by Hickey, Greg
He moved to the door once more. Nobody was there to observe him—the colonists nearby had turned away from the fearful sight and paid him little heed now that the noise had stopped—but had anyone been watching him, they would have noticed that his few steps to the door were strong and smooth, that his whole body seemed at once rigid and relaxed, that the muscles in his legs scarcely tensed to move his body forward, but in this minimal tension there was no wasted energy, that his body was truly alive for one brief moment. They would have also noticed that his face bore no signs of his momentary anger, that he did not frown or scowl or furrow his brow, but pressed his lips together gamely as the faint light in his deep, dark eyes now rose to the surface.
Samuel crouched in front of the door, ran his hand over the cool metal surface, then along the narrow space between the door and the frame, standing up to reach the top. He stepped back and studied the entryway again, then leaned in to examine the space between the door and the frame, scanning with his eye the narrow gap his hand had traced seconds before. In the darkened crevice he could just make out the shadow of the bolt. Samuel grasped the handle and pulled it hard, all the while studying the frame, hinges and bolt. He saw that the door was meant to open and close by turning on its hinges but that the bolt now restricted this motion. But how to remove this part? Samuel stood back. He was calm now; the sudden anger that had filled him some moments ago was gone. He walked around the hall, studying it as he went, the problem of the door and the gap and the bolt always on his mind. After passing twice around the building, he sat and stared at the placid stone façade, lost in thought, until the sound of bells signaled the evening meal.
He walked to the nearest meal hall with the door still on his mind. It was not until he reached the hall and saw the other colonists with their meal cakes that he realized he was actually quite hungry. He stood in line, eagerly awaiting his share of food, but once he received it he was overcome by a desire to eat as fast as he could and return to the sleeping hall. Samuel was so deep in thought as he returned from his meal that he did not notice Penny had followed him. She sat against the side of the sleeping hall and watched him as the daylight faded and he circled the building time and again, stopping every so often to approach the hall and study a crack in the masonry or white-painted door, then backing away again, some new detail either filed away in his thoughts or dismissed as unimportant. She waited for him each time he appeared around the corner of the hall, walked toward her and passed on by, but she did not call out to him. Samuel wished she would join him in his work, though he feared to ask. And Penny’s doting gaze never wavered as she watched him stride pensively around the hall. Finally, when the last rays of the sun withered away and the blackness and starlight closed in, he came and sat next to her.
She turned to look up at him, her throat long and pale under the rising moon. “You are like them,” she said in her careful and deliberate way, and this simple statement of admiration at once thrilled and frightened him. He looked away, out into the darkened meadow.
“No,” he said. “There will be another.” Yet, for the first time, he did not truly believe it.
The silver-blue moon settled above the mountains, and they lay down in the grass outside the hall. Penny fell asleep within a few minutes, but Samuel lay awake for a long time, his body drained but his mind restless.
VII
When Samuel awoke in the morning, Penny was gone. The sun had risen some hours ago but had not yet climbed above the height of the sleeping hall, leaving him still in the shade. He was alone. Whatever colonists had spent the night outside the hall had already wandered off. The bells sounded for the morning meal, but he was not hungry. Instead, he resumed his pacing around the hall, stopping only when he heard the midday bells and the pangs in his stomach overcame him, and every now and again to sit at the base of the hall and think. Penny came and went twice, but they did not speak.
As the afternoon wore on, Samuel’s patience waned. His breaks from circling the building came more frequently, and when he stopped to sit against the hall, his mind strayed more readily from the problem at hand. His imagination was exhausted, and he was still no closer to finding any semblance of a way into the locked building. He thought about leaving the hall, just for an hour or so, to walk in the meadow and clear his mind, and as the late afternoon sun beat down upon him he longed to immerse himself in the cool currents of the river. But he forced himself to stay, resolved not to abandon his efforts, even for a few moments, and to keep circling the hall, keep thinking, in the belief that there must be some little detail he had overlooked.
The bells tolled for the evening meal, but Samuel ignored them and kept on with his work. The sun set, bringing relief from the heat of the day, and soon the moon rose, its turquoise light shimmering on the creamy façade of the hall, like the surface of the stone that was the planet’s namesake. In this soft reflection Samuel was struck by the vital detail which had eluded him all day long: a set of narrow, horizontal grooves cut into the stone of one side of the hall. He happened to pass them just as the moon reached a certain height where its reflected light caught the wall and filled the grooves with a faint blue glow.
Samuel leapt to the wall and ran his hand over its smooth surface. His fingers slipped neatly into the grooves, which were about as wide as his body and just high enough from top to bottom to give his fingers purchase. They were spaced unevenly up the height of the wall and stopped just below a cracked open window. Perhaps, had he been less excited by this discovery, Samuel might have noticed these notches were not part of the building’s original design. They were roughly made, and their edges were sharp, not rounded and smoothed with age and wear, and in some places the paint had been scraped away to reveal the dark gray rock underneath.
