The Roaring Spot

 

By HJ Dutton

 

          “Did you hear it, Daddy?”

          He paused halfway through brushing his teeth. “Hear what, bud?”

          “Last night,” his son said around a mouthful of fruitloops. “The Roaring Spot was making noise again.”

          Turning, his brow wrinkled.

          “It’s up there. In the sky.” For emphasis his son poked a finger at the kitchen ceiling. “It’s in between the–what’s the names of the red star and blue star?”

          “Betelgeuse and Bellatrix?” Since they’d moved out of the city, the boy had been using the telescope more. No light pollution out in the boonies.

          “Yeah, those two. There’s a gap of sky in between Betelgeuse and Bellatrix that roars. I swear, Daddy, it roars. And it’s loud.”

          He spat toothpaste into the sink. “I think you had a dream.”

          “Nuh-uh!” His son crossed his arms. “It’s real, and I heard it! See for yourself!”

          Grabbing his keys, he smiled. “Maybe I will, at that. Let’s get you to school.”

 

          That night, he carried the telescope onto the deck. He pried the tripod’s legs apart and rested the optical tube on the railing. Wind tugged at his shirt. Beyond the backyard stretched a sea of corn, around which gleamed the windows of his neighbors. Television chatter sailed through the dark. Someone left their door or window open. Big mistake, that; the bugs would get in.

          Crouching, he pressed his eye to the lens and pinched the focus knob. The cosmos congealed into view. Amid the distant stars dusting the night he could make out the bloody hue of Betelgeuse, and to its right the glacial blue of Bellatrix. He let go of the focus and turned the zoom ring. Betelgeuse and Bellatrix slid out of view. Between them, the black of space expanded.

          Then he heard it. A new sound, beneath the wind and the TV. The more he focused on it, the louder it grew. He sucked in a breath. Each and every hair beneath his shirt bristled. It was less of a roar, and more like the rusted hinges of a door. A bout of silence, then the sound flooded his ears again.

          He backed away from the telescope, trembling. The TV had stopped. The only sound, the hiss of wind through corn. Still shaking, he collapsed the telescope’s tripod and walked it back to the sliding glass door. He glanced back at the night sky. In that brief glimpse, something caught his eye. There, within the Roaring Spot. A shape. Black – blacker than the night around it. It detached from the spot. Crawled out of view, quick as a comet. Then gone.

          At the door’s threshold, he paused. A thought struck him there, one that squeezed his throat and scraped his nerves raw.

          The hinges of a door.

          An open door.

​

      HJ Dutton is a Pushcart-nominated horror writer based in PA whose work has appeared in venues such as the Creepy podcast, Penumbra: Journal of Weird Fiction, and many others.

 

      Darren Blanch, Aussie creator of visions which tell you a tale long after first glimpses have teased your peepers. With early influence from America's Norman Rockwell to show life as life, Blanch has branched out mere art form to impact multi-dimensions of color and connotation. People as people, emotions speaking their greater glory. Visual illusions expanding the ways and means of any story.

     Digital arts mastery provides what Darren wishes a reader or viewer to take away in how their own minds are moved. His evocative stylistics are an ongoing process which sync intrinsically to the expression of the nearby written or implied word he has been called upon to render.

     View the vivid energy of IVSMA (Darren Blanch) works at: www.facebook.com/ivsma3Dart, YELLOW MAMA, Sympatico Studio - www.facebook.com/SympaticoStudio, DeviantArt - www.deviantart.com/ivsma and launching in 2019, as Art Director for suspense author / intrigue promoter Kate Pilarcik's line of books and publishing promotion - SeaHaven Intrigue Publishing-Promotion.