The Spiral

by Iain Ryan

  ‘Ah, I—’

  ‘Are you close to your mother?’

  I shrug again. It’s all I want to say.

  Archibald seems oddly satisfied with my non-answers. ‘Yes, yes. Families, they can be a source of such joy and such terrible agony. The problem with them is that they know you too well. You can’t lie to your blood, Erma. They see through it, see through everything. They see it all eventually.’ Archibald looks past me. ‘Is it time?’

  I swivel in my chair and find Harlan standing there like a silent butler, his hands clasped together over the waistline of his shorts.

  ‘Sorry to sneak up on you, Doctor Bridges. And yes, Archie, the man is here so you’ll have to wrap this up.’

  I stand up and straighten my skirt. ‘Well, thank you both so much for your …’ And I stop because Archibald has picked up my dictaphone. He is staring at it, turning it over in his hands.

  ‘Dear, how do I turn this thing off?’ he says.

  I take a step towards him.

  ‘It’s small, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘Are they fragile?’

  ‘They can be.’

  He holds the dictaphone out and as I take it from him – as my hand covers his and we’re both holding the device – I see the slightest glimmer of a smile cross his face. It’s more in his eyes than his mouth but it’s there, precise and clear. ‘Nice to meet you, Doctor Erma,’ he says. ‘Maybe we can chat more at some point. I think we could learn a lot from each other.’

  ‘Yes. I’d like that. Thank you.’

  ‘This way,’ says Harlan.

  I follow without looking back.

  We take the hallway, the stairs, the corridor.

  We ride the golf cart.

  What is happening?

  My heart pounds.

  It ended weird.

  Why did it end weird?

  Harlan doesn’t speak as we motor along. He brings the cart close to the bumper of my car then puts it in reverse, steering back towards the giant shed beside the car park. The bay door is open wide.

  ‘What are we doing?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll show you his cars.’

  ‘I really need to—’

  ‘Two minutes. You’ll love it,’ he says.

  He backs the cart into the shed and as we come in I see the doctor from the house. He’s standing there in the open with another man beside him. Someone new. Behind them are a row of vintage cars.

  ‘Hey,’ says a voice behind me. ‘Erma? It’s me, Drew.’

  A kid in glasses appears and walks towards the cart. He’s smiling. ‘We met at that pub that night with that cunt’s sister.’

  The world goes black, cloth material stretched over my face. I bring my hands up, and I’m screaming, lashing out. I grab a handful of someone’s hair and a man grunts but then there’s a crushing, choking arm around my throat.

  Then a cold, sharp sting in my arm.

  Then nothing.

  PART THREE

  SERO

  21

  A day’s ride through the desert and the sky is washed in red and orange. The horse runs without pause, sensing something in the strange weather. You both sense the closeness of death. You are both afraid.

  A hill appears in the distance, a mound in the desert floor.

  ‘That way,’ you tell the horse.

  There’s a cavern dug into one side of the mound, an opening the width of ten men and the height of two. A portal down. You recognise this place from Rohank’s vision.

  You dismount and lead the horse down. In the low light, there is a chamber of sorts. In the chamber there is a well and, behind it, a set of three doors dug into the earth wall. The horse pulls you to the well. You draw water and it looks clear and smells clean but you give it to the horse first.

  The horse snouts around in the bucket but doesn’t drink.

  ‘Is it poison?’

  The horse looks at you, then makes up its mind and starts lapping at it.

  You fill your flask and say, ‘I’ll wait and see if you die first.’

  While you wait, you inspect the doorways in the earth wall. Each has a jagged timber door. All unlocked.

  The horse lets out a loud snorting neigh. He shakes his mane and backs up out of the cavern onto the desert floor above. There, the beast rises up on hind legs and neighs again.

  Not poison, then.

  ‘You look OK to me,’ you say.

  The horse snorts and shakes its head.

  ‘You need to wait for me while I venture down into this horrible pit. Come back down. I’ll tie you.’

  The horse bolts.

  No.

  You clamber up the incline but there’s no catching it. The beast has made its decision.

  You’re alone again.

  22

  You return to the three doors in the chamber and search your memory for Rohank’s vision, asking for some hint or direction.

  Heat.

  Sand.

  Wind.

  Flying over a desert and into the night and down into dark blood-red sand and through it into a passage …

  There was water too.

  Dark water.

  You drink from your flask, guzzling down every drop of the cool liquid. It tastes like rain. Not a grain of salt in it. A few flasks later, you investigate the doors further. Behind each is a pitch-black corridor. You cautiously throw stones down these corridors, checking their depth. All the stones disappear. You check the walls by the doors and as your eyes scan around you uncover crude symbols etched in the ceiling above each entranceway.

  An arrow.

  A cross.

  A spiral.

  Three doors and three symbols.

  Exhausted, you curse the symbols, shaking your fist at them. Night is fast approaching. Those creatures will return if you stay out in the open. It’s time to act.