But Samuel noticed none of these details. Instead, he saw at once that his fingers fit the grooves, that the grooves led up to the window, that the window was open, and that the combination of these elements represented a way into the otherwise impenetrable hall. He pressed his fingers into the wall and tried to climb. But he was exhausted. He had spent the entire day sweltering in the hot sun, walking countless circles around the sleeping hall, racking his brain for some clue that would grant him access to the locked building. He had eaten only one meal, and his body was completely worn out. So despite his fervent desire to get inside the sleeping hall, Samuel decided to rest for the night.
He lay down next to the wall under the grooves, afraid he might lose them in the daylight without the moon’s reflection to guide him. It seemed as though he scarcely slept, but in the morning he felt refreshed, and when he slid his fingers into the notches he found his arms had regained some of their strength. He took one last deep breath, flexed his legs, dug his fingers in as far as he could and began to climb.
The ascent was arduous. The notches were just large enough to admit the height of his fingers, but only deep enough to allow them to penetrate to the second joint. There were no footholds. He found he could just rest the edges of his toes on the bottoms of the grooves, and that this tiniest of holds gave his fingertips some aid in supporting the weight of his body. Up he went, slowly, inexorably, bent at the waist with his rear end protruding. His fingers burned as they gripped the narrow notches while his feet scrabbled for whatever hold they could find. At one point his toes slipped and he dangled by his fingertips from the wall, the tiny muscles in his hands and forearms on fire, the rough stone scraping his fingers raw. He kicked frantically to regain a hold on the wall, refusing to drop back down to the ground, and after a long few seconds his toes found holds once more and he resumed his climb.
Nearly five agonizing minutes passed before he managed to reach his right hand into the slightly opened window. He clung to the sill and pulled the window all the way open with his left. With the last of his strength, he used both arms to hoist himself up and through the window frame, then dropped safely onto one of the beds below.
The first rays of sunlight crept through the high wi
ndows, providing scant illumination to the inside of the hall, but Samuel managed to find his way among the rows of beds to the door in the gray half-darkness. He ran his eyes and hands over the door until he found the lock. He fumbled with it for a few moments, pushing, pulling, turning it back and forth, until he noticed the metallic clicking sound that emanated from the area of the bolt each time he turned the latch. In the hall’s scarce light Samuel could not see the bolt in the gap between the door and frame, but he guessed correctly that each turn of the lock must move the bolt in and out of this space. He turned the latch to the left and pushed hard on the door. Almost to his surprise, it opened quite easily.
The wind rushed in and swelled around him as the door swung open to reveal the freshly sunlit meadow. Samuel stood still for a moment and reveled in the cool morning breeze that danced past him into the hall, in the grass rustling softly beneath his feet and the twinkling rays of the newly risen sun. He breathed the clean morning air with a new appreciation, even though he had spent but a few minutes in the previously enclosed and rather stale-smelling room. Then a great fatigue overcame him. He found the nearest bed, flopped into it and fell into a deep sleep, a wide grin still pasted across his face.
VIII
Samuel awoke late that afternoon from the best sleep of his life. He walked around the colony to each of the sleeping halls. Similar grooves had been cut into their walls, so he climbed into each hall and opened the doors. He emerged from the last building as the bells sounded to signal the evening meal. The setting sun at his back lit up the meal hall in front of him, dwarfed by the mountains surging upward in the distance. His stomach growled in response. He stopped at the river for a drink and watched the current roll by, a deep, strong blue flecked with sunlight.
A few colonists waited in line as he entered the meal hall, and they shrunk from his presence when he fell in line behind them. Samuel ignored them, marveling at the strangeness of the air around him. It was cool and light and seemed to resonate with a sort of energy as his limbs sliced through it. He studied his arms, wondering at this odd feeling. His hands and wrists ached already from his climbs up the sides of the sleeping halls. But he was not tired. He was already thinking of tomorrow. It had been some time since he had climbed one of the colony’s trees. His stomach rumbled again. He finally noticed the gap between himself and the young man ahead of him and stepped forward to close the line.
At his approach the other colonist scrambled forward and collided with an older man in front of him who had just received his meal cake. The older man whirled around with an inhuman yelp and threw his arms up defensively, striking the younger colonist across the face as he did so. The young man stepped back and felt dumbly at his swelling lip. His fingers came away with a few watery red drops. A choked growl escaped his throat. He started to lunge at the other man, but stopped in mid-motion and stumbled forward awkwardly. The older man scampered away, leaving his meal cake on the floor where he had dropped it.
The look on the older man’s face seared itself into Samuel’s mind. In that brief instant, the vapid mask of the colony had melted away, replaced by an animal expression contorted by rage and terror. The younger man swallowed and lowered his eyes and glanced quickly around the hall. A few colonists looked up at him from their meals, but no one said a word. He took his meal cake and scurried from the hall, clutching the food to his chest.
A wave of nausea came over Samuel. Half in a daze, he stepped forward and took his meal cake from the hole in the wall. He carried it outside and walked away from the meal hall and across the meadow, finally taking refuge at the base of a tree atop a low hill. He picked at his food absentmindedly. From his perch here he could look out over most of the colony. He watched as the distant figures of his fellow colonists scuttled across the meadow like insects, occasionally drifting too close to one another, at which point they would both freeze for a moment—antennae extending, probing, gathering information for their simple minds—before darting away once more.
