The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell

by Brian Evenson

  “More important than that, he had another device that hid his fall, a cloak of sorts.” My father said a word in an unfamiliar tongue, something that sounded like the smacking of lips. “That was his name for it, but we have no word for it exactly in this language, the language the citizens have given us.” He frowned at the object in his hands. “Though the citizens were searching for him, they did not find him. But we did.

  “His legs had to be removed. There was no saving them.” He looked at me. “This is what you must sometimes do: remove the legs to save the body. Remember this.

  “We hid him. We taught him our language, and he learned quickly since our language had come from his. He was, so he told us—not me, of course, nor my father, nor my grandfather, but one of us who came before that—very old. He had been in the high city encased in ice for many years, and then the citizens had figured out how to awaken him. They wanted something from him, but he would not give it. In the end, aided by his devices, he managed to escape.”

  “What did they want?”

  “Why, to know what world we had come from, so they could go there. They were not content with their dominion over just us. They wanted dominion over all our kind.

  “He told us of the high city, of a place within it, a circular room with walls of glass and a swivel chair. It was the room from which one could awaken the city, make it fly like a bird, make it soar home. The city must not leave, he told us, it must not go home. Not with the citizens aboard.”

  He stopped. He blew on the innocuous-looking object in his hands and a sharp blade flicked out of it. Then he pushed the blade carefully back in and set the object on the table.

  “And then what?” I asked.

  “What indeed?” said my father. “The citizens found him eventually. Before they could take him away, he slit his own throat. But before that, he passed along to us what we needed to know. How does the story continue?” He looked at me, considering. “I suppose that depends on us.”

  I waited the citizen out. I was as sure as I could be that I was in the correct place. I was waiting to see what he would do next, how he would choose to move forward. I tried above all to give nothing away.

  “Would it surprise you,” he said, “to know I met your father?”

  I darted a glance away from the console and at him, but his face remained expressionless, difficult to read.

  “I was assigned to … work with him,” he said. “I was with him when he died.”

  Still I said nothing.

  “There is probably a great deal you did not know about your father,” he asserted, though in this he was mostly mistaken.

  “Did you kill him?” I asked.

  “Not me,” he said. “But he died while … under my care.” He came around in his strange ambling gait, stood in front of the central console. “Before he died,” he said, “he revealed that he had passed something along to you.”

  “What they are hoping for,” my father had said, “is a means not only of reactivating the city to its full potential but a means of retracing the path to its origins. There are many of us here, in the low city. Tens of thousands by now, after all this time. But where we come from, there were billions. That is what they want: the rest of us.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “To have dominion over us,” he said. “That is how their holy books phrase it.”

  I nodded.

  “I am going to tell you something,” he said. “I will not tell you what it does, why it is important, because I do not want them to understand through you what it will do. It is not that I don’t trust you, only that I know how powerful they are. But I will tell this something to you, and one day, if I succeed in my next step, they will ask you for it. I am telling you not to give it to them, under any circumstances. Do you understand? They must understand that it is not something I want you to give them.”

  I was confused but nodded anyway.

  “Good,” he said, and drew for me for the first time the schematic he would draw again and again, and that, once he was dead, I would draw repeatedly as well. “Activation bypass,” he said. “Can you repeat it?”

  “Activation bypass,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. “Good.”

  “He passed nothing along to me,” I claimed.

  “Look at me,” my citizen said. When I did, he had that same intense gaze, the one I had been unable to resist before. “Did your father give something to you?” he asked.

  I resisted at first, squirming, then finally said, “Yes.”

  “Give it to me,” he said.

  “I won’t,” I said. “I am not willing.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you killed my father.”

  “I?” he said. “I did not kill him.”

  I gestured around me. “All of you,” I said.

  “You are mistaken,” he said. “What if I were to tell you this information your father gave you will benefit your people tremendously if you give it to me?”

  “I would say you were lying,” I said.

  He tightened his lips, if lips are the right word, in what might have been a grimace or a smile. “Give me the information,” he said again, gazing at me. In one sense I could not resist answering, but what he was asking me to reveal was complex enough that his gaze alone could not bring it out. I stuttered nonsense.

  He struck me hard in the face. “What did your father give you?” he tried.

  “A schematic,” I could not stop myself from saying.

  “Good,” he said, and his eyes glittered. “Will you draw it for me?”

  I shook my head, clenched a fist.

  “You are indeed your father’s son,” he said. “And now, as with him, we shall see what we can tear out of you.”

  …

  My father looked at me. “You know I love you, no?” he said.

  I nodded.

  “I will die soon,” he said, and when he saw my expression, he added, “Please, don’t worry. This is the way it has to be.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because I am in a position to do some good by dying,” he said. “To bring an end to all this.” He looked at me. “You too will be in a position to do some good, but only once I am dead. I can make them curious, I can make them let down their guard, but I know too much to go further. I can only take the process so far. It will be you who will do the most good in the end. If we are very lucky.”

