Chapter 1
Two days after Matthew Banks went missing in the summer of 1999, his right shoe was found on the roof of a neighbour’s house. The authorities did all they could, but — to the devastation of his family and friends — nothing more of Matthew was found.
A month later, Matthew’s left shoe was found by children in Sudan. Suspecting something was wrong, the children brought the shoe to their parents. The parents then passed it to the police, and it eventually came into the possession of the U.S. Embassy.
Despite the joint efforts of both American and local authorities scouring two square miles around the location where the shoe was discovered, they turned up nothing.
Then the case went cold, as all too many do.
It had been five months since Matthew Banks first went missing by the time Alice and Elijah Erikson turned on the television for their fix of Saturday morning cartoons.
As the TV came to life, the first program to appear was a nature documentary that featured a tropical forest with a river running through it.
Elijah, the eldest and therefore in charge of the remote, was ready to change the channel when Alice put her hand on his.
“Look!” said Alice, pointing at the TV.
Elijah lowered the remote and leaned forward; he saw it, too.
A dishevelled man hurried up the riverbank toward the camera.
Alice clung to her brother’s arm, but he was scared, too.
The man was directly in front of the camera now, and he seemed to be looking right at them.
He spoke rapidly, but the volume was too low to hear him.
Elijah used his trembling hand to raise the volume.
“Can you hear me? My name is Matthew Banks; I’m from Michigan, and I’ve been trapped here for several weeks, or months… Possibly years. Time works differently here,” said Matthew frantically.
“What channel is this on?” asked Elijah before glancing at the station’s watermark logo in the top corner of the screen. “‘Alt-Earth’? Never heard of it.”
“Listen to me, please! This isn’t part of a show; I’m really talking to the two of you. I’ll prove it: one of you is a boy in blue pajamas, and the other is a girl in flower-patterned pajamas. Now do you believe me?”
The children didn’t respond to his accurate descriptions of them; they simply took flight to their parents’ bedroom.
The ghostly-pale complexions of the brother and sister were enough to intrigue their parents from the comfort of their bed to promptly debunk the claims of “a man in the TV.”
The groggy parents led the way down to the living room. The children were torn between the instinctual pull to be close to their parents and the push to be far from potential danger.
Ultimately, Elijah and Alice decided to remain at the halfway point of the staircase and watched through the bannister railings as their mom and dad vanished into the living room.
The mother screamed while the father exclaimed, “Oh my god!”
The children hurried to their parents, fearing the worst.
They entered the living room to find their mom and dad physically unharmed, but psychologically anguished–made abundantly clear by the expressions painted on their faces by the brush strokes of Deimos.
“That’s the guy who went missing a while back,” said the father.
“You recognize me?! My name is Matthew Banks,” said Matthew, unable to contain his excitement. “Now will you help me get out of here?”
“Of course, just tell me who to call.”
“There’s no one you can call. You need to get me out of here.”
The father looked back at his wife and kids to see if they knew what Matthew was implying: they were just as confused.
“You need to break me out of your TV,” Matthew clarified.
The father subsequently ran to retrieve his toolbox. During that time, the only thing Matthew mentioned to the rest of the family was that he was anxious to be freed before “the storm” returned.
Elijah and Alice’s father returned, toolbox in hand, and wasted no time in disassembling the bulky TV set.
He rammed a screwdriver down into the frame around the screen.
“Oh no, not now. You have to hurry; the storm is here!” screamed Matthew.
The family drew closer to the screen to see dark purple clouds swirling into the camera’s view above the tropical tree line.
“What kind of storm clouds are they?” asked the mother.
“The kind that rains acid,” said Matthew, holding up his burnt forearm to the camera.
The father popped the frame off, triggering the TV set to erupt with a tidal wave of Matthew’s blood and guts.
The family, left traumatized by the sick cosmic joke that the universe so often churns out, was left drenched in the entrails of the man they tried to save.
Looking around, the father noted something peculiar about the contents of the entrails: they all belonged to the upper torso; in other words, the parts of Matthew’s body visible to them on the TV.
When Elijah and Alice’s father pictured the bottom half of Matthew Banks’s torso being corroded away by an acid rainstorm native to an unknown dimension, he broke into a chuckle; before long, he was laughing uncontrollably. The rest of the Erikson family stood in a sort of catatonic state.
The police showed up to find the family stood in the living room. The father, Walt, was still laughing and the others were still catatonic.
Walter Erikson was charged with the murder of Matthew Banks after his DNA was matched to the gore in the living room.
After 26 years in a prison for the criminally insane, Walter still laughs when he thinks about Matthew Banks’s corpse–swallowed and lost to the cosmos.
