Void. Life. Winter.

The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window. It flickered lonesomely, alighting – in only shifting, shadowy fashion – the interior of the small, rustic room. A resident mouse, his senses alerted, dove scrambling from the tabletop, to the chair bottom, to the floor, flying frenziedly to his home inside the creaking bones of the building. That mouse had spent nearly all of the winter in the cabin, its shelter providing – though maybe not warmth – survival. This new light was unusual. It destroyed his daily routine; it awakened his temporarily dormant flight instinct.

The shadows encircling the room enlarged as the lone flame grew – its wick, fueling the flame, withering slowly away – melting away its red-wax prison. Smoke wafted slithering through the air, up through the chimney, and out into the night. That same smoke – if smoke were capable of sensing anything – would have noticed upon its ascent skyward a pair of young hikers trudging through the snow only a mile away.

* * *

“Why did we decide to do this, again?” said Jonathan. The heavy falling snow had collected to a depth greater than he had imagined it would be. He pushed through the dry powder, using his stained, trusted walking stick as a sort of snow machete.

“We did this because it’s fun!” responded Melanie. She was several paces ahead of Jonathan, leaning confidently on a barren sycamore tree as she awaited him. The two of them were best friends; they both loved new adventure, but Jonathan was a bit wimpish in cold weather.

“We’re nearly there, anyway,” said Melanie, “The cabin is less than a mile away.”

“Holy shit, a mile?” said Jonathan, stopping briefly, placing his thick-gloved hands on his knees. He yanked off his green knit hat and began scratching at his unkempt, shoulder-length hair. Jonathan had psoriasis – getting his haircut was embarrassing, so he pretended that he was a rebel – some sort of punk, who never gave a shit about his hair. Rocking the mop, as he called it. It worked sometimes – with some people – but not with Melanie. She was more astute than most, and she knew Jonathan well.

“Let’s go!” she belted, “We’re never going to make it to the cabin, at this rate! It’s already dark as hell out here! It’s getting colder by the second! I’m freezing, standing here by this tree! I need to move!”

Melanie and Jonathan, both recently graduated from high school – both taking a year off to focus on work while they decided whether to attend college – liked finding nearby adventures. They couldn’t afford to travel anywhere too far away – nowhere exotic or foreign – so they researched local legends and then investigated. Well, Melanie did most of the research. Jonathan was more than happy to tag along, though. He liked being around her. She was his only real friend.

“Let’s go!” she said again. Jonathan was getting there, slowly.

* * *

The candle continued flickering – its flame growing nonstop, unnaturally. It now looked like a small, bowling-ball sized orb in the center of the room. It alit the entirety of the place, somehow not catching ablaze the old wooden table upon which it sat swirling. The mouse, peeking out from his crevice in the wall, didn’t know what to think about it. It was terrifying to him – in both an evolutionary, instinctive sense, but also in some other, new, unknown way – but it was also oh-so warm. He cuddled up by his crevice – the warm flame comforting his tiny fur coat – involuntarily closing his lids and getting a bit of shut-eye. His dainty chest heaved up and down rhythmically.

* * *

The night darkened. The light from within the cabin sprang out as if electrically from the old, now merely translucent windows. Looking upward, Melanie saw its pulsating glow shining atop the tree, out into the now dark sky:

“Look!” she said, “What the hell is that? Looks like it’s coming from the cabin! You think there are already some people there?”

“Who knows,” said Jonathan, “But if someone is there, I’m heading the hell home. I’m not setting a single foot inside that place. That gives me the creeps – more so than I’m comfortable with. Shit,” he continued, “Maybe the place is on fire. The light coming from that area looks a lot bigger than anything controlled.”

“Let’s check it out!” said Melanie, pushing forward through the mounding snow. Jonathan followed begrudgingly.

