The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

by Brian Evenson

  We had bantered like this every morning since they had taken me. But today was the first day that, when I looked at him, I could clearly imagine him dead.

  This was the day before the night I went to the cave alone. This day I went to the cave but as usual, as their slave. My first keeper unlocked my chain from the ring attached to the tent’s center post. He wound the chain’s end tight around his fist, then jerked me from my pallet. I scrambled up. He was already pushing his way through the canvas flap and toward the path.

  Outside, he gestured at the scattered remnants of a meal beside his dead fire. The night keeper was wrapped in his cloak and asleep, his face hidden in the crook of his arm. “Bread,” he said. “Cheese.” I managed to secure a hunk of each before he rushed me past. I ate as I walked, hurriedly, and then rushed to stay beside him, so the chain would not tug on my collar and set my neck bleeding again.

  The path turned and twisted, rising slightly. I could not see the cave yet, but perhaps through the trees the cave could see us. We walked a time in silence save for the sound of the first keeper’s long, slow plod and my quicker, sharper steps beside. “If it was me,” he said finally, “if it was my choice, I would have killed you already.”

  “It is not you,” I said. “You are merely a keeper.”

  “First keeper,” he said, and laughed. “Merely! But they will kill you in the end. Either after they have what they hope to have from you or after they realize you cannot give it to them.”

  I said nothing. In fact, I understood the situation precisely as he did. He was perfectly right. They would use me until they determined I was of no value to them, and then they would slaughter me.

  When we arrived at the cave, the others were already there. As usual, no women apart from me—and they did not truly consider me a woman. Or rather, they did, but thought that aspect of my being beside the point. I was an eater, and thus both more than and less than human.

  The four gaunt men were dressed in their thick robes, their faces expressionless. The first keeper stopped at a distance. When I hesitated, he pushed me toward them.

  “Go on, then,” he said.

  I moved slightly forward. The four men watched me come, and when the first keeper’s hold on my chain kept me from coming any closer, they inclined themselves toward me in a slow bow, as if performed underwater.

  “Eater of darkness,” said the one I had come to think of as their leader, in a broken voice. “Welcome.”

  I said nothing.

  “You know what we would have of you,” said the second. When I did not answer, the first keeper jerked the chain.

  “Yes, I know,” I said.

  They performed again their slow, balletic bow. When I felt the chain grow slack again, I started toward the mouth of the cave.

  The first keeper stopped at the cave’s entrance. He secured the end of the chain to the ring they had hammered into the stone of the cave’s mouth.

  “In with you, eater,” he said. “Eat.”

  In I went.

  At first the cave was unnaturally dim, the darkness thick and palpable, and I opened my mouth and began to gulp it in. I could feel the darkness crowding my lungs, a black mass, and soon, dizzy and stuffed with it, I had to lie down. With the chain attached to the collar around my neck, I could not reach the stone bench that had been cut into the back of the cave. Instead, I had to lie on the floor.

  Feeling the cold of the stone through my skin, I waited for my breathing to calm. I closed my eyes.

  Things grew darker still, but after a time the darkness became variegated, a collection of wavering shadows and shades. I felt a wind rush through my head, saw dogs made of shadow fading in and out of being, saw a vast and ponderous shape as it passed through me. I waited for the dogs to bark, or for the vast shape to notice me and speak, but neither did.

  After a while, I rose to my knees and opened my eyes. The light of the cave was now a pale gray, as visible to me as if it had been daylight. I could see everything but could detect neither my hands nor my body. Where they had been, there was only darkness.

  Staggering to my feet, I stumbled toward the cave’s mouth. When the robed men saw me, their breath caught in their throats. They looked afraid. Even the first keeper seemed momentarily taken aback. I held my hand before my face and saw there was no hand there, only swirling darkness.

  “Eater of darkness!” said their leader. “What do you see awaiting us?”

  I opened my mouth to speak but nothing came out. And then I fainted.

  When I awoke, it was late in the afternoon. The four robed men were gone. The first keeper had seated himself on a large rock near the cave’s mouth and had hold of my chain again. From time to time, he tugged at it. It was that, perhaps, that had awakened me.

  When he saw I was awake, he said, “They discussed whether to kill you or no. One said yes, the other three no, but they were less certain than yesterday. In the end, they were still too afraid to kill you, or perhaps too greedy, so we shall see what the darkness speaks through you tomorrow.” He jerked the chain again. “You are running out of time.”

  I coughed up a black, slick lump. It lay in the dirt a moment but almost immediately curled at its edges and began to dissolve.

  “It makes for a nice parlor trick, this eating of darkness,” said the first keeper. “But once they realize anyone can do it, they’ll surmount their fear and kill you.”

  “If anyone can do it,” I said, gesturing to the cave’s mouth behind me, “please, feel free. Go inside and open your mouth.”

  He just stared. There was not fear in his face exactly, but I still knew he would not enter the cave.

  I fell asleep almost as soon as we arrived back at the tent, but a few hours later was awake again. I lay on my pallet listening to the first keeper conversing with the night keeper, the former’s voice thick with drink. Over time it grew dark outside, and soon they both stopped speaking. I could tell from his snores the first keeper was asleep.

