An intrepid spirit pushes my pen forward. Lands and terrains lie beyond this ink, which no material feet can tread. I thus require this white page to be my path; and these black words to be my guide.

Where I am starting is difficult to capture. It is both a place, and nowhere. It relates some of the phantasmagorical spirit of my journey; it is not real. It is a place only in my mind: and yet it is a beginning as complete as any other.

Of minuter importance is perhaps the room that contains me. I think the walls are wooden, and brown: I have never paid them much attention. I am seated on a chair of lukewarm comfort, at the desk marking the room’s centre. There may be otherwhat along with me in the room, but I see it only as vividly, as the attention I paid to the aforementioned wall.

On the desk rests the journal, which I occasionally disturb with the strokes of my pen. It has a crimson cover, and its pages are a creamy white. This journal shall be the vehicle of my journey, the vessel of the memories it brings, and the field in which the characters of my journey shall die, once the journey reaches its end. But we are yet to attain that point in this telling—we have scarcely even begun.

Let me construct for you a room. Every story needs a place, be it physical, or the mind. This room is warm; that is to say, its walls, floor and ceiling are painted with a reddish, orange-like hue, and the air feels heavy with moisture. It is a room relatively large, like that spawned from prodigal wealth; I seem diminutive standing inside it. This room’s adornments exist, but are absent; it has been recently emptied, though silhouettes of past furnishings mark grand frames on the walls; an assortment of sofas, for pursuitless seating, missing from the room peripheries; a banquet table, stretching the length of the room, dividing the chamber in two; and quartets of square vertices on the floor, those of chairs, sufficient in number to accommodate a crowd at the table. It is thus but an empty chamber, and I, along with the air I breathe, am its only inhabitant.

The chandelier hanging from the lofty ceiling provides the light, while the active fireplace diffuses the room’s uncomfortable heat. There is little noise disturbing the air—a quiet rules over the room; but for a nearly inaudible static, coming from behind the room’s only door. My first movements are to approach the door, and touch its handle; – it burns to touch, like the static is of a fire, spreading beyond the boundary of the door. I roll my sleeve over my hand to shield from the heat, and pressing it down, unvail the fire without.

Though my expectations are unmet. There is no fire behind the door: but a hallway, of polished white marble walls, and an abyssal shadow, that conceals the tunnel’s extent. My curiosity yearns the beyond: I have no choice but to pursue the extremity.

I enter the hallway. Its immediate frost envelops me, and my muscles tense. Without entreaty, the door closes behind me; when I revolve to see it, the white marble has consumed it, and the door is gone.

I march through the glacial tunnel. The cold amplifies with each step of depth, and the marble walls develop crystal webs of frozen moisture. My whole body becomes servile to the temperature; my calves drag an invisible burden, and with each moment my heart threatens to stop. I would succumb, if there were not only a few steps remaining.

I am inhibited from describing my escape from the icy hallway without attributing to it the mist of my eyes, whose lashes were webbed with flakes of frost, and whose lids were near merged for eternity; it is no small miracle, that I survived the hall at all, and that frostbite did not leave me scathed after leaving. The door that saved me I believe to have been as marble as the walls that surround it, and it is only to wonder how I knew it was a door at all, or where to reach for the handle. Nevertheless, the unclarity of my egress can be left to its own contemplation.

For now I have entered a new room, of manageable warmth, though not potent enough to invoke hypothermia. On the new metallic floor, I rest my body, letting it convalesce from the extreme conditions it just underwent.

***

Upon my waking, an immediate confusion grasps me. The walls are ones I do not recognise, and the lines of lights that mark the ceiling are not ones I have seen before. The floor, however; – yes, I survived the cold marble hallway, and this was my escape. Investigating the room, I find it constructed of metal sheets, likely of iron, or some other, similarly-coloured metal. Where the sheets end, they are bolted to the wall with large, hexagonal bolts, both on the floor, and on the walls; and it is four such sheets that hold the two parallel lights to the ceiling, two for each light. The room is much smaller than that I had begun in, amounting to only some sixty four cubic metres, give or take the eye’s error; for the room appears a cube, and it seems about four metres in width; or four sheets, each sheet roughly a metre. But apart from any other of the room’s characteristics, there is one exceptional one, which attracts my attention with predominant gravity.

