Dark Places || ONC 2023

Mind's Eye

Janelle doesn't understand where they're going, or what's going on. She tries to return in her memory to standing over the dark hole looking down and wondering. Did she think this was a possibility? Did she even think they would find something down here besides a pile of discarded couches, old vacuum cleaners, rotting food, and broken wine bottles? 

No. She imagined trash and a small adventure.

But they're following a woman made of stone down breath-hot hallways. With a strange sort of warmth, they're walking hand in hand. Her favorite piece of garbage. The man she spent months waiting to talk to each night is holding tight.

The woman checks over her shoulder every few seconds, to make sure they're following, but honestly what else would they be doing? Somewhere behind them is a monster and a wall of stone that even if they could climb they still may never find the top of.

"This. way." She says after a while. She walks easily to her left. Right into the stone wall. Her body disappears, and then so does the red light.

Janelle's heart skips a beat. They're back in the blackness, up and down are no longer a constant, before blue light appears and a new body pushes past them. A new woman tsks. She has a blue rope sash that lights up the hall. She's as stony and light footed as their previous guide. 

"She forgets always that you are of flesh and bone." This woman's english is clearer, her emotions more obvious. 

"Come," she says, But this woman also doesn't walk in a way that Janelle can obviously follow. For a moment she's walking straight and then slowly she's starting to move up the wall. Gravity and space do nothing to hold her down. Janelle follows, uncertain. The world folds and bends for her.

She grasps Adam's hand tighter. The floor turns to a wall and a hole above their heads turns into a tunnel at their side. She saw once, the metal sculptures made when you pour aluminum into an ant hill. She feels sorry and almost angry for the ants who died, but the dripping spindles of metal, like capillaries or tree roots, reminds her of this walk. If those anthills existed in a spinning world where gravity doesn't play by the rules, full of people who speak like dreams that would be this place.

Janelle and Adam follow the blue light woman, up and over and down and sometimes sideways until her light is multiplied by a hundreds in a cavern as large as a stadium. Fifty people with stone features walk around with lighted ropes in hand, or strung around their necks or tide around their waists. They're every color and brightness.

Janelle feels a familiar crunch underfoot. There's the dismembered electronics of a broken toaster shattered at her feet. She takes another step, but she's jerked to a stop by Adam's. He's not moving. A sob breaks the silence somewhere in the middle of the hall, followed by a soothing shhhhh and calm words. The stone people shine flecks of gold and green and pink along the walls and onto Adam's scared face.

"S'okay," Janelle says, because there's trash, and that means they've maybe found the end of the line. They're in the final resting place of everything that's fallen. But Adam's not looking at the broken toaster at Janelle's feet or the ripped black bag a few steps away. His eyes are further into the room, at a man with yellow light around his waist kneeling in the scattered remains of a Thanksgiving meal. His hand is resting gently on a face.

Janelle feels sick. A stone body is half formed coming out of the floor. The same way their first guide slipped into the wall this person is trying to slip out, but their hand is sticky with red blood, garbage and grit tear through stone skin. There are pieces sticking out of every bit of them in the same macabre way they stuck out of the monster. Janelle is frozen in fear. This is where monsters are created.