It’s easy for people to think they’re alone just because they don’t see anyone around. For most people, though, they’re never alone. There’s always the idea of a person living inside their heads, the perception of the person in the next room, or the next building, or somewhere in their vague, ill-defined area. But in space, there’s no one. If ever an astronaut is separated from their crew, if ever they’re lost or abandoned, that little person inside their head deserts them, too. Not a vermin nor a blade of grass accompanies them in their vast prison. Then the darkness, its cavernous maw always waiting for some unlucky soul to consume, takes their own mind from them and leaves behind a scrambled mess. It promises eyes in the wispy trails of far-off nebulas and images of friends in the scattered, random stars.
This is the sort of thing that gives way to urban legends. Some spacefarer would fall away from their craft only to be recovered days later with a nasty case of the emptiness. They’d babble some nonsense, and word of mouth would amplify the more sensational aspects. There are long, dark things that live in the universe, they’d say. They eat suns and tear rifts in time itself. Any random band of darkness in the night sky isn’t actually random, and these poor astronauts knew it. They looked long enough and hard enough that they saw it squirm. Or maybe they’d talk of the demons that live on rogue planets, deprived of any sunlight. They never had a reason to be seen, so they walk and float invisibly on their planets, or on unsuspecting ships back to stations in deep space. Tall tales is the word we use to refer to stories like that. Fictions. The ravings of an unwell mind. It’s such a convenient way to ignore those people who saw things none of us ever had, and it gives us an excellent excuse to pity ourselves when we suffer the consequences of not heeding their warnings.
We didn’t know how long the Cosmonaut had been adrift in space, and I’m reluctant even to imagine. Our ship was on a long-distance scouting operation; no one should have been out there before us, but we found him floating to the starboard of our ship one day. I had to help David, one of our mechanics, drag him into the airlock. He tried to shake us off, and I could see through his darkened helmet he was screaming. We took him to the brig immediately, and after a few hours, he calmed down. We tried to speak to him. Judging by his suit, we assumed he was Russian, but our interpreter didn’t understand him any better than the rest of us. His only responses were jumbles of syllables and sounds clearly belonging to the Russian language, but containing few real words and no discernable content. After a mere twenty minutes of trying to talk to him, I returned to my duties, but I later heard our ship’s doctor had kept trying for a few hours more. The emptiness must have wormed its way deep, for he never regained his ability to speak. He became a sort of passenger of our crew, receiving food and water so long as he caused no trouble, and he was supposed to be turned over to the authorities once we returned to civilization.
Such a return would have been much easier if our pilot hadn’t become increasingly distracted in the following week. I remember he kept insisting he lost something, but I didn’t talk to him long enough to puzzle out what. My investment in the strange happenings on the ship was still fairly low, but I remember him accosting anyone who would listen so he could yell about his empty drawer and whatever he had lost. He disordered his living quarters in his attempts to find this thing, and I had the luck to spy the aftermath. His blankets, clothes, and loose papers were coalesced into a large pile in the middle of his floor, and he had carefully stacked all his books, binders, and baubles next to it. Someone asked him why he cared so much about his misplaced trinket, and he insisted that he didn’t know where it could have gone. This seemed to bother him the most, but the crew generally ignored his rantings and erratic behavior. Whatever delirium had seized him, it hadn’t affected his ability to fly, but we all anxiously anticipated when he would be sent to brig to live with the Cosmonaut.
And then he vanished. Some of the security crew searched his room when he didn’t report to the helm, but he was gone, and all of his things were, too. The piles on his floor had just ceased to exist. The room was sterile, as though it had been scrubbed for months. The whole crew was on edge, but I told myself that there was a perfectly reasonable, rational explanation for all of this. I consider myself practical, so I couldn’t believe anything else.
