Outside, it did not seem that hours had passed, that he had somehow made the transition from a spring morning into an unnatural twilight; more a matter that light, too, and color, had been leeched away. The cityscape before him had an oddly two-dimensional look to it, like some vast construct of cardboard cutouts on an amateurish movie set, feebly backlit.
The only thing real to him was the cold. It was very cold, and the air had a dusty, acrid taste. His eyes watered. His throat was raw. He put his hand over his mouth and tried to breathe through his fingers, as if that would somehow help.
Then there were people around him, rushing in the opposite direction from the one in which he was going. He pressed through the stream of them. They buffeted against him, like puffs of wind. Close up, he could see them clearly enough, but in the distance they seemed to flicker and fade, like shadows on an ill-lit wall. They were all, he realized, in flight from something. He felt their muted fear, their exhaustion and despair. One woman, very young, but dirty, haggard, gaunt, with a limp, motionless child over one shoulder clung to his hand briefly and said, “You will help us, sir, won’t you? You will stop him from getting out? You will do it?”
He made no answer, but kept on, one foot ahead of the other. Ahead, the darkness roiled, like smoke.
Then he was alone again. The darkness closed behind him, featureless, with only the cutout buildings looming before him. He found a door. It didn’t have a doorknob, but a crude circle painted where the doorknob should be; yet it opened at his touch. Inside, he passed through many featureless, empty rooms, rendered very slightly less than utterly dark by curtainless, rectangular windows, until he came to a stairway and began to climb, passing a door of the disabled elevator on each landing. He never paused, but continued his ascent because he could do nothing else, go in no other direction, as helpless as the salmon working its way upstream.
That woman had asked him for help, begged him to do what had to be done. He couldn’t think what that might be, but he resolved to try. He had already resolved to try. That thought he had already formed, before any of this began. That much he could still cling to. He wished he’d been able to find the words to reassure her. Too late for that.
At the very last he came to a room which, quite shockingly, was lavishly furnished, like a throne room, actually cluttered with faded, dusty hangings and furniture and with vast, crystal chandeliers hanging unlighted from the ceiling, and what looked for all the world like gold-covered mummy-cases lining the walls, only the faces on them were not of stately, Egyptian kings at all, but hideous parodies, diseased, deformed, and lascivious.
And before him, in the center of the room was a great mirror, set in an elaborate fixture of black ivory, as if held up by two gigantic hands so finely and intricately carven that they could well have been alive.
He stood before that mirror, and he saw, reflected in it, himself, but not himself; a figure that had all the same features and even wore the same coat, but which somehow possessed that wrongness you can see in photographs of Hitler or Charles Manson, an evil which is not expressed in fangs or horns, but in something far more subtle, instantly recognizable but impossible to describe.
The figure was laughing at him.
“You must have figured it out,” it said. “You must already know that he who overcame me once, who bound me into this mirror for the good of all, has been dead for some time, and the spell which holds me here has worn off, after a year, a century, a thousand years. Who knows? It does not matter. My reflection lived where I did not, lived a lie, dreamed a dream that might have fathered whole generations of nothingnesses, each suffering from the delusion it is real and solid and human, and that its offspring were real and solid and human. That might have been you. Or it might have been your great-great grandfather. But that’s over with now. Pfft! All done. Sorry! Nothing you can do about it.”
“Someone asked me to try,” he managed to say.
With almost theatrically convenient coincidence, there was a large hammer on a table by the mirror. He snatched it up. He struck at the figure before him, which still laughed as the hammer seemed to pass through something even less resisting that the surface of a still, clear pool of water. There was no splash, no ripple, as he realized that he was already on the inside and that the reflection of a hammer striking the inside of a mirror isn’t going to break anything. The other was already walking away from him, into featureless darkness, fading from view like the dot in the middle of the screen when an old-fashioned TV set is turned off.
At the very end, he rediscovered his power to weep, to rage, to pound his fists uselessly against the smooth glass. He even remembered his wife’s name, and his daughter’s, and for an instant, before he forgot it all forever, every last moment of their lives together flashed through his mind.
