“It’s not an actual written language. He was French. It’s the phonetic spelling of something he overheard.”
“So… we intone it?”
Her torchlight picked and hesitated across the debris.
“Like a rite?”
“We’re not wizards. We don’t do anything with it. We can fiddle the linguistics later.” A long puddle ran a sectioning line across the cave. “Runoff from yesterday? Some issue with groundwater?”
She craned back they way they’d come–“Still pretty fierce out.”
Their landing had been almost vertical, the skinny beach between bridges a natural funnel for headwinds. The entrance was a raised nub up into the storm, a threshold between wet and dry cold, noise and still, an awkward splice of media across the rear of the long-buried little chapel. Here–another transition, stone slabs ending at what was once a wall, now a cavern floor sloping off into deep-black and further branches.
Entirely encompassed within the larger town of B–, scaffolded within the underside of its supporting bridge network–the remains of the historical village of M– sur M– were a warren of temporary housing and storage space grown up alongside the bridge-web as it slowly spanned an expansive, fractal delta, now long-gone. It eventually became a location in its own right through the quirk and fancy of B–’s early aldermen. Its total effective area was a little under twenty thousand square feet. Since the network had never been fully completed it was impossible to walk solely upon, under or through it from one end of the notional village bounds to the other. It existed in pockets only, pooling and congealing alongside cycles of structural decay and renovation.
This breaching space was something more modern, part of a later expansion of B–, running through the old village at a tangent in a long tunnel of last-century brickwork intended as part of a cistern, eventually opening up this wide wedge down into the exposed caves.
This is where the text had been found, part of a tiny, esoteric library-space hidden under rock and fallen masonry. The oddly-distributed set of marginalia listed times, dates and placenames too obscure to correlate; scribbled pseudo-tongue commentary within a little-known antignostic tract.
It wasn’t clear whether the library had been within M– sur M– itself–detritus knocked through into the upper portion of the caves by the structural work–or if it had always been here, in some unrelated den, maybe not even in use around the time of the chapel. The disruption was significant enough to have churned any potential boundary into mulch.
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? …
You wonder instead if the man on the table, during your period of momentary oblivion, or the bird or cat or gusts of wind above, if one or more have not snuck or crawled or blown themselves down and around you, manipulating and arranging you for reasons of their own, or none, or for play, or for no purpose. Perhaps you were dealt with in some physical manner, brushed-down or poked-at or simply even looked upon and unable to return that look, for a time now repressed …