by Ike Hamill
Her stairs were long. She had just tumbled down them—she should know. They were relatively new compared to the age of the cabin. Of course, her grandmother hadn’t needed an elaborate underground storage facility with a Q-battery link, heat exchanger, and control system. Those were all things that Madelyn had installed back when there were still contractors who did such work. Now, The Wisdom had erased all that effort by filling the stairwell with sand.
The stairs were long, and then followed by the shaft that the lift operated within. All that sand had enough volume to fill her control room, lounge, and the storage area. If she managed to get the lift doors to open against the weight, it would bury her.
Madelyn was trapped underground.
She paced and thought about the construction of the place. There was an exit that led to the compost stack, and one that led to the leach field. Those pipes were only ten centimeters apiece. Even if they led somewhere, she would barely be able to fit her arm down them.
The heat sinks had much larger pipes, but those led straight down into the mountain’s bedrock. There was also a drilled well. Again, it didn’t lead anywhere useful.
The chimney was the only exit that went straight up, and that could fit her. She would have to climb vertically up the smooth walls for tens of meters. It wasn’t a solution. The chimney was built over the Q-battery. If she breached the walls of that, she would be dead in seconds.
Madelyn walked back over to the lift doors.
When she looked from the side, she could see that the doors were buckled in towards her. The sand had deformed the metal slightly. It was anyone’s guess if the doors would still slide on their tracks.
She put her hand against the metal. She thought she could feel the weight it was holding back.
Madelyn sighed.
She was going to die down there.
# # # # #
“My name is Madelyn Ava Clarke. I’m the daughter of Jacob Mason Clarke. I’ve lived here for longer than anywhere else. My grandmother and her husband built this cabin back when this part of the world was a place of snow and ice. When they were just married, they came up here in June and nearly froze their butts off. They managed to build enough of a shelter to make it to December and then they fled. She said that in December the sun would only come up long enough for a hot cup of coffee and then it would go back down. It’s hard to imagine.”
Madelyn adjusted her posture so she would be better framed by the camera. Her hair looked terrible. There was still a big patch of her scalp missing from where The Wisdom had sliced it away.
“The next year, they shored up the place so it could last over a winter. They cut and stacked ten cords of wood and laid in the supplies they would need to make it through until spring. My grandmother made it. My grandfather didn’t. She raised their son alone.
“That was my father, Jacob Mason Clarke. He left here when he was fourteen. My grandmother had taught him how to read and do simple math, but he wanted more. He wanted to figure out how people got smart enough to launch rockets and beam signals all around the world. As soon as he got to civilization, he realized that what he really wanted to know was how people figured out how to translate the beauty inside themselves into the great works of art.”
Madelyn took a deep breath and let it out. She had veered off the topic, but it didn’t seem to matter. She had nothing but time. There was nowhere she had to be. She had food, water, oxygen, and heat.
“That’s how he met my mom. She was studying how to make beautiful things. He was studying how to appreciate them. I never met her, but I saw some of her art. My father had a painting of a tree in our living room. He would stare at it for hours. He showed me how to do it one time. You picked a spot just to the left or right of the center of the painting and you stared. You looked at that one spot until it seemed like you could burn a hole through the canvas with your eyes. Then, as your neck got stiff and your mouth went dry, you would start to see it. The branches of the tree would sway in the breeze. The leaves would flutter and flash. You could imagine the bird that was standing on a limb just out of sight. You could picture the nest that a squirrel had made on the other side of the thick trunk. The tree would come alive. That was a part of my mother’s spirit. At least that’s what my father said about it. He said that my mother had torn a corner of her soul and carefully brushed it into the painting.
“It hardly ever worked for me. My father had already used most of the magic in that painting by the time he taught me how to do it. He was selfish that way.”
Madelyn reached over her shoulder and scratched at the scar. It was just about gone. The Wisdom had probably figured she was going to die of her wounds, and had sealed her up in her own tomb. Either that or it didn’t like being underground. She had lived through the assault, but what did it matter? She was doomed.
“My brother and I were close when we were kids, but I always resented him. People were easier on him. He was always getting sick, or hurt, or scared. He always needed help in some way. The weaker he was, the more people went out of their way to make sure that he was going to be okay. They didn’t do him any favors. He never learned how to take care of himself and make himself stronger. Maybe if they had forced him, he would have become more self-reliant.
“His son is strong though. Jacob Riley Clarke can take care of himself. If he ever sees this, I want him to know that I admire him. He’s the best part of my grandmother, my father, and my brother all rolled into one. I’m glad I got the chance to meet him.”
Madelyn looked away from the screen. It was strange watching herself. It didn’t seem like she was actually feeling her emotions—she was watching some old lady have them.
“I know that nobody will ever see this. I don’t understand the precise reasoning. People have tried to explain it to me before. There’s too much video out there on the ether, so new stuff just gets lost. I suppose it’s like turning your face towards the sky and telling a wish to the stars. Someone could hear it, but nobody will.