In the far right corner, relative to my own position on the floor, there is a woman of age in the early twenties. She is sitting parallel with the wall, with her face tucked into her legs, and her smooth brown hair concealing the sides of her head. She has on her body a long-sleeved shirt of a light, pale-blue fabric, and her legs are covered entirely by a long skirt, of similar fabric, though of a much darker, black colour. She has her arms hugging her thighs, that are propped up supporting her head. She is barefoot, and her pale soles are as though glued to the unfavourable surface of the room’s floor.

I deliberate alerting her. I am uncertain to her knowledge of my presence, and her hair might hide a demonic countenance, with vampiric teeth and a strangling tongue. Nonetheless, she does not have a threatening air about her. I decide to raise my voice, and make our presences mutual.

‘Hello,’ I say.

Her hair rustles; indeed, she heard me. When she lifts her head, her hair spreads like a maroon curtain, revealing the youthful face underneath. Her skin is in likeness to her bare feet, and is pale with a deathly hue. Her Roman nose rests above a pair of pursed light pink lips, syphoned of life, and she regards me with beady eyes of an abyssal depth. She makes no other movement but to lift her head and look at me, and no words leave her mouth.

‘Hello,’ I repeat.

But her response is of little comparison to her mute disposition; for she tilts her head slightly in the direction opposite the wall, and with a twitch of explosive force, launches her skull into the metal plate she is huddling to. The impact, so potent in its instantive velocity, crushes her skull, and sprays its contents upon the wall above her.

The morbidity startles me. I take a few steps back, till two plates impede further recession. The woman’s corpse remains static against the wall.

It takes the reacquisition of some lucidity to see that the splatter of blood is shapeshifting upon the wall. Before my eyes, the particles of crimson flesh languidly course around the silver plate; till, when their travel is deemed complete, they fix in place. I clear any moisture from my eyes and approach to better view the image created, ensuring to stop before stepping into the blood pooling under the woman’s mutilated body.

I am unclear to the exact image before me. The blood has formed into a shape of rotund edges, like a red blot on a metal page. Inside the blot, there are fragments removed, and it seems to be what is missing that is meant to be the image’s focus.

With sharp, surgical edges, there are four squares cut out from the sanguine canvas.

Each of them seems to denote a vertex of a singular, larger square, and each of them has its own independent proportion to all the others. The north west square is the largest of them all, and the rest are miniscule in comparison, and their respective sizes have differences difficult to spot when compared to the north west vertex. To complete the picture, there are thin lines connecting each pair of adjacent vertices, all of equal thickness, but of varying lengths, to accommodate the different proportions of the squares and the different distances between their edges.

I am left uncertain as to how I should proceed. The way I entered has been closed shut, and there doesn’t appear any other way out of the metal box that traps me with the decaying woman. That is, till the panels below me start to move, and I can feel the floor under me beginning to give.

A series of flustering hops carry me far enough to the side to avoid sinking into the expanding orifice. Laying on two of the twelve peripheral floor panels, I watch as the four innermost panels open downward like opposing trapdoors. Their movements are slow, and mechanical, and they make no noise to signal their opening. It takes some twenty seconds before they swing completely open, and allow the innocent observer in myself to carefully lean over and look down.

Assuring that neither panel beneath me is loose; reasoning that if any more panels start moving, should they move one at a time, my chances of escaping on two are greater than on one; I look into the new pitfall that has materialised in the metal room. The walls of the two by two drop are of rough, unpolished rock, and the abyssal shadow from the marble tunnel has returned to conceal the profundity’s depth. I carefully shift myself to another panel, maintaining procedural certainty of each step’s stability, and touch the rock where it is not covered by one of the metal panels. The rock is cold, but a manageable difference from the marble hall. It persists some two metres down, before being consumed by the fog of darkness.

