Her
single light revealed the stone walls at the bottom of the labyrinth she had
spent so many terrifying hours navigating. The unimaginable being that had
pursued her throughout had now left her alive for reasons which she knew not,
but was nevertheless grateful for. Though he had spared her life, he had not
spared her eyes, or her heart… or her imagination. She now watched as her
companion… the last one still left… sank slowly into the black and seemingly
bottomless pool before her. She nervously fingered the black and white length
of silk tied fastidiously around her neck. Her tense brown eyes locked
compulsively behind the lenses of dowdy glasses on the body of a hard and good
young woman sinking into nothingness.
The walls, like the undercroft of some
decrepit church or an ossuary of the dead of Paris, were lined with crude
carvings. As they had descended ever deeper, the carvings had progressed into
ever more horrific shapes to taunt the eye and turn her imagination against
her. They were pagan and brutal. Stick men and primitive beasts with horns and
multiple heads flanked gibberish writing. She feared to move her small light,
for any flash against a wall might reveal another image most bewitching to burn
itself into her mind where she would see only it in this darkness.
Sitting alone, she fingered the
collar of her maroon trench coat and pondered what her next move would be. She
could not go back. The only way out was forward, but there was no forward, only
down… into the hole… into its blackness. Still, how could she? It was still
full of the water that had by now consumed her companion in whole, vanishing
her like a lovebird’s penny in an artesian well. The young woman’s mind began to fill with a
terrible thought. Was this Hell? Had their escape route been a descent into an
underworld from which there was no exit? A feeling began to creep over her.
They had entered the maw of a nightmare. And worse yet, she was pretty sure
that she was awake.
She waited as thoughts of what had
lured her into this place beyond time and reason swirled. Pushing her fine dark
hair back from her face, she could look beyond the darkness and into the past;
a past too agonizingly recent to forget.
She had watched him from across the
room many times, although she pretended not to. She waited for him in corridors
and found reasons to buy things where he worked. Headphones, a pack of AA batteries,
a power strip; all overpriced, but worth the trip just to make sure that he was
there and that she might run into him by accident. She never engaged him
directly, at least at first. The temptation and the possibility of absolute
failure levied sheer terror on her timid heart.
Then he came to her. Their eyes had
somehow locked in the old library that fall day. He had never paid her a second
thought, other than her normal and yet strikingly unusual appearance. A soft
afternoon light dropped through the window on the pale, eye grabbing young
woman. She seemed to glow in that way that only the Dutch masters could achieve
in oil on black canvasses. He approached her and for whatever reason they hit
it off. For the first time in her long time, she felt legitimately happy. It
was a good day.
One night she opened a fortune
cookie and it read, “You CAN have what you want.”
She remembered standing in a dark
corridor some months later, alone. Her phone rang and she answered it. It was a
text message. They knew that she would not respond, and she figured that that
was the point. Somebody they both knew, he better than her, had laid it on in
clear terms. He was dead.
It was an automobile accident.
Something had happened, she never learned what, but someone had slammed into
someone else. He was either that someone or that someone else. She could
imagine it with a near clairvoyance; the broken and twisted wreckage of an
economy car like a carcass on the side of a rural road under the spread of a
single, barren, diseased elm tree. His red blood squeezed from him, and
spattered like paint across the grey road. His glasses, broken and twisted fell
through darkness and to her feet. The shattered pieces of what she had only
reached-out and touched enough to fall in love with, now before her and
irreparable. She would never see him again.
They had not spoken in some days.
She imagined that it was her fault. She knew that she could be grinding on
people, especially when she did not mean to. Had she said the wrong thing? Had
she done the wrong thing? Made the wrong move? Most likely, yes. She knew that
was what it had to be. She scared him away, and before she could tell him how she
felt and why. Again, she had sabotaged herself without knowing it.
It would be just another part of a
life that she could not fit into.
“I know why I’m here, now,” she
lamented, her voice drained and quiet, “I can’t taste the future. I’m not meant
to go on. I guess I belong back up there… nowhere.”
“Are you sure?” said a voice, deep,
but unspecific. She was startled to her feet by the sudden reply from nowhere
and from no one.
“The only way forward is down,
through the hole.”
“But it’s full of water,” she
answered back.
“Only because you want there to be.
Your fear is what keeps you here,” explained the voice. “Beyond there is
unknown, but it is not here. Through there is tomorrow.”
The water began to drain from the
hole. She watched as the slow pull grew into a flush. Soon the water was gone,
and she found herself staring into blackness. She struggled to see a bottom,
but she could not. Might she drown down there? Might she come-out alive? Would
she simply drift in the darkness ahead? Perhaps she would land near the light
of day. She did not know. She faced the black chasm of a future where nothing
was impossible.
“The only way forward in down,” said
the voice.
She pictured him waiting for her
down there. Might the one she lost be there to share whatever future awaited
her? She had to believe so. Her heart raced as she stepped to the edge, her
cold, wet feet trembled in her boots, her thoughts fixated on his image.
“Dream on,” said the voice in her
ear.
With that, she took a step and
plunged into the hole and into whatever lay ahead. Falling down…down…down…