* * *

The previous few weeks, Melanie had researched the cabin incessantly. She and Jonathan had – for the last couple of months – been coming up empty in their search for interesting local places. The discovery of the cabin’s existence reignited Melanie’s thirst for adventure. She heard a story about the place while shopping for tomatoes and peppers at the local farmer’s market. Apparently, numerous local people had disappeared at the cabin – which had stood otherwise quietly in the holler off Tick Creek Road since near the end of the nineteenth century. The old man at the farmer’s market didn’t have any details about the nature of the disappearances; he said no one else did, either – the folks were just there, and then gone. No fingerprints, no witnesses – nothing. Melanie’s subsequent research at the local public library – where she scoured through stacks of old issues of the local newspaper, The Abry Sun – corroborated this collective ignorance regarding the events. Melanie’s interested was piqued. It hadn’t been difficult to drag Jonathan out to the cabin – even in the snow. He liked new adventures, too. Mostly, though, he just liked hanging out with Melanie.

* * *

The mouse awoke from his snooze. The growth of the alien, solar orb had subsided, but something else was happening in the room. The mouse, who due to his species’ inherent colorblindness was already incapable of seeing the brilliant, flashing reds and yellows coloring the orb, now recognized his incapability of seeing any color, at all – not even the previously visible darker colors littering the room. All depth of color had been sucked from the interior of the cabin, as if into the now more rapidly swirling black hole of the central sphere. Startled, the mouse crept within his crevice, shrinking to that miniscule size only mice are capable of achieving. He watched, and waited – his relatively large ears alert, his powerful nose sniffing.

* * *

Emerging from the blackness of the wood into the starry skied, relative light of the wide-open holler, Melanie and Jonathan stared ahead. They saw the cabin in the distance. It stood seemingly intact, though with an otherworldly, blinding white light emitting from within.

“What the hell is going on there?” said Jonathan.

“White light, white heat! Just like Lou Reed said,” responded Melanie excitedly, “But honestly, who knows? Regardless, we’ve got to find out! Let’s get over there!”

“I don’t know,” said Jonathan, “That place has a dark history, right? Maybe whatever is happening there is related to that. Maybe it’s a cult, or some aliens, or some shit.”

“There aren’t any cults in Abry,” said Melanie, “And there certainly aren’t any aliens. At least, not as far as I know! But I hope there are! Wouldn’t that be cool? Now let’s go! You’re bumming me out!”

* * *

The orb continued spinning. The interior of the cabin was a television picture of the 1940’s – all of the color had been pulled from the building. The moisture – at least that moisture not inhabiting organic, cellular entities, or the air itself – had been completely drained. The furniture fell crumbling. The ceiling was slouching. The building itself looked as if to soon collapse. The windows – at first protecting the outside world from the light and heat of the swirling orb – now cracked, allowing the escape of whatever physical, particulate matter was being emitted from the alien ellipse. As a result, the discoloration painting the cabin extended outside, into the natural world. The wooden exterior of the cabin turned grey. The snow – though still white – shifted into a somehow recognizably fake hue. The barren trees kept their brown.

* * *

Jonathan, looking up from his laborious trudge, noticed the change in color:

“Um, Melanie?” he said, “Could you please tell me what in the hell is happening over there?”

Melanie glanced to the cabin: “What?” she said “We’ve got to get over there! Something amazing is happening! I’m talking about some extraterrestrial shit!”

“I don’t know,” said Jonathan, “This adventure is quickly moving into the territory of being really stupid. Let’s just – I don’t know – call the cops, or something.”

“What?” said Melanie, “The fuzz? I didn’t think I’d ever hear you suggest something so utterly repugnant. I’m ashamed of you, Jonathan! Plus, why would we call the cops when we’re perfectly capable of getting to the bottom of this situation ourselves? Isn’t that why we look for these places, anyway – so we can actually find adventures?

“That’s true,” said Jonathan, “I just think we may be in over our heads, this time. We’re still kids, you know? We just legally turned adults like three months ago! I’m not sure that diving into a cult, or some alien encounter, is something we’re ready for. At least not yet. Let’s get some experience under our belts first, you know?”

“This is the experience!” said Melanie, “We will – in all likelihood – never experience something like this again in our entire lives. We have to take advantage of it! Ghosts! Aliens! Cults! Mad scientists! Who knows what’s going on in that cabin! We have to find out! Hell, maybe it will make us rich – then we can expand our adventures to places other than Abry!”