I draw from the pit, resting my back upon the panel behind me and sitting on the floor. I contemplate how I ought to proceed. There is no exit besides that just formed, but without gauge of the pit’s depth, my only option might be to persist where I sit, lest I fall and the drop end my journey unfavourably.

Just now, I am reminded of something. I am not in this metal box, with an exploded corpse three metres from me on the floor and a mysterious hole threatening to be my only means of escape. I am not here, because I am in my room, sitting at my desk, and all I have experienced is merely some ink on a yellowish page. I am the master of this tale, and it is I who decides how I, that is the I in this story I am writing, shall fall in his journey, and exactly what woes and pleasures should befall him, with what quantities they shall befall, and at precisely what times. Equipped with this new knowledge, I grow the courage to stand up straight, and do what I must do, because I can.

Marching up to the pit, I stop finely at its edge. I look down. No amount of conviction quells the uneasiness of such an uncertain drop, and the fear I feel at the thought of falling at all. I tell myself one more time I will write a pleasant conclusion to this episode: perhaps a body of pillows, all soft and all kind, will be awaiting me at the bottom of the pit; or maybe on my way down the freefall, I develop the ability to fly, and learn to fly quickly enough to avoid any injury, no matter the landing that greets me. I smile at the endless possibilities, and with my eyes closed, I walk off the metal ledge, placing complete trust in my abilities to paint myself into a most pretty picture.

I keep my eyes closed for the short duration of the fall. When I land, I plant feet-first directly into a concrete floor, breaking both my legs within instants of impact. I shout and scream, with some fury directed at the inanimate floor, and the rest pointed at myself, for not painting that pretty picture I had promised. My scream wanes to a shrill mumble, and after what feels like a century of helpless lying and staring into the grey ceiling—from whose centre, now covering the orifice I alighted through, a singular lit bulb hangs by the cable that powers it—I manage to turn myself over onto my right side, without releasing a wail to deafen my own ears.

The chamber I landed in appears almost entirely of concrete. It is comparable in size with the metal box, only slightly smaller, though my sense of scale is slightly disturbed by my perpendicular view. The one source of lighting is the aforementioned bulb, strong in the middle of the room, but submitting to shadows closer to the corners, and failing to reach the farthest corners, which contain spots of darkness not unlike that in the marble hallway, and through which my fall just passed me.

I spend the first moments, seconds, hours—time passes confusingly in this chamber—staring at the one wall I had rolled over to look into. It contains a bleak nothingness that strains the eyes; the busy busy eyes, that incessantly search for something within nothing. The blank grey slate becomes more vivid, and I begin noticing particles of concrete spattered around, deeper gashes here, more protruse edges there. What the mind won’t spot, when unleashed in time. There is a certain individuality to each of them, a uniqueness distinguishing each imperfection from the others, and I start to associate each of them with a certain feeling: the deep, profound gashes, like slices from blades and knives, are anger; the tiny specks, like drab stars in a colourless sky, are smiles, and happiness; the patches of smooth fossas are calm, and peace—silence, and agreeable musings.

When I acquaint myself sufficiently with the feelings upon that concrete slab, I start to think more deeply about them, and soon, with the assistance of some words and images, the feelings develop into personalities. The gashes are no longer Anger. This one gash is called Ellefp, and it has been engulfed by the violence which has always existed around it. For centuries it fought with all its might to combat the evil it knew to persist around it; the wicked whispers were met with covered ears, and diabolical negotiations were passed upon time and time again. For centuries it lasted, clean and pure: good. But eternity—for that was what this room contains, eternity—was simply too long for such resistance, and even the mightiest heart, of strongest mind and of coldest steel, cannot overcome the eternal effort, the ease and facility of the harmful path. Ellefp gave in; it didn’t recall when: it didn’t matter. All history would recall was the breaking point, and the centuries of good were erased into insignificance. Ellefp had become evil, and the iniquitous word, for all the burden it strained the heart with, brought with it such comfort, that Ellefp hadn’t known its kind in all the time it spent good. After only seconds, all the good was forgotten, and Ellefp hasn’t considered it since.