“I’ve got nothing better to do. I’m trapped down here under my grandmother’s cabin. I was sealed in with sand, like an Egyptian mummy. After my father passed away, I used up all his savings and everything that my grandmother left to us to make this cabin last forever. I wanted it to stand as a monument—something that could be passed along to future generations. The only problem was, I never got around to making another generation. By the time I felt I was ready to have a family, the world wasn’t a good place for that kind of thing.”
Madelyn wiped her forehead. The process of telling her story was harder than she thought.
“I suppose it never is. It didn’t stop my brother. That’s where my nephew comes in. He’s the rightful owner of this place now, but he belongs with other people. He’s not a recluse, like me. It’s fair to say that I’ve done a number of things wrong in my life. I was never able to recognize when a man was bad for me, or when he was right for me. I didn’t think that my father was strong enough for the world, so maybe I let him go before it was truly his time. I should have taken my brother in when I saw him again. I should have hugged him and told him how much I missed him, or how many times I cried when I thought that he was dead. I should have cried for him when he did die.”
Madelyn wiped away her tears. Even the time for regret was too late, but she had to try to feel something.
“And, of course, I’m sorry for David. He and I could never quite come together in the right way. I wish we had. If you’re watching this, and you’ve got unresolved emotions for someone, don’t let yourself forget them. Don’t hypnotize yourself into amnesia because it’s easier than feeling the pain. You have to keep that pain close to you. You have to be comfortable with the regret so you can face it. It’s the only way to survive The Wisdom.
“I’m going to hang on down here for as long as I can. I won’t give up this time. There are people out there who would do anything to survive. It would dishonor their struggle if I were to give up. I understand that
now. There is food down here, and fresh air. Entertainment will come to me from the ether. And, from what I understand, I’m a part of that network. As long as I’m here, I’m helping to keep that information alive.”
Madelyn thought about shutting off the recording. She wasn’t accustomed to speaking out loud so much, and she certainly wasn’t comfortable with the idea of other people finding her recording and watching her confessions. But the process had created a warm spot inside her. For once since finding herself trapped underground, she didn’t feel quite so lonely. She had created an invisible link with the outside world, even though it was one way. She wanted to keep that feeling. She wanted to strengthen that bridge.
“I want to tell you about the time my grandmother taught me and my brother to clean fish,” she said. “Actually, let me first tell you about the time that I almost killed myself.”
Madelyn nodded at the idea. That was a good place to start an autobiography.
“Yes. Let me start with that. I was struggling to put my world in order. I had lived alone up here for more years than I could count, and I was out of things to do. I had figured the best way to minimize my energy expenses. The woods were well-maintained. My equilibrium with the world was established. I had solved the problems of the day. With that, there was nothing left for me to do. It was time for me to make a soft exit. That’s when my brother showed up. He should have been dead. If anyone was unsuited for survival, it was him. One time when we were kids, he got a paper cut that became so infected that he had to go to hospital. That’s the kind of person he was—helpless. Only constant care from his family and the kindness of strangers kept him alive. At least that’s how I knew him. I suppose that after I lost track of him, he became his own person.”
She smiled.
“That’s a generous way to think of it—after I lost track of him. In reality, I divorced myself from society. When it seemed like society had turned on itself—consuming itself from the bottom up—and I decided that my husband had beat me for the last time, I took a powder. I fled up here and closed the door. I saw the final moments of our infestation from a distance. This place was already wrapped around me, like a cocoon. There was nothing out there for me anymore.”
Madelyn cleared her throat and kept talking. She had a lot more ground to cover.
# # # # #
Each time she started a new video, the counter at the bottom of the screen reset. It wasn’t long before Madelyn lost track of how long she had been telling her story. She fell into an unconscious pattern. She woke, drank some water, and started recording. At some point, she would get so hungry that she stuffed some food into her face between sentences, but it was never much.
Most of the time her stomach was quieted by the water. She grew accustomed to the burning feeling of stomach acid that didn’t have anything to break down.
The image of the talking woman on the screen grew more and more foreign. The woman wasn’t just old, she was bone thin. She was like a talking ghost, and then like a talking skeleton.
Madelyn made no effort to keep track of what part of the story she was telling. Some facts came out in scrambled order. Some clever turns of phrase brought a smile to her lips until she realized that she had already told that part of the story. She was composing her own epic poem. It refined and grew with each telling.
One part came back again and again—the taste of her father’s city gun in her mouth. That was the end and the beginning. That’s where her entire life pinched down into the tiniest moment. With the smallest twitch of her finger, she would have been gone. It was the true moment of her birth. The first one—the one where she had been ripped from her mother and wiped down by jaded hands—was just an accident. Some random cells had collided and split and grown. There was no decision there. It was just the way life happened.
Her real birth had come when she took her father’s city gun from her mouth without pulling the trigger. Life from then on had been intentional. She had made all the same mistakes, but they had been conscious decisions. There was no randomness in her life since then. Everything was planned and plotted.
