Boz was curled on the living room sofa with a ginger and cream, banded tail draped across his nose. He raised one eyebrow and half opened one eye. "Good, perhaps, now, we can get some peace around here."
Richard was surprised, he had not considered that fawning subservience was required of a hoover. However, armed with a Phillips screwdriver, a wire coat hanger and eternal hope he readied himself for an attempt at a repair. The yellow Hoover télios class 1500 lay in the middle of the dining room floor whining pathetically. Richard unplugged it from the wall socket, spread out a used copy of the Fernton Bugle to receive the contents of the distressed appliance and then removed an access cover from the machine. The stout brown paper bag within was bulging and stretched close to the point of losing structural integrity. He detached the bag and emptied it over the newspaper. There was a puther of normal dust which spread out to hang in cloudy layers across the room and then a dark mass flopped out over a full colour photograph of the town crier, in full regalia, and a short article about inappropriate dealings in respect of a lucrative but unpopular proposal for a town centre shopping mall. The heap settled gently, its lumps and folds resembling black mashed potato and wire-wool, tar black rivulets and pools seeping into crannies, its boundaries blurred as if it was not quite in this world, its hyper-black core sucking in colour from its surroundings. The dust cloud, slowly at first, gravitated back into the primal entity.
"What on earth is that?" Joy was standing in the doorway holding a wrought iron toasting fork out defensively in front of her body. Boz peeped from behind her skirts.
Richard could not take his eyes off the hypnotic murk. The intense blackness seemed to draw in everything around it, filled his field of vision, tugged at his mind, his soul.
As Joy watched in horror, writhing black fingers of fluff reached out towards her husband.
"Get away from him, you bitch!" She thrust her toasting fork into the mass. The iron chilled in an instant and was tugged from her grasp. She jerked back screaming as the weapon was drawn into the slowly pulsing form.
Richard watched as the blackness clouded over, blackly. He was tumbling towards the blacker than black core. Faint pin pricks of light began to appear and multiply, pastel clouds hung in the void, vast clouds of fluff; fluff within the universe and a universe within the fluff. The clouds towered above him, the points of fuzzy light grew into swirling galaxies. An immense tilted catherine wheel spiral rushed towards him, around him. Ahead was a single, boiling honey-gold star. Orbiting gas giants spun past, billowing elemental clouds and storms thousands of miles deep, magnetic fields crackling from pole to pole - and now he was falling towards a sphere of vapour cloaked rock. He was through the cloud in a heart beat and into drizzle, giant rime-heavy wings slowing his descent. Below, the bleak junction between pallid grey land and a heaving black sea; a web of gunmetal highways and charcoal grey rooftops; a canyon-like street, a bustling sidewalk.
He is inside the saloon bar of a dockside ale house. The grey-brown linoleum is cracked and sticky, the anaglypta wallpaper shades of tobacco, upholstery faded and threadbare. Faded and threadbare locals at black iron, marble topped tables, too heavy to throw, stare into their flat pints, thin light from shabby wall lamps struggles to penetrate the pall of cigarette smoke; fall-down-drunk sailors grope their tattooed escorts, slop beer, leer and cheer at the pole dancer. Her death-white body writhes around the chrome shaft - bored, unsexy, mechanically caricaturing the procreative act on a low stage.
Richard, out of body Richard, is at the step-high dais, drinking in the body odours, her blue-white flesh containing his view, every purple thumb and tooth imprint, each livid indented bra and knicker-elastic scar sharply detailed. The blanched belly envelopes him. He is dissolving into the bland, self absorbed, all absorbing eternal feminine...
"So that's where you've been all this time." Peering into the fluff mound he has seen something treasured. He leaps into the middle of the outspread newspaper, dust and fluff flying in all directions. There is a collective gasp. Boz sneezes.
Phoebles emerges clutching the limp, grey, filthy form of his favourite one eared catnip mouse, more furless, featureless and tailless than ever. The company, fast recovering its equilibrium, regards him and sighs.
"...What?"
At a quantum level Dark Fluff is constantly and spontaneously flicking in and out of existence. These transients are known scientifically as Quirks. To the observer of one small area of space such events are barely detectable, but at any one moment in time, across the entire vastness of our universe the net mass of all the fleeting and tiny flufflets is significant. Very occasionally a number of coincident creation events will occur in close proximity and sufficient mass will accrue for gravity to come into play. As the conglomerate grows fluff enters our Newtonian World and that is when the true mystery of Dark Fluff becomes apparent.
