“You’ll die. There’s always a chance… but in all honesty, you’ll die.”
“I am a scholar of the fort.”
“Melodrama?”
“Self-realisation.”
“Melodrama.”
They walked another loop through the wide, shallow bowl near the overlap with normalcy, through the little spikes of ice-in-the-nethers clarity brought on by the inversion of it all: the once slow-rise into the hill-that-was, now a scarred, shallow indentation. Flaps of excess skin sewn up after excising the cyst. It seemed exactly as overgrown, exactly as furrowed and ploughed-through as on the day of the event, the day of the absence of event.
“Typical Wednesday.”
Their refrain. I did not see this coming.
“Typical Wednesday,” she confirmed. Wednesday 22nd July, eighteen-months-and-change ago. Today she would meet with the anchoress. The third attempt overall, this one long past due.
“It doesn’t have to be you.”
“No. And yet,” she gestured at the absence of volunteers.
They had been two of the first to arrive, a bond that lingered. Two of only a half dozen to have lived within close visual range of the hill before its abrupt absence. They had shared the same mix of incredulity and embarrassment of self-doubt. There were no startled cries, no pontifications. They began instead with:
This cannot have been a singular phenomenon of nature.
Not solely. Around the central shaft downwards—towards one of ten successive, partially-fortified platforms—they had discovered the first set of apparently abandoned apparatus: torches, lamps, simple rigging. No excavation tools. Nothing exotic. It wasn’t clean enough for some spontaneous outburst of new physics, yet too strangely and quickly done for a manned event.
It has the appearance of antiquity.
Each level showed obvious degradation, whether under layers of mosses or the thick accretion of dust.
The revealed structure may be unrelated to the disappearance.
Perhaps there had always been an entrance down into whatever-this-was, the hill always some temporary capstone, no matter how many generations had known and walked it.
Can this really have occurred.
Was there any possibility that they were, if not collectively insane, then simply mistaken? Caught up in some narrow-beam psychological confusion, a hyper-local Mandela Effect? It was wildly easy to doubt what had been cast-iron certainty when all evidence of the certainty was removed. None of them had anything as trivialising as a photograph. Not even showing as a background feature in an unrelated shot. On their phones, satellite images showed only a low resolution static of trees, too far from any mapping-friendly roads for a side-elevation view.
The platforms were a series of sections through stone, as though a mountainside had been cut away downwards to show uncannily uniform strata, each layer apparently self-contained, each at slightly different angles, depths and prominences out into a central funnel of clear space, wider as they descended. Each seemed snapped or broken off, but not artificially so, without any obvious marks of tooling.
The whole edifice had the feel of a nook, of a place set-aside. It had the sense and shape of a shelter. As though a weak seam in the world had been forced open and co-opted as a hiding place.
“Somewhere to sit out the end of all things.”
“And yet you choose not to.”
The bottom. Wide and flat and damp. Clearly concrete underfoot. They turned towards her rooms, towards the woman who claimed to have been living there for notional-years before any of them had arrived that first day. The woman who claimed the underfort had always been exposed to sky.
You rouse yourself. You limber up, as best you are able, bouncing and jiggling yourself in place, still supine, still sore. You walk yourself using shoulders and back so that you move in a little pinwheel, reorienting yourself within the nook. It is tiring and hideous but not unmanageable. You wheel yourself to your left, to your right then back again, as fast as you can manage, enjoying the sense of motion …
You wonder what you might become yourself given sufficient time, enboxed here upon your back, in darkness except for a crack—still visible—at the other short-end of the room. Some floor-oriented shape; some human matting. Perhaps, bamboolike, you will find yourself slowly shooting towards it; your legs extending outwards with rhubarb-forcing cracks, or with new shoots forming, budding out of the heel and soles of your husk …
You can recall only two members of that dialogue, bulb-lit or otherwise. It was the only one you had with that group of people, you are sure of it—some of these sureties are intuitions as much as memory—as though you are sometimes able to see a counter or tag associated with a given event in your internal catalogue which shows at a glance its number or relevance, regardless of the content recalled. Memory metadata. It is not an outcome of repetition; this was a single occurrence more clearly intuited than those with many. The thin lady and the one with a hat: the combination of impressions associated with them are significant enough to unconsciously mesh with your own sawtoothed internals …
Accidentally or otherwise, your memories are primarily nonsense. Nonsense or embarrassments or otherwise essentially degrading. Perhaps you have spent so much time in worthless activity that these are the only things to have seeped through, your memory rendered ineffectual through sheer saturation of moments you would not wish ever to recall, now so fundamental to general information storage or the fitting together of detail with detail that without them you would have no past at all …
The only memories you are able to invoke—which are invoked regardless of your intent—are broad and flat and saggy. Your behaviour and your circumstances are recalled, but never the mood. Detached from any actual experience of the time, they are at most re-imagined with the temperament that you bring to them now …
