The Boogeyman's Lullabye

A Land That Was Never Far Away

 I'd heard men talk about time, sitting around our living room table and filling the air with indifferent smoke from fat cigars, deep accents doing their best to sound meaningful and philosophical so that the others would take their words to heart.  They said time was something that couldn't be stopped or manipulated, they compared it to a stubborn woman or a locomotive, that it was the only resolute thing in this world.  But as I felt something close around me, a darkness thick and deep envelope my head and hollow out the insides, as I fell into a relative direction, I thought about those men and how they had never really experienced anything other than time continuing.  And their lack of experience rendered them incorrect.

  I fell into a moment when time jolted, like someone had stopped the train much too suddenly.  It happened only for a moment, a quick second, but it was as if the Earth had stilled in that one second.  I felt it all the way through me, past layers of skin and muscle and deep into my bones.  Whatever hole I'd thrown myself down, I quickly realized, was more than just a cavern that would have led to the parlor down below.  I was not going to land on a carpet, Michael was not going to be waiting in the broom closet, and this was not the normal that I was used to.  Boogeymen that could disappear and read books in various accents.  I could understand that.

  Men with gleaming swords of sand and holes that stopped time.  I didn't like any of that.  I didn't like this.

  Of all the things to occur at this moment when nothing at all seemed ordinary, my ears popped.  And when they did, something clicked, something fell out of place and into a new one, and the space around me opened, throwing me into what at first I thought was another abyss.  The thought of being tossed infinitly from one oblivion into another, time never stopping or going, my body being compressed and my mind hollowed of all matter, for a moment that fear strung deep in my heart.

  And then I landed hard on a wooden floor.

  There was a moment of pause,  the rest of me catching up to my body as I rested my forehead on the floor I was sprawled upon, slowly beginning to feel my feet, legs, stomach, all the way up to my head and the cold feeling of old oak in the winter pressing against my brow.  Separated from my body for a time, my senses slowly nestled their way back into their own places. I heard muffled footsteps outside, voices far, far away, I tasted a bitterness after sleeping for a long time, I felt a cold and unfamiliar chill.  I smelt old books.

  My eyes flew open, almost choking on a sudden inhale, and used my stiff arms to push myself up off the floor and feeling my knees dig into the uneven boards below.  I turned my head almost too fast, vision blurring for a moment as I furiously tried to blink it away, head throwing left and right because I knew that smell, I knew that smell.  It was Michael distinctively, which meant he was here.  He had to be here, I just couldn't see him, or he was hiding-

  My vision cleared, and I looked around in a private, self-silence.  The smell continued, but the thought of Michael being the cause fell into improbability.  The smell was Michael, yes, but it also belonged to actual old books, of which were stacked all around me on shelves that reached the pointed ceiling.  Dust was visible from the dim shine through a window to my left. The room itself was small, no bigger than my own bedroom, but it wasn't my bedroom, not at all.  Not one bit.

  From what I could see on the far left of the room, the only items of furniture were shelves, continuing forward in rows with books shoved and stacked into the spaces until there was no way to see beyond the individual shelves.  There was one walkway between the two columns, but as far as I could tell no one was walking down it, the footsteps coming from somewhere outside of this room.  Silence other than my own breathing.  Michael wasn't here...but he was somewhere.  We'd gone down the same hole, we had to have entered into the same place.  We had to.  There were no other options.