I’ve heard from a mutual that you’d like to move out to the countryside. They told me you want some place quiet, away from the rat race, something more affordable. I’m the last person on earth to tell anyone what to do with their lives, really, but I must give you my two cents for this. There is a lot of Nothing in between the cities.

  You might not have heard of it, it happened a semester before you joined. It was the Davies expedition. A group of twenty-four researchers– mostly students from our college –went out to collect some data. They all vanished. All but one. That one was me. If you didn’t already know, I’m not surprised. I don’t like talking about it, but if it can change your mind about the move I will.

  The Davies expedition was named after my friend, and its lead, Howard P. Davies. He was only a year older than me, but several years my academic senior. He was young for a department head, and had multiple fields of focus. I didn’t then, and still don’t entirely understand Davies’ research. Our fields of study weren’t close. So I was a little confused when he asked me to come along the expedition. He told me that he had enough researchers to do the work, but that needed more bodies to carry the equipment. It was going to be a short trip. Two days at most, and it would pay well. As a broke college student, of course I said yes.

  The canyon we were going to was in a heavily protected wilderness. So protected we arrived with a government escort. We were picked up in the pre-dawn in huge cars with wheels as tall as a man. They took us down a scenic wooded valley situated between two monstrous mountains, following a river that shone pink with the light of dawn. It was like being inside a painting at the Louvre.

  That all ended at the canyon.

  There was a clear boundary drawn between the canyon and the rest of the valley. All the vegetation, from the tree line to the grass, stopped growing in a hard line. Only the river kept going, because it couldn’t be stopped.

  I picked up my share of the equipment and– while waiting for the others to gather theirs –looked over the edge.

  The canyon was narrow at the top, widening at the bottom, looking much more like a cave with an open ceiling. Which brings me to the canyon’s first oddity.

  The top of the canyon was narrow, but not so narrow that the sun shouldn’t have been able to shine down to the floor. I should have been able to see the whole breadth of the canyon, but from where I was standing it seemed like the eastern and western edges disappeared into darkness. It wasn’t a normal kind of dark. It was almost blinding. Like there was Nothing there. It was hard on the eyes. I stared at the Nothing on either side for a minute before becoming so unsettled by it that I felt my stomach turn.

  I rejoined the group and noticed that none of our escort was sticking around.

  “Isn’t anyone going to stay with us?” I asked

  “No sir,” said the man, who answered me without looking in my direction, continuing to prepare for departure.

  “What about animals? I thought you’d leave someone behind in case of animal attacks or something.”

  “There aren’t any animals around here,” said the man, casually, lifting an empty case as long as I was into his car without so much as a grunt of effort.

  No animals? This far from humanity and he was telling me there were no animals? I could hardly believe it. I wanted to ask him more, but the government men were on a timetable and they were sticking to it.

  My mind was buzzing. I watched the escort leave. Suddenly, desperately, I wished that I had left with them. I watched them leave until my attention was torn away by a loud cheering from the expedition party. Evidently Davies had given a speech and I’d missed it.

  The expedition started shuffling to the edge of the canyon and I followed. The trip down the canyon would be simple, as it had a set of natural stairs. They almost looked carved. Though the newly forming pit in my stomach told me they couldn’t be.

  I took one step down and in the blink of a second I was at the bottom with Davies' hand on my shoulder. It was disorienting, and if Davies hadn’t been holding onto my shoulder I may have tumbled backwards and cracked open my head.

  One moment stepping down, the next second on flat ground. I noticed too that the shadows had shifted. It must have been later in the day.

  “You weren’t listening earlier, were you?” said Davies.

  “What–”

  “Happened?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s basically highway hypnosis. Something about this place lets you really lose yourself. Have you noticed the air?”

  I hadn’t, no, but then I suddenly realized that I couldn’t feel the air. Down there the air was skin temperature. It was like being in a sensory deprivation tank.

  “I can see you have now,” said Davies. “What about the quiet, awfully quiet right?”

  It wasn’t quiet. It was the absence of sound. Totally and utterly, I couldn’t believe it, and it shouldn’t have been possible. For one, sounds should have been echoing between the canyon walls, and second was my tinnitus. After attending one concert too many I was stuck with a constant ringing in my ears. Always present, it became unignorable whenever it became quiet.

  I stumbled in place, being put into a stupor by what I was experiencing.

  “It’s okay, you’re not losing. It’s hard to notice Nothing, right?” he smiled. I’m not sure how he could be so at ease. This place was unsettling. “Come on, it’s fine. I think it’s a little creepy too. Let’s just set up our gear, get our measurements, and we’ll be out of here in a couple days.”

  A couple days. I dreaded the thought. Davies put me at ease though, even if he was probably just putting on a brave face. If the expedition lead isn’t panicking then how can you be, right?

  Davies gave me the cliff notes on what I’d missed while watching our escort leave. Basically I had to be mindful of the noise, and the people around me. Keep your mind focused on them and you won’t enter that trance-like autopilot. I did as instructed and before long I had managed to put off my mind from the unsettling aspects of the canyon. The sounds of everyone working to set up our camp was comforting.