He even thought to get his cell phone out of his pocket once more, and try to call them, to say goodbye, and to warn them.
But there was no signal.
The Xenambulist: A Fable in Four Acts
By Robin Spriggs
I. The Missing Step
Unable to sleep yet again, he took his leave of the dark and dusty one-room apartment that his life’s actions, or rather inactions, had conspired to make his most recent excuse for a home. He descended the three flights of rickety stairs, counting every step, just as he had counted them every night since arriving two weeks ago in this latest of a long line of towns. But on this particular occasion, as he reached the bottom of the staircase, he came up one step short. In the past he had always counted thirty-six, but tonight … tonight …
No doubt, he assured himself, he had only miscounted; lack of sleep had finally taken its toll. Still, an icy sensation of unease blossomed in the pit of his belly as he made his way across the foyer, opened the door, and stepped into the lamp-illumined night.
II. The Curious Church
The street was as hushed and companionless as his life. When, he wondered, had he become such a solitary soul? Time there was when he had been at least as social as the common lot, had more than his share of friends, and known in great abundance the motley human distractions that constitute a healthy, happy existence. But now—now this thing he called his life, like the autumn night that presently enshrouded him, was silent, chill, and achingly unpeopled. When, though? When? When had such become the case?
“Moment by moment,” he whispered, and, as the sound of his own voice prised him from his self-interrogative reverie, he found himself standing in the ragged shadow of what appeared to be a church—an ancient, ruined church.
Glancing over his shoulder, he noticed, much to his surprise, that he had wandered a great distance in the course of his gloomy musings. Somehow, without knowing it, he had left the lighted sidewalk somewhere far behind. Indeed, he could not make out even the faintest hint of lamplight in the direction from which he had come.
Turning back to the church, he noted how uncannily at one with the night it seemed, as if the shadows, and the shadows beyond the shadows, driven and directed by a force even more mysterious than themselves, had coalesced into a structure of ostensible solidity. What religion, he wondered, might such a church embrace? What beliefs would its members espouse? What flavor of comfort would it offer? Would it offer comfort at all? What manner of clergy and congregation would it house? What sermons and psalms would sate its darksome walls?
He knew, of course, that he was being overly fanciful, that the edifice before him was likely little more than a long-abandoned place of Christian worship. But fancies, even when recognized as such, can be remarkably compelling company to an otherwise companionless soul, so he welcomed their attention and gladly gave them his own, determined, for what it was worth, to prove a gracious host.
“Shall we?” he asked his heedful entourage, gesturing grandly at the shadowed fane. And taking their silence as an unequivocal “yes,” he started up the weed-choked walkway, trusting his fancies to follow.
The cobbled path ended at a flight of stone
steps that ascended to an arched portico. Two words were carved into the keystone of the archway, but they were long past reading; all he could make out were the initial letters of both—an L and a V. The steps, though timeworn and riddled with cracks, seemed reliable enough, so not to trust them, he suddenly felt, would have been the height of rudeness.
Gaining the top, he paused beneath the archway, half his person lingering in cloud-alloyed moonlight, the other half lost in the deeper darkness of the vaulted portico, each half at odds with the other and pulling in its own direction. But no sooner had he noticed the struggle than the victory had been won, and his cloven self stood whole again in the passage’s dark embrace.
Accepting the decision as his own, he took another step, two, three, reaching out into the darkness, groping, searching—
The door! It was wooden but iron-banded and sturdy as an ancient oak. He fumbled about for a handle or latch, found neither, and was suddenly overcome with an inexplicable desperation: he must, at any cost, gain entrance to the church. Yet a full minute of half-panicked effort—pushing and pulling with all his might—proved fruitless, and he sank, exhausted, to the cold hard flags.
