Bone Pattern

The Man in the Earth- October 12, 2014

Much to tell.  I did as I said.  I went there.  I took Fisher, calm again, eyes turned inward and dreaming once more.  No need to bind him.  He came like a newborn lamb, trembling and weak but willing.  Night fell and I took him out into it.  We made our way north, fitting into Saturday night drunks until we were able to slip down into the deep.  I did not speak and neither did he.  It was a relief.

The walk to the building and Fisher's cache took a long time.  Longer because I half carried him.  Whatever strength had caused him to drag himself from my bed to stand over me with a knife that night was utterly gone.  As we descended the steps down toward the room he had filled with all the mysteries he could find, I wished he would be strong again.  Not just to spare my arms and shoulders from helping him down the stairs.  I wanted him whole and strong so I would not be alone.  The door opened and we stumbled into the room.  Sat on his mattress to rest.

"I still don't understand why you started this," I said to him.  We had a camping lantern before us, and my little LED flashlight in my hand.  There below the street, it was very quiet.  The only sound was our breathing, and the still persistent tap of water on concrete.

"I just wanted to leave a mark.  Change something," Fisher's voice was nearly inaudible.  A hollow eyed ghost in that chill and echoing space.  "I wouldn't have succeeded without you."

"You nearly stopped it for both of us."

"I know.  I'm glad you stopped me.  It still might not have happened if you hadn't."

"I still wish I'd never met you."

"I'm sorry."

I could almost forgive him for the wound across my face.  Almost.  It was harder to forgive him for the dark room we sat in.  Fisher didn't seem to think we would get out of there.  I certainly did not.  I'm not sure how long we sat there in the dark before I pulled us both to our feet and opened the trapdoor.  

We went down double, and in darkness.  Neither of us could hold a light in that descent. Fisher clung to the ladder with my arms around him.  Both of us were shaking at the bottom.  I stepped away from the ladder and left him kneeling, crumpled, at its foot.  As I fumbled again for my flashlight, I realized I would not be able to take him back out of there.  Not unless he could climb on his own.  Whatever would happen here would be the end, then.  Fisher would walk out on his own feet or not at all.  No more would I carry him.

With that thought, I found my light again and its cold white glare lanced into the darkness.  Light seemed to fill up the room for a second, to bright to see.  But my eyes adjusted and I saw just how pitiful my flashlight was in that vast empty space.  It did seem empty.  For one clear, disappointing second, it was nothing more than an empty hole in the ground. A filthy dripping cave that someone had forgotten to fill in.

Until I saw him.  That man kneeling there in the dirt below the bones.  I saw his immaculate suit crumpled and stained.  No more was he the confident business man Wayland and I had found downtown.  Nor even the manipulated manic man with a knife who had lashed out at the Weaver.  This was a man rendered static.  He knelt there, slumped forward, his arms flung forward to lay palm up before me.  A supplicant's posture for a ragged man kneeling before a terrible god embracing him in turn.  I thought wires ran from the bones above us both to penetrated the empty space at the top of his head.  I wanted them to be wire, perhaps more of those that held the bones suspended. They were not.  And then I wanted his head to be merely opened and hollowed.  A prosaic scrape of bone, a bit of brain surgery, would have been preferable to the smoldering crater that was all that remained above his eyes.  Tendrils of spun shadow stretched into him, wound the texture of wire.  They wrapped themselves around his grey matter, thrust into his mind.  They must have.

 And the thing he entreated loomed above us both.  A writhing sky of bone holding terrible space at their center.  I stood and stared at this tableau of a man and the spiraling face of his deity, all lit by the cold glow of my flashlight.  And in this moment, Fisher chose to pull himself forward, into my light. With his back turned to me, he looked whole.  He could have been any sick and wasted young man dragging himself through the earth.  His shadow  stretched away before him, ran ahead toward fate.

Fisher pulled himself toward his counterpart.  One man pierced through his head, and Fisher through his very core.  He reached toward the avatar of our doom and his shadow reached with him.  That moment seemed to last forever, to stretch itself out as such moments do, there on the precipice.  All the years of this city hung in that moment.  But it could not last.

Fisher's shadow fell into the waiting hands of the supplicant.

You will want me to give you some conclusion here, I know.  Something to hold onto in this chill autumn night.  But my hands are shaking and my eyes begin to run with tears.  I cannot see the screen.  I have no conclusion.  No neat and tidy ending.  So why should you?  If I must wait for my end, then so must you.  I can write no more on this night.  So much happened that night.  I cannot digest it myself, so let me feed it to you in bits.