text: I’ve heard from a mutual that you’d like to move out to the countryside. They told me you want some place quiet, away from the rat race, more affordable even. I’m the last person on earth to tell anyone what to do with their lives, really, but I have to give you my two cents for this. There is a lot of *Nothing* in between the cities. You might not have heard of it, it happened a semester before you joined. It was the Davies expedition. A group of about twenty-five researchers, mostly students, from our college that went out to collect some data. They all vanished, all but one. That one was me. If you didn’t already know, I’m not surprised. I don’t like talking about it, but if it can change your mind about the move I will. The Davies expedition was named after my friend, and its lead, Howard P. Davies. He was only a year older than me, but several years my academic senior. He was young for a department head, and had multiple fields of focus. I didn’t then, and still don’t entirely understand Davies’ research. We weren’t even relatively close in fields of study. So I was a little confused when he asked me to come along the expedition. He told me that he had enough researchers to do the work, but needed more bodies to carry the equipment. It was going to be a short trip, two days at most, and it would pay well. Of course I said yes. The canyon we were going to was in a heavily protected wilderness. So protected we arrived with a government escort. They picked us up in huge cars with wheels that were almost as tall as I was. The escort took us down a heavily wooded valley that ran between two monstrous mountains. It had a crystal clear river running through it too. It was like being inside a painting at the louvre. That all ended at the canyon. There was a clear line drawn between the rest of the valley, and the canyon. The tree line stopped, and the grass stopped growing. Only the river kept going, because it couldn’t be stopped. I picked up my share of the equipment and looked over the edge. The canyon itself was relatively narrow at the top, but widened at the bottom. It was really more like an underground cave, but there was more than enough sunlight coming through to light the entire area. So here comes the first oddity I noticed. I should have been able to see the whole breadth of the canyon, but looking too far down or up its length the light would disappear. I was sure that the sun should have been able to light up the whole of the bottom, but it just didn’t. It wasn’t a normal kind of dark either, it was almost blinding. Like there was *Nothing* there. It was hard on the eyes. I blinked a couple times and grouped up with the rest. I noticed that none of the people with the escort were getting off. “Isn’t anyone going to stick around?” I asked “No sir,” said the man. “What about animals? I thought you’d leave someone behind in case of animal attacks or something.” “There aren’t any animals around here.” No animals? This far from humanity and he was telling me there were no animals? I could hardly believe it. I wanted to ask him more, but the government men were on a timetable and they were sticking to it. My mind was buzzing, not quite alarm bells, but thinking hard. I watched the escort leave, thinking I should probably have left with them. I watched them until they were completely gone. My mind got snapped back to the here and now when the expedition let out yowls and cheers. Apparently Davies had given a speech and I had missed it because I was too busy wishing I’d left with the escort. The expedition started shuffling to the edge of the canyon and I followed. The walls of the canyon actually had some pretty nice natural stairs along its walls. They almost looked carved. The canyon was deeper than it looked too. It would take us most of the day to get down to the bottom. I took one step down and in the blink of a second I was at the bottom with Davies' hand on my shoulder. It was disorienting, one moment stepping down, the next second on flat ground. Even the shadows shifted, it must have been later in the day. “You weren’t listening earlier, were you?” said Davies. “What-” “Happened?” “Yeah.” “It’s basically highway hypnosis. Something about this place lets you really lose yourself. Have you noticed the air?” I hadn’t, no, but when prompted I realized that I couldn’t feel the air. Down here the air was skin temperature. It was like being in a sensory deprivation tank. “I can see you have now,” said Davies. “What about the quiet, awfully quiet right?” It wasn’t quiet. It was the absence of sound. Totally and utterly, I couldn’t believe it, and it shouldn’t have been possible. For one, sounds should have been echoing between the canyon walls, and second was my mild tinnitus. After attending one concert too many I was stuck with some mild ringing in my ears. If it got too quiet it was hard not to notice, but not here. I was put into a stupor. “It’s okay, you’re not losing. It’s hard to notice *Nothing*, right?” he smiled. I’m not sure how he could be so at ease. This place was unsettling. “Come on, it’s fine. I think it’s a little creepy too. Let’s just set up our gear, get our measurements, and we’ll be out of here in a couple days.” A couple days. I dreaded the thought. Davies put me at ease though. He was probably just putting on a brave face. If the expedition lead is panicking then how can you ever be at calm, right? Davies gave me the cliff notes on working around here. Basically I had to be mindful of the noise, and the people