Over all else, the inundation continues; the layering of noise is as though you are in a much larger room with a hundred loud conversations taking place simultaneously and you have lost the facility to selectively bring into focus just that which is directed toward you. Some long-instilled behaviour insists that you attempt to decode it, you can feel the associated mental weariness spinning up, but you stop yourself from nodding or shaking your head in faux comprehension …
You need to shift your weight, it is too painful to continue to lie on those parts of yourself that you have so abused to get here. You attempt a roll: your shoulders and the muscles of your upper back are fatigued, so instead you slide your elbow, your right-hand elbow—perhaps you are right-handed?—upwards a little, in the direction of your head, until your head and torso begin naturally to tilt to the left. The pain is significantly greater in this interim position; your upper arm trembles with spasms that appear to require no deliberate effort on your part. You bear the pain and increase the angle and stress untill the tremor becomes a shimmy, the shimmy a full palsy. You pull leftwards with your head, fail and rock back. You pull leftwards with your head, fail and rock back. You pull leftwards with your head until your upper torso twists enough, your arms splayed, to bring your forehead into contact with the wood of the floor, fighting the pounding blood of the onset of unconsciousness and keeping yourself awake …
Whatever those dolls may be, however discovered and wherever encountered, you think of them as game pieces. You are as certain of this as of any fact relating to them, a pointless certainty, one of your own instincts rather than of any properties of the dolls themselves …
That day is a clutter, long in the recollection, with a twisting in its growth over time. You could not possibly have lived it for as long as you recall, could not have taken so many and so contrary a set of actions …
In the light: cloudsign. A feel of increasing lateness that may be just a camouflage of the weather. You can still feel the start of what will eventually be a full headache, the tiny but constant weight of the light resting on the front of your brain, straining the optic nerve, pulling your eyeball tight against the skull. Having to process day and night in alternation is surprisingly tiring …
In the darkness: box edges merge with box edges, merge with empty space. You roll your head and eye, memorising the impression of shape and volume, the fading lines of contrast against the increasing flat noise. Your pocket of visibility beyond the curtain is shrinking now, not obviously so, but you feel the decrease in granularity. The rain is noticeably loud, bleeding into and over the scraping of wood, sound and vision becoming a single lulling white-noise …
It is dark, but not pitch, with no shadow of movement from the curtain-bottom. Since the imagined window gutter is low and near, any interuptions in its illumination will be visible only when something is close-pressed against you. Your body beyond the curtain tingles with exposure, but your head is safe. You wink to your still dark-attuning eye, keeping your head tilted woundwards and away from the line of light. The dark slowly turns gritty, the grain of old film stock. You wink back and check for shadows in the light. None …
The skin of your shoulders is a continuous burn down through your muscle to your bones, which feel small and fragile and popped. The rear of your head is wet underneath your sweating: the sticky and underhair wet of blood or some small wound. You cannot move your fingers. The palms of your hands are cramping. Your lower back and abdomen are a single hard girdle, all the small pieces of yourself through which you have force-marched this distance are fused and immobile. You will not be moving again in the same manner, not for some time at least, but you still have the majority of your ankle and toe and foot strength as a reserve …
Shuffle, heave, scrape, you caterpillar across the floor, sinuously now, call it that, adding a small and inefficient kick to your right as you convulse onwards, trying to avoid collision. The thing-with-drawers is almost certainly not close enough to be an actual impediment but you fear that you might snag against it and cause some movement or shunting, drawing attention to it or to you and forcing another improvised exchange of noises. The least exhausting option is to make allowance, to detour slightly in your continuing high-activity, low-speed shuffle …
Shuffle, heave, scrape, you inch and centimetre through the area between the table and the first table-span distance from it, full of wonder, it being broadly the same as the area you have left behind yet from your new vantage so very differently angled and aspected …
Eventually, finally, you can hear waters. From directly upwards and from one side you can hear what you believe to be the impact of a dense rain. It does not directly touch the shell of the room you are within, feeling more than one space removed from that. You are not on the top or outermost rooms of this structure …
Unexpectedly, your hearing returns as the sounds do, a shuffle bump of the man or thing, and still a lack of water-noise. You note that the drift of time is moved again, is less immediately riverside. The balance of smells suggesting industry are stronger, or at least more unevenly biased. You do not know what to make of that. You wonder if you travel closer to some notional home after all, rather than farther from it. Perhaps you misjudge the intent of this place or its captain or pilot or orchestrator. You do not know why you assume you have come from a town or city …
You allow yourself to relax into your paralysis. You could be comfortable here, for as long as it lasts, some small time no doubt. Release your too-tight grip and surely all those long and life-formed habits will reassert, just as breathing must. Are you truly even paralysed? Were not your arms arrayed in some form when you fell and now distinctly otherwise? Surely your legs and feet could not have been so unnaturally placed? …