Regardless, my mind festered with an insidious sludge that made it slip from sound reasonings to ill-advised actions. In an effort to discern when the disappearance must have occurred, I enlisted David’s help to buy me time alone with the airlock controls. Though I didn’t like how the terminal whined at me while I escalated my security privileges, I was much more concerned with the content of the airlock logs. Since the last known time our pilot had been performing his duties, it hadn’t been opened. It hadn’t been opened since we dragged the Cosmonaut in. That was all a group of us needed to hear to force our way into the brig. We questioned him, but his only response was to rock back and forth, speaking in that idiotic jumble and staring at us with tired, bloodshot eyes. As we became angry, he started laughing at us. He shook and slammed his fist against his cell wall, cackling all the while. Our own security force finally forced us out for fear of a riot.
The disappearances slowly stole the crew away. First the navigator, then the doctor, then even the chief mechanic. One by one, people vanished. Day by day, we drifted uncontrolled into deep space. Night by night, I heard the Cosmonaut’s laughter steal into my room through the grated vent above me. At first, we hoped it would only be the commanders, but the subordinates eventually started to follow. Some of the crew spent long hours huddled by a lamp, trying to discern a pattern, and they hoped they could predict when they were safe, as though that would let them sleep better. Unfortunately, the last officer disappeared before they gleaned anything useful.
I stopped doing my job; I forgot what my job even was. All I remember is walking around the ship in a daze. There was a vague sensation that I was missing something, but I couldn’t imagine what. Then things started changing. With every decoration that vanished, the blank, cold, steel hallways lengthened, and with every disappearance, new sliding doors appeared, leading to desolate, empty rooms no one had ever lived in. I wandered in and out of those rooms over and over, and nothing was ever different. If not for the numbers above the doors, I would have thought there was only one.
My crewmates started to go mad as if the sickness of the ship had started to infect them. They were understandably anxious and paranoid, and I don’t think anyone would fault the ones who locked themselves in their rooms until they were whisked away. The truly worrying thing to me was their memories. Some of them swore upon their lives that we used to travel with commanders and crewmates I had never even heard of, and some of them seemed to completely forget entire groups of people they had once considered friends. I started to avoid the more talkative of the crew; their constant chatter about these fictional astronauts unsettled me the most. As that chatter lessened, I did my best to be grateful.
Eventually, David and I were the only two left. He occupied himself by performing unnecessary repairs on the ship’s life support and hull; I occupied myself by staring into the blackness of space, hoping to see a hint of an approaching starship. Maybe David managed to drown out the faint chattering of the Cosmonaut, but I had no such respite. That damn Cosmonaut wouldn’t have still been here, working his magic, if Mark hadn’t insisted that we keep feeding him. But Mark was gone, and we had wasted enough of our rations on our stowaway.
I don’t remember why we thought we could talk to the Cosmonaut, but I don’t think we could have done anything else. His cell was musty and dark, and when I stepped inside, I saw he had torn up part of his spacesuit and strung the rags over his lamp to counterfeit a state of perpetual dusk. He stared blankly from his dirty, unmade bed as we approached. I talked at him, demanding he stop doing whatever he was doing to our ship, and that he return all of our crewmates safely, to which he snickered and said some gibberish. I told him he had already snatched away anyone who cared to protect him, but he didn’t seem to understand. He just laughed. He laughed, and he laughed, and he laughed, so I picked up a pipe, and I hit him. I hit him again, and again, and again until his battered and bloodied face stopped laughing. David watched, horrified, but I could tell he also thought this was for the best. We didn’t talk about it after; I think we both assumed we’d talk about it later.
David went missing two weeks ago.
I’ve been trying to figure out how the Cosmonaut did it, but I can’t. I used to sit with his mangled corpse every day and ask him how. Then I started asking why. Now I just ramble bits of thoughts at the mangled corpse. Through it all, he stares up at me with a careless grin on his face, and I think I smile back sometimes. Goodbye, poor soul. I hope you didn’t understand what was happening. I hope in your next life you’re spared whatever hell my crewmates were taken to. God, I hope I go into that hell with them. I don’t want to be alone.
First published as an episode of The Creepy Podcast on June 13, 2024.