text: “You ever hear the story of the trough?” McCullough asked. He sat like a patriarch at the back of the booth, grey hair glowing in the dim light. His arthritic hands clasped a dwindling pint. The air was filled with the clatter of billiard balls, a faint argument as two drunks tried to get the jukebox running. “Trough?” Bradley burst out from beside me. “I just pissed in one in the men’s room!” The table broke out in rambunctious laughter. McCullough was usually one to join in. Despite his age and seemingly serious demeanour, he tended to enjoy toilet humour, dirty jokes, the whole lot of it. He usually managed to save face though, lips stuck in a half-smile, chuckling and shaking his head. But now his expression had gone completely blank. Checked out. The pockmarked skin hung from a wooden skull. “I haven’t heard it” I said, without planning to. The whole booth turned to stare at me. Their cheeks were flushed pink from the beer, all six of us wedged on the snug leather seats. McCullough was at the head, a crescent of light spilling on his chin. “It was, quite possibly, the strangest thing I’ve ever witnessed. And I’ve witnessed a great many strange things.” Silence hung across the table like a layer of smoke. The jukebox fight reached its crescendo. “Well, out with it then!” Bradley spouted. He was the loudest and drunkest of the bunch. Those huddled around the bar looked up over their drinks. McCullough flashed his famous half-smile, and drained his remaining gulps of beer. Only a web of white froth remained, clinging to the bottom of the mug. “In due time. But first I’ll need another.” I waved over a hurried waitress. Once McCullough’s mug was sufficiently replenished, he leaned back in his seat, pale eyes on the ceiling. His thumbs twiddled in his lap. “It happened when I was a boy. Probably 1950 or 1951, some now-distant era. The German war was still a fresh memory, and the Russian war was a growing fear. But I didn’t care about any of that. I was in the infancy of my true passion...” “Beer?” Bradley interrupted. “Science fiction” McCullough continued, eyebrows heavy. “There wasn’t a lot of it until later in the decade, and even then it was mostly bad TV specials and B-movies with backyard special effects. So we treasured what we had. I kept a stash of comic books in a tobacco tin under my bed. Flash Gordon, Space Detective, Strange Worlds, the whole set. The pages were all worn and crinkled I read them so much. Occasionally my mother had to force me to go outside. I usually just read some more in the treehouse. She was a good lady, died when I was twenty. Though an eyewitness, she never talked about the trough.” I felt a sharp jab in my stomach. Maybe it was time to lay off the drinks. “It was a cold autumn morning, if I remember correctly, back in whatever year I said earlier. A few days before school started. Summer had breathed its dying breath, and the claws of winter were already starting to take hold. There was a blanket of frost on the back window. It’s probably why we didn’t notice the trough from inside.” McCullough took a swig of beer. “My mother booted me out, as usual, so she could clean up from breakfast. Still tugging on my sweater, I hopped down the back steps, running towards the treehouse. Suddenly, I was facedown on the lawn, coughing up clumps of dirt and grass. Something tripped me. I figured it was one of my toys- they littered the yard like shells after a shootout. But there was no model car, no baseball glove, no BB gun. No. There was only a thin rut running horizontally across the lawn, from one neighbour’s fence to the other. I can’t recall the exact dimensions, I was young after all, but it may’ve been about six inches, both wide and deep. It never wavered from these measurements, smooth the whole course. But there was something...even stranger about it. It wasn’t like a crater, the grass torn up to expose the topsoil. Rather, it looked like the ground had been simply pressed down, grass lining the valley of the rut, as if the earth itself was tugging this particular strip to its core. Maybe gravity was stronger in the trough.” Bradley yawned rather audibly, slapping his hand against his mouth. When the old man spoke again, the must of alcohol drifted across the table. “At first I thought it was a tire track, like you’d see on a muddy backroad. But, of course, there was only one rut, and it was smooth, with no impression left by treads. A car certainly couldn’t have made it. A car couldn’t even have accessed the backyard, there was only a narrow gate, and the fences remained intact. It could’ve been from a bicycle or something thereabouts- I remember laughing, picturing a crazed man on a unicycle tear through my yard in the middle of the night. But no bike could’ve applied enough force to leave such a rut in dry