by Mark Morris
I should be screaming. I stand and the world tilts under me and I should be screaming because none of this is possible, not with any of the mechanics of any universe I’ve ever been taught to believe in. I should curl into a ball and cry in terror, but that image pricks my heart and I shake off my terror and shock, because I’m not here as the child trapped in a nightmare, I’m here as the father, and it’s my job to free her.
“Gracie,” I say, her name a prayer, a mantra, a battle cry.
The world is all narrow corridors and strangely angled doors. The shadowed, shifting halls are filled with the smell of roasting meat and my mouth waters. My stomach tightens. It’s been a day and a half since I last ate and the mist in the claustrophobic corridors is the smoke from the ovens of this jagged maze.
I nearly trip over the first one, a man in a torn and stained pinstriped suit. He’s unshaven and emaciated and I think of a thousand homeless men I’ve treated like ghosts in my life. I’ve given money to some of them, bought meals for one or two, but I’m not absolved for all of the times I’ve passed them by.This one flinches as I stumble and skirt around him.
“Sorry,” I mutter, because I can’t care about him. Gracie is here somewhere.
Just as I realize I ought to ask him about her, I see the next one. A woman huddled in an alcove in jeans and a blood-smeared sweatshirt. Beyond her, on his side, is a dirty, naked man whose filthy beard seems much too large for his withered body. A rattling wheeze comes from his chest and it’s a half-second before I realize he’s crying.
“Go back,” says the woman in the alcove. Her eyes are full of the same gentle humanity I saw in the eyes of that flight attendant, back in the world. At least they look that way for a second before I recognize terror in her gaze. Terror and despair. Maybe that’s all humanity ever was.
“Go back,” she says again.“Just go.”
“Whoever you’re looking for,” the pinstriped-suit man says from behind me,“it’s not worth it. Go now.The price is too high.”
I stare at the alcove woman.At the blood on her sweatshirt and the screaming sorrow in her eyes. “It’s my daughter,” I tell her.
She only looks at me sadly and then turns her back, shaking, hugging herself.The naked man on the floor begins to wail and she kicks him hard in the side and screams for him to be silent. Pinstriped-suit cries out that I should go back, but instead I run past them… I run past a dozen more scarecrow men and women in the coalescing shadows, the twisting narrowness of this place. I find a set of spiral stairs and I descend, forced to duck my head.
When I pause, heart pounding, I hear the whispers of children and I can barely breathe, suffocated by my own hope as I wind down the steps.The smell of roasting meat is so tantalizing that I have one hand over my tight, grumbling belly, as if my hunger is a child growing there.
At the bottom of the stairs is a smoky chamber whose floor is a latticework of glass panes, but the first step I take, my foot catches in the glass and I tumble forward onto my hands and knees, fingers plunging into the soft, warm, malleable membrane I’d imagined to be glass. It’s a honeycomb of strange windows, and I peer down through the sticky mucous and I can see that each one of those panes in the latticework of the floor is not a pane but a pen, and inside each of those pens is a child.And below the honeycomb of stolen children is another chamber, where horrible, spindly figures move back and forth to wide-mouthed ovens whose fire—when their doors are opened—turns the honeycombed prison a furious red. The smoke wafting from those ovens makes my mouth water like nothing I’ve ever smelled before and I weep at the hunger and the revulsion as I see what’s being placed into those ovens. I retch but I won’t take the time to be sick. Instead I crawl on hands and knees above the gelatinous honeycomb prison, using the strong latticework between the pens to keep myself from sinking entirely, and I whisper her name.
Over and over, I whisper for her. “Gracie. Gracie, please. Gracie, can you hear me?”
I don’t hear her answer. Instead, I look down through the cloudy honeycomb pane by pane, pen by pen, until I see her face staring back at me. She’s talking but I can’t hear her voice. She’s crying and her beautiful face, my little girl’s beautiful face, is contorted with terror, but it’s her.
