The crack has split and widened. It is a darker shadow than the dark. It is like charcoal, like a hole burned into the molecules of the air, like a long black slit slowly dilating, opening up. A primal, empty, sucking dark.

“What is that?” I murmur, but no one else is paying attention—Elizabeth pushes and my mother nods and offers small inane encouragements, both of them trying to ignore the bang of the door as Donovan pounds at it—and I look back again, unable to draw myself from it. Darkness there, unlike any darkness I have ever seen, or perhaps like a darkness I saw, once, long ago.

As the darkness opens up, deep inside I can almost make out two small pinpricks of light, a reflection of our candles, and the darkness gives birth to itself, and its edges peel like a flame burning a hole through a piece of paper as it spreads beyond the mirror’s frame.

I ought to smash it before it spreads any further, but I cannot move. Elizabeth is clutching my hand too tightly.

“Push!”

Elizabeth’s face is red, her muscles taut. She strains her whole body to get him out.

“Open this door, dammit!” Don shouts, rattling the doorknob.

I want to get out of here.

If I wander to the far reaches of the room, I think I may not find my way back. I think I could just keep going and going eternally into that everlasting dark, finding myself in an increasingly strange and unfamiliar world, a place that is somehow both contained within the house and also much larger, much vaster, and much older than the house. And whichever new direction I turned in, I would see floating before me, mysterious as death, that gently smoldering hole. All around, the room is like outer space, with our candles like stars shining in the distance I left behind. And somewhere, here, in the dark, live primordial entities from before the birth of the universe, and far-future enigmas I could never hope to understand. I go around and around, and the geometry makes no sense—I may wander here for weeks. The darkness inhabits the mind, and time becomes illusion. But always, always, that black hole following me, as if it exists in all places at once, even though that cannot be.

But so it is, and as I look around, the light begins to bend strangely, the way the distant light of stars and galaxies bends around objects with high gravitational fields, light bending around a black hole and in doing so revealing its shape but also unnaturally curving the galaxies that lie behind it, warping them into twisted shapes so that the way they look is nothing like the way they are. I see the light bending in the room around that singularity of the endless hole—and everything, everything is bending outward from this central point, this moment that has fractured the world and sent its ripples outward like a stone dropping into a pond, distending the room and all that lies beyond it, the edge of the earth, the curve of a pregnant belly.