Right or wrong, she owned her life.
Madelyn leaned forward and looked closer at the screen. The talking skeleton was reminiscing about her time down in Fairbanks. It was obvious now—Elijah had been in love with her. Maybe it was just wishful thinking. There had been a spark there though. It was undeniable. Why had he left her? Why had he let her stay at the cabin?
When the skeleton stopped to take another sip of water, Madelyn looked down and saw the bottle in her own hands. She was the skeleton. Of course she knew that, but it was strange to remember it all at once like that. She put down the bottle and continued her monologue. She needed to eat more. Her body didn’t demand it, but her eyes did. There was almost nothing left of her.
Chapter 26
{Dead}
Madelyn blinked until her eyes cleared.
The counter said that the recording had been going on for two minutes. It couldn’t be right. The thing must have reset itself. As far as she knew, she had been talking for hours, telling about the time that Gabriel had shown up and chased Jacob away.
Madelyn quickly forgot her confusion.
She thought of another story she wanted to tell.
She started to reminisce about how she had finally gotten away from her abusive husband, Austin. When she started to cough, she opened her eyes and realized that her mouth was so dry that her lips were stuck shut. Her cough rattled around in her hollow chest. Madelyn focused on the screen and saw the counter flip over to three minutes. She had dreamed the beginning of the story. She took a sip of water with fingers that looked as skinny and brittle as twigs.
On the screen, her face was just bones wrapped in translucent skin. Even more of her hair was gone.
It was time.
She looked up at the screen for the last time and saw the darkness in her own eyes.
“It’s time. I’m going,” she said.
The trip through the control room to the lift doors was a monumental trek. Madelyn swayed as if there was a strong breeze down in her bunker. When she finally reached the opposite wall, she braced herself and caught her breath. She remembered how the doors had bent inward with the weight of the sand. Her plan wasn’t going to work.
Still, she hit the button.
The metal screeched and ground, but the doors began to slide apart. As the sand spilled through the doors buckled and stopped. There was a good flow coming in, filling her space with sand. Madelyn backed away when it hit her feet.
The doors groaned and the one on the left tore free at the top. The sand ripped past it, gathering speed. It hissed like an angry wind. The static of the flowing sand sounded like all possible noise combined together. Madelyn imagined voices in the hissing. Then, she imagined shouts.
The torrent of sand pulled her feet out from under her and she went down in the tide. It carried her a few meters before it washed over her and buried her. She prayed for a quick end to what was left of her life.
The sand roared as the other door tore from its tracks. Behind her, the control panel blared some alarm. It sounded like more confused shouts to Madelyn. The sand washed over her chest and began to push the breath out of her.
She got her arm up just before the sand covered her face.
She breathed in the space of the crook of her elbow.
Madelyn smiled at her body’s effort to cling to life. It was time to let go.
# # # # #
Madelyn kept her eyes closed against the sand. She didn’t hear the hiss of it flowing anymore, but still heard the alarm from the control panel and something else. There was something in the sand with her. She could hear it moving.
Madelyn struggled against the weight. She had made her peace with dying under a blanket of sand, but she couldn’t stand the thought of The Wisdom finally getting its claws into her. It was too late—she was pinned down by the sand. Her diminished muscles were no use again
st it.
Her lips were pressed against the arm of her shirt. Using it as a filter, she was barely able to suck in enough breath to satisfy her lungs. Still, she supposed that she couldn’t be that deep if she was able to breathe at all.
Something grabbed her arm.
Madelyn fought.
It pulled on her. She couldn’t resist it. The force was about to rip her arm from its socket.
By the time Madelyn’s head breached the surface, she found enough air to curse at her attacker.
“Let me go! I’ll kill you!” she croaked.
She was half-buried in the sand.
“Oh, lord, what’s happened to you!” the man asked.
She managed to open her eyes. The light from his headlamp blinded her. When he pushed it away, she saw her brother. He had waded through the drift of sand and was standing over her.
That couldn’t be right—her brother was an old man now.
“Wait,” she said. She still wasn’t right—her brother was dead.
“I saw your memoir,” her brother said. “You still looked okay in that. How long has it been since you’ve eaten anything?”
Another man waded up behind him. He didn’t make sense alongside her dead brother. It was Elijah. He looked just the same as when she had left him.
“Let’s get her out of this place,” Elijah said.
Madelyn lost consciousness as they dug her out of her grave.
# # # # #
She opened her eyes and took in the picture.
After a second, she figured it out. It was Jacob, her nephew, who was crouched next to the couch. Elijah was over in the kitchen.
“You’re making a mess,” she said.
Jacob followed her eyes and smiled. They had tracked sand everywhere in the cabin. There was a deep trail that led to the front door. It was bisected by the tire tracks from her cart.
“Yeah,” Jacob said. “It’s like a beach in here.”
“The Wisdom tried to bury me,” she said.