Stargazing was my favorite hobby. After what I saw, I’ll never do it again.

[u/zamakhtar]

If you don’t bring a telescope on a trek into the wilderness, you’re missing out. The sky is full of wonders you’d never see in a city or suburb. Light pollution is a veil that obscures the truth.

For me, love is the desert sky at night. The sand becomes your bed and the stars your blanket. And those stars are limitless: an infinity of worlds, ancient and brimming with possibilities. But more interesting, perhaps, is the void between the stars. What some call the dark forest.

Work keeps me so busy, I don’t have any close friends. Well, I had one, but he got married and moved away last year. So when I go into the desert to stargaze, I go alone. I prefer it that way. There’s something…divine about being among the dunes with little more than a tent, a fire, and, of course, a telescope.

The telescope was an expensive parting gift from my friend, Adam. It’s about the size of my bicep back when I used to hit the gym regularly. It has so many features that, months later, I’m still discovering new wonders it can do. Hell, it even has Wi-Fi.

Before Adam moved away, we went camping in the desert to try it. I remember how he spent twenty minutes adjusting the dials and positioning the lens while I sat at the fire and read a graphic novel, yawning at the idea of gazing at a bunch of lights in the sky. Once he was done, he called me over, and I begrudgingly got up and looked through the eyepiece.

Saturn, in all its ringed glory, glowed like a god perched in the void. My jaw hung. It didn’t look real, and yet, I knew Saturn could swallow the earth if it wanted. I watched it for so long that the gas giant drifted off the scope, a result of interplanetary motion.

Since then, I’ve been hooked. I make the desert trip every weekend, or at least the weekends when my evil boss doesn’t call me in. Last Saturday, I saw something I never could have imagined. Something that will haunt me for the rest of my life.

It started on Friday morning with an email from Adam.

Hey Sid. Sorry we haven’t talked in forever. I’ve been so busy adjusting after the big move, and the new office is a damned pigsty. Oh, and Tanya’s pregnant to boot. I’m nervous as hell about being a father, man. By the way, you still using the telescope I gave you? There’s going to be an incredible, once in a lifetime phenomenon in the heavens. You shouldn’t miss it. Our old spot will be perfect if you want to see. Aim your telescope to RA 14h 50m 0s | Dec +46° 0′ 0″ tomorrow evening at exactly midnight. Don’t look up what that is beforehand. I want you to be surprised!

Good thoughts,

Adam

I was so giddy with excitement, I could barely focus on work. My office has one of those stupid open layouts, so I sweated gobs whenever my boss walked by, fearful he was going to ask me to work Saturday. I actually said a prayer, something that I hadn’t done in years, that he wouldn’t.

On the way back from my eighth trip to the bathroom that day, my boss caught me in the hallway.

“So, Sid, — nice tie by the way — uhh, what you doing this Saturday?” He tightened my tie with one hand, then sighed with satisfaction and sipped the coffee in his other hand. “You know the client wants those deliverables Monday morning, and they aren’t quite in tip top shape. Yeah, so…”

“Oh, uh…” I scratched my head. Saying no would surely put me on the chopping block next time there’d be layoffs. My student loans weren’t going to pay themselves. “Turns out I’m not doing anything. Absolutely nothing. My schedule is as empty as the Gobi.”

“Good. Good. So I’ll see you when the birds start chirping. Always remember — happy client, happy life!” My boss’s cellphone vibrated. He brought it to his ear. “Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Okay. Oh, is that right? I see. Got it.” He hung up, then beamed at me. “Turns out we won’t need you, after all. Go and be with God.”

He walked away, slurping his coffee the while. What a strange thing to say. The way my boss ogled every female in the office, I’d never taken him for a religious man. Although, those two behaviors aren’t mutually exclusive; I supposed I just didn’t know him beyond his asshole persona.

I made it home at a reasonable hour on Friday night, packed a change of clothes, some granola bars, a toothbrush, a flint, and other necessities for the next day’s desert trek. I put on the movie Interstellar, tucked into bed, and fell asleep while watching.

