Particle Participle

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The CERN LHC (Large Hadron Collider), was switched on for the first time in 2010. There were issues, as you probably know. I should know because, well, I lived two doors down from the facility.

Nothing major, obviously. As of yet, the world has not ended.

But, you know, first time for everything.

And that first time almost started with my friend.

I'll start at the beginning.

I can't talk about my friend anymore. Not only have I signed in triplicate not to mention his name ever again, I have signed legal documentation that stops me from making up a name in place of his actual name. So if his name was Jeff, I can't say "My friend, let's call him Steve."

The only problem is that the government didn't stipulate that I can't call him "my friend" or indicate that he was a he. Fun fact, for all their domineering power and scary behaviour, there are laws in place that mean you can't just make people disappear.

Just remove their names, wipe away the evidence of the little house built along the border of France and Switzerland just a hop, a skip and a jump away from Geneva and leave the rest in the mind and memory of someone that everyone's going to probably ignore or think is a crackpot.

So it all started in 2010. The collider had been turned on after several problems and setbacks including

a technician, José Pereira Lage, killed when a switchgear fell on top of him in 2005 and the electromagnets having a fuckabout in 2007 - 2008.

There were no problems, lots of joking about if you remember, with a lot of people claiming that the LHC would either bring the world to an end by recreating The Big Bang or that they now there was a strong advancement in the field of particle viewing, because they now had access to tools that would find the penis of unpopular figures of the time.

I remember when I headed round to his house. It was a Saturday night in late September and I had a case of Budweiser in my hand. Just ringing away on that doorbell, wondering why he didn't answer.

Every Saturday we had two beers together, it was an annual tradition. Suzanne tucked the kids in and would sit in with either a soap on or an episode of one her boxsets and a glass of chilled white wine and I popped down for a beer and catchup with my childhood friend.

He took forever answering the door that Saturday, and when he eventually opened it, I noticed that he'd pulled on his hoodie which I rarely saw him in unless he was under the weather or had a particularly bad work day.

He let me in and eventually took off the hoodie, revealing what I first thought was some sort of rash or facial scars over his face. Upon closer inspection, I noticed it was acne. I mean, we're both thirty-four! Those spots were the first indicator that something was wrong.

We sat down to drink and we were amicable. We talked about work, the weather, the neighbours and the football. But I noticed something was off about my friend. Not only was he picking at the bizarre milky-white spots on his face, but his eyes darted around his living room.

He could sense something, and if I'm being totally honest with you, so did I.

It sounds a bit new age-y, but I honestly think houses are living and breathing things. Ever since I was a kid, I always looked up at first-floor windows and thought that they were eyes with the curtains acting as the eyelids. And they seem to have minds of their own as well, sometimes things will get misplaced. You put something down on a desk in the dining room and it'll turn up in the kitchen. And if you listen, really closely, as closely as you can, you can hear the breath of the house you're living in.

Something was wrong with the house.

I visited him next Saturday, but there was a note on the door. Ill? He was never ill.

I was a little blue as I sat on the sofa with Suzanne and she consoled me, saying that maybe he was going through something at work or just going through a particularly sad moment in his adult life.

But it just wasn't like him at all.

I drove to work on Monday with my friend still in my mind. After clocking in and doing my daily admin tasks in the office, checking off the budgets for the parts we need for a lot of the tech we use, I decided to give his work a call.

I'm a geologist, outside of doing the insurmountable pile of paperwork that stacks up in the plastic "IN" tray, I'm allowed to pretty much do what I want. Not that I use that privilege often, that tray rarely goes below nine inches of sheets.

He didn't pick up his phone, but instead I got the voice of an intern. I asked for his supervisor and he promptly told me that he'd stopped coming into work and hung up.

After I'd finished up my shift, I swung by his house.

Now it wasn't a relatively big house. He lived mildly reclusively up on the hilltop near a small running brooks that we used to play in as children and I felt a small lump rising in my throat as I saw it babbling away in a juncture between two large elm trees before entering a small waterfall that ran into the large lake below.

At the front of his driveway, I parked and was about to get out of the car when I noticed something very unusual.

It wasn't a hot day, but his entire house appeared to be shimmering slightly, not as if visibly through some sort of heat wave, but waving as if it was having problems coming to terms with the rest of the world.

It moved in the way a picture on a television set will glitch and wave slightly when it's on the blink.

I got out of my car to take a closer look. My mouth may have been open as I walked towards the house to get a better look at it and I noticed that even stranger things were happening to it.

The house had been painted green in the Summer of 1998, but as I looked I could see the caked and scratched green paint freshen on the surface of the walls before, and this was really strange, it seemed to disappear from the wall in great large swathes and splotches that revealed the previous blue paint underneath.

I approached the front door and put my hand on the doorknob.

Immediately, the house ceased. It was as if I had broken some sort of charm and somehow had tied the house back into reality like some sort of human conduit as I hammered on the door, shouting for his attention. When that didn't work, I pulled on the doorknob until giving up and taking five steps back.

The hinges of the door snapped at about the fifth kick.

Stumbling over the threshold, I took to the stairs, ignoring the wallpaper that appeared to be from my friend's childhood and got to the landing. If I knew him, he'd be in the bedroom.

