145 - Thin Ground

Unnatural Phenomenon: Thin Ground

There’s a spot in a remote section of Sydney’s Royal National Park, out by the cliffs overlooking the ocean. Nothing immediately marks it as strange from a distance and the terrain makes it hard to get to which is why it went undetected for so long. It’s a rough rectangle of rocky cliffside about 4 and a half by 7 feet, tapering a little on one end. If you stand on it you can see to the ends of the world.

In any direction other than east this effect is blocked by vegetation, but out over the ocean there’s suddenly no horizon for things to disappear behind. You can see as far as your eyes, binoculars or telescope will allow like something out of a Flat Earther’s wet dream. The shift in perspective is perceptible if you’re looking for it as you cross the boundary, stop halfway and you get that weird effect where your brain attempts to reconcile two different images at once. The colours look different too. Bright and cartoonish, as though someone has added a filter to a bad picture.

Six inches under the rock, crumbly and loamy unlike the hard earth around it, is sheet metal held together with rivets along a singular seam. It ends at the boundary of the effect, if you dug around and under it would hang suspended in mid-air. Breaking through it from the top, popping the rivets and bending and cracking the thin metal reveals a void. It’s only visible from the top and extends as far out of view in every direction occupying space that must logically intersect with the rock beneath it like the world reflected in a mirror. Within is darkness, stars and vacuum.

Fortunately only organic materials can pass through the threshold, so it can’t suddenly hoover up the Earth’s atmosphere. This also made it easier to cover up after one of the trio of park rangers who found it fell through up to his belt buckle and then frantically suffocated in deep space before the others could pull him out. The elder, a staunch anti-government, government worker, appealed to the other’s confused terror and the sense that nothing good would come of people in authority learning about it. Her complicity in hiding the body by shoving it the rest of the way through unclothed is why she remains silent.

Between the two of them there is an uneasy agreement. Solo neither one could comfortably pull enough strings and run enough interference to make sure that part of the park remains unexplored forever. That one of them has been posting pictures of the void online and trying to figure out its location by what stars are visible doesn’t help matters.