Yet despite the frenzied movements of these few, the colony as a whole was lifeless and silent. There was no wind and the meadow itself lay humid and sluggish in the tepid warmth that bled from the last of the day’s heat. The signs of the once peaceful life of the colony were gone. But Samuel had no desire for that past he too had once enjoyed. He tried to imagine sharing in the silly mindless play of the other colonists, tried to imagine making love to some anonymous female in the shade of a spreading tree. He felt nothing. The recent meal hall scene lingered deep in his mind, evoking a roiling nausea that left an acrid taste in his mouth and a dull throbbing in the space between his eyes.
After some time, which to Samuel might have been ten minutes or a hundred, Penny came and sat beside him.
“You… fixed them,” she said after a moment. She seemed pleased with the effort it required of her.
“Yes.” He could not decide if he was glad to see her. He gazed out at the meadow, plucked half-heartedly at the grass next to him and waited for her to continue.
“You are like them,” she said again.
Samuel looked at her now with his full attention. Her smile had a softness to it, a delicate uncertainty, like a worn baby’s blanket that has started to unravel at the edges and threatens at every soothing curl to return to so much cotton thread and empty space.
“You are like them,” she repeated, with some hesitation now. Her grin began to fade under Samuel’s stare.
“There will be more, more… problems,” he said. The low sun glared out of the cloudless sky and he was forced to shade his eyes.
“But you will fix them.” It seemed almost a question. Her lips trembled as she spoke.
Samuel did not know what to say, and in response to his silence her big, glossy eyes grew even wider. He could see in them a tiny echo of the same fear he had seen in the old man’s eyes, that blank look of mindless anxiety, a faded mirror reflecting the locked sleeping halls, missing meal cakes, incessant rain and the skittish movements and frightened gazes of the other colonists.
“I do not know,” he said. “I do not know what I can do.”
He looked away again, back out over the meadow. A painful burning sensation arose in the center of his rib cage. They sat there for some time, watching over the colony from a distance.
* * *
The next day the colonists awoke to find there was no furniture in the meal halls. This latest incident should have been a mere inconvenience, as the people of the colony often neglected the tables and chairs and carried their meal cakes from the halls to eat them outside. But as they entered the buildings for the morning meal, the colonists’ knees buckled slightly, their shoulders sagged just a bit lower. It was not a back-breaking straw, but merely a reminder of the weight upon them, a weight that showed no sign of relenting anytime soon.
IX
Samuel saw the seams in the hall floor as soon as he entered for the morning meal. They were much more noticeable without all the tables and chairs disguising their presence. The seams formed large squares on the floor, and within each square was a cluster of small circular protrusions, as though the furniture had left footprints in its stead. A second set of seams ran the lengths of the two long walls of the hall, about half a meter above the floor. In the empty room these narrow grooves looked like doors in the floor and the walls, and as with the sleeping halls, Samuel’s first instinct was to find a way to open them.
Recalling the notches carved into the walls of the sleeping halls, Samuel scoured the meal hall for some clue as to how to proceed. But aside from the seams, the room was bare. There was nothing carved in the walls or the floor, nor any other obvious clue, no crumbs, no dust, no footprints, nothing at all. In fact, the floor was absolutely immaculate and even shimmered in the late morning sunlight peering into the hall. But Samuel did not notice this fact. He did not consider that the extreme cleanliness of the hall was especially odd given that a few colonists, despite their unease at the sight of the barren room, had ventured insi
de earlier that morning to fetch their meals from the hole in the far wall, and then exited through the hall’s only door, thus crossing the full length of the floor two times over as they did so.
Samuel inspected every centimeter of every seam in the hall, crouching by the walls, crawling along the floors. They were much narrower than the grooves carved in the walls of the sleeping halls, scarcely wide enough to admit his fingernails. When his search was exhausted, he sat back against a wall, closed his eyes and tried to think. For the first time in his life he felt the urge to lash out and strike something, anything, to smash through the floors and walls, break them off at those seams to reveal—what? A storeroom large enough to house an entire meal hall’s worth of tables and chairs? Even if the seams were doors, even if there were some way to open these doors, Samuel could not begin to imagine how opening them would somehow lead him to the discovery of the hall’s missing furniture.
Penny found him sitting in the meal hall some hours later, his eyes closed, head tilted back against the wall. He did not notice her until she stood over him and said, “Come.” He opened his eyes and his mind went blank; the tension dissipated. She turned and began to walk toward the door; he trailed her out into the meadow as if in a dream. The midday sun was hazy and distant overhead and the wind tickled his bare skin. He followed her with his mind empty, almost unwilling to think. She did not speak to him, and he was content to merely bask in her presence. He watched her as she moved, studied the way she walked. There was a relative fluidity to her gait, a studied calmness that perhaps belied some nervousness, the poise of a body held in constant relaxation by the mind, like an actress instructed to portray a sense of quiet ease. She looked up at him every now and then, and her black eyes lingered on his for the briefest of moments before her cheeks rouged and dimpled and she turned away once more.