The end of everything

10pm, suburban neighbourhood, early Autumn, present day. ‘Crash, boom!’. The sound reverberated around Tom’s house and woke him up from a deep sleep. ‘What the hell (followed by colourful expletives) ?!’ cursed Tom. Bleary eyed he fumbled for his bedside lamp switch. After his eyes had adjusted to the sudden bright light, he got out of bed, put on a bed robe and peered out of his bedroom window and into the yard in the general direction of the noise. Tom saw his neighbour next to an open shed door in his backyard. ‘Ah, it’s that strange neighbour of mine, Mr Shaulhoop’. The latter was a believer in flying saucers, conspiracy theories and ghosts.

Next to the man was a metal looking bucket on its side and a bowling ball next to it. Mr Shaulhoop then went inside the shed and got out again holding a stack of books on both hands which were obstructing his vision. As he got out of the shed, he tripped on something. The books went flying and he landed on his stomach with a loud ‘thump’. ‘Oh my’ Tom exclaimed and ran as quickly as he could downstairs and out to check on him. In that moment he did not even consider the temperature difference between inside and outside. When he reached his neighbour, the latter was groaning and had managed to move and rest on his left side.

After a few moments of unintelligible mumbling, Mr Shaulhoop said, ‘Not much time left…’. .’What are you talking about ?’ I replied. ‘ Are you hurt? ‘. ‘I..am…fine’ he groaned in an annoyed tone of voice. Then , seeing the concerned look on my face and bleary eyes, he apologised. ‘I am sorry Tom; I must have woken you up. It was unintended.’ ‘Forget it. What are you doing out here so late? What is with those ...old books( Tom suddenly smelled the musky odour of old pages) ?’ He looked at Tom as if considering whether to reply to not but then he sighed and said, ‘I can try but you will think I am crazy’. ‘Well, humour me!’.

‘You know that I am interested in mysteries and all that strange stuff. So it happens that lately I became aware of strange phenomena occurring in back yard. You see that old tree over there? Two nights ago, as I was taking out the trash, I saw a shimmering haze in front of the tree, blurring it outright. I got rid of the trash and went near the shimmering curtain of light. Then, all of a sudden, parts of it opened and revealed an opening like a window of sorts. And as I looked through this opening, I saw like a mirror image of my yard in daylight and a copy of my tree but younger’. He paused and I made a ‘go on, continue’ gesture with my right hand. ‘Well, after a minute the opening closed and there was like a blast of compressed air which threw me off my feet for a couple of metres and knocked me unconscious.’ As I came to, I looked at the time and noticed that an hour had gone by. Also, the tree appeared to have lost a couple of branches. This phenomenon happened another couple of times more and the last time, the shimmering haze had move beyond the tree and closer to my clothesline.

This made me remember something my father used to say about parallel dimensions. Because I released that this was a possible explanation about the opening in the shimmering haze which I had looked through. However ,my father never mentioned another parallel dimension encroaching on an existing one and ‘eating it up’ and replacing it.’

‘But what has this night’s shenanigans got to do with all of this?’, Tom replied. Mr Shaulhoop said, ‘Well, my father had mentioned reading about something similar happening in the Middle Ages and how it was stopped. Of course, at that time I looked it up, but it read like a fairy tale. So tonight, I could not sleep because I had a nagging doubt that it was true after all; considering all that I had witnessed so far . And I had managed to stumble upon rituals to combat such a calamity. Quick, gather all those books and help me look for references about parallel dimensions. Ignore the descriptions about spells and focus on use of real metals or minerals that exist in our world.’

So, they gathered the dusty books and took them inside and put them in a file on Mr Shaulhoop’s kitchen table. Poring over the books was quite a tedious task but fortunately Tom managed to come across a mention of quartz mixed with incantations and other chaff. Now, properly cut plates of quartz are used for frequency control in radios, televisions, and other electronic communications equipment and for crystal-controlled clocks and watches. ’Good, so quartz has to be thrown over the ‘inter-dimensional window’ where it ‘magically’ closes the aperture for half a millenium!’ , exclaimed Mr Shaulhoop. ‘Yes, but where are we going to find the amount of quartz mentioned here, dear neighbour?’ , Tom replied. ‘Holy cow!, You are right!’ . Tom took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, and said ‘Let us think logically. We may have broken electronic equipment lying around. But it will not contain enough quartz. What we need is a bigger ‘supply’ of unused or thrown-away electronic equipment’. ‘The local bring-in site!’ , exclaimed Mr Shaulhoop. ‘But we will have to break in! Either that or it’s ‘the end of everything’. They looked at each other while deliberating their choice. ‘Ok, let’s do it. I will bring a bolt cutter. We will take your car’ , Tom said.

They eventually arrived at the bring-in site, ‘guarded’ by a grimy CCTV camera. But they were wearing hoodies, sunglasses and COVID masks on their faces. Might as well give a funny slant to all this crazy business. Tom took out his bolt cutter and cut open the chain holding the entry fence closed. With torch lights cutting through the gloom they located the electronics pile. They put quite a sizable amount of items on a ‘borrowed’ wheelbarrow and filled the car boot and back seat. Once home they placed the electronic items near the clothes line, the last known location of the inter-dimensional portal. ‘All we have to do is move a few metres back from the clothes line and wait for the portal to re-appear’ said Shaulhoop’. At nearly 11:30pm, the portal suddenly appeared. They quickly tossed the electronic items through the portal ‘window’. Nothing happened. Well, we tried . I hope the end will be painless’ , Tom said. Then, all of a sudden there was a bright flash and the portal disappeared.

Tom woke up in bed and noticed that there was the faint light before dawn filtering through a gap in his bedroom window curtains. Then he started remembering his strange night time adventure. Maybe it was all a dream. He took out his trash to have an excuse to look over his neighbour’s backyard. But nothing seemed out of the ordinary except for a momentary glint of something hinting the sun’s rays from a bush. Tom shook his head , dismissed it and went back inside. Unknown to him, there was a motherboard in a bush and one of it’s gold-plated connectors had caught the sun’s rays. It appeared as if the motherboard has fallen from a discarded piece of electronic equipment…