by Travis Smith
3
Eventually, though, Patrick did wake, and he found that he could squirm in a different manner and propel himself forward through the obstruction.
For a time, he ate raw bugs and rodents he encountered in the tunnels, but he eventually arrived at a larger cavern, where he took an extended pause to exist without significance. Distant moans of anguish and wrath echoed throughout the chamber from the many branching tunnel entrances sprouting in every direction. The skittering of paws and legs and carapaces dragging across nearby rocks broke the lengthy silences. Moisture from above trickled down through the branching tunnels and formed tiny pools of murky water in his cavern, which he lapped at like a prawn.
Before too long, Patrick’s lack of sight became negligent. His other senses helped his mind craft an image of the cavern in which he dwelt for a time. He spent a great deal of his time exploring the splitting tunnels leading out of his cavern, bringing prey and supplies back to the base. He developed an ability to gauge the distances of various sounds, even when they seemed to come from worlds away and bounced and echoed throughout vast twisting and branching tunnels. From the north—was it north? did it matter?—came the guttural war cries of some unspeakable underground tribe of savages. From the east were chirrups and squeaks of the blind rodents and insects that had fled the torment unfolding in the north. The west, from whence Patrick had crawled, was silent and cold. From the south came a low hum that was less auditory than it was tactile, seeming to reach within Patrick and prod at something buried deep inside.
The vacuity that Patrick had become ignored the drawing energy at first, but over time, the hum began to stroke a part of his mind that had been shut down. As he slept, the power accessed memories that his conscious mind refused to touch. It fed on these subconscious parts of Patrick, and each time he awoke, its allure had grown. The subtle, almost imperceptible nature of it grew over time and eventually became overwhelming. The new Patrick felt the woes of his former self resurfacing and pulling him toward the south.
After he could no longer distract himself with fruitless expeditions into the nearby tunnels to the north and east, his ability to ignore the ominous call began to falter. It tugged at his mind and infected his restless dreams when sleep did come.
At last, his dispassion wavered enough that Patrick looked toward the beckoning power with unseeing eyes. He gazed into darkness for a while before slowly making his way toward the southern set of tunnels he had yet to explore.
4
Patrick ventured again into the narrow tunnels. He felt small holes and forks branching in all directions throughout his crawl. The southern tunnels were the smallest of any he’d explored. The walls were smooth and moist, as opposed to the dry, rocky routes he’d grown accustomed to. He could sense no other life in the branches surrounding him. There were no detectable sounds and no sense of a living creature, no matter how small or distant.
The path which Patrick crawled soon became slick with moisture, and it seemed as though it could be an underwater tunnel. Though the passageway was empty, the narrow walls were wet and dripping all around him. He struggled to take in a full breath. There was an illusion of being submerged, and his heart pounded rapidly as his lungs quivered beneath a sensation of drowning. His brain was losing oxygen.
His mind had not succumbed to a sense of claustrophobia or panic since entering the dark caves by the rail yard. He stopped crawling and attempted to take in a slow, measured breath. The sensation of water in his mouth was overwhelming. His arms were forced outstretched over his head to make his figure as slim as possible, and his hands flapped in the tunnel. Though they created a wet slap against the walls, there was no standing water. He remained motionless and struggled to breathe while his mind rebelled. Still, the alluring hum in the tunnels before him called out.
He took his time and inched forward at a crawling pace, his eyes closed and his chest hardly expanding around small, slow breaths. Eventually the moisture broke, and he found himself in a larger space that allowed for him to maneuver on hands and knees. The soggy walls and ground gave way to a harder, rockier surface again. Patrick’s hand fell upon an unmistakable object in the darkness. His fingers probed its inflexible, round surface until they snaked their way into two cavities. Below the cavities was another, smaller and sharper. Below that was—sure enough—teeth. He fumbled off the skull and heard the sounds of dry bones clacking atop one another below. On his side, he could feel long bones beneath him. As he dragged his hands around his surroundings to take them in, he felt innumerable jagged spurs and the round crowns of other skulls. They must have been human—or at least humanoid—based on the size and shape of them. Patrick lay on his back in the scattered pile of bones and reached his hands above his face to feel above him. He was distantly mortified to find bits of skeleton above him as well. He was fully encased in human remains.
Somewhere—not too far away—the inviting hum persisted.
5
Patrick wandered the strange underground tomb until his callused hands were cracked and bleeding from the dry spurs of bone atop which he crawled. He lost all sense of time and direction as the hum grew to a ubiquitous pounding that seemed to emanate from within his own head. His limbs ached, and his mouth grew dry. The sensation of air hunger grew until he was panting, chest hitching painfully against the remains atop which he crawled. The agony crescendoed and peaked, until he felt that his head would explode and that his lifeless body would lie in unrest with all the others beneath the earth.
But then, at last, his hand fell upon it. Everything stopped. Something long-dead awakened within Patrick as all sense of unpleasantness vanished with an almost palpable thud. His fingers slid around the edges of the smooth, glassy stone. Even without sight, he sensed its blackness. His callused thumb traced the curved symbol etched into its surface …
6
Falling?
