Bone Pattern

The Trapdoor- September 9, 2014

I know I have been quiet for a few days.  I haven't known what to say.  Whenever I close my eyes, I see that gaping hole, vanishing through Fisher.  I see the delicate perfection of his face, marred by tiny seedlings of the hole in his abdomen.  I want to go back and beg Lydia to allow me to plunge my hand into him, as she did.  To embrace his void. Barring that, I want to open that trapdoor.  Find the source of the hole.  But I am afraid.  I have no sister to care for me if my substance gapes open.

So, I have been walking a lot lately.  Just me and my mp3 player in the small hours of the morning.  I would turn off my music and stand in shadow, watching the orange glow of the streetlights pushing back the darkness.  Listen to the brief silence of a sleeping city.  

Last night, I found myself in front of the hidden door again.  Found myself lifting up the panel of false stones and slipping down the stairs without quite knowing what I was doing.  Down the stairs, still with the echo of water dripping.  Into the musty smelling room before I had even turned my flashlight on.  I went blind down the stairs.  Shut the door behind me and stood there in the dark.  A greater silence here than any found in the street.

At last, I turned my light on.  Found the room as I had left it.  Broken glass and rotting bits of flesh from the broken specimen jars pushed into the corner, papers and books stacked on the remaining shelves.  The room smelled of rot, still, and alcohol.  Felt smaller than last time I had visited.  I took a couple of books off the shelves for August.  They will keep me going.  But that was not why I was there, and I knew it.

The back room, the bed room, did not smell as back as the front.  Did Fisher actually sleep on this stained mattress?  With the door beneath his back?  He would have made even this dismal space glow.  I pulled the mattress aside.  Tried to ignore the reddish hue of some of the stains on it.  There, at my feet was the door.  Below it was the place that Fisher had created.

I opened the door.

I expected it to scream, the rusted protest of hinges left too long to themselves.  It did not.  The trapdoor opened to me almost eagerly.

Beneath it was a wooden ladder, running down into the dark.  What could I do?  I went down.  I turned off my flashlight and went by touch.  It was absolute black, the darkness of caverns in the earth. Fisher, laying on his altar, glowed in my mind as I descended. That was enough.  For a long time I climbed, it seemed, with my predecessor lurking there in my mind.  Guiding my feet to each next rung.  Until at last I found solid earth again.  I turned my back on the ladder, stood staring out into the unknown before me.

The flashlight I had with me is a small thing, with only a cold LED glare. It showed me more concrete, a cold floor running away beyond my light, glistening in places with damp.  A vast space echoed around me.  My little pool of light ran up the walls, vanished into the overwhelming black ahead of me.  Glimmered off something white hanging from the ceiling.

Bones were strung across that space.  Bound one to another to chase each other across the eternal night of the underground.  Vast bones of creatures I cannot imagine.  They spiraled together, wound around with wire.  Bound into a spiral circling a vast eye.  An empty circle.  Like the empty circle mirrored in Fisher's flesh.  And that bone eye of darkness stared down upon me, as I stared back into it.  

I am not sure how long I stayed there.  How long we looked at each other.  Maybe I would be there still if the battery in my flashlight had not died.  It flickered out and I was freed from the pressure of the huge eye of the deep night on me.  I scrambled up the ladder, out the door.  Back into a world that was coming into bustling morning.

I walked home among crowds of shallow folk on their way to work.

I found what Fisher made.  Now I only have more questions.  What bones were those?  Where did he get them?  Where did he learn to do that?  More importantly, what exactly was he trying to do.

I checked my flesh in the shower.  Peered between my toes and fingers, examined my back with mirrors.  My skin is whole.  Nothing gapes open in answer to that eye in the darkness.  Not yet anyway.

I will not go back.  I promise myself that.

But I want to.