  When we finished setting up, everyone gathered around the kitchen area. The kitchen had a fire going, and everyone welcomed the heat against their skin, the contrast between it and the Nothing that had been surrounding us all day, which had been slowly eroding our sense of self, where we ended and the canyon began. There was also the smell of food. I’d never thought about what it must be like to smell Nothing. I suppose it’s the difference between darkness and blindness. Darkness is still something that you “see”, but blindness is just the absence of even the absence of information

  With everyone bunched up there was a great deal of ambient chatter that filled in the unbearable silence, a silence that had seemed to swallow the smaller sounds that couldn’t fight against it. It was pleasant. More than pleasant, it was a reminder that we existed.

  Night time arrived soon after, and with it, a deeper Nothing than before. While the area around the camp had been well lit by the sun, that void of light I had seen from above was still present. The camp was surrounded by Nothing on either side. It was somehow worse at night, because you had real darkness to compare it too. Real darkness was dark, black, a lack of light. The void on either side was Nothing, an absence of reality.

  One by one people dropped off to sleep, prepping for the next day. It happened slowly. We were all reluctant to leave the group and the campfire, afraid to travel even the few steps to our tents. When people did leave, it was often in pairs, with their tentmates. Eventually, everyone did leave, until it was just me and one other student, a girl named Sasha, who, like me, had failed to leave with the last of her tentmates.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  Neither of us wanted to get away from the fire, however we knew that we couldn’t keep it going forever. We needed to save fuel for the next night. After a half hour or so of us exchanging glances, saying to each other with our eyes “who will be the one to put out the fire”, it was her who stood up quickly and put it out. Completely in the dark now, still too afraid to leave, we began to converse, much louder than we needed to. There was no worry at all that we would wake the rest of the camp. Somehow we suspected the noise would never reach them.

  Our conversation was trying, despite the fear, we had very little to talk about, and very little in common. And then she said something that filled me with dread.

  “Don’t you think there’s something wrong with the sky?” she said.

  Internally I cursed her. Why would you say something like that, in this place, on this night? Despite the dread that was beginning to spring up from the pit in my stomach– which had only deepened –I looked up, and at the moment I was thankful I did, because I was greeted with a familiar sky. I almost laughed I was so relieved.

  “No?” I replied.

  “Good,” she said, the relief evident in her voice as she repeated herself. “Good. I’m going to bed.”

  She got up, and I almost wept at the thought of being alone, not having the courage to make the journey to my own tent, but it was with great relief that I realized that she was not getting up to leave, but to come closer. She dropped her backpack next to mine, and fluffed it up, intending to use it as a pillow.

  “Good night,” she repeated, and lied down next to me.

  “Good night,” I echoed, and fluffed up my own backpack, mimicking her, and when I laid down I did so with my back against hers. She shifted, and for a moment I thought she was about to move away, but instead she pressed herself to me, and we both began to breathe a little easier.

  Who knows how long later, I was still thinking about what she had said. Was there something wrong with the sky? I asked myself, cursing her again. Why would she even put that thought out there? And so, as sleep began to win its battle of attrition with fear, I looked up at the night sky again, and reassured myself that it looked fine. It looked just as it did back home in the city.

  The next day was much smoother than the first. A quiet settled into the camp, but most of us, including myself didn’t mind it anymore. In no time at all we had grown accustomed to it, and had relaxed our active mindfulness. It helped to know that it was our last night there. I was tasked with setting up cumbersome equipment, building and tearing it down for the researchers. When I wasn’t needed, I passed the time with Davies, who was able to talk on account of his primary job being to oversee everyone else.

  “So…” I started to ask Davies, “what is this place?” Like I said, I wasn’t in his department. I had no clue what he was studying. I didn’t understand what the equipment I was building and tearing down was surveying.

  “For starters, it’s not just this place,” said Davies. “There’s places like this all over. We don’t have a name for them yet, I’m thinking something like ‘Null Zones’.”

  “So then these places are…?”

  “Right now they’re just holes in data. Nothing more. Really. I first noticed them while looking at a colleague's work. They’d been collecting data on animal populations, density and spreads. Something seemed familiar in the pattern, so I pinned those populations on a map and noticed these empty pockets. Looking at them like that, I was able to remember where I recognized those patterns from. Meteorological data. I decided to find other data sets that I could map out and recognized similar empty pockets in all of them.”

  In other words. Nothing. Davies had recognized a whole lot of Nothing.

  I recalled what the government man had told me. No animals in this area. This place was a void. One of Davies’ empty pockets, a Null Zone. It was Nothing.

  Before I could ask more, a researcher interrupted us to tell Davies that Sasha, the girl I had spent the previous night with, had gone missing. Davies and I shared a look, and immediately began a search, gathering more bodies to assist us as we went, but not only had no one seen her, everyone we asked who had been working with a partner suddenly realized that they had lost someone too.

  Davies gathered the entire expedition together to count heads, and discovered that in the course of the day we had lost just under half the expedition.

  Everyone, minus Davies and I, had lost track of someone.