earth. Also, why hadn’t the grass been torn up, but left almost caving in on itself? I stared at the trough, filled with that raw curiosity that a boy feels when he sees something he just doesn’t understand. But this wasn’t like when I wondered how a lightbulb lit up, or how one of those B-52 bombers stayed in the sky. I knew those had rational explanations, ones that my father could at least half-explain. The trough...I wasn’t so sure.” “This is a load” Bradley whispered to me. “Wanna get outta here?” He began to rise, but I put a hand on his knee, guiding him back to the cushion. My eyes remained fixed on McCullough. We lived in a small town and, though he had no blood relatives, he was like everyone’s doting, slightly alcoholic grandfather. A fixture of the local pub. “Did you follow it?” I asked. McCullough wagged his finger. “You know me all too well. Would Flash Gordon have followed the great, mysterious trough? Of course he would’ve! That was enough for childhood me. But I was a smart kid, not like the ones today. I knew I had to find a decent observation point first, survey the area, see how far it went on.” “The treehouse?” I interrupted. “Who’s tellin’ this story?” McCullough took another sip, smacking his lips. “But you’re correct again. I hurried over to the big oak that my grandfather planted at the turn of the century, and climbed up the planks to the wood house. My shack in the sky. I miss it. It was torn down in a windstorm a few years later. When it was still standing, however, it gave me a great view of the surrounding neighbourhood. I liked to pretend that I was Flash Gordon at the top of a crashed rocket, gazing out over the alien landscape, the peaks and craters that no human eye had ever seen. And this time, I could see the trough. It ran in a perfect, almost eerily parallel line straight through the yards on my street, ducking under fences but never causing any damage. The neighbour’s dog sniffed it curiously, pawing at the dirt and then whimpering away. It disappeared near the end of the lane, where it stooped behind the Godwins’ hedge- at a straight ninety-degree angle. The sharpest turn in the books.” “Is this going somewhere?” Bradley burst out. “Aren’t you listening?” I shot back. “It went behind the Godwins’ hedge.” McCullough chuckled. “I still remember Old Man Godwin, scratching his head as he stared at the rut. It went right through his petunias. People were pouring out their homes now, into their yards and the street, confused as all hell. The police station’s telephone was probably ringing off the hook. The town paper came to take photos. I believe the reporter’s labour was lost when he tripped over the trough and shattered his camera.” “Isn’t that convenient” Bradley muttered, rolling his eyes. “But I wasn’t deterred” McCullough continued, ignoring him. I could see a gleam in his eyes, a certain spark. He wasn’t with us anymore, not exactly, a pub table of kids in the present day. He was back on his old street, in 1950 or 1951, whatever year he said earlier. “I decided to follow the rut on the ground, see where it led. I climbed down from the treehouse, hopped on my bicycle, and rounded the corner to the Godwin place, making treads of my own. The trough did indeed make a turn in his yard, as I’d seen from above. From there it crawled beneath the back hedge, emerging on the curb beyond. I expected it to stop there as, until this point, I’d only seen it cut through grass. But there it was. Running straight through the road, the asphalt dipped ever so casually. I could barely believe my eyes. Slipping through grass was easy, I suppose, but concrete? Whatever the source of the trough was, it had to be incredibly powerful. There wasn’t even any dust or debris left behind. It was a precision cut. As if made by a laser.” “Did you keep going?” I asked. “Was there any other option?” McCullough leaned back. “I tore down the street on my bicycle, tracing the trough as it weaved through the next block, mostly straight but with the odd right-angle turn. Sometimes it disappeared onto private property, but I was able to pick it up again further down the road. Even when it cut across the ditches at the side, the rut arced low, tracing the ground without any deviation. The trough and I eventually landed on the shore of Glenmore Lake, where the old boathouse was, the yacht club now. I remember pulling my sleeves over my fists- it was cold, and harsh waves crashed against the beach, shooting up charcoal spray. The trough ran into the work-yard of the boathouse, and I clamoured over the fence, landing hard in the muck on the other side. The lake had hacked up a heap of debris- driftwood, clumps of seaweed, old crates and bottles, all scattered about. It was no day for sailing, that was for sure. Old Man Godwin kept his boat there, a cheap