The Dark Between Stars

Your eyes flick to the margins. The footnotes. The small print.

That’s where the truth is.

“Where are they?” he asked, staring at the screen, at the blank, dark space where a hundred thousand galaxies should have been. “Where’s all the light?”

Dr. Calhoun didn’t answer. Just sat there, motionless. The blue glow of the monitor turned his face into a skull, hollow eyes staring out into the black. His fingers twitched once, twice, as if he could summon the missing galaxies back from the dead.

“No transmissions,” Calhoun murmured. “No stars. No gravity wells. Nothing.”

He sounded calm. Too calm. Like this was just another puzzle, another curiosity of deep space. Not the most terrifying absence in the known universe.

But when Dr. Calhoun looked at him, there was something wild in his eyes. Something broken.

“It’s as if they were erased,” he whispered. “Like they never existed.”

For years, the Bootes Void was just a curiosity. A blot on the map. An empty patch of night. But every observatory, every radio telescope aimed into that dark swath of space heard the same thing: silence.

No radio bursts. No gamma flares. Not even the soft hum of background radiation. Just dead air.

It took fifty years to notice the first one was gone.

A faint spiral galaxy on the outermost edge. Just...gone.

Then another.

And another.

“How does a galaxy disappear?” he asked, his voice breaking the silence. He was a junior researcher—fresh out of university. Too young to have an opinion, but too terrified to keep quiet.

Calhoun didn’t look at him. Didn’t even blink. Just kept staring at the black, empty center of the Bootes Void.

“They’re not disappearing,” Calhoun said softly. “They’re...folding.”

“Folding?” He took a step closer, frowning. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It means...” Calhoun’s voice was trembling now, like a taut wire about to snap. “It means the space inside the Void isn’t empty. It’s compressed.”

The researcher’s stomach twisted. “Compressed? By what?”

Calhoun turned to him, and his smile was empty, empty, empty.

“By something that eats the dark.”