Shortlist Saturdays: Black Henry by Liam Hogan

It looked like a normal Henry, only in black. Same tub-shaped vacuum cleaner, with the same friendly smile and upward looking eyes and snaking snout nose.

“No cable?” I said, after making an exploratory circuit.

“No,” the hovering saleswoman agreed.

“Cordless. Well! Wonders never cease. Where do you plug it in to recharge?”

“You don’t.” She offered a smile. “This is the latest innovation in vacuum cleaners, straight out of space. Whisper quiet and powered by whatever it sucks up.”

“Oh.” Sales assistants and their techno-babble. It was still just a vacuum cleaner. “And emptying it?” I asked, to deflate her cheery bubble.

The easy smile ticked up a notch, confident of a sale. “That’s the beauty of the new model. Because it’s powered by what it sucks up, it never needs emptying. No bags, no mess, no loss of suction. Ever.”

“Really?” I guessed that explained the hefty price tag, even for something so legendarily robust as a Henry. But with a messy toddler in tow, my last vacuum cleaner had been in use pretty much every single day. Until the engine decided to shred itself in a shriek of tortured steel and a noxious cloud of burnt plastic. A replacement was a priority. And a vacuum cleaner that could go anywhere, never need emptying, and never lose its suck, well! Sold.

“It’s lighter than I expected,” I remarked as I lofted my purchase in its cardboard box. Was there the tiniest glimmer of worry in the saleswoman’s eyes as she handed me the receipt? Or did I just imagine that, later on?

Though that wasn’t the first problem to rear its ugly head. No, that was heralded by the distinctive noise of one of Archie’s Lego bricks, sucked from beneath the edge of the sofa, rattling up Henry’s metal proboscis.

“Drat,” I muttered, guilty and glad that my son was at kindergarten. He was too quick to parrot things he shouldn’t. A sign of intelligence, some said. But irksome when you’re not used to censoring yourself, with the added potential for social embarrassment that Archie, bless his mischievous wee soul, always seemed to exploit to maximum effect. Intelligence, indeed.

I unclicked the latches that gave access to Henry’s pot-bellied stomach, lifted off the top half by the fold out handle. Henry’s innards were empty, no sign of the Lego brick.

No sign of anything.

I guessed this was as advertised. But that meant if you accidentally vacuumed an earring, or a coin, or just a Lego brick, you weren’t getting it back. Ever.

Ought to come with a warning. Probably did, but who reads the instruction manual? I was more careful after that, though I still found myself leaping for the off switch on Henry’s top whenever I heard the rattle of anything hard and chunky, and usually losing the race.

The second problem was weightier, literally. After about three months of use, during which the vacuum cleaner became if anything even more powerful, I found I could hardly lift my Henry.

Somewhat surprised, I hoicked it on the bathroom scales. Fifteen kilos. It was closer to two when I bought it. I scratched my head. Where was it all? And where had it come from? There couldn’t have been much more than a couple of kilos of dust, hair, and spilled pieces of pasta and fragments of toast from Archie’s meals. So why was the thing so damned heavy?

This was just before I found Archie, sitting in front of the Henry while I prepped his supper to a background of overly loud CBeebies, feeding it blue pebbles of decorative glass. The ones I’d bought for vases of dried or artificial flowers, the ones I’d put in a big shallow dish that was now nearly empty.

There were tears and tantrums when I snatched the contents from Archie’s grubby hands and turned Henry off. Tears and tantrums that made me feel like a terrible mother and lasted until he’d been read to sleep, still red-cheeked with overwrought emotion.

I poured myself a restorative glass of wine, but hadn’t taken more than a sip before I was back hovering over the hoover. Glass pebbles alone couldn’t explain the extra mass. I’d bought two bags, two kilos. Even if Henry had swallowed them all, I was still almost ten kilos light.

What else had Archie been feeding Henry?

I looked around in vain for what wasn’t there. Nothing, as far as I could see, had vanished into thin air--

Ahh. That explained something else that had been nagging at the back of my brain. Henry never blew, only sucked. I was used to feeling the warm blast of expelled air that had travelled through a vacuum’s filter. Henry didn’t do that. The air that went in, didn’t come out. Henry wasn’t just sucking dust and Lego and pebbles into oblivion. You don’t think about air having weight, you’d have to suck in an awful lot for it to add up. Many, many balloons worth. Kilos of the stuff...

There was only one thing that could do that. Only one thing that exerted such an inexorable, and increasing, pull. One thing that didn’t need electricity, the off switch being mechanical, closing the trapdoor on what lay hidden within. I imagined a five-year-old’s inquisitive fingers, and shuddered.

When the saleswoman had said ‘out of space’ I’d assumed she meant something designed by NASA engineers. But no. The claim had been more literal than that. Other than the metal body and plastic hose and those ever smiling eyes, the working parts--or working part--of Henry had come from space itself. And although it might had been micro to begin with, it had gorged on the steady diet that I, and Archie, had fed it.

I stared at the cheeky little chappie in horror.

Black Henry...was a black hole.

Liam Hogan's short story Black Henry placed third in our 3rd Anniversary Short Story Contest! Liam Hogan is an award-winning speculative short story writer, with stories in Best of British Science Fiction and in Best of British Fantasy (NewCon Press). He volunteers at the creative writing charities Ministry of Stories, and Spark Young Writers. Sci-Fi collection: A Short History of the Future (Northodox Press). Fantasy: Happy Ending Not Guaranteed (Arachne Press). More details at http://happyendingnotguaranteed.blogspot.co.uk