There exists nothing. And everything.
There is no life. No death. No light. No dark. No future. No past.
The faintest cloud of nebulous awareness forms within the void. It is falling.
Falling from nothing, toward nothing.
As it falls, the vacuum around it slowly spins.
Without bounds for reference, there can surely be no concept of motion, yet there is.
Falling.
Spinning.
The axis within the conscious nebula begins to turn in another dimension.
Soon, it twirls and spirals as it falls and spins in a downward corkscrew into infinity.
Falling and
spinning and
twirling and
spiraling and
falling and
spinning and
twirling and
spiraling and
falling and
7
Patrick lay on his back atop hundreds of human bones. His eyes were open in the darkness, staring sightlessly ahead, as if in a trance. His mouth hung slightly agape, and even in the silent subterranean void, his breaths were so faint as to scarcely disturb the molecules of air. All thought and conscious understanding of sensory input had vanished. He felt nothing (and everything). He may well have been dead, if not for his rhythmically twirling thumb.
He was a mere speck in a vacuum, unaware of the painful rocks and bones prodding at his back and limbs. He was suspended in nothingness. Falling. Spinning. Spiraling toward infinity. His thumb slowly traced the small circle etched on the black stone, then it made a faster, wider sweep along the larger outer circle. This rhythm continued and repeated long beyond the time when Patrick’s thumb should have cramped and grown numb and weakened.
If he were above the earth’s surface, with the blue sky and the sun to demonstrate the passing of time, with the endless cycling of day to night to day, with the call of a loved one in search of him, with the pangs of hunger sweeping through his gut … even then Patrick could not have estimated how long he lay in silence, thumb sweeping over the cursed symbol on the stone.<
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8
When the trance finally broke, Patrick felt both exhausted and rejuvenated. His sense of bleak hopelessness had given way to the fiery determination that had driven him from his hometown after the outbreak. He’d experienced things within the darkness—within the stone—and he understood subtle details about life and about death. Wispy details that were so faint they could not be put into words, nor into questions which could be studied or researched. Details that nearly every other human he’d ever meet would never know, would never even possess the vocabulary to express their curiosity.
He stowed the talisman in his smock pocket and attempted to turn himself back around on the pile of remains. As he did, the ageless bones shifted and tumbled. He felt his hands and knees sink into the dense pile impossibly, as if a pit of quicksand deep below had opened up. A low rumble rose from depths unspeakable beneath him. The rumble grew into the deafening roar of thousands of rocks and bones shifting and falling in the vast darkness. Patrick gasped instinctively as though he were being pulled underwater and not into a mound of dust and decay.
A guttural cry escaped his hoarse throat, which had passed only breaths of air and drops of moisture and bits of vermin and insects since the day he entered these tunnels. He sank into the pile, which now seemed to be alive with movement. Skulls and short bones skittered by across his back, tumbling and sliding from atop their heap toward unknown blackness. Within moments, he was completely submerged in the painful osseous prison, and it continued to shift and collapse as one unit all around him. The more he pulled his hands and legs against the vast crypt, the more he disrupted its structure. He could feel the bones avalanching by atop him, and he could feel the pile as a whole, sliding and collapsing downward. He had never explored this deep into the tunnel, and he could venture nary a guess as to the possibility of its depth.
Eventually Patrick could fight the avalanche no more, and he grew still.
9
When the collapse ended, Patrick’s arms were tucked close to his chest, and his legs were straightened out behind him. He was buried in the mound of bones as though submerged in a hellish pool of water.
He tried to bend his legs and reposition himself, but they would not bend within the bones. The pressure was too great. He twisted his wrists to plant one palm atop a round bone—likely a skull—and grip a sturdy long bone with his other hand. With that leverage, he was able to slowly push his body backward and upward. As he shifted the pile of remains again, he heard faint rumbles below, as various pieces tumbled farther down, but it was nothing compared to the earth-shattering avalanche before. In the space he’d made by shoving himself backward, he was able to bend his arms again and take hold of more sturdy surfaces to push upon.
Slowly, he inched his way backward and toward the top of the pile. The journey was painful and torturous, and oftentimes shards of teeth or broken bones poked and rolled into his face and limbs, creating more scrapes and slices in his dry skin. He felt tendrils of blood stream past his cracked lips and fought the urge to drink it down.
If he could have spared the moisture, Patrick would have wept when he felt his feet break through the surface beneath which he was buried. He pushed himself back until his hips were freed and he could plant his knees and pull his torso out of the bones. He attempted to sit bolt upright once freed and belted his head painfully against the tunnel’s low ceiling. Readjusting to his surroundings, he lay himself back flat and low, taking pains not to rest on his knees or elbows, lest they be pulled back into the remains below.
The path through which Patrick had journeyed seemed to have been closed off by the collapse, and he was unable to make his way back toward the cavern with all its familiar, branching tunnels. He slowly maneuvered his body to turn and face again toward the unknown.