  He put a piece of paper in front of me and asked me to draw the schematic he had taught me. I did so swiftly. He examined it closely, then nodded.

  “Perfect,” he said. He took the paper and placed it on the fire. I watched it catch flame and curl up, blackening. It shriveled, disappeared. “Once I am gone,” he said, “you must continue to draw this, over and over. You must remember it. Exactly. Every line. Promise me you will.”

  I promised.

  “Good,” he said. He leaned back. He took off his eyeglasses and breathed on the lenses, then polished them on his shirt and put them back on. “I must be very careful with what I tell you next,” he said. “I must tell you enough but not too much.”

  I did not know what he meant by this, so I said nothing.

  “A citizen, or perhaps several citizens, will ask you for your schematic. I am ordering you now: do not give it to them.” His voice rose. “I do not dare to be equivocal about this: you must not give it to them.”

  He looked away. When he spoke again, his voice had softened. “But they have ways of being persuasive. In the end you will tell them. But I want you to know this as well: once you do tell them, do not despair.”

  …

  He tied me to the command chair and tortured me. Not him exactly, not my citizen, but two others of his kind, and he oversaw it. As he had no doubt done with my father. As they lacerated my flesh, he watched, attentive, waiting for the right moment. He did not seem to enjoy it, but he did not seem not to enjoy it either. It was as if he had no opinion of it at all. He gave the terrible impress
ion that this was something he had done a thousand times. The point was, I came to realize, to weaken me enough that I could not resist when he cast his gaze upon me and demanded that I draw.

  “I was not lying to you when I said I did not kill your father,” my citizen said between sessions, when the knives had been set aside and the other two citizens were wiping them clean of my blood, as he sponged away the blood still beading on my chest. “He killed himself. A most ingenious device: a little blade that flicked out when blown on just right. My preference would have been to keep him alive. I had not, after all, gotten all I wanted from him. But before he died, he let slip that he had given something to you.”

  I said nothing.

  “At first we thought he had left something physical with you. We watched your residence carefully, waiting for you and your mother to give yourselves away. When you were out of the residence, we searched it from top to bottom, then searched it again, then again, finding nothing. We made certain you often had a citizen near you, speaking to you, trying to gain your confidence. Did you not notice how often we were near? Did you wonder why it was different for you than for others your age? We made ourselves available, bided our time, waiting. We chose to not rush, concerned that it would work against our purposes. We could afford to wait; we live much longer than you. Even with your father, it was he who forced the issue, not us.”

  Then the torture resumed. Before, it had been confined to my chest and arms; now it spread to my thighs and face. I squirmed, bellowed, tried to break free. I felt my resistance running out, my exhaustion growing, and yet I still did not reveal to them the specifics of the schematic.

  Another pause, another rest. The rests had become almost more terrible than the torture itself, this strange calm before and after the storm that served to give contrast, that made me realize how bad the pain had been and how bad it soon would be again.

  He squeezed the sponge out in a bucket full of water tinged yellow with my blood. Perhaps it was the same bucket I had vomited into when I first arrived.

  “We made available to you the idea of visiting the high city,” he said. “We gave you an invitation to see what would happen. If you came, we thought, you would bring whatever your father gave you and attempt to use it. But when, in the false high city, you were unconscious, we searched you and found nothing. It was then we realized it was not a thing at all, but something he told you. Knowledge.”

  He leaned into me. “What is it?” he said. “What is the schematic for?”

  When I did not answer he slapped me hard, then slapped me again. I struggled to get away, but they held me fast. He hit me in the face with a clenched fist a dozen times, until my face throbbed and I was nearly unconscious.

  “Activation bypass,” I finally said.

  “Ah,” he said. “Marvelous,” and hit me again and again. “There,” he finally said, his voice flat, his face devoid of expression. “I think that should suffice.” He forced a pen into my shaking fingers, slid a piece of paper beneath it. “Draw the schematic,” he commanded. “Now.”

  And, God help me, I did. And then I passed out.

  V.

  When I became conscious again, I was on the floor of the circular room. The two citizens who had tortured me were no longer near. They had unstrapped me and let me fall, not bothering to restrain me. Now, they were on the far side of the room, where they had taken the casing off one of the pieces of machinery. They were glancing back and forth between the machine’s innards and my drawing, conversing in low tones.

  I rolled over and crawled to the other side of the central console where they would not see me. Here, the only portion of the wall I could see was glass. I pulled myself close to the console and gathered myself into a ball.

  “You will fail,” my father had said. “But in failing you will succeed.”

  “What do you mean?” I had asked.

  He had shaken his head. “I cannot say any more,” he said. “Wait and see.”

  I had failed. I had given the citizens what they wanted. Now I was of no use to them. Soon they would kill me. I took the stylus out of my pocket and held it in one hand, sharp tip out. Perhaps when they came for me, I could at least jab one of their eyes out.