There he sat, panting, defeated, lightly rapping the back of his head against the conquering door. At first the action was unconscious, an automatic expression of his frustration and fatigue, and of a dawning apprehension that this latest in a lifetime rife with failures was also, somehow, his greatest failure of all. But with each dull thud of his skull upon the door, a deeper, more hopeful notion grew: that these firm but gentle jarrings of his brain had become (or perhaps had been so from the outset) nothing short of a rite of conjuration. He was attempting, he now realized, to draw from the concealing murk of his profoundest subconscious some long-forgotten thing of utmost importance.
So the conjuring continued—thunk-thunk-thunk—increasing in speed and intensity but still well shy (he assured himself from a vantage point of remarkable mental remove) of doing him physical harm. Yet despite the moderate force with which his head struck the door, the resultant sound was now of near thunderous resonance, which, to his increasing awe, originated not from the point of impact, but rather, seemingly, from some abysmal depth in the bowels of the ancient fane. And, like the quake-inducing footfalls of an approaching colossus, each percussive report boomed louder than the last, shaking his psyche to the core, till by and by he came to understand that the object, the target, the prize of this epic evocation was a word—a single, impossible, unknowable word, its shape and sense and sound still well beyond his grasp but within him just the same, shining, vast, demoniacally puissant, casting off at last its adamantine chains and climbing swiftly freedomward from the oubliette of self.
Then, suddenly, the word was in his mouth. And though it remained indiscernible to his mind, he felt his jaw and teeth—indeed, all the bones of his face—expanding to contain its enormity of meaning and power, a process by which he was made to understand that in certain sorcerous pursuits, the tongue must sometimes venture where the mind itself cannot. So it was with little choice in the matter that he relinquished his monstrous burden to the nigromantic workings of spontaneous glossolalia.
In that instant, free at last, the word gushed forth like a river of aural fire, blistering his lips and filling the night with the smell of burning ozone. The utterance, unhuman and incomprehensible, expanded interminably, syllable upon syllable, phoneme within phoneme, sound beyond sound, diminishing him—by comparison to itself—to a state of near matterless insignificance. Yet still the word came flooding forth, shrinking him smaller and smaller, till finally, on the very cusp of extinction, with a wink of consciousness that might have been his last, he was struck by a singular thought: perhaps it was not he who was speaking the word, but the word that was speaking him.
With that, the utterance ceased, cut off by a silence as clean and cold as the stroke of a guillotine. And in that soundless moment, so swift, so violent, the door of the fane imploded behind him, and he pitched backward into deeper darkness still.
III. Where the Mind Itself Cannot
Gazing upward as he fell, he observed the fragments of the shattered door, scattering like luminous puzzle pieces to the farthest reaches of space, going … going …
He landed with terrific force and for a moment thought himself dead, but the notion, by its very existence, proved itself a fallacy, and the pain he felt provided further evidence. His entire body smarted, his head as well, but nothing appeared to be broken, and he could wiggle his fingers and toes. It hurt to breathe, though, so perhaps he had broken something after all.
Better a rib than a neck, he thought.
He tried to sit up, which hurt even more—on the right side, mostly. A rib, all right, possibly two.
Flat on his back, mustering his strength and resolve, he focused his attention on the height from which he had fallen. No trace of the edifice remained: no doorway, no arched portico, not a single moss-covered stone—just infinite, unobstructed sky. But it wasn’t the same sky that had preceded his encounter with the church, the sky that had sheltered him on this latest of nightly strolls; that sky had been smothered with a dense covering of clouds, illumined only by the faintest hint of moonlight, while this one was immaculate and bejeweled with sidereal majesty.
Yet the stars, and the constellations they formed, were wholly unfamiliar. He made no claims to erudition in astronomy—nor even in astrology, of the popular variety—but the strangeness of the starscape above him was a fact beyond dispute. Even the color of the stars, now that he looked more closely, betrayed them as undeniably “not right”; one and all shone a brilliant crimson.