around me. Keep your mind focused on them and you won’t enter that trance-like autopilot. I did as instructed and before long I had managed to put off my mind from the unsettling aspects of the canyon. The sounds of everyone working to set up our camp was comforting. When the set up work was done, everyone gathered around the kitchen area. The kitchen had a fire going, and everyone welcomed the relative heat vs the *Nothing* of the air around the rest of the camp. You could be mindful of the smell of food too. Everyone was bunched up there, chatting with more volume than needed. We wanted to fill the area with sound, because the quiet was dreadful, haunting. Night time arrived soon after though, and with it, a deeper *Nothing* than before. While the area around the camp had been well lit by the sun, that void of light I had seen from above was still present. The camp was surrounded by Nothing on either side. It was somehow worse at night too, because you had real darkness to compare it too. Real darkness was dark, black, a lack of light. The void on either side was Nothing, an absence of reality on either side. One by one people dropped off to sleep, prepping for the next day. It happened slowly because we were all reluctant to leave the campfire and head for our tents. Little by little though, people did leave, and soon it was just me and one other student. A girl named Sasha. Neither of us wanted to get away from the fire. We were terrified, but also tired. We couldn’t keep the fire going forever either. We needed to save fuel for our last night tomorrow. She did the hard part for both of us, snapping to her feet and dowsing the fire then quickly retreating to sit beside me. We tried to make idle chatter, just to keep the quiet away, but to little use. “Don’t you think there’s something wrong with the sky?” she said. Internally I cursed her. Why would you say something like that, in this place, on a night like this. I looked up, just briefly, terrified of what I might see. It was just a regular night sky. “No?” I replied. “Good,” she said, a little relieved. “Good. I’m going to bed.” She didn’t get up though, she fluffed up her backpack and laid her head on it. I gave her a reluctant good night, and fluffed up my own backpack. Was there something wrong with the sky? I asked myself, cursing her again. Why would she even put that thought out there. I took one last look at the sky before I let sleep take me. No, I thought, the sky is fine. It looks just like it does back home. The next day was much smoother than the first. A quiet settled into the camp, but most of us, including myself didn’t mind. In no time at all we had grown accustomed to it, and had relaxed our active mindfulness. It helped to know that it was our last night there. I was tasked with setting up cumbersome equipment, building and tearing it down for the researchers. When I wasn’t needed, I passed the time hanging out with Davies, who had some free time himself since most of his job was just overseeing the work of others. “So...,” I started to ask Davies, “what is this place?” Like I said, I wasn’t in his department, had no clue what he was studying. I didn’t understand what we were doing here. “For starters, it’s not just this place,” said Davies.” There’s places like this all over the U.S.. We don’t have a name for them yet, I’m thinking something like ‘Null Zones’.” “So then these places are...?” “Right now they’re just holes in data. Nothing more, really. I noticed them while looking at a colleague's work. They had been collecting data on animal populations. They had notes on population locations and their spreads. Something seemed familiar so I pinned those populations on a map and noticed these empty pockets. Moreover I recognized these pockets too, from collections of meteorological data. I decided to find other data sets that I could map out and recognized similar empty pockets in all of them.” In other words. *Nothing*. Davies had recognized a whole lotta *Nothing*. I recalled what the government man had told me. No animals in this area. This place was a void. One of Davies’ empty pockets, a Null Zone. It was Nothing. Before I could ask more, a researcher interrupted us to tell Davies that Sasha had gone missing. The girl I had spent the last of the previous night with. When Davies and the other researcher had caused an uproar about Sasha, everyone else began to note that their respective partners had gone missing as well. All of us had been in a stupor, let our guard down just a little too much. Davies gathered the entire expedition together to count heads. In the course of the day, we had lost just over half the expedition. Everyone, minus the researcher who told Davies about Sasha, had the same story. They had been hard at work on their tasks since morning, and when Davies snapped them back to reality with his uproar, noticed that their fellow researchers had disappeared in the blink of an eye. One second there, the other second, gone. There was a panic in the remaining members of the expedition, but Davies kept a cool head. He knew, as well as I, that the first twenty-four hours that someone is missing, are the most important. Every hour they weren’t being searched for increased the likelihood they wouldn’t be found alive. I saw him dig into his backpack for a satellite phone. Myself and a few others had been entrusted with one in the case of emergencies. His face turned sour. I fished out my sat phone as well and knew why. Down here in the canyon, we had no signal. Davies