Jonathan kicked around at the snow, unsure of how to respond. Finally lifting his head – digging his walking stick to the ground and mustering within himself a renewed confidence – he looked up to Melanie:

“Okay, let’s do it! Let’s get to the bottom of this! Let’s get the story, and get rich! This time next year, we’ll be hacking through the jungles of Borneo, with a local orangutan as a guide! We’ll be scouring the Burkhan Khaldun for Genghis Khan’s tomb! We’ll be staring over the face of a cliff, in Pattagonia – atop a llama!”

Light animated Melanie’s wide, green eyes. She tramped around excitedly in the snow: “Yes! Let’s do it! Let’s get to the bottom of this!”

* * *

The mouse had become fearful, more so – due to his species evolutionary history – than he was already predisposed. Sniffing at the warmth of the orb, he again retreated into his crevice, scanning pathetically his meager cache of remaining food. It had been a difficult winter, and – being that it didn’t experience very much human occupation – the cabin didn’t provide very much in the way of sustenance. The mouse turned abruptly in fright, noticing a change in the structure of the orb. His dug his nails into the wood, fighting against the newly developing gravitational pull coming from the swirling circle. Dust, previously dormant on the cabin floor, was thrown into the air. The mouse sneezed, losing his grip.

* * *

Melanie and Jonathan approached the glowing cabin, which was now trembling as if to explode from some sort of unknown interior energy:

“Holy shit!” said Melanie, “Let’s get in there! Let’s check it out!”

Despite her excited language, she stepped cautiously across the snow, her soft footprints painting a picture of uncharacteristic timidity. Jonathan followed reluctantly. He was horrified, but he didn’t want Melanie to know that, and he certainly wasn’t going to leave her. He knew she was intent on discovering the source of the cabin’s unnatural luminescence.

Melanie gripped the wrought iron front door handle, which had turned ghostly grey from the color inhalation of the orb. It was incredibly hot, though somehow not in an uncomfortable sense. She looked back to Jonathan, who stood shivering – from fear, not from the cold – behind her. He shrugged, then nodding in affirmation.

Melanie pulled the door ajar. White light, white heat burst out from within the cabin, immediately staining grey conically the environment for at least a hundred yards. Jonathan turned, witnessing the alien change in the area. The color continued sapping from the natural world, spreading further, off into the distance.

Melanie gazed squinting into the cabin, shielding her eyes, though peeking through the shutters of her open fingers. She sidestepped slowly forward. Jonathan followed her uncertainly.

Upon entering the cabin, the both of them noticed the orb, now swirling at a chaotic rate entirely unnerving. Jonathan scanned the black and white room, noticing a sprinting, abnormal brown blur scurrying across the floor, struggling – fighting against some invisible pull. Jonathan stepped forward, scooping the field mouse from the floor. The mouse sprinted in frantic circularity in Jonathan’s palm, finally stopping and looking up, into his eyes. The mouse looked afraid, Jonathan thought. Jonathan looked afraid, the mouse thought. The gravitational pull of the solar orb strengthened slowly, continuously.

* * *

Melanie gazed agape at the alien sphere. Her eyed widened. She felt a magnetic pull, making her step wobbly – her legs began cramping. She didn’t care about that, though. What was this thing? Where did it come from? She looked across the room to Jonathan, who she noticed was holding a small mouse.

* * *

The mouse looked up to Jonathan, one last time, before being swept vacuously from his sweaty palm, into the white light of the orb. Jonathan, in a moment of impulse, dove frantically after the mouse. The both of them were inhaled into that endless ellipse – their physical forms blurring into a wavy, colorful aurora.

Melanie noticed terror on Jonathan’s stretching, vanishing face. She stepped back in horror. Jonathan was gone; she didn’t know what to do. The gravitational pull of the orb continued. Realizing that she had little time left to escape, Melanie turned and ran from the cabin.

Emerging outside, she stepped into a world completely discolored. She could almost hear the silent lifelessness. She fell to the snow, sobbing. She screamed.

* * *

Jonathan and the mouse emerged from the orb somewhere in a galaxy distant. A gigantic, gaseous blue planet, with a singular, vertical ring, consumed the horizon remnant from the star-filled blackness of space. The mouse floated wriggling in the emptiness. He opened his mouth; he scurried his little paws – it was no use. The mouse died. Jonathan, not long after, joined him.

The orb disappeared, but only temporarily.

End