He tried again to sit up and this time managed to do so, though the pain was still extreme. Much to his dismay, he found himself not in the bowels of a ruined church, but rather in the middle of a forest. And no ordinary forest, at that. All the trees were of the same odd ilk—stunted, witchy, denuded, not at all like the early-autumn maples amongst which he had earlier walked. Despite the bizarre nature of his predicament, he found himself more bemused than frightened, more mystified than terrified, but something in that realization provoked a dread of its own, rendering the point moot and puzzling him all the more.
In the distance, between two skeletal trees, he saw what appeared to be a reddish glowing orb. Its color, he noted, was almost identical to that of the stars above: crimson with the faintest hint of other hues for which he had no name. It hovered in midair—motionless, as far as he could tell. And something about it made him feel … observed.
Pushing through the pain in his side, he stood up and took further stock of his surroundings. Everything seemed unnaturally still. Not a hint of a breeze stirred, and the air itself was stale and close. Even the ground felt strange beneath his feet, though the why and wherefore eluded him.
He focused again on the orb, started toward it for a closer look. The pain in his side redoubled. He buckled over, fell against a tree. It toppled and crashed to the ground.
Barely managing to maintain his balance, he looked down at the fallen tree. His jaw dropped.
“Not real,” he mouthed.
And it wasn’t. Just a piece of theatrical scenery. Wire mesh wrapped with painted muslin.
He peered at the next nearest tree. It looked no more real than the one that lay at his feet, but he had to be sure. The pain in his side all but forgotten, he hurried over to the tree and placed his hand on the bole. No doubt about it, nothing but a cheaply made fake.
Turning back to the crimson orb, he suddenly saw it for what it truly was—just a painted image on a distant wall, along with the trees that flanked it. Was it possible that he was indoors after all? He looked up at the stars again. Still there. Still crimson. Burning. Twinkling.
He started toward the orb—or rather the painting of the orb. Framed by the two witchy trees, it suggested the look of an eye—more than suggested, now that he thought about it. An eye, yes—a single, blinkless, staring eye, as red as the stars above
. Its distance was impossible to calculate, but he knew he was getting closer. As the wire-and-muslin trees fell away behind him, he could see that the forest ahead was merely a painted mural, though where the wall (or scrim or backdrop) gave way to floor and sky remained a vexing mystery.
Then he noticed something else, inside the eye, inside its crimson pupil: the outline—the rectangular outline—of what appeared to be …
A door!
It opened with a creak, swung slightly toward him, stopped. Beyond it a whisper: “Lamed Vav?”
His nape hairs prickled. A wave of dizziness washed over him. Had he really heard what he thought he heard? Had he heard anything at all?
The door opened further, slowly, steadily, wider and wider, creaking all the way. He held his breath, watching. An eerie crimson glow spilled forth from beyond.
The door stopped again, an open invitation.
He eased toward it, closer, closer, then stopped just one step away. Despite his straining eyes, all he could see on the other side was the eerie crimson glow, too thick to penetrate. And for the first time he noticed how high in the wall the doorway was set, its base no less than four feet above the floor.
Cautiously, but with a decisiveness that confounded even him, he took hold of the doorjamb and pulled himself up into the threshold. Teetering on its narrow edge, he tried again to see what lay beyond, and again saw nothing but the unyielding crimson glow.
Then the door slammed shut behind him, knocking him from his perch, and he toppled headlong into blood-hued nothingness.
IV. An I for an Eye
This time, to both his bafflement and relief, he landed with the lightness of a feather, and without further pain or injury. The eerie glow now enshrouded him but no longer proved impenetrable.
Rising to his feet with remarkable ease, he found himself in yet another room. This one, though, was perfectly spherical, and the doorway through which he had fallen was nowhere to be seen. He felt like something tiny—a mouse or fly or germ—trapped in the hollow interior of an enormous red ball. As his eyes adjusted further, however, he saw that the walls of the chamber were not entirely crimson. Like those of the previous room, they sported painted trees. But these were even witchier than their predecessors, more twisted, more abstracted, smaller too, as if painted to seem very far away. They reminded him of the veins in a bloodshot eye, only black instead of red.
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