had seen me fruitlessly try and make a call with the sat phone. We looked at each other and knew that someone would have to go up top to make the emergency call, to get a search party as soon as possible. To be clear, the horror of the situation hadn’t escaped us. People had gone missing in the middle of the day, in the middle of camp, without anyone noticing. The practical reality of the situation however, kept us grounded. Ultimately Davies made the executive decision as expedition lead, to go back up the canyon alone. Such a decision wouldn’t have been necessary except that the trip back up would take longer than the trip down, and it was already mid day. Whoever went up, would be climbing a steep canyon wall in the middle of the night. Davies got ready to leave, gathering the minimum to make the trip, just a lamp and some dry rations. A few others had decided to join him, citing that it would be safer to make the trip together, but in truth, I’m sure they just wanted to leave this place as soon as possible. So that was that. One part of the expedition would stay behind to make the safer climb at dawn tomorrow and the other would go up the canyon to get help as soon as possible. I said my goodbyes to Davies, and it was hard. It would be the last time I ever saw Davies again. When he left, I was too tired to cry, or do much of anything. So were the others. There were about ten of us left then, down from a team of about twenty-four. Night came, and with it more dread. We lit the campfire as soon as an inkling of dark came over the canyon. We all gathered around the campfire. I looked up the canyon wall, searching for Davies’ team. They should have been somewhat visible in the darkness of the canyon since they would be making the climb assisted by lamp light, but I saw nothing. Then again I had made the trip down in a trance, and did not know the path up. I held on to the thought that perhaps the way up curved around corners that you couldn’t see at night time. I patted my thoughts with the idea that Davies was just out of sight, somewhere up there, climbing back up the canyon walls. Time passed in laps of awareness. We all tried to maintain the mindfulness that Davies had instructed us in, but it was growing increasingly hard. There was also the issue of those of us that remained. No one wanted to acknowledge it, but we were all gathered around the fire and there were fewer and fewer of us than before. At that time I counted six left. All of them worried, and panicked in their silent isolated bubbles. We had been quietly losing people since Davies’ team had left. The fire started to die some time later. The fuel was dwindling, and soon we would be left alone with the darkness and the void on either side. We would be stuck down here with the Nothing that surrounded us.That’s when it hit me. Just as the fire died, it hit me. There was something wrong with the sky. We were far into a great protected wilderness. Far and away from civilization, there wasn’t any light pollution. SO WHERE WERE THE STARS. We should have been able to see the milky way out here, billions upon billions of stars should have been twinkling in the sky but there were hardly any. Just a few miserable twinkles. “Where are the stars!?” I tried to scream, but nothing came out. I looked to the others, frenzy clear on my face just as it was on theirs. They had made the same realization, the terror was clear on their faces. It was the last I saw of the others. The fire died out, and I only had the miserable few stars to keep company. There were so few I could count them, and they were blinking out of existence. The night sky was turning into a great blanket of *Nothing* right before my eyes. I must have willed myself to stand up and run. Despite the loss of all my senses I must have run. The air was indistinguishable from my skin, there was no noise, there was no sight. I had only my mind, and the faintest inkling of self left. Somehow I stood up and ran, I know it, and it saved me. The rescue party found me later the next day, babbling near a waterfall. At a guess, I must have run toward the booming sound of the river up top crashing into the canyon below. They found me screaming, spouting random gibberish, any noise to keep away the nothing. Later, much later, when suspicions of foul play had been cleared, I was allowed to read Davies’ journal, which had been swiftly recovered but kept for evidence. I tried to read through it, but as I said I wasn’t in his field and understood little. What little I could understand was most of what I had experienced myself. There was only one more horror waiting for me at the end of his notes. *The Null Zones were moving*. In his notes. I quote. “Conclusion: More in depth study needed, original hypothesis invalidated. Originally I thought the Null Zones spawned away from large population centers, but the readings here suggest that they migrated. Rather than large population centers being built away from the Null Zones as I hypothesized, it was the Null Zones that had been “chased away” by the life of large cities.” They move. Places like the canyon move. So I beg you to take me seriously friend, do not move out to the countryside. You may be fine for a while, but one day you might wake to the peace and serenity is just the absence of sound. You may even notice that the air seems strange, and wonder when the last time you saw any wildlife was. By then it would probably already be too late. Stay in the city friend, where it’s safe from the *Nothing*.