Knocking | Short Story

A lone astronaut drifts through space. And then, from the outside of his ship, he hears a knocking...

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The knocking came quietly at first. Nothing more than the gentle patter of debris hitting the tin-can hull of the Infinitum. Then it grew louder. And louder.

By the time Commander Worthy neared his end, the knocking had become something else entirely. A pounding on the outside of the Infinitum like a heartbeat in the void. Beat. Beat. Beat. Silence. Beat. Beat. Beat. Silence.

Worthy could scarcely comprehend the vast and empty quiet between each knock. The way he'd felt the first time he'd laid eyes on the endless blackness at the edge of the solar system, Worthy's mind attempted to confine the silence. To box away the whining breaths between each beat in order to make sense of the fact that someone or something was knocking on the outside of his ship.

It had been at least eight days since he'd killed the last member of his crew. At least eight but perhaps as many as twelve or thirteen. He'd stopped tracking days when the world beyond the Infinitum had turned completely and irreversibly dark. The ship began its mission with a crew of five. Two, pilot Mass and engineer Warbuck, were killed in the initial impact.

A piece of debris small enough to evade their sensors. A bullet passing through the hull of the ship and on through the forehead of Warbuck as she ate. By the time the small string of blood began to stretch from the open hole in her head, undulating like a worm in zero gravity, the hole had depressurized the aft cabin.

Safety systems kicked in sealing off the hab and leaving Mass to suffocate inside. He's still in there now as Worthy drifts alone through the silence between knocks, purple face and bulging eyes showing little of the man who'd joined the first mission beyond the edge of what is known.

Medical officer Carrion was next. An injection of air into her vain as she slept. Better to kill her in peace and comfort, to prolong her sleep forever, than to let her suffer the fate that awaited him.

The initial accident had caused a cascade of failures aboard the Infinitum. Some they'd prepared for and were able to fix. Others they could not. After weeks of placing bandaids and temporary fixes over everything from the telemetry and guidance systems to the life support and internal comms, they accepted that there was little to be done. The ship was, at last, adrift.

They had always known this mission was a one way trip but they hadn't expected it to end like this. Worthy made the executive decision early on to ensure that none of his crew would have to suffer the way that Mass had during his final moments. He stood at the window looking into the hab shining a thin shaft of light into the room and watching the corpse of the man he'd once called a friend as it swam through the airless dark. He was sure that nobody would suffer that fate again.

Francis, the ships second-in-command, woke up when Worthy was trying to administer her mercy. She grabbed at his wrist so hard that his hand jerked open and released the syringe. He watched it float away as Francis pulled herself free from the buckles holding her in bed. She pushed him backwards, wrist singing with pain, and kicked off the wall. The attack played out in slow motion as she reached for the floating syringe and lunged at Worthy, he flailed behind him for whatever he could reach and wrapped a hand tightly around a small scalpel.

Before she could reach him, he steadied himself on the wall of the Infinitum and thrust the scalpel forward into her eye. She screamed and Worthy thought, for a second, they'd be able to hear the dreadful sound back on Earth. He wrapped his arms around her in a bear hug and stole back the syringe, carefully and gently slipping the needle into a vain that had began to bulge from her neck as her body tensed and convulsed.

Worthy never stopped hearing that scream. It was like some unending tinnitus following him wherever he went. Even in the blackness of his dreams, he could still hear it. Bang. Bang. Bang. Silence. A thought occurred to him in the quiet. What if something else heard the scream?

He'd sealed off all but the Infinitum's cockpit as the life support system, the only thing still online now that the heaters had died, began to splutter its last. He set on the helmet of his spacesuit and checked the oxygen gage. 21%. Around an hour of O2, if he's lucky.

As he floated around the cockpit in his spacesuit he considered taking his own life. Not for the first time, Worthy wanted to save himself from the misery that awaited him. He'd even tried a few times but his body wouldn't let him finish the job. He recalled holding his breath as a child when he didn't get what he wanted. He'd hold and hold and his skin may turn purple but eventually his body's instincts would kick in and he'd take a deep, gasping drink of air. Perhaps it was the bodies of his crew that littered the halls and habs of the Infinitum. Perhaps, deep down in his subconscious, he felt he owed it to them to die at the hands of fate. Whatever the reason, he was never able to press the needle into his own flesh.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Silence.

With 4% of his oxygen remaining, Worthy started thinking about his mother. The warmth of her smile and the smell of her perfume. The last thing he'd said to her before she'd left for church on the Sunday morning that would be her last. The numbness he felt when the police officer told him of her fate. And finally the strange grin molded onto her face as she lay in her casket, a failed attempt to try and capture the woman she’d been just days before her death. He'd began crying, the tears turning cold against this skin.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Silence.

The knocking echoed inside his spacesuit like the bass drum of a marching band. He scanned the readout on his wrist. 2%.

Bang. Bang.

The rhythm was broken. The knocking ceased. He waited a moment but only the silence remained. Worthy pulled himself along the wall, no sense of up or down.

Outside all there was only blackness. No. Not just blackness. Something in the blackness, something moving.

He squinted his eyes as to focus more closely on the darkness. It moved again. He pulled himself towards the cockpit window, the visor of his helmet tapping against the glass.

The movement was everywhere, as though space itself was a mess of limbs writhing violently.

He pressed a hand up to the cockpit window, his eyes dry and stinging. The oxygen alarm on his suit sounded and he immediately hit cancel, plunging the Infinitum back into that ceaseless silence. His body once again acted on his behalf, his eyes blinking shut. Between each flutter of his eye lids Worthy could see the void billowing like spiral waves.

He forced his eyes open again, his pupils dilating wide and wild as he was finally able to make out the truth within the darkness. Seeing, he quickly realized, isn't the same as knowing. Just as the silence had been filled with infinite, unknowable horrors, so too was the writhing space before him.

Like a branch he felt his mind break as he realized that what was moving outside the cockpit of the Infinitum was one entity of unimaginable scale. His mouth agape and no air left to breath, Worthy watched in horror as he met his fate. Whatever it was knocking in the void, it was reaching out for Worthy and, with the screaming in his ears louder than ever, he reached back.

END.

A Voice in the Void

exploring cosmic horror and the writing of ‘Knocking’