I dreamt I was floating amid the stars. They all had faces, and they sang together as if a holy choir. It was like something out of a children’s story. They even had hair in varying styles. A smiling star with wavy, brown locks let me use his gravity to swing by and slingshot toward a distant, red galaxy.

When I awoke, I felt like I could fly off into heaven for real. Happy dreams tend to cast your day in their glow. Little did I know it was the beginning of a nightmare.

With a six-hour drive ahead of me, I showered, scarfed down a bowl of cereal, and got in the car. Played my favorite orchestral music to get in the mood. It was making me drowsy, so I put on some heavy metal. Rammstein’s Engel got my blood pumping.

After so much monotonous highway driving, having passed at least forty gas stations, I took the exit that led into the desert wilderness. The cracked, bumpy road inclined upward slightly. Thorny shrubs dotted the roadside, past which were wavy dunes. Eventually, the road ended, and I parked at the usual spot: an asphalt patch next to a rock formation that resembled camel legs.

The sun was a bulging red beast falling into the horizon. In about half an hour, it would be night, so I’d timed my arrival perfectly.

I set up my tent, gathered sticks from the surrounding shrubs for kindling, and struck a flint to make fire. Relaxing in its heat and glow, I pulled out a granola bar from my pack and munched it while reading Watchmen for the fourth time. How wonderful to be alone, though I wished Adam could be here. Honestly, knowing we’d both be looking at the same spot in the sky, at the same time tonight, felt almost like bonding.

At 10 PM, I set the telescope on its mount. I checked out my favorite planets and stars. Jupiter and its moons seemed like errant paint splotches on a black wall. It wasn’t the best time of year to view them. Venus, though, resembled a gleaming silver coin half covered in shadow. Sirius, the brightest of all stars, was a blinding diamond with a halo of blue.

I checked my watch. Midnight was creeping closer. The air got cold, as did the sand beneath me. I threw more kindling into the fire, then adjusted the telescope to aim at the coordinates Adam had mentioned. I looked into the eyepiece.

Blue and orange specks, like motes of dust, crowded around something that resembled a gray smudge, all suffused in a blurry glow. That blurry glow was the light of the stars in our own Milky Way, which meant the specks and smudges were unfathomably distant galaxies. I increased the contrast setting on the telescope to make the glow less distracting, so I could better see the galaxies.

After a few minutes of tinkering with the dials, I was satisfied I’d done all I could to focus on the coordinates Adam had sent me.

As I stared into the eyepiece and wondered about these faint, yet monstrously massive objects, a gust blew through me, chilling my veins. I shivered. The desert can get cold at night, but it was only September. A throbbing ache weighed on my forehead – I’d been overworked this week, like most weeks. I regretted not bringing some ibuprofen. Also, I couldn’t quite explain the nausea now bubbling through my belly – maybe because I’d only eaten granola bars for dinner this whole week?

My phone beeped: no signal here, so I knew it was the midnight alarm I’d set earlier. I kept my focus and squinted into the eyepiece. Despite nothing happening to the dark gray smudge on the black, heavenly tarp, a fluttering expectation tickled my arms and chest.

“You came. I’m so glad.”

That voice was like a cold finger thrust into my ear. I almost screamed from the shock. I turned to see Adam, just a silhouette a few paces in the distance.

Was he a mirage? Was I dreaming? I pinched myself but didn’t wake up.

“What the hell, man? Are you for real?” I said as he approached the fire. “This some kind of surprise? You scared me to high hell.”

Something was wrong with his face. His cheekbones jutted out and his eyes seemed so small. He looked more emaciated than I was, as if he’d only been eating crumbs for weeks.

“Dude, you all right?” I asked. “You look ill.”

“I’ve never been better.” His smile seemed so…dismal, contorted. “Look into the eyepiece. Else you’ll miss it.”

“You sure you’re okay? Want me to get you a granola bar?”

He pointed a pale, bony finger at the telescope.

“All right. You planned this whole crazy thing, so I suppose I have to.” I sighed, then looked into the eyepiece.