I’ve plunged my hands down through the honeycomb pane and am dragging her out before I can even ask myself if it’s possible. I know it must be, and it is, and she’s stinking and covered with that sticky mucous membrane, but she’s in my arms. I shush her as she cries against my chest. I shush her as she turns and vomits whatever’s in her belly, and I see some of that hideous honeycomb in her puke and I nearly throw up as well.
The smell of cooking flesh chokes me but I gather her into my arms and then I’m rushing back up the spiral stairs and down that corridor. Arms reach for me, those pitiful scarecrows who told me to go back, told me to give up, and I hate them now. Despise them for even suggesting it. Still they reach for me as if to stop me and I knock a dirty, sneering man aside. Others turn their backs, sobbing as if I’ve committed some atrocity and they can’t bear to look at me. Alcove woman sees me coming and shakes her head sadly, but it’s the filthy bearded man who snaps his head up, drags himself into the narrow corridor, and screams at me.
“Stop!” he shrieks.“You don’t know what you’re doing!”
But I know exactly what I’m doing. Gracie’s warm against me and I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.
“Daddy,” she says.“Daddy, I want to wake up!”
My little girl thinks she’s dreaming. I won’t ever tell her she’s been awake all along.
The pinstriped-suit man doesn’t move as I skirt around him, and a moment later I’m there. Half of me is convinced the abduction door will be gone, but it remains, its solidity sure and unsure, the walls themselves almost opalescent with their uncertainty about their own impossible nature. I cradle Gracie against me and touch the door. When it took her, it was warm and the metal seemed to hum, but now it is cold and silent.
The elevator. It’s not moving. I’m certain that’s it. If I just wait—
“Daddy, please,” Gracie says, and she looks up at me and coughs and I wipe the last remnants of that stinking mucous from her lips and I know I am getting her out of here. I am getting her home.
I wait, one hand on the abduction door, not hopeful. Certain.
I hear shuffling and whispers and I glance over my shoulder and see them, those human scarecrows. Pinstriped-suit man and filthy naked guy and alcove woman and a dozen others. Gracie catches sight of them and cries out for me again, but all I can do is hold her more tightly against me with one arm while I keep my other hand against the cold, still metal of the abduction door. I want to scream at them to stay away, those poor husks, but they’re not coming any closer. They only watch us, doing nothing.Watch us with pity in their eyes.
I feel the hum against my hand as the metal of the abduction door begins to warm and I want to roar my victory at them. Fuck their pity.
With my hand against the metal I can feel the rattle and rumble of the elevator in motion. I try to jam my scraped-up fingers into the crease, to force the door from this side. I’m sure I can hear—
“Voices,” Gracie says.“Do you hear—”
“I hear them.” And I do, voices on the other side of the abduction door.
The hum subsides and the metal cools just a bit and I feel my hope collapsing within me, feel my certainty die. But only for a moment, because the hum returns and the metal warms and the elevator on the other side of the abduction door is moving again, but this time there are no voices.
I push and it opens so easily that I whimper with relief and tears stream down my face. Our world is there, on the other side. The elevator lights flicker a bit and I hear tinny music playing inside and I wonder if it’s the same elevator or another, on the other side of the world, but I know it doesn’t matter. Not a bit.The elevator is empty but moving, the numbers above the door are dinging and I don’t know
how long it’ll stay open, so I pry Gracie away from me. She clutches at my jacket but I tear her loose and half-shove half-drop her through the open door.The sound of her thumping to the elevator floor is the greatest sound of my life and she turns, so brave now, and tells me to come on, Daddy. Come on. Hurry.
But I can’t.
There’s no barrier. The door remains open. Gracie’s standing now, eyes wide, calling for me to come through after her but too terrified to get near the abduction door again.
I just can’t. My body will not follow her. I’m wailing inside. Raging. I raise my hands but I can’t make them move toward the opening again, can’t make them reach through. I feel the shuffling presence of the scarecrows around me, these lost humans who told me to go back, who told me I didn’t know what I was doing.They say nothing now, just watching me, part of the shadows of this nothing space.