  I had little to fear from the night keeper. He was afraid of me. As long as I was quiet, he would not risk entering the tent.

  I rolled off my pallet and folded it back, prying the rock out of its cradle of dirt. It fit comfortably in my palm, one edge of it sharp and jagged. I stood and felt my way to the center post and then, slowly, dully, began to pry at the lock that held my chain to the ring.

  Twice I thought the night keeper had heard me, and so threw myself quickly down again. The first time perhaps I had misheard, or perhaps he hesitated just outside the flap and, hearing nothing further, returned to his seat beside the fire. The second time he opened the flap and held it parted with the back of one hand, his unsheathed knife glinting in the other. He remained there for some time, staring in, motionless. I pretended to sleep, the rock clasped tight in my grip beneath the blanket. But then, finally, he let the flap fall and left again.

  Shortly after that, I had scratched and torqued the lock sufficiently that it came apart. I took the chain and wrapped it loop by loop tight around my waist so it would not clink, and then I squirmed under the side of the tent and was gone.

  Once an eater, always an eater: I went straight to the cave. At the mouth, out of earshot of the camp below, I used my rock to break most of the chain off, until the only thing that bound me were a few links still hanging from the metal collar. And then, alone, I entered.

  It was dark inside, much darker than it had been by day. I began to gulp the darkness down. My heart was beating fast and my mouth was dry. Still swallowing, I made my way to the bench cut in the stone against the back wall of the cave. I was dizzy, yet still I swallowed more. And then, head spinning, I lost consciousness.

  I dreamt in just the way I used to dream in the cave, back before the others came, back when I had been known and respected as an eater of darkness, back when all came to ask the darkness questions through me and none dared molest me. I dreamt of dogs made of shadow, growling, their forms sometimes spread long on the ground and sometimes squ
at and froglike and sometimes tilted or crimped across several surfaces. The shadows of dogs with no dogs to cast them. And then I dreamt of that vast and ponderous shape, and this time I heard its breathing too as it came closer and passed by me, but then it hesitated and returned for a closer look.

  Ah, it said. You’ve come.

  I could not tell where its head ended and its body began, or even, properly speaking, if it had a head at all. And the voice when it came seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

  “Yes,” I said. “Here I am.”

  What became of you?

  When I had explained to it all that had happened, I admitted I still did not know what to do.

  It stayed for a long time motionless, peering at me with those eyes, which were pitchy blots within what was already deep darkness.

  Do you trust me? it asked.

  I hesitated. Despite having come to this cave for years, I did not trust it. But perhaps I mistrusted it less than most.

  You must trust me, it said, or I cannot help you.

  And so, reluctantly, I did.

  I came down from the cave. It was nearly day, though I was still steeped in darkness. I could not feel my body or do anything really but watch it move and try to keep up. I watched it walk down the path, footsteps awkward at first, then more and more certain, then perfectly fluid and unnaturally silent. I watched it come to the tent it had left, but instead of crawling back under the canvas it circled around to the other side, to the fire where one man slept and another man kept watch, both with their backs to me.

  The night keeper never saw me coming, never knew I was there until he spun rapidly around just in time for me to take his face between my hands and exhale into it. He collapsed without a sound. His comrade in arms, the first keeper, had begun to stir, but I was already on my knees beside him, my face inches from his own, the darkness curling down and seeping into his nose, his mouth, his ears. He cried out, or tried to—his mouth gaped like a fish, but no sound came out. Soon, he was still.

  “There,” my voice said to his slack face. “Wouldn’t it have been wiser to kill me while you had the chance?”

  And then I watched myself—though it was not myself exactly—wander from tent to tent, trailing darkness in my wake. A great, silent revolution culminating in the tent containing the four robed men who awaited me each day to hear the judgment of the cave. Now, my body offered them that judgment. They were the only ones to try to resist, the only ones aware of their fate before that fate overwhelmed them. They brandished the instruments of their god as if these could protect them, but a moment later lay collapsed and still, for what can withstand a darkness such as this?

  …

  And then I found myself waking on the stone bench as if none of it had happened, as if it had all been a dream. I awoke gasping, the cave around me brighter than it had ever been, and stumbled my way out.

  It was daylight. The metal collar around my neck had come loose at some point, the metal twisted and warped now. I let it fall to the ground. My neck, no longer used to being without it, felt more than naked: flayed.

  I half suspected I would find them awaiting me just outside the cave, the four robed and bowing men, but nobody was there. I made my way slowly down from the cave. Before I had even reached the camp below, I could see something had changed. The tents were just as they had always been, but there was no sign of life. Or, rather, simply a series of prone and motionless men, their eyes wide open, their expressions as blank as if they had never been alive.

  It took me several weeks to haul them, one by one, to the cave. I would tug one in and leave him there and by morning he’d be gone. I did not know where they went, but I knew I must take them to the cave and leave them, for this came to me in my dreams. The first keeper I saved for last, partly because of his bulk, partly because, in an odd way, I felt closer to him than the others. He was my first keeper, after all. As I dragged him slowly to the cave, I saw that he could move his eyes. No matter where I was, they were always looking at me. And, yet, after a night in the cave, he too disappeared along with the rest.

