The Hole Behind The Gym
Chapter 5: The Hole Behind the Gym
Nobody told Takeshi Goda that Saturday morning was for sleeping in.
He was already standing in the vacant lot behind Nobita's building at seven forty-five, holding a baseball bat, shouting.
"Get up!" he yelled, for the fourth time. "Get up! We're playing baseball!"
Lights came on in the Nobi apartment. Then the curtain moved. A small face appeared, blanket still wrapped around its head.
"It's Saturday," said Nobita's face.
"I know it's Saturday," said Giant. "That's why we're playing. No school. Hurry up."
Nobita disappeared. The curtain stopped moving.
Giant waited exactly thirty seconds, then yelled again.
By eight o'clock, everyone had arrived.
Suneo came first, because he lived closest and because he had made the mistake of looking out his window when he heard Giant shouting, which Giant had noticed. Shizuka came next, in her pink baseball cap, carrying her glove. Nobita came last, still wearing his pajama top underneath his jacket, which he didn't realize until Giant pointed it out.
"You look ridiculous," said Giant.
"It was seven forty-five," said Nobita.
"Stop complaining. You're on my team."
"You always say that, but then I always bat last and you never—"
"Stop complaining," said Giant again.
Doraemon arrived on his own. He had learned, over many years, that showing up when Giant called was faster than hiding and being found anyway.
They walked to the park near the school. It had a flat stretch of grass and, just past the left-field fence, the edge of the forest that backed up against the school gym. Nobody went into the forest much. It was thick and overgrown and there was nothing interesting in it.
"Left field is out if it goes past the fence," Suneo announced.
"Left field is fine," said Giant.
"The forest is full of poison ivy."
"It is not full of poison ivy."
"My cousin got poison ivy in a forest that looked exactly like that."
"Stop talking and pitch," said Giant.
The first three batters hit small, manageable balls. Nobita's went straight up and came back down into his own hands, which was at least interesting. Suneo hit a line drive that rolled past second base and stopped neatly at Shizuka's feet.
Then Giant stepped up to bat.
He rolled his neck. He planted his feet. He spun the bat once over his head in a wide, dramatic arc, which the others had learned to step back from.
Suneo pitched.
Giant swung.
The sound was like a thunderclap.
The ball shot off the bat in a straight line, still climbing, over the heads of the outfielders, over the left-field fence, and directly into the dark tangle of the forest.
Everyone watched it go.
"That's out of bounds," said Suneo.
"I'll get it," said Giant.
"You said left field past the fence was out."
"I changed my mind. I'll get it." Giant was already walking. "Keep your positions. I'll be back in two minutes."
"We should all—" Shizuka started.
But Giant was already through the fence gap.
The forest was cool and dim and smelled like wet leaves.
Giant pushed through the first line of bushes, boots crushing twigs, and stopped to listen. No sound of a rolling ball. He'd hit it hard enough that it was probably buried somewhere in the undergrowth.
He pushed deeper.
The trees were closer together here. The light went from pale morning gold to a murky grey-green. Giant didn't mind. He'd played in worse.
He found the ball after about three minutes of searching — wedged between two roots at the base of a big oak tree. He bent down to pick it up, and that was when he saw the hole.
It was about a meter across. Round, like someone had cut it with a very large compass. And it was glowing.
Not glowing like a flashlight or a lamp. The light pulsed. Purple and dark, the way a bruise looks in a certain light. It wasn't threatening, exactly. It was just there. Sitting in the ground of the forest behind the school, pulsing.
Giant looked at it.
He looked at it for about four seconds.
He had not inherited the family trait of looking at unusual things for a long time before touching them.
He crouched down and reached one hand toward the edge.
The hole pulsed. Once. Twice.
Giant's hand crossed the edge.
And then — the ground disappeared.
He fell.
Not far. Maybe three seconds of falling, which feels longer when you weren't expecting it.
He landed on both feet, bent his knees, and stood up.
He was somewhere else.
The sky was the color of a television that had lost its signal — grey and faintly buzzing, with no clouds, no sun, and no horizon that he could identify. The light came from everywhere and nowhere. Everything was flat and dim.