The elevator dings as it slows to a stop, about to open.
I scream my daughter’s name. Gracie cries out for me as the abduction door slams shut, and only now are my hands my own again. I pound against the door. I jam my fingers into that crease and a nail cracks down the middle and blood spills out and all I can hear is the echo of my daughter calling for me.
I put my hand against the metal. It is cool and still.
I round on the scarecrows.They’ve started to wander away, some muttering and shaking their heads. I grab pinstriped-suit man by the lapels and slam him against the wall with such force that his skull bounces off it, but all he can do is cry and then he’s sliding down the wall and I can’t hold him up. I let go of his suit and he curls into a mound of sorrow at my feet.
Alcove woman hasn’t wandered away.
“Please,” I whisper to her.
“You took one of theirs,” she says.
“No, I… I took my daughter back.”
“That’s not how they’ll see it.You took one of theirs and now they won’t set you free until you give them thirteen in return.”
I stare at her. The words echo strangely in my head, no sense to them. As impossible as this place.
“Give them?” I say at last.“How the hell am I supposed to give them thirteen children?”
Her face crumples and her lips tremble. She reaches up to wipe fresh tears from her eyes. “Don’t you see? That’s what the door is for.”
And then I do see. Her tears are not for me.
Numb, I look up and down the shifting, narrow corridor at the withered husks of people who inhabit this place and I understand. They weep not for me, not for Gracie, not even for the children. They weep for themselves because they’ve all done precisely what I’ve just done and now they’re trapped here.
Give them thirteen in return.
The filthy, ragged mothers and fathers scattered up and down this corridor are all abductors themselves, now. They’re monsters, stealing other people’s children until they’ve given back a tithe of thirteen to pay for their own.
Or they’re hopeless, unable to bring themselves to do it, to steal someone else’s child, and they know that as a result they are trapped in this hell forever.
I scream my daughter’s name.
And I wonder what I will become.
THE SWAN DIVE
by Stephen Laws
I really don’t remember my night walk across the Tyne Bridge.
But I was aware that I had reached that part of the pedestrian walkway halfway across, right over the river, where the water was deepest. I’d driven across the bridge many times, of course, on the way to work; too many times to count, I guess. Just one of those things in everyday life—you do it so often on autopilot that you barely think about the journey. But I’d always been aware of that particular section of the bridge, with its central girder-strut and the crosspiece of ironwork next to the concrete barrier. I realized that a small, subconscious part of me had been thinking about this place when I was very low, when the depression had kicked in. Perhaps I’d been figuring out that this was the place I’d eventually end up, when all my options had gone.
Traffic flashed behind me, uncaring, as I walked to the rail and braced my hands. I looked through the gaps in the barrier, strained to look down at the water, but couldn’t see it. Only utter black.
I’d have to climb up on to the barrier if I wanted to look down and possibly see the water. I could see the lights of the office blocks and buildings glittering on the river from the shoreline of Newcastle Quayside on my left and Gateshead on my right. But I didn’t want to look at those.
I wanted to look at the water directly beneath me.
I wanted to see ripples on the water there.
I looked back at the traffic flashing behind me. A car horn blared, but it wailed and vanished in the night and was nothing to do with me.
You want someone to care? Is that it?You want a car to stop and someone to say:“Hey, you! Don’t do it!”?
“No,” I said aloud. My voice sounded strange. Not like me at all.
I turned back, braced my hands—and clambered up onto the parapet. I hugged it like I was sitting astride a sawhorse or something.The concrete was icy cold, even though the night was warm.Wind ruffled my hair, but there was no caress in it. I still couldn’t see the water below.The darkness down there was as black as the night sky above. If I didn’t look up across the shoreline, it was like being on a bridge across limbo.
I got to my hands and knees and stood.
It was easier than I expected, and the fear that I also expected just wasn’t there.