  And why, the others gone, after having entered myself, have I not disappeared? Why, now that I am once again alone, can I enter the darkness of the cave and emerge unscathed and alive? Those who come now, those who seek me out again to know their fate now that the invaders are gone, claim it is because I am an eater of darkness. That either you eat the darkness or the darkness eats you.

  But I know better. A meal was made of me long ago. What does it matter if I can dream of a body that resembles what I used to be, and that I can make others dream they see this body too? No, this is not me. I am lost in the darkness, in the whirl of the voices of the dead. Daylight, for me as for them, will never come.

  Elo Havel

  I.

  It is good of you to write, and I thank you for it: I am glad at last to hear from another of my kind—and, above all, to have another of my kind acknowledge me. I have indeed, since my return, heard many voices, seen many faces, but the individuals to whom they belong neither hear nor see me in return. I shake them, shout in their ears, but they do not respond. It is as if for them I do not exist.

  But why then, I wonder, would I exist for you? What is different about you? To put it bluntly, what is wrong with you? By which I suppose I am also asking: what is wrong with me?

  You ask me what happened. You ask if I can recount to you what passed in the forest—why, though four of us went in, only one came out. First, I must ask how you found me. True, after leaving the forest I returned to my old residence, and have been here since my return. But considering that everyone around me acts as if I do not exist, how did you know I did? Did you deduce somehow that one of us had returned and simply posted letters to all of us in turn? Was I the first of the four you contacted? The last?

  What do I need to tell you of the forest before I begin? Since you are not from our city, I am not certain what you already know.

  We have enjoyed a long friendship, for lack of a better word, with the forest. We foraged there but did so with care. There were, true, portions of forest that over the years we destroyed, razing whole hectares of ground to make way for our roads, our houses, our farms. We also inadvertently, carelessly, burned down many hectares more. But these were exceptions rather than the rule: nobody should be judged by the exceptions. Consider them the momentary slights of a thoughtless friend. No, for the most part we honored the forest, preserved it.

  And what did the forest offer us in return? It provided berries and mushrooms for food, animal skins for clothing, wood to build our shelters and to warm us. It healed us, nurtured us, kept us alive.

  Or at least it did in the past. More recently, no.

  But that, no doubt, is why you have written to me.

  For many years, we had a practice. We would care for our elderly until they were moribund, and then they were taken into hospice. They would wait there a day, a week, perhaps more, and then a delegation would arrive. Elo Havel, they might begin—or with whatever name the individual possessed—you have been chosen to commune with nature. Then they would turn to another individual, say his name, and tell him he had been chosen as well. Eventually the delegation would lead or carry one or several individuals into the forest. They would be left in a designated place, a certain grove. From there, waving and smiling, they would watch the delegation depart. They were happy to be left there. Their friend, the forest, they trusted would take care of them.

  One day they were in the city and the next they were in the forest, and once left in the forest they were never seen again. Never a trace of them, never a sign.

  They always went willingly. The forest was their friend. To go into the forest when death approached was the order of things. We had taken from the forest, and now the forest took us in return.

  …

  And then one day something changed. One of the moribund did not wave, did not smile, when he was left in the grove. He resisted, and when th
e delegation left, he screamed and begged them to come back. When they would not, he tried to follow, and despite his frailty managed to leave the grove. The delegation rapidly conferred about this man crawling after them, about what to do with him. There was talk of breaking his legs so he could not follow, but they could not agree to this. There was talk of letting him return to the city—if he did not care to be taken into the embrace of the forest, why insist? But they could not agree to this either.

  What they could agree to in the end was to pick the man up bodily, carry him back into the grove, and lash him to the trunk of a tree. When he continued to scream, a delegate removed both of the man’s stockings and wadded them into his mouth. And then the delegation turned and left.

  What did the other moribund do as this occurred? Just observed, saddened perhaps at the man’s failure to understand and accept his role. They did nothing to interfere. They exhibited no desire to leave the grove. When a member of the delegation circled back to see if one of the other moribund had released the recalcitrant man, he found they had not. They had gathered around him; those who could still stand were stroking his face and arms, attempting to calm him, but they did not free him.

  Two days later, the delegation returned to the grove with more of the moribund. As usual, there was no trace of the individuals who had not resisted. But with the man who had resisted, it was different. He was gone, but a substantial trace of him did remain: an immense amount of blood spilled upon the remains of the rope and splashed up the bole of the tree. When the new group of the moribund saw this, they collectively expressed a desire not to be left in the forest. They began to scream and shout, and resisted. But since they were weak, they were quickly subdued. One of the delegation was sent running back to the city in search of more rope to lash them. Soon they were tied up and left. That was the end of them.

  Perhaps if the delegation had chosen a different grove, perhaps if the moribund had not been confronted with the frayed rope and the blood, things might have reverted to the way they had been before. But instead, the grove grew more and more spattered with blood, and the chosen became more and more panicked. Quickly, as word spread, to be sent to the forest was deemed more punishment than release.