  There was a panic in the remaining members of the expedition, but Davies kept a cool head. He knew, as well as I, that the first twenty-four hours that someone was missing were the most important. Every hour they weren’t being searched for decreased the likelihood they would be found alive. I saw him dig into his backpack for a satellite phone. He pressed a button, and then seemed to play with it, and then his face turned sour. Myself and a few others had been entrusted with our own satellite phones for redundancy and safety so I dared to check mine, fishing it out of my pocket. I understood then why Davies’ mood had soured so suddenly. Down here in the canyon, we had no signal.

  Davies saw his crestfallen expression reflected in my own. We looked at each other and knew that someone would have to go up top to make the emergency call, to get a search party as soon as possible. To be clear, the horror of the situation hadn’t escaped us. People had gone missing in the middle of the day, in the middle of camp, without anyone noticing. However the practical reality of the situation still demanded action.

  Ultimately Davies, as expedition lead, made the executive decision to go back up the canyon alone. Such a decision wouldn’t have been necessary except that the trip back up would take longer than the trip down, and it was already mid day. Natural staircase or no, whoever started climbing up the canyon wall now would have to make part of the climb in complete darkness.

  Davies got ready to leave, gathering the minimum to make the trip, just a lamp and some dry rations. Just before he left, he was stopped by a few members of the expedition that wanted to join him, citing that it would be safer to make the trip together, but in truth, I suspect they only wanted to leave. I would have volunteered as well, but I feared being stuck on the canyon wall, surrounded by the Nothing on either end of the canyon.

  So that was that. One part of the expedition would stay behind to make the safer climb at dawn tomorrow and the other would go up the canyon to get help as soon as possible. I said my goodbyes to Davies, and it was hard. Somehow, maybe, we both knew it was the last time we would see each other alive.

  When he left, I was too tired to cry, or do much of anything. So were the others. There were about ten of us left then, down from a team of twenty-four

  Night came, and with it more dread. We lit the campfire as soon as an inkling of dark came over the canyon. We all gathered around it.

  I looked up the canyon wall, searching for Davies’ team. I thought I should be able to see their flashlights jingling as they scaled the canyon wall, but I saw nothing. Then again I had made the trip down in a trance, and did not know the path up. I held on to the thought that perhaps the way up curved around corners that obscured Davies’ party from me. I comforted myself with thoughts that Davies might just be out of sight.

  Time passed in lapses of awareness. We all tried to maintain the mindfulness that Davies had instructed us in, but it was growing increasingly difficult. There was also the issue of those of us that remained. No one wanted to acknowledge it, but we were all gathered around the fire and while there had been ten of us leftover when Davies left, there were suddenly only five. We had been quietly losing people since Davies’ team had left.

  The fire started to die, and I cursed myself for not turning it off sooner the day before. We would be stuck down here with the Nothing that surrounded us.That’s when it hit me. Just as the fire died, it hit me.

  There was something wrong with the sky. We were far into a great protected wilderness. Far and away from civilization, there wasn’t any light pollution. SO WHERE WERE THE STARS.

  We should have been able to see the milky way, billions upon billions of stars should have been twinkling in the sky but there were hardly any. Just a few miserable dots.

  “Where are the stars?” I tried to scream, but nothing came out. I looked to the others, frenzy clear on my face just as it was on theirs. Had they made the same revelation as I did? Or had they come to their own impossible conclusions? Their opened mouth terror was the last that I would see of them. The fire died out, and I only had the miserable few stars to keep company. There were so few I could count them, and they were blinking out of existence. The night sky was turning into a great blanket of Nothing right before my eyes.

  I must have willed myself to stand up and run. Despite the loss of all my senses I must have run. The air was indistinguishable from my skin, there was no noise, there was no sight. I had only my mind, and the faintest inkling of selfhood. Somehow I stood up and ran, I know it, and it saved me.

  The escort party found me later the next day, babbling near a waterfall. At a guess, I must have stumbled upon the booming sound of the river crashing into the canyon below. They found me screaming, spouting random gibberish, just noise to keep the Nothing at bay.

  Later, much later, when suspicions of foul play had been cleared, I was allowed to read Davies’ journal, which had been swiftly recovered but kept for evidence. I tried to read through it, but as I said I wasn’t in his field and understood little. And what I could understand was most of what I had experienced myself. There was only one more horror waiting for me at the end of his notes.

  The Null Zones were moving.

  In his notes. I quote:

  “Conclusion: More in depth study needed. Original hypothesis invalidated. Originally I thought the Null Zones spawned away from large population centers, but the readings here suggest that they migrated. Rather than large population centers being built away from the Null Zones as I hypothesized, it was the Null Zones that had been “chased away” by the life of large cities.”

  They move. Places like the canyon move! So I beg you to take me seriously friend, do not move out to the countryside. You may be fine for a while, but one day you might wake to find the peace and serenity is just the absence of sound. You may even notice that the air seems strange, and wonder when the last time you saw any wildlife was. By then it will probably already be too late. Stay in the city friend, where it’s safe from the Nothing.