INTO NOTHING!

It’s a crowded street, peak shopping time before Christmas, and the clouds are pressing down hard and grey, there’s a chill drizzle and a spiteful wind, so most of the crowd on the street are pressing on quick from where they’ve been to where they’re going, heads down until they reach the next blast from a warm air curtain in the doorway to another brightly lit shop.
Which is why you might be the only one who notices.

At first you think you’ve just seen it wrong, a twitch of your eyes, a moment of inattention. A man appears a little way ahead of you, in amongst the shoppers, as if he wasn’t there a moment ago. He appears troubled, frantically looking around. And then he’s gone. Just like that. He was there, and then he wasn’t. He filled space, and then he didn’t. You look to see behind other shoppers, convinced someone had stepped in front of him, and then you see him blink into life on the other side of the street, just for a moment, even more distressed now, pushing at the air as if at a wall.
Then he’s gone, and the pavement where he stood is empty.
You look around, to see if anyone else has noticed, but they haven’t, and then he flashes into being on your side of the road again, his mouth open as if he is shouting, banging on the air around him, tearing at it with his hands as if trying to open it up.
Then he’s gone, and you don’t see him again. It was all very quick, but as you stand there in the rain and the wind and the crowd moving around you, you think that in that last moment he didn’t just blink out, but something dark wrapped around him and pulled him away, into nothing.