I got to the door and was about to open it when my phone began ringing. I took it out of my pocket and noted that the time on the lock screen had been changed to 00:00 and that date was listed as October, not September.

Thursday, 29th October 1987.

Answering the call with a hand that didn't quite feel my own, I was relieved when my wife's voice rang out. "Honey, don't go in there. That's not your friend anymore."

"What do you mean?"

At many points during the following conversation, I considered just opening the door and running in to save my friend from whatever demon or monster was hurting him. I'm just glad I didn't.

Suzanne had tried phoning him again whilst I was at work, concerned not for his sake, but because I'd been pretty moody during his sudden silence.

She talked to someone who was no doubt my friend of many storied years. He talked about how he'd cried at work, unable to do any of his jobs and becoming distressed at not understanding what anyone was saying. He'd tried to keep going to work, but things got more and more complex until they let him go. Then for the next two weeks he told Suzanne about how he just stayed inside.

He didn't feel ill, but he knew something was going dreadfully wrong with his body.

Suzanne heard all this.

But the oddest thing was that he didn't sound like my friend. Oh, she'd met him.

According to my wife, the person on the phone sounded as if he wasn't a day over ten years old.

I dropped my phone and pushed open the door.

The bedroom of my friend at thirty four was a pretty normal bedroom for a man of his age. Incense diffusers, a persian rug and a double bed along with a few tasteful Salvador Dalí reproductions on the wall. He'd done a lot to make it more adult than his childhood bedroom and at many times joked that he'd made the changes in order to improve his chances of "getting the ladies round."

His room looked just like his childhood bedroom. No, it was his childhood bedroom.

The first Action Comics Annual #1 was propped up against a cabinet filled with Asterix Comics that looked almost new along with a rocking horse. It all looked new.

On a desk in front of a hunched over figure was an Amiga 500. It looked as if it had been purchased yesterday.

The blue screen glowed as the figure tapped on the large chunky grey keys on the keyboard and turned around.

My friend's eyes shone with a blistering light. It was if I was staring at a pair of burning searchlights. He smiled underneath those awful eyes and opened his mouth.

"Hey, wanna come in and play a game?"

I heard a low rumble and looked up at the ceiling, only to discover there was none. Where the stucco glow-in-the-dark plastic stick on lights my friend usually had on his bedroom ceiling, there was an abyss. Just a dark hole beyond the cracked and broken ceiling and I noticed that parts of the ceiling panels had broken off and floated above me, suspended.

I only looked up for a second, seeing pinpricks of light in the unfathomable darkness. I don't know if they were stars, worlds, universes, I still don't.

But as I looked up, I felt something looking down. Something large that watched down on every bedroom, of every place, of every time. Something big, and something moving.

It was in the distance, hundreds of millions of miles away but perhaps thousands of miles across.

And I knew it was something evil.

And heading for me. For all of us.

I ran from the room without looking back at the child or the creature out of the dark and ran down the stairs. I headed home. The drive back was not pleasant, and I had to pull over to twice to get control of myself. Looking up at the blistering hot sun of the early Autumn, I could still somehow feel something bad coming down.

I don't have much else to tell apart from when I came back to the house several days later. For the next 72 hours, I did absolutely nothing. I couldn't sleep. I called in a holiday at work and just stopped. I stopped everything. I stopped going out, seeing people, I was constantly jittery and on edge. Eventually, I found it in me to return to the scene of the crime.

There were men in dark suits with sunglasses with a large yellow biohazard tarpaulin over the entire house, most of them holding guns and several pressing fingers to their ears and talking into those strange see-through shrimp-like earpieces to others around the site. I tried to approach, but two of the men raised M5's in my direction so I backed off with raised hands.

In front of my very eyes, the house seemed to fade. First, the blanket around it flopped off, and then the structural integrity disappeared. The roof tiles vanished, then the thatching, followed by the walls and then the beams until there was nothing there.

I tried to leave in my car but was pulled over. The guards were a little bit intimidating, and I had to sign a lot of the paperwork I mentioned in the beginning.

Other things happened since then.

There was work done on The Large Hadron Collider around the space where the house was built, which is now a large square dead-zone, devoid of grass or anything else. They built a circular pipe that curves around it.

The dead zone seems to be the centre of where the tornado storm blew. Flowers won't grow and phones won't ring anywhere near it.

There are reports of a small bundle that was carried out of the house by spec ops forces a day after the house was cordoned off and quarantined by people who happened to be nearby. Allegedly it looked like a small baby swaddled in blankets. Again, reports.

Dog walkers, nosy neighbours or people on the internet with too much time on their hands.

Nothing else really happened until today. You see, I've found my job as a geologist to be useful in the last few months. I picked up a dirt sample from the dead zone and did a little examination of it.

It turns out it's slightly older than the earth around it. By around three hundred million years.

In fact, the soil roughly dates to the Permian period, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Yesterday I turned on the news and heard about upcoming Asteroid shower in 2023.

And I thought about the large object I saw in the endless sky above that bedroom.

Suzanne thinks I'm crazy.

I really hope she's right.