The happy particles, minute in the vastitude of the concrete universe, were most notable in their simplicity. The gashes contained within them such innumerable intricacies, uncountable in their artistry and beauty, that they could produce universes of their own; and indeed, upon keener inspection, they did. The happy particles bore no such intricacies. The simpler each particle’s constitution, the happier it was. Certain particles were so small, they blended perfectly into the greyness, and were virtually invisible: these were the happiest particles of all. These particles were not capable of thought—it would only needlessly encumber them—and the proximities of all the surrounding violence and malevolence did not bother them, because they persisted so briefly and moved so quickly, slipping through cracks of convoluted structures of thought and mind, thay the evil hadn’t the agility to catch them, and even through the expanse of infinity, after a point of time, it hadn’t even the patience to try. So these particles rest happily, in blissful ignorance, and thought, the world’s only evil thing, cannot reach them: leaving them happy forever, simply happy forever.

It only takes a final, short step then, to connect the individual personalities, to a single greater connexion. Ellefp is not alone: it exists in a world with other gashes and other happy particles, and between them are the empty plots of space, that connect them all by freedom, if not by immediate proximity. The individual actions are no longer solitary. Ellefp’s evil is judged not by the merits of singular instances, but is now relative; within the other evils that surround it, it would appear Ellefp is not malevolent at all. The happy particles are no longer considered happy. They are foolish, and ignorant. They do not observe the wider world, the consequences of actions, the intents behind them; they do not see at all. They are accused of simply existing; they do not live. And the void between the two is now most highly valued by everything. Everyone seeks its peace and freedom, but those who reach it find it filled and gone, and start searching for it again. The blank space is the only thing that truly unites all the imperfections; it’s the only thing each of them truly wants, and it’s the only goal that keeps them moving, and brings them closer together.

I am just about to reach the next level above just the connexion, when my muse of thought is abrupted by paralysing fear. Through the immeasurable duration of my considerations, I have been lying uncomfortably on the side I rolled onto after landing and breaking my legs. I have not moved a muscle since, for fear of irritating in the slightest fashion my crumbled legs. I therefore cannot say where the hand, the bony hand of long, smarting nails, is coming from, and to whom it belongs. The elongated, fleshless fingers touch me on my left shoulder, and sprawl closer and closer, soon snaking around my arm, and tightening their grip. I am too scared to move, no longer minding the pain in my legs, but minding the fear of imminent death, or the threat of greater misfortunes than I have already incurred upon myself. The hand wraps entirely around my arm, and sharply pulls me onto my back.

The agony of my crippled legs is only momentary, and soon eased by my curiosity towards the harasser. The reaching hand belongs to a man, or what is left of one. Upon my supining to look left, I see an atrophied skeleton leaping back into the umbrous corner. He recedes into himself, curling into a tumbleweed, seemingly terrified by my moving and not being a corpse. From above two twig-like arms, shine a pair of glistening eyes, staring at my helpless form lying on the floor. The eyes give him a life his body removes; he is a living, pale skeleton, with a thin mesh of skin clinging to his bones, and shining eyes beaming with vitality. I want to speak, but in my injured state I am left the submissive: it is I who will wait for my superior to speak to me.