He was standing on a wide grey plain. In the distance, he could make out shapes. Buildings, perhaps, or structures — tall, blocky, made of something that looked like stone but wrong, like stone that had forgotten what it was for.
Giant turned around. The hole was there — a bright disc in the air behind him, showing the forest floor, the oak tree, the ordinary morning light. He could have stepped back through.
He didn't.
Instead, he squinted at the structures and started walking toward them.
The city — if that's what it was — appeared gradually. Streets appeared under his feet. The streets were made of the same grey stone as everything else, and they were very clean. Too clean, for a city. No litter. No weeds growing between cracks. No smell of cooking or exhaust or someone's laundry drying.
People appeared too.
They walked in straight lines. Three or four to a column, evenly spaced, all facing the same direction. Their heads were down. They made no sound. None of them looked at each other.
One column passed within two meters of Giant, heading left. He stared at them. Nobody stared back.
"Hey," said Giant.
Nobody stopped.
"Hey!" He stepped in front of the column. The first person in line simply stepped around him, smooth and automatic, like water rerouting around a stone. The others followed.
Giant turned and watched them go.
Something felt wrong about this place. Not in a way he could name. Just wrong, the way a photo of someone's face is wrong when all the expression has been taken out of it.
He kept walking.
More people. All the same. All walking in lines, all heading somewhere with the calm certainty of people who had given up deciding where they were going.
A child passed him, no older than Nobita. Head down. No backpack, no lunch box, no nothing.
"Hey, kid," Giant said.
The child walked on.
Giant grabbed his shoulder — gently, for Giant — and the child stopped. Turned. Looked up at Giant with eyes that were completely blank. Not frightened. Not curious. Just empty, in a way that eyes shouldn't be.
"You okay?" Giant said.
The child stared at him.
Then the child smiled. It was the most unsettling smile Giant had ever seen, because it was completely correct — all the right muscles in all the right positions — but there was nothing behind it.
"Everything is fine," the child said, in a flat voice. "Everything is always fine."
Then he turned and kept walking.
Giant watched him go.
He didn't like this place.
The shadow soldiers appeared without warning.
One moment there was nothing. The next moment there were four of them, standing in a ring around Giant. They were tall — taller than Giant — and they were made of something that was not quite solid. Smoke, perhaps, that had decided to wear the shape of armor.
They didn't speak. They just stood there.
Giant, being Giant, did the obvious thing.
He punched the nearest one.
His fist went straight through.
His arm went through too, up to the elbow, like punching fog. There was a faint resistance, like pushing through cold water, and then nothing. No impact. No pain on his knuckles. No shadow soldier falling over.
Giant pulled his arm back and stared at his hand.
He punched again, faster, with his left. Same result. His knuckles met nothing.
"What — " He punched a third time, with both hands together. A big double-hammer blow that would have knocked a wall down. It passed through the shadow soldier like the soldier wasn't there.
The four of them closed in a little.
Giant stepped back. His mind was working, which it did when Giant was annoyed enough to make it work.
He couldn't punch them. They weren't solid. Fine.
He grabbed the nearest one by the shoulders instead and tried to throw it. His hands found nothing. He tried to kick. His foot went through. He tried a running shoulder charge that had worked on bigger kids than these.
He ran through the soldier entirely and ended up on the other side.
The four forms rearranged themselves around him again.
Giant stood in the center, breathing hard.
He was very strong. He had always been very strong. Strength was his whole thing, the thing that made him Giant. But his strength worked by hitting things, and these things could not be hit.
He looked back at the hole in the air. Still there, behind him. The forest was visible through it, morning light and oak trees and the sound of Suneo complaining about something, faint with distance.
He could have gone back.
He thought about the child with the empty smile.
He stayed.
The shadow soldiers closed in around him from all four sides, and Giant lifted both fists and got ready to fight something he could not possibly hit, because that was all he knew how to do, and stopping did not feel right.
The grey sky buzzed. The city made no sound.
Giant stood in the middle of it, loud and angry and completely stuck.
And then the portal behind him flickered, and began to dim.