  ‘Show me,’ you whisper. ‘Show me.’

  Without warning, a quiet voice in your mind returns the call.

  If Sero takes the door marked with the arrow, click here

  If it’s the cross, click here

  If it’s the door marked with the spiral, click here

  YOU DIDN’T MAKE A CHOICE.

  You must click Previous Page to go back and pick one of the choices in the story.

  Beware: if you continue without selecting a choice, you’ll be lost in the spiral.

  23

  Even with the door left open, the darkness envelops you quickly. The corridor is narrow. You follow the wall with one hand as a guide. With the other, you hold your sword at the ready, inching forward. You remember the nun who led you to your encounter with Rohank. You curse yourself for not bringing along a portion of her red crystal. A taste of that would help with this.

  Time passes. You feel your bearings start to slip.

  How far have I come?

  Two hundred paces?

  Two thousand?

  You rest a moment on the earth floor. It’s so quiet you can hear your heart beating. Without movement, the corridor seems to slip away. Minutes or hours pass in the void.

  Then:

  A bright flash of gold ignites, burning your eyes.

  Panic rises in you.

  Another flash of gold leaps out, visiting another blast of agony on your eyes. Regardless you follow the light further in. The corridor becomes so narrow, you are forced to move sideways. The gold light keeps flashing. After two hundred paces, you arrive at an intersection. One path flashes with the light. The other continues on into darkness.

  If you want to follow the golden light further, click here

  If you prefer to continue along the dark corridor, click here

  YOU DIDN’T MAKE A CHOICE.

  You must click Previous Page to go back and pick one of the choices in the story.

  Beware: if you continue without selecting a choice, you’ll be lost in the spiral.

  24

  You are only a few paces down into this dark passage when a sense of impending doom starts to weigh on yo
u. A thought circulates, What fool chooses the door marked with a cross? Surely death awaits. You carry on, nonetheless. The Terrentine mystics have a saying about choices such as this: Those who realise death, avoid the trap of hope. Maybe the daunting path is the true path in this place. Maybe—

  Your sword strikes something soft in the darkness.

  Withdrawing the blade, you find it dry.

  You reach a hand out.

  Cloth. A heavy curtain draped across the passageway.

  You tear it open and light spills in.

  Click here

  YOU DIDN’T MAKE A CHOICE.

  You must click Previous Page to go back and pick one of the choices in the story.

  Beware: if you continue without selecting a choice, you’ll be lost in the spiral.

  25

  The door marked with the spiral takes you into an unlit passage that soon grows too dark to safely navigate. You draw your sword and carry it aloft, tracking the wall with your spare hand. Moving this way is slow-going but after a period you sense that you are descending and that the wall is bowed. An unsettling sensation washes over: you are moving in a broad circle.

  Hours later, you feel surer of this. The curvature of the wall tightens and the slope of the floor feels steeper underfoot. You are spiralling down.

  If the spiral door brought you here, you get to wondering about the alternate pathways foregone. Would the arrow passage have riddled you with arrows? Would the cross door lead you through to a burial cross or to a crossroads, to choices or options? On the spiral, your destination feels preordained.

  You follow the path down and around until your body aches and throbs with fatigue. Time slips away inside the spiral and in the matte blackness there is no sense of movement or achievement. Wretched and desperate for rest, but fearful of this place, you push on and the passage keeps turning.

  After many hours of staggering along, you finally trip and fall.

  A sign.

  You pad around the floor looking for sand or rat holes or any kind of opening that may allow the undead desert creatures in but find only a sealed corridor. Some part of you knows this is the way of this place.

  This is a vacuum. A place of absence.

  You rest your eyes.

  You sleep.

  You see dreams filled with ghosts set in an alien land. Everything in this setting is familiar but none of it makes linear sense. You feel things rather than know them. Are these memories, minced and reshaped? Have you lived so long without these thoughts that they now appear distant to you?

  In the dream:

  Two mirror women. Twins.

  Erma.

  Dora.

  These names are known to you.

  Their parents are there too, both as old as mystics and royalty.

  A younger man also. A suitor.

  He is called Euan.

  Together they reside in a house made of impossible materials: surfaces and colours completely foreign. Walls with the whiteness of children’s teeth. Window openings covered in transparent crystal, shaped like parchment. Steel shining like blade-iron but morphed into inconceivable shapes and forms: tiny instruments and fittings. And the sun shines with intense brightness in this place, making everything very clear. Everything in this world is flat and tamed. Even nature is forced to conform. This is a land of control.

  Yet the connection between this diorama and your own world is not revealed in the dream. Instead, the objects and people are presented to you without story or context.

  You wake parched and hungry and the world around you remains so unlit and barren of activity that you can’t be sure your eyes are open. You take food and water from your dwindling supplies (you only have enough to sustain you for one more day) and you continue your descent, reaching for something in the dark. Increasingly, your thoughts wander. You think about the sisters from the dream. Dora and Erma. Strange names. Your mind returns to them constantly as you push on.