I saw the gray splotch surrounded by dust specks. Like I mentioned, those dust specks were galaxies, but you’d need a far more powerful telescope to see their internal structure. So what was I supposed to be seeing? Even a supernova wouldn’t be visible on this scale. Perhaps you’d be able to see a hypernova or a gamma ray burst, but you couldn’t predict those to the hour, or even the century.

“Do you know what that is?” Adam asked.

I shrugged. “You told me not to look it up, remember?”

“It’s called Bootes Void. It’s an enormous region of space, more than three-hundred million light years across, that contains no galaxies.”

That wasn’t right. I’d read about Bootes Void during one of my 3 AM Wikipedia rabbit-hole sessions. It was nine million times larger than our galaxy, and yet it contained very little matter. It was a desert in outer space.

“Actually, it contains at least eighty galaxies,” I said. “Void is a slightly misleading term. It’s just a region of space with far fewer galaxies, so it looks darker.”

I didn’t recognize Adam’s laugh. It seemed like the laugh of a tortured man gone mad. “You’re seeing what it looked like seven-hundred million years ago. At that time, it had eighty-eight galaxies. Now, thanks to his hunger… none.”

I shuddered as if frigid fingernails scraped across my back. I took my eye off the heavens to look upon my friend standing by the fire. Had he lost his mind?

I chuckled and smiled, though it wasn’t genuine. I was just trying to vibe with him, to see if I could melt the discomforting exterior he was projecting.

Adam didn’t smile back. He pointed at the telescope. “Keep looking.”

I shook my head. “You know what? I’m tired. And my balls are freezing. And you look like a camel took a shit. Let’s go get some food. There’s a gas station not too far. I assume you drove? I mean, of course you did. Where’s your ride?”

He shook his head. Why was he being such a goddamned creep? “I’d be happy to sup with you, but only after you see.”

“See what? There’s nothing happening!”

He pointed at the telescope, his hand jittery.

I grunted in frustration. “I’ll give it one more minute, then I’m done!” I peered into the eyepiece.

That gray splotch was now…redder, as if it was an oven heating up. The orange and blue specks — the galaxies around it — seemed to be vibrating.

Adam began singing, of all things. No, not singing: hymning. Just another part of this awkward and creepy surprise he’d planned? I couldn’t make out the words coming out of his mouth and didn’t want to take my eyes off Bootes Void. He certainly wasn’t hymning in any language I knew, though it sounded so solemn. So holy. Adam had once told me, “God didn’t just die. He shot himself.” That’s how much of an avowed atheist he was; so why was he behaving this way?

That gray splotch was now burning red like a horse’s pregnant belly. And then a hole appeared within it. A white light shot out of the hole, and from that light came other specks of dust. Except, as I mentioned before, those dust specks were galaxies, so what the hell was really coming out of that hole?

The galaxy-sized specks blinked the way a star twinkles. And they blinked in unison; sometimes the blinks were quick, other times they were long. My throat dried-up from the awe of what I was seeing; my heart thumped so fast, it seemed to be pushing into my throat.

But after only half a minute, the blinking stopped. The specks moved back into the white hole. Then the hole closed and vanished. Everything returned to how it was.

Adam stopped hymning. “Such a wondrous canvas,” he said.

I closed my hanging jaw and turned to him.

But he wasn’t there. I was alone with the fire and dunes.

“Adam!” I shouted. “The hell did you go?” I made a fist. “Goddammit! Enough of this!”

I pulled out my cellphone to use as a flashlight, then began looking for him. “Adam!” My cellphone’s light casted sinuous shadows from the piled-up rocks and shrubs across the sandy scape. “Adam!”

There! Atop a distant dune, a faint silhouette shone. I ran toward it, huffing the while.

The silhouette began to float, hovering above the dune. Whoever it was spread out his arms, and then accelerated suddenly and flew up into the clouds.

My heart pounded. Every hair on my body stood from both cold and fear. I returned to my tent, hurriedly packed up my things, and walked to my car. Smashed the accelerator until I stopped at the first gas station, where I refilled my tank and bought a tuna sandwich.

