The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror. Volume 10

Peter Atkins Adventures in Further Education

Kenny tapped the pen on the surface of his desk for the seventeen thousand, four hundred and thirty-sixth time.

There was nothing the matter with him. It wasn’t like it was an obsession or anything. It wasn’t like he didn’t do anything else. Since his sixth-grade teacher had first introduced the idea to him twenty years ago, he’d done all the normal things — he’d graduated from high school, he’d graduated from college, he’d met Tiffany, fallen in love, married, fathered two children, and found himself a perfectly respectable job with a perfectly respectable firm. There was nothing unusual about Kenny except his little hobby. And that’s all it was — a hobby, he didn’t bother anybody with it. In fact, nobody knew he did it, not even Tiffany. It was just a hobby, an interest, an experiment that nobody else had ever had the patience to see through.

Mr Neill had only tapped his pen five times, for example.

“So it’s theoretically possible,” Mr Neill had said, sounding almost as bored as the fifty twelve-year-olds who were doing their best to pretend to listen to him, “that, if you kept tapping this pen on this desk long enough, one time it would just slip through the surface.”

He’d been giving the class a glimpse of the New Physics, a taste of the theories that were revolutionising the way scientists looked at the world, a hint that the matter that made up the forms of this world which everyone accepted as solid and separate was in fact all one and that only probability kept everything as it was and kept our reality apart from a multiverse of others.

Kenny hadn’t been particularly interested in the theoretical and metaphysical implications of what Mr Neill was saying. He was twelve years old, for Christ’s sake. He’d just thought it would be really fucking cool to see a pen slip through a desk and had been disappointed when, after his fifth tap, Mr Neill had put his pen down and moved on to something else.

Quietly, and without drawing anybody’s attention, Kenny had started tapping his pen. And counting.

Seventeen thousand, four hundred and thirty-seven. Seventeen thousand, four hundred and thirty-eight.

It wasn’t the same desk, of course, it was the sixth desk since he’d started. But it was the same pen (dry now of ink, chewed up and useless for anything but its secret purpose), and that had to count for something.

The phone rang. Kenny picked it up, dealt with the call, hung up. He laid the pen down throughout the call and it didn’t bother him at all. After all, he wasn’t crazy. Life had to be lived. Work had to be done. His experiment required patience and tenacity, and Kenny prided himself on possessing plenty of both.

Seventeen thousand, four hundred and thirty-nine. Seventeen thousand, four hundred and forty. Seventeen thousand, four hundred and.

The pen slid effortlessly and smoothly into the desk.

Kenny, letting go instinctively, threw himself back in his chair, an adrenal shock of surprised fulfillment shooting through his entire body. He looked up, ready to shout his triumph to the rest of the large open-plan office.

But the office wasn’t there.

Kenny was staring at a kaleidoscope world of shifting, flickering lights, a surfaceless void with an unimaginably distant vanishing point near which huge amorphous shapes twisted and writhed in a constant fury of becoming. Lightning in colours he couldn’t name seared across the infinite and multi-hued sky in jagged shards the size of which he couldn’t conceive. Alien winds screamed their impossible being in warring cacophonies of notes he couldn’t believe at volumes he couldn’t bear.

Had he still had hands, Kenny would have grabbed at his chair (had there still been a chair). Had he still had a mouth, Kenny would have screamed. Had he still had eyes, Kenny would have closed them.

Had he still had his pen, Kenny would have started tapping.