I lay there some time, locked in a steady gaze with the living corpse. Neither of us move: I cannot; he appears too scared. I remark the curiosity of his yellow complexion; how feeble he appears, and how strong he is against me in my current state. I am left a pathetic invalid, to the will of any malevolent fly. With some time, perhaps I could acclimate: my wounds would heal, and I could relearn strength, and its meaning in my new body. But here and now, I am a newborn: a fragile, brittle child, whose every breath brings pain, and whose cooled pool of blood is soaking into his clothes, freezing him to the touch. Even the light, from its single bulb dangling above me, is starting to irritate me. In the stillness of the closed chamber, it is swinging ever so slightly; swaying first here, then there, then back here again, and like that indefinitely, driving me insane. And the itching. Oh, the itching! I want to peel off my skin, and tear away the parts that prick me with a thousand invisible needles. It is incessant. It hurts more than my legs, which I can manage with enough stillness, and calmness of breath. But the itching, it is only fuelled by my idleness. The stiller I am, the wilder my own body seems to torment itself, and the greater my despair. With my eyes, I beg my captor to do something about it, to release me from my pain, or remedy it some way or another, to be a good master to me, his humble servant; and as if by a mute whisper, he hears and answers my plea.

With three simian hops, the skeleton moves over to me and stops right by my body. He leans over me, eclipsing the bulb, and I can faintly see his grotesque, spiked teeth peaking out above his lower and upper lip. His eyes are only more mesmerising up close; but the rest of his countenance is vile to look at, and at this proximity, putrid to inhale.

I shiver. I have never felt so helpless. What could the monster have planned for me? I do not know; I am terrified to speak. In its reigning position, the corpse scrutinises my body’s every feature. I cannot know if it is pleased by what it sees, for its expression never changes. But there is something calming about it staying fixed, and never jumping to disgust, or worse, to anger. I shut my eyes, for fear of jolting from anxious terror, and scaring the beast into violence.

The creature completes his inspection of me, and scuttles back to where he was at the wall. With his breath no longer hanging over me, I open my eyes to the blinding light, and watch my acquaintance sitting where he was before, though it must be admitted in a far different posture, and with a shift in his overall demeanour. He is more relaxed now. He is completely naked, and sitting with his legs crossed, and hands loose within the arena they create for them; I can see his taut skin clinging to his ribcage atop a thin bark of flesh that carries his torso. Without the protruding teeth, that have now been hidden behind an idle expression, I must admit he is not all that entirely ugly as I thought him to be up close; though I must also admit that it is his eyes that are doing the greatest favours to his appearance. I take his new disposition as his way of communicating approval, or whatever is closest in this instance, and with his curious look of expectation, imagine this must be the opportunity the creature is giving me to speak my part; and I do not hesitate to respond in kind.

‘Hello,’ I say: the first words of greeting from what must be hours of occupying the same chamber together.

The creature is taken slightly aback, but is sufficiently contented in its analysis of me to disregard whatever it is I am doing as a threat. I take this as my cue to proceed, and I introduce myself. I immediately notice the nonsensicality of performing such a ritual with an individual incapable of understanding the noises I am producing. I ponder for a moment; the skeleton awaits. Finally, with a silenced grunt, I begin raising my right hand. My companion tenses slightly, and I slow my movements to ease it. Continuing my gesture, I spread the fingers of my right into a palm; and with my flattened hand, proceed to slowly press down on the middle of my chest, exhaling audibly in the process.

I cannot describe the precise motivation for these particularities in my response, nor can I explain the effect I expected it to have on my cohabitant, if any. The skeleton watches my movements with scrutiny through its magnificent eyes. I continue my steady, profound breathing, with my hand resting on my undulating ribcage. With each breath, by minute shifts along the ground, my friend draws closer to me. My breathing intensifies slightly the nearer he comes, my nerves still not accustomed to his caricatured presence.

When he is about half a metre away from where I lay on the ground, he stops. His gaze is fixated on my chest, following each rise and fall of my pectoral muscles. I try discern from his eyes the nature of his desires. They sparkle now under the light like they haven’t before. There is wonder and intrigue in them, like a child observing the complexities of an alien mechanism. I feel some relief, if only illusory. There is no hunger in his glorious orbs; the child does not wish to rip the mechanism apart.

The skeleton’s eyes jump quickly to my own. We lock in an amiable stare. There is agreement