I turned to look at the traffic. I had no fear that I might lose my balance and go over backwards. How strange.
The traffic still didn’t care. It had places to go.
But this was where I had to be.
I turned in small, tight steps away from the traffic— one-two, one-two—expecting to lose my balance at any moment. A small part of me, deep inside, was surprised that I didn’t. Now I was facing the other way, looking out across the River Tyne and with that wind on my face, coming in from the unseen North Sea miles away in the darkness.The Sage building on the right-hand Gateshead side was like a huge glass-and-metal spaceship, multiple coloured lights shimmering on the river water. But when I looked down, directly beneath me, I still couldn’t see ripples or light on the water down there. Just black.
And I realised now, for the first time, why this particular place had drawn me. Since this was presumably the point of deepest water, might it not be that when I went over, maybe (just maybe) I’d possibly survive the fall? If I jumped and hit the concrete quayside (or struts on the way down) then there was no way I’d survive. But if I was guaranteed to hit the water, then perhaps I wouldn’t be killed outright? Sure, the height and the impact of hitting the water from here would probably kill me (remember that joke from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid about a ridiculous fear of drowning when the chances are that the fall would probably kill them anyway?). In which case, job done. But what if I did survive the fall? What if I didn’t drown? And what if I was dragged out of the river, and was resuscitated or whatever, might not kind people then set about convincing me that life really was worth living? That there were people out there who cared and that I could set about starting again with new hope in my heart and a new life-affirming outlook?
“Yeah…” The wind took my word away because it didn’t believe it.
I looked out along the river and wondered what I’d do next.
I raised my arms on either side till they were parallel and shoulder high.
Now how did I think to do that?
I wondered when the fear would come; wondered when the utter emptiness inside would be filled with it. When it came and filled that hollow in my guts and heart, would I fling myself backwards from the parapet onto the walkway, weeping and shaking? Or would it steal away this weird and newfound sense of balance and make me stumble and fall from the bridge—now twisting and screaming and clawing at the air as I tried to scramble back?
Not a jump, I thought. No, it h
as to be a dive.That’s it, a proper dive, like I used to do at college. A swan dive—that’s it. A forward dive with my legs straight together, my back arched and my arms stretched out from the sides, then brought together over my head and down—just before I hit the water. Although I haven’t done this for years, it will be the best dive I’ve ever performed. My swan dive will be a swan song.
The fear hadn’t come.
The fear might not come at all.
I bent my knees slightly in preparation.
I wanted to see the ripples on the water directly below. I needed to see light down there; any kind of light, however dim. But now I realised that I would only see that just before I hit the water. It was all part of the “test”. I’d have to make the dive like it was a promise. My part of that promise was to make the dive—and the promise would only be fulfilled, the ripples and the light would only be revealed, when I did what had to be done.
I hadn’t taken a drink that night—hadn’t needed one for the first time in a long, long time—but it all made complete sense.
Was a small part of me still waiting for a blaring car horn, or a voice from behind calling out urgently that I should stop?
No, of course not.
Will the fear come?
No, of course not.
The wind was now rushing in my face, no longer warm but cold and fiercer than before. I suddenly realised—without being conscious of having made the decision, but with the pull of gravity changing all over my body—that I had begun the dive.
My eyes were open, and my head was tilted back—but even so I had to squint against the rush of cold air on my eyes. My body was tilting straight down, my back was arching, and I held my legs straight—now up and above me as my face swung down.
This was my last, perfect dive.
I opened my eyes.
And fear, that hateful liar, was upon me—as I knew it would be all along.
I saw, at last, the reflection of my face in the water; white as the moon and with crater blur-lines of the river surface distorting that visage—and my arms were held wide. It was a perfect reflection of my swan dive. My widespread arms, embracing the reflection, now swiftly bent forwards as if to caress my face, just before the joined palms and pointed fingers met to pierce the surface of that black water.A perfect reflection of my face swarmed up to kiss me.