  “Here it is,” I heard one citizen say.

  “And what does the schematic demand?” added a second.

  “The reversal of the twinned circuits.”

  “Easily done. Shall I—”

  “Wait a moment,” said my citizen. “Let me assume the command.”

  I heard him move into the chair on the opposite side of the console, the chair protesting under his weight. His long fingers momentarily extended past the edge of the console as he stretched. Their tips waggled above my head, then retreated again.

  “Ready,” he said. “Time to track them to their hive.”

  I heard a clinking sound coming from near where the other citizens stood. Then, suddenly, the lights dimmed and the room was illuminated only by the glow from the outside world coming through the glass.

  “Is it all right?” asked my citizen.

  “We had to deroute before we could redirect,” said one of the other two. And then, “There.”

  Immediately the lights blazed on and then turned red. An alarm began to pulse, deafeningly loud. Air began to rush through the vents.

  “Turn it—” said my citizen, the end of his sentence cut off by the blare of the alarm. Off, I would assume.

  The other citizens shouted but the alarm did not diminish. I crawled to the side of the console and risked a glance around. There they were, striking the machinery again and again with tools, but though the machinery had begun to mangle, the alarm did not stop.

  I heard someone coughing and realized it was me. The citizens near the machinery were coughing too, struggling to breathe. I could only assume my citizen at the console was as well.

  In failing you will succeed, I thought, continuing to cough. I took the stylus and plunged it hard through the side of my encased trachea, in one side and out the other, through the machine that had been built into my throat. It hurt tremendously, but no worse than torture. When I tugged the stylus out, I could breathe through the holes, sucking in the air that was becoming more and more like the air from the domed city that was my home.

  I breathed in and out. I coughed up blood. I was, more or less, alive. The alarm stopped sounding, though the lights still flashed red. I heard nothing from the citizens.

  With great effort, I rose to my feet, using the console for support. There was my citizen, half-slid out of his chair, clutching his throat. He was still alive, though just barely, occasionally taking in a great juddering breath that did nothing to sustain him. The other citizens were heaped in the corner, near the mangled machine. They did not seem to be breathing at all.

  I made my way around the console to stand beside my citizen. I slapped him lightly until his eyes focused and he looked at me.

  “Ah,” he managed, gasping. “You.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Me.”

  “You,” he said. “Have,” he said. “Tricked. Me.”

  “No,” I said. “My father tricked you.”

  His face for once twisted in consternation, and then he let out a strange, strangled sound I took for a laugh.

  “He tricked me as well,” I said. “So as to trick you.”

  The red light suddenly went out. Normal lighting returned. “Air now restored to breathable norm,” said a calm voice from above.

  I searched his pockets until I found the calipers and then, as his eyes glazed over, I beat him to death and dragged his body out of the command chair. It was petty of me—he was dying anyway—but I still found some slight satisfaction in it for myself, and for those who had come before me. I let his blood run over the deck, marveling at its redness, for his blood was different than mine.

  I made my way to the other two and assured myself they were dead, then I moved slowly through the high city, past corpse after corpse, confirming that I wa
s the only one still alive, that all the so-called citizens aboard the true high city were dead.

  And so, here I am, back in the command center, alone. Now it is my turn to sit in the command chair and place my palms once again against the smooth plates next to the controls.

  “Acknowledged,” the voice says from above. “What do you wish?”

  I hesitate. Home, I am tempted to say, but what if the citizens have some way of tracking me? Perhaps the best response is simply down, fast and hard, into the false high city below, destroying both that city and this. What is the right thing? What would my father do?

  I take a deep breath. Soon I will decide. But, for now, I will live a little in this moment of freedom. I will breathe the air in, and breathe the air out. And then, perhaps, I will make the city move.

  The Barrow-Men

  By morning the others were dead, or so near to it as to make no noise. Was Arnar still alive? Arnar thought so, but he wasn’t completely certain. He did not know what being dead felt like. Maybe it felt very much like being alive.

  Near to him a body coughed up blood, became at least temporarily alive again. Perhaps it had never been dead. He turned his head, watched the body’s eyes roll madly about then freeze and grow opaque. Now, yes, it was dead. He turned away.

  I will wait for dark, he told himself. Then I will crawl away.

  He counted four of the barrow-men. Two stood together, conversing, their neck-boxes switched off so he could not understand what they were saying. One of these two barked and spread its mouth parts in what was, perhaps, the equivalent of a smile. Another stood leaning against a stone, forelimbs interlaced, chest and hindlegs brown with dried blood. It was motionless as the stone. The last was a little distance away. It moved among the bodies with a long, sharp-tipped spear, prodding them, sometimes pushing the spear in.

  When the spear reached one group, a man pulled himself off the ground and began to run. The barrow-man with the spear simply watched. The two who had been conversing turned to watch the man run. Even the barrow-man who had been still as a stone allowed its head to turn very slowly in pursuit. And then the first barrow-man threw its spear.