Interstellar

He jerked back as a sheet of metal slammed into the windshield. They waited a few moments to recover from the surprise, then Donald opened the passenger door, took Tom’s arm and the two of them started slogging, eyes closed, toward the house.

Cooper took hold of Murph and dragged her out of the vehicle.

Even with his eyes closed, the dust got in, and even with a mask on, some of it got to his lungs. And it was easy to get lost in one of these storms, even when you knew you were just a few feet away from safety—or at least protection from the wind that made projectiles out of everything not nailed down. Shielding Murph with his body, he pushed toward the house. Then he came up against the porch, put wood under his feet, and followed Donald and Tom through the front door.

It wasn’t, after all, his first storm.

Inside, shutters banged, dust jetted up through cracks in the floorboards and windowsills, and it rolled in through the front door in huge gusts until Donald slammed it shut behind them.

Cooper darted his gaze about, surveying the damage, and suddenly noticed a dark cloud rolling down the stairs.

Cooper looked at his kids.

“Did you both shut your windows?” he demanded. Tom nodded yes, but the expression on Murph’s face told him what he already knew. In a flash she was running up the stairs, hurrying to amend her mistake.

“Wait!” he cried, following her.

When he got to her room she was just standing there, staring at the floor, with the window still wide open. The rush and howl of the storm were fighting their way into the room. Suppressing some inelegant turns of phrase, he crossed the floor, gripped the wooden frame, and slammed it shut, instantly distancing the sounds.

Bereft of wind, the dust hung in the air, as fine and insidious as powdered graphite.

Murph just stood there, gawking at the floor, her eyes wide as dinner plates. And then Cooper saw why. Streaks were forming in the suspended dust, as if a giant invisible comb was being pulled through the air from floor to ceiling. Then he realized the dust was actually streaming down with unnatural speed, collecting on the floor; not randomly, but into lines—lines that formed into a distinguishable pattern.

“The ghost,” Murph said.

The ghost. Cooper didn’t bother to contradict her this time. He was too busy staring himself.

The dust was collecting as if it were falling on wires, but there were no wires to see. He was reminded of a very old toy which had been his uncle’s when he was a boy. Basically it consisted of a piece of cardboard with a human face drawn on it, covered by a flat plastic bubble. There were finely cut iron filings inside of the bubble. The toy came with a pencil-shaped magnet, and if you held the magnet behind the cardboard, you could drag the filings around to form hair and a beard on the face.

From the front it appeared as if an unseen force was dragging the filings into shape. Which of course was the case, since a magnetic field is invisible to the human eye. Yet the source of that little trick—the magnetic field—the magnet—could easily be discovered by any observer who looked behind the cardboard.

Not so, what was happening before his eyes.

Dust wasn’t metal. It wasn’t attracted by magnetic fields. And below the pattern there was only floor; no hand—human or otherwise—was wielding a hidden magnet. Yet undeniably, something was attracting the dust, and not randomly.

Someone was behind the cardboard with… something.

He felt a little prickle on the back of his spine. The drone. The harvesters.

Now this.

“Grab your pillow,” he told Murph. “Sleep in with Tom.”

She went, but with considerable hesitation.

SEVEN

Murph woke the next morning, trying to figure out what was wrong. Where she was. She certainly wasn’t in her room, but in a far smellier place.

Then the pile of covers on the bed snorted and she got it—she was in Tom’s room, for some reason.

Then she remembered it all. The dust storm, the open window, the ghost tracing lines with the dust. Trying to go to sleep, wanting desperately to see what the ghost had drawn. Then finally sleep, and crazier dreams than she usually had.

Now, at last, morning had come.

It was cold, so she wrapped herself in a blanket before leaving Tom’s room and padding down the hall to her own, worried there wouldn’t be anything—just a pile of dust. Just another thing for her dad to dismiss as nothing. As her imagination.

He was always ready to get into a fight when other people didn’t take her seriously—like at the school yesterday. But when it came down to it, he was the worst one of all.

So she went on to her room, braced for disappointment.

But when she walked quietly through the doorway, her dad was there already, and she realized with a shock that he might have been there all night.

The dust had settled now, leaving a thin mantel throughout the house, on everything. It all would need cleaning soon.

Except here, in her room.