"The Habitsville Planetarium WILL change your life"
At least, that’s what the latest Yelp review says. There’s a 5-star rating (pun not intended, just unavoidable), but not a single word in the space for a description. It is, surprisingly, the only available review for the facility.
I’m not looking into the Planetarium because I’m bored, or want to know more about space, or because I'm looking for a cliché first date spot.
My sudden interest in with my town’s Planetarium is rooted in a phenomenon that I’ve been tracking for the past three months or so: Ever since the Habitsville Planetarium’s Grand Reopening six months ago, the population of Habitsville has decreased by one, every month, every second Friday at 7pm.
I know, it may not seem like a lot. 1 person dead or gone a month could be considered low for a big city. But Habitsville is a tiny town, where everyone’s known everyone since they were born, and no one ever leaves. Since I’m not on a big story at the moment, I think this newfound trend requires my attention.
The Planetarium, up until six months ago, had been closed to the public for as long as I’ve been alive. But after recently acquiring some new funding—anonymous funding, as far as I can tell—they are now able to reopen to the public.
And every second Friday night since, at 7pm, I’ve seen it—the count on the Town of Habitsville’s official website, right under ‘Population’, ticks down by 1.
I won’t begin to go into the details of my journey to find the human being that actually updates our town’s website—it involved an incredibly long and perilous internet search, a day spent wandering around town, and eventually a fake address that led to an abandoned warehouse.
But I know it’s not a glitch in the system. People that I’ve known all my life, constants in my day-to-day, are just gone. Another one of my coworkers at the paper. My favorite waitress at the best restaurant in town. A guy I went to high school with. They’ve all disappeared, one a month for the past six months.
And what do they all have in common?
They all purchased tickets to The Habitsville Planetarium, for the highly advertised Friday Night Special: A Night Amongst The Stars.
So there I was, the second Friday of the month, at 7pm, sitting amongst the crowd in the darkened Planetarium.
I was nervous, to be sure. Although I knew it didn’t make much sense, and it was more of a hunch than any sort of hard evidence, there was still something frightening about being in the same place as the six people who have seemingly vanished off of the face of the Earth.
There was a large crowd, which wasn’t totally unexpected—there are limited things to do in our small town, so people will take what they can get on a Friday night. It had tiered seating, and dimmed lights on the walls.
The main difference was the screen—it was magnificent. Rather than a flat display directly in front, it was a huge glass surface that stretched from the floor in the very front, over the heads of the audience to the back. It was curved at the edges, and reflected the little light in the room. It must have had some sort of glass coating over it, like a television screen.
There was a family seated in front of me, a husband, wife, and two children. The kids were already impatient with their outing, and were bickering and smacking at each other, as each parent tried their best to pretend it wasn’t happening. When the boy let out a particularly loud squeal, the father snapped.
“Jamie, cut it out, now,” he said gruffly, grabbing the small boy’s wrist and pushing his arm roughly back towards himself. I winced. I had seen this sort of parent before. Both children settled, the boy rubbing his wrist gingerly and giving his father a reproachful look.
“Tim, don’t be so rough with him,” the mother said, though her voice wasn’t exactly forceful.
“These kids act like animals,” Tim muttered. He looked impatiently around the room. “When is this thing going to start anyway? I already have to take a leak.”
The woman sighed. “Be patient hun, I’m sure things are going to start up soon.”
The man sat lower in his chair for a second. A few moments passed in silence, then the kids started tentatively playing again. When one smacked the other a little too hard, causing their sibling to let out a loud wail, the father stood up. “That’s it. I’m going to the bathroom.” Then, he walked out of the theater, leaving his wife to comfort his two small children.
To be honest, I too was thinking about going to the bathroom before the show started. But, not wanting to run into Tim, I decided to stay put.
It was a good thing I did, because a few moments after he left, a voice spoke through the speakers surrounding the audience. “Good evening. The Habitsville Planetarium’s very special event, A Night Amongst the Stars, is about to begin. Please, silence your cellphones, sit back, and enjoy.” There was a sound when the intercom turned off—a weird gust of air. But I didn’t pay it any mind, thinking it just the announcer’s breath against a hot mic.
I did as I was told, and soon, the lights began to dim even lower. It was completely black above us, and a hush quickly fell over the crowd. I looked up to that great impressive screen before us, but for a while, nothing showed up.
Then, something odd happened.
There was a moment, only a second or so, where the entire room felt strange.
It was like that sensation as you’re drifting off to sleep, where your mind begins to travel into dream-like, illogical thoughts. Until, suddenly, you’re jerked awake, with a confused mind and a pounding heart.
I looked around, trying to see if anyone had just felt what I had.
But then, the screen turned on, and my attention was turned elsewhere.