He slithered his way across the pile of bones until the surface of the tunnels once again turned to hard, packed dirt and damp rock. With no way back, he continued along the one-way tunnel toward his only fate.
10
The last stretch was the hardest and the longest for Patrick. He trudged forward on his belly through tight crawl-spaces in the rocks, continually reaching to his pocket to ensure the stone was still there. At times he would stop and roll onto his back to trace his thumb along its symbol for unknown periods of time, allowing himself to slip back into that dark trance. The alluring thrum that had drawn him to the talisman had stopped, but he could feel its presence against his hip.
When he wasn’t worrying with the stone, the double-circular symbol would flash in front of his eyes, like a phantom flame in the darkness. He’d come alive for the first time since his companions were taken, and his systems were beginning to do the same. The numbness slowly faded, and pangs of reality seeped back in. His stomach burned and ached with starvation, and his muscles and joints cramped with searing aggravation. His legs turned to strings and threatened to stop propelling his body through the darkness. Four times, he stopped to sleep. He knew not if full days separated these breaks, or perhaps full series of days.
After the fourth slumber, Patrick opened his eyes to a change. At first he couldn’t place what was different, as his senses were dulled from such prolonged lack of stimulation. But then the familiarity settled into his mind like the face of a long-lost friend—it was light. He held his hands before his face and blinked in the darkness. Was this another mind-trick? Patrick thought not. He could surely make out the shape of two hands there.
His heart hastened, and his legs flailed behind him, powering him ineffectually forward. The tunnel gradually opened and nearly allowed him to scurry forward on hands and knees. As he bumbled through, his eyes began to form images of the jagged tunnel walls within which he’d resided for so long now. The sensation of light grew stronger until he was in a full gallop, hunched over in the growing tunnel like a manic leper. Patrick laughed silently as the sounds of his feet and hands scraping on dry rock turned to splashes. The ground above and beneath him was turning to mud. He began to feel sporadic drips fall from the low ceiling and hit his face and open mouth.
But something wasn’t right. He allowed himself to slow down as he could feel himself approaching the source of the light. The quality was dampened and dulled, even in the dark. Patrick was unable to place what exactly was off about it, even as he crawled beneath. Ahead, the tunnel seemed to grow dark anew, behind him it was darker still. He squinted and blinked his eyes, but nothing changed. As he waved his hands in his face, he opened and closed his fists, twitched his fingers in erratic orders, as though the unpredictable movements would fool his mind into revealing itself if it were truly playing tricks on his eyes. Eventually he shifted his focus from his hands to the tunnel walls. He placed a palm on the slick, muddy wall. Drops of water were falling frequently now, and the ground where he sat was beneath a thin pool of standing mud.
The light was coming from within the wall itself. More specifically, it was coming through the ceiling above him. He slid himself forward and backward, inspecting the ceiling closely, until he was satisfied that he sat directly beneath the center of the source. As he reached up to touch it, a steady stream of water droplets poured down on his hand. When he placed his palm on the dirt above, it seemed solid enough, if not a little soft. He dug his fingernails into the clay and scraped a chunk away. It pulled away with ease, and more water dripped down.
How long had it been since he’d seen anything at all? How many days had he existed without stimulus in total darkness? Could he count them on both hands? Both hands and feet? He had no chance at estimating, but he thought not.
Patrick reached up with both hands and began to claw and dig upward through the tunnel, toward the light. With each scrape, the dirt turned softer, the water dripped faster, and the light grew stronger. At last, the ceiling collapsed in a small area around where Patrick was digging. A deluge of cool, murky water rained down around him and filled the tunnel around his knees before flowing off in either direction.
“Oh!” a surpr
ised voice above him exclaimed.
Patrick squinted against the sudden blinding light of day. He could now hear voices and what seemed to be angry shouting all around. He peered up through the crater he’d just created and saw a thin man with wiry black hair, tufts standing in every direction. Small, cracked spectacles balanced atop his nose. His expression was one of wan horror. Next to him was an apparently much older man with wisps of grey hair atop a mostly bald head. He smiled as though he were witnessing the most ordinary of events unfold.
“Who’s ’at?” he called to Patrick.
Patrick peered up higher to note the metal bars of a cell behind the men, and a small cot in the far corner. As he looked on, another bearded stranger leaned over in the cot and met Patrick’s gaze with confusion.
11
The Stranger lay atop his cot while his cellmates produced the usual confabulation. The older demented man was blabbering about nothing while the younger man drew his symbols and mumbled about another brand of nothing.
“Who’s ’at?” the old man called as a boisterous group shuffled by outside.
Someone from across Fanxel shouted a bitter jeer, and a crowd of others chimed in with malicious glee. Another fight was brewing, and the guards would be lining up to gamble and trade their paga.
Another group bustled by the cell. The Stranger did not look up or open his eyes. By now, these events were routine.
Over the growing roar of the crowd, The Stranger heard a small splash, followed by a rush of flowing water in the cell behind him.
“Oh!” Ian exclaimed.
“Who’s ’at?” Gregoire asked again.
