’t been the brightest star in the heavens, but at the same time, I couldn’t recall ever noticing it before. We stood watching it for a while, trying to determine its nature. At first I thought it was a plane or satellite - there appeared to be lights blinking around it, but my husband couldn’t see them and besides, it wasn’t moving. Or it was. We couldn’t decide, even after we placed it next to a distant landmark and tracked its relative position.
“Could it be a meteor?” I asked.
“Possibly,” Matt replied, “although you’d have thought we’d have seen something in the news by now if one was passing that close.”
“Maybe it’s going to hit us and they don’t want to cause a panic because they can’t divert it and we’re all going to die.”
“That’s my girl. Always looking on the bright side.”
When we got home, Matt disappeared off into the depths of The Cupboard, the place where clutter goes to die, and emerged unscathed (for once - it was not unknown for neglected piles of comics to throw themselves at him, insisting that he read them that very second instead of doing whatever job he was supposed to be finding the tool for), clutching a small telescope I didn’t even know we owned. He set it up in our room and after some fiddling, focused on the star.
“You need to see this, Kathy.” He moved aside so that I could take a look. At first all I could see was a brilliant white light, but Matt told me I might need to readjust the focus and sure enough, suddenly there it was. A triangle encircled by flashing lights.
The pit of my stomach went cold. I’ve never been one to believe in benevolent aliens coming to lead us into enlightenment. I’ve always felt that they’d abandon the human race as a lost cause the minute they were hit with the inevitable military strike. No, it was always much more likely that they’d be looking to enslave or simply destroy us and there’d be nothing we could do about it.
News of the UFO was all over the papers the next day. Speculation was rife as to the nature of the ship and everyone was asking why the government hadn’t warned us about it sooner. Theories ranged from it being a previously unknown form of star to angels to a scout ship for a following invading force, but no one really had any evidence for any one theory being more likely over another. The conspiracy theorists were having a field day, claiming that the lights were terrestrial in origin, part of a government experiment in causing mass hallucinations, but it didn’t look like any hallucination to me, especially not now that it was getting closer and larger.
Matt and I spent our evenings huddled around the telescope. Day by day we could see a little more, but we were still no closer to understanding what we were looking at, other than it was no meteor. There appeared to be things floating or swimming in the triangle, exactly what we couldn’t be sure, but they had to be vast for us to be able to see them at this distance and it wasn’t long before we could see it during the day.
There’d been times when I’d regretted our decision to move out to the country for the sake of children we ended up being incapable of conceiving, but watching the food riots on television, I was glad that we had the space and time for a well-established veggie patch and our trusty chickens. I was doubly grateful that my foresighted husband had stockpiled supplies before the government belatedly introduced rationing in an attempt to reassure people that they were being looked after, although I didn’t especially appreciate one of us having to be on the lookout for poachers all the time. We didn’t kid ourselves that living in the middle of nowhere meant that we were invisible.
Now the triangle was as big as the sun, with a pearly, milky sheen and indistinct shapes moving across it. The conspiracy theorists were going nuts by now - something that large should be having all sorts of effects on the planet apparently, but the moon and sun maintained their course, the tides came and went as they should and with the exception of the strange sight in the sky, nothing had changed. So, they argued, the whole thing was one big hologram, just like the one used to project images of planes crashing into the Twin Towers before the government blew them up, only on a larger scale.
For once, I wished the theorists were right. Because as the triangle drew closer, we could see what was in it, begin to make out the screams of the damned and the dying as they were tortured in a thousand different ways by laughing demons. Everyone saw people they’d known, people they’d loved who’d long since passed over. No manmade machine could create something like this; we were looking straight into Hell.
You can imagine the impact it had. Many people killed their families and themselves to spare them the torment, only to be seen on the surface of the triangle before descending into its depths. In many ways I wished I’d had the courage to join them, if only to end the horror of waiting, watching, listening, knowing there was nothing I could do to avoid joining them sooner or later. Matt and I found ourselves sitting on the porch, holding each other, trying to blot out reality in the comfort of each other but to no avail. The triangle was so close now, it looked as though you could reach out and touch it if you were in a plane, but there were no pilots brave enough to try.
And then, suddenly, it was gone, leaving behind chaos. In many ways it was worse without the triangle as people demanded answers no one could give. The rioting and looting was out of control and Matt was never far from a loaded shotgun.
What was it? Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe it really was Hell poking through into our reality until it was sucked back to where it was supposed to be. Certainly, attendance at church went up.
But the most popular theories were that it was some kind of weapon. The government claim it was aliens; the conspiracy theorists say it was the government, of course. But the one thing both sides agree on is that whatever was behind it, this was a trial run, the pebbles jumping down the hill before the major avalanche. If that’s true and what we experienced over the past few weeks was just a taster, then I really don’t want to be here when the main force hits. There’s more than one reason I’ve been getting Matt to teach me how to shoot.