It was beautiful. The view was, quite literally, out of this world. It was different from the common way we view space—flat, lifeless, a black background dotted with spots of white. There was so much depth to it. The sense of eternity, of true infinity, is usually so out of reach to humanity. And yet, here it was, displayed before a crowd for a small fee of ten bucks per head.
Even the children in front of me had calmed down, their tiny heads tilted upwards, eyes reflecting the swirling designs of stars and dust that now filled their view.
A calming, female voice reverberated overhead:
Welcome, citizens of Habitsville, to the Kuiper Belt. Located just outside the orbit of Neptune, this collection of icy asteroids is thought to be remnants leftover from the very creation of the solar system.
As the voice spoke, the view on the screen drifted lazily through the pieces of rock and particles that floated by weightlessly. Then, the camera tilted slightly. It was strange—it was as though I could feel the tilt, deep in my stomach. Like watching a video from the point of view of someone on a roller coaster, our bodies experience phantom sensations based on what we’re looking at. That’s what this was.
Right?
Coming into view now is the dwarf planet, Haumea.
There, on the horizon, was an entire planet.
It was oddly shaped, not like the usual planets you see in photographs, or in sci-fi movies. It was unusually flat, like it had once been a sphere, until some giant hand came and smashed a fist down on top of it.
Little is known about Haumea. What we do know is that it has an unusually elongated shape. It has two moons, and an incredibly short day of a mere four hours. It is the fastest-spinning large object in the solar system.
If you look closely, you might be able to see the thin ring of debris that orbits the planet.
Once she mentioned it, I could see. It was a wide circle around this huge rock, which was spinning so fast I could actually see the movement. The bits and pieces in the ring weren’t slow, either—the entire entity had the feeling that it was whizzing by, vibrating with some unseen energy.
As we crept closer, I felt something strange.
There was this deep rumbling. At first, I thought it was the air conditioning in the Planetarium. But, as the film grew nearer to the planet, it grew stronger. I could feel it, through my feet on the ground, and my back against the seat.
And then, I heard it.
SCRAPE
The audience’s heads turned to the right of the theater. There had been a distinctive sound this time. A sharp scrape, coming from the wall.
“What was that Mommy?” the small boy in front of me asked his mother.
“Nothing, sweetheart,” she said, though her face was lined with worry.
Because of Haumea’s distance from the sun, it has a temperature of negative 241 degrees Celsius, or negative 402 degrees Fahrenheit.
As the video passed through the last of the rocks that made up the ring, the rumbling I had felt deepened. It now reverberated in the hollow of my chest, and I could even feel it in my teeth. Then—
SCRAPE
We all turned our heads to the left this time, as the squealing sound of metal being bent resounded from the other side of the theater. The children had shrunk down in their seats now, obviously frightened, but this time, their mother offered no words of consolation.
Since Haumea’s discovery in 2004, there has been no sign of life on the planet’s surface.
Until, around two years ago.
SCRAPE
The sound came from behind us now. We all twisted around to face the back, but only saw the back of the Planetarium. My hands were shaking now, both from the heavy rumbling that now made it difficult to hear the voice over the speakers, and from my own fear.
Then, I saw something.
It was a large, black shape, that traveled from the top of the screen overhead to the bottom at the very front. It was so quick, it could have been a flicker of the film. But it didn’t take up the whole space, and when it reached the front, we heard it again, right there at the start of the theater.
SCRAPE
The following presentation is rated R. View discretion is advised.
We turned back around, our attention turned to the sights in front of us.
I heard that sound again. Not the scraping, or the rumbling. That suctioning I heard at the very beginning, right after the speaker announced the start of the show.
Then, the woman in front of me screamed.
Soon I saw him too. There, floating up and outward from somewhere behind the camera, arms and legs floating gracefully around him like the tendrils of a jellyfish, was Tim.
His body was limp and blue, and as he made his way closer to the screen, I could see he had a layer of frost and ice over his skin. He came so near the surface of the glass that I thought he might go off camera—
But then, he pressed up against it.
We could see him, sliding cold and hard against the curved glass, like a bug caught on a windshield. His face was pressed against it now, his nose turning black at the end. A bit more pressure, and then the tip merely broke off, floating back behind his body and joining the ring that danced around Haumea.
The children and their mother were dumbstruck.
“Daddy?” the small boy asked in a quiet voice.
Then, the shape came again. So fast and dark that I couldn’t truly see it.
I could, however, make out two distinct things:
One, a long, scaled tail that dragged across the Planetarium’s surface with a terrible scrape.
Two, the wet, gaping mouth that spread wide and swallowed Tim whole.
Then, as quickly as it had come, it was gone.
The voice overhead spoke again, politely and calmly:
That concludes the Habitsville Planetarium’s Friday Night Special, A Night Amongst the Stars. Please, remain seated until the lights come back on in the theater, and we have made our descent.
Comments