thing he barely used, some slab of red-rusted metal with two splintered oars. It had fallen from its supports a few weeks earlier, leaving it half-submerged in the mud. He hadn’t bothered to lift it out. Too focused on his petunias, I suppose. I, on the other hand, tried with all my might to push it aside. Why? The trough disappeared under the stern and came out beneath the bow, as if it traveled straight through the hull. But it wouldn’t budge.” The waitress came to check our progress. McCullough waved her away. At least he tipped well. “Of course,” he continued “Godwin took a sudden interest in his boat, as did the rest of the town, and he had it hoisted back up that afternoon. It took nearly all the town’s men. There were worms and beetles in the mud beneath it, wriggling in the boat’s perfect imprint. But those weren’t the only things. Just as I expected, and as you’ve probably come to expect by now, the trough ran smoothly from one side to the other, six inches wide and deep.” “You’re telling me...” Bradley interjected, with a violent hiccup. “...that this piss trough went right *under* a heavy boat?” “Have I gained your interest now?” McCullough asked, chuckling. “No” Bradley insisted, leaning back on the wood panelling. Just like the old man, his thumbs twiddled in his lap. “Did you ever find the end of the trough?” I asked, getting ahead of myself. “That would probably lead you to whoever- whatever- made it, right?” “Right...and that was the problem” McCullough concurred, slowly. “Once the trough came out from under the boat, it ran north across the damp sand, until it hit the lake itself. I sprinted down the beach, halting at the foot of the waves. There the trough simply vanished into the water, the tide wavering in and out, flooding the rut before draining it again.” “Wait, so whatever made it must’ve...” I started “...drowned itself?” McCullough shrugged. “It looked that way. According to the tracks, whatever it was floored itself straight into the lake. And Glenmore is over two hundred metres deep. It’s no mere pond.” I took another swig of my beer. It tasted stale. Bradley scratched his chin. “So...that’s it?” he asked. “Not quite” McCullough claimed. He shuffled in place, the cushion groaning. “Standing at the edge of the lake, watching the tide caress the trough, nothing but open water ahead, I felt rather dejected. It was a mystery left unsolved. An adventure gone stagnant. Not the type of thing that Flash Gordon typically ran into. Not knowing what else to do, I simply trudged home, following the trough back. I made it just in time for lunch. School started a few days later, and the playground was swirling with rumours. You know how children are. One classmate said it was the Russians, as if it were an explanation in of itself. Another, also a fan of science fiction, claimed that it was something much more foreign. A third explained it away with what he called ‘erosion’- his father had clearly taught him the term, but left out the fact that it was an ungodly slow process. Plus it didn’t typically leave a flawless rut with perfect corners that cut across concrete and beneath half-sunk metal boats. No one quite knew what it was. What made it. I figure no one ever will. But the trough did resurface- that afternoon in fact.” “What happened?” I asked, leaning forward. McCullough paused, enjoying the drama. “I was eating lunch when the telephone rang. The call was for my father, from my Uncle Edward. He lived on the other side of Glenmore Lake, nearly directly across from the boathouse. He said that he’d looked out his window that morning to check his garden. Animals had been ravaging it lately. Brushing away the frost, he stopped dead in his tracks. There was no mess left by scavengers, not at all, but something far more ominous. A thin rut had emerged from the lake, cutting through his flowers. They were not torn but simply pressed down, mashed into the earth. The trough turned a full ninety degrees before disappearing down the street.” I nearly spat up in my glass. McCullough leaned back, looking rather satisfied. “And *that* is the story of the trough.” Bradley’s face was red. He shot up from his seat, shaking the table, glasses quivering. I steadied my beer. “That’s bull, and you know it!” he asserted. The whole pub stared at him. The jukebox screeched on a bad groove. Bradley gasped in and out, like the tide that covered the trough. “You said it yourself. Your passion is *science fiction*!” He jabbed his finger accusingly. “And *that* seems like the kind of stupid old story that would be in one of those dumb comics.” He crashed back down, draining his mug. “Don’t humour us old man. The *trough*? We ain’t that gullible.” I glanced back at McCullough, his eyes meeting mine. They hadn’t lost their gleam. He flashed his famous half-smile.