  If you choose to dwell on Dora, click here

  Or if you feel pulled towards the other one called Erma, click here

  YOU DIDN’T MAKE A CHOICE.

  You must click Previous Page to go back and pick one of the choices in the story.

  Beware: if you continue without selecting a choice, you’ll be lost in the spiral.

  26

  You slowly lower a hand to the hilt of your sword and say, ‘Not today.’

  ‘Your loss, stranger,’ says the creature, backing up. ‘Perhaps I’ll see you again soon?’

  ‘I think not.’

  You take careful steps past before breaking into a sprint. Minutes later, the corridor walls open up to accommodate a circular shaft. A conclusion. You lift a candle from a nearby lantern and drop it into the shaft. Brickwork all the way down until the candle hits water and ignites some type of fuel. A circle of flame fans out, illuminating the whole space. It looks to be a deep well of some sort with a rope hanging down the centre. And now, on the opposing side of this well, a good way down, you can see an opening in the wall.

  Faced with the prospect of turning around and dealing with the lizard, you run and jump out. You fall a distance but your hands grab hold of the rope. The speed of your fall swings your body across, slamming your head and shoulder into the brickwork. Dazed and short of breath, you seize the rope between your legs and hold on, swaying back and forth until brick and mortar come loose above.

  You drop.

  As your legs plunge through the flaming waterline, you feel yourself transported.

  Click here

  YOU DIDN’T MAKE A CHOICE.

  You must click Previous Page to go back and pick one of the choices in the story.

  Beware: if you continue without selecting a choice, you’ll be lost in the spiral.

  27

  The curvature of the wall winds closer but the black endlessness of the passage continues. You start to fear for your mind. How long can one go without light? The only measure of time is the appearance of your monstrous hunger. This is a hunger born of at least three days without food. A dangerous hunger. Your sense of the world is slipping. There now exists a smooth gliding between vastly different states.

  Asleep and awake.

  Walking.

  Sitting.

  Lying.

  Up.

  Down.

  None of it changes. None of it lights the path. You start to fear that this terrible descent is without end.

  Until you notice a slight change in colour in the world around you. You can’t be sure, but some of the darkness feels tempered.

  Am I going blind?

  You push on, drawing on a reserve of strength that you know is fraught.

  The last gasp.

  But the corridor lightens. It is not your mind playing tricks. You can see sand littering the floor now, the grit of the earthen walls.

  You run until you collapse.

  You sleep.

  You get up and run again.

  After episodes of unconsciousness and exertion blur into countless cycles, you finally step into the most unexpected of all chambers: the centre.

  It is a small room, like the bottom of a well. And you can see clearly because the room forms a circle around a small candle-lit lantern. Beside the lantern is a basket of fresh fruit and a flask of wine. You grab the supplies and tears stream from your eyes as you take your first sip.

  Once sated, you notice the strange symbols painted on the floor. A series of angular shapes. Small drawings of eyes, stars, machines, sea creatures. It’s all marked in what looks like dried blood. You trace the designs with your hands and they all point to the lantern. Curious, you lift the lantern and underneath it is a tiny bowl of water. You dip a finger into this bowl and lift it to your mouth.

  Sea water.

  Something moves above you.

  The round ceiling is descending.

  Within seconds it is only a few feet from you. It looks like water. Black water. You jump into the air, puncturing the surface of th
is magical liquid, testing for a hard surface above. There is no such surface. It’s all water.

  The thought of stepping back into the spiral corridor is one you cannot bear, hence you stay in the room thinking, If this is my end, unlord, then this is my end. You conjure a fast death for yourself and watch the ceiling of water descend closer and closer. Eventually it reaches you and your outreached arms break the surface, like a diver in reverse. You swim up into it.

  Click here

  YOU DIDN’T MAKE A CHOICE.

  You must click Previous Page to go back and pick one of the choices in the story.

  Beware: if you continue without selecting a choice, you’ll be lost in the spiral.

  28

  The lizard-faced creature gives what you presume is a smile. ‘You made yourself a good decision there, friend. A good decision. Now, step this way. You can call me Margo, if you like.’ The look on your face must be clear because Margo smiles again and adds, ‘Yeah, I was raised by damned fools. I know it. Who calls the likes of me Margo?’

  Margo takes you down the little hallway and pushes aside another curtain, revealing a small cobblestone room. The room is furnished with a bench seat along one wall and a table against the other. There are two doors: one on the left that provides glimpses of Margo’s quarters and another leading to descending stone steps. Steam drifts up out of the stair.

  ‘OK now, do you need a robe or are you gonna wear that kit of yours in there?’ Margo says, peering at you. ‘Might be wise to wear your kit. It could use a steam. You can leave the rest up here.’

  ‘No. It stays with me.’

  Margo looks about to argue but says, ‘It gets mighty hot down there.’

  ‘Will I encounter anyone else?’

  ‘One or two.’

  ‘How many is that?’