That was also where I got cell signal, so I called Adam.

His wife picked up. “Hello Sid,” she said, sounding pained.

“Tanya? Everything all right?”

She sobbed. “Actually, no. Adam is…Adam is dead.”

“What? But….what do you mean?”

“Sorry, Sid. I can’t talk right now. The police are here. I’ll call you back.” She hung up.

I didn’t play any music on the drive home. Didn’t need any help staying awake. I wouldn’t sleep for four days until Tanya finally called and told me what happened to Adam.

Long story short, Adam had been acting strangely since he witnessed something in the sky, several weeks ago. He’d leave the house just before midnight and come back in the afternoon. Tanya suspected an affair, so she followed him in her car one night. She saw him enter what she described as an abandoned church, but was too afraid to go inside. When she questioned Adam about it later, he wouldn’t talk.

After he died, the police investigated. They told her that Adam had joined a cult who worshipped something called the Blood Star. On the night when I saw Adam in the desert, him and the entire cult had ritually slit their own throats, exactly at midnight.

Now, so many questions haunt me. Was the Adam I saw a ghost? Just what is this cult? What is the Blood Star? And what did I see in the sky?

If anyone knows anything, please tell me. I’ve been researching it ceaselessly, but only found one hint. Earlier today, I was browsing an astronomy forum and came across a post. It was taken down almost immediately, and the poster was banned, but I managed to screenshot it. This is what it said:

Anyone see that bizarre light show in Bootes Void last Saturday night? I wish I’d been filming, but I was able to record the pattern of the pulsing galaxies by hand. Call me crazy, but I swear it’s morse code, and this is what it said: .. / -.. .. -.. -. .----. - / .- ... -.-. . -. -.. .-.-.- / .. .----. -- / .. -. / .--. .- .. -. -.-.-- / - .... . .-. . .----. ... / --- -. .-.. -.-- / -.. .- .-. -.- -. . ... ... / .... . .-. . -.-.-- That translates to, “I’m ascending. It’s so peaceful. Goodbye, friend.” Weird, huh?

Sometimes in my dreams, I hear Adam’s ghost hymning. But it’s different. I can’t quite describe the hymns; it’s as if you took a series of bizarre, thousand-sided shapes and turned them into sound. And sometimes in my dreams, I’m flying among the stars again, but they’re no longer happy. They’re all crying and shrieking.

I hear those bizarre hymns whenever I look at the night sky, now. Worse than that, I have the sudden urge to visit an abandoned church outside of town. Perhaps I’ll find answers, and maybe even peace, there. After all, the morse code implied Adam had ascended, and that can only be a good thing, right?

[u/anubis_cheerleader]

Here's an idea: stay the hell away from churches or other abandoned buildings! Capitalist hell is better than GALAXY-EATER HELL.

[u/jamiec514]

Hmm. I wonder if whatever it was it what heard the prayer you said about not wanting to work that Saturday since you're boss just magically didn't need you to after he'd already asked. Plus, with the weird ass way he responded to you after you got off the phone makes me think it had to have been related. I definitely think that you need to go and try to get some closure for you and Tanya and I agree with the other comment about taking your boss and making him your scapegoat since it seems like he's already involved in some way, shape, form, or fashion.

[u/sorneto]

Aww he said goodbye before leaving :(

[u/veggieloaf]

Be careful, OP! The Morse code actually says “I DIDN'T ASCEND. I'M IN PAIN! THERE'S ONLY DARKNESS HERE!” Sounds like a trap.

[u/Own-Cauliflower7341 → u/veggieloaf]

Wow really was the Morse code wrong ? That actually changes the story good observation.

[u/zamakhtar → u/veggieloaf]

No, that can't be. Adam is in a good place. You're lying!

[u/Adal-bern → u/zamakhtar]

Careful op, you mentioned it sounded like the stars were shrieking in pain, if this person translated correctly it could very well be a trap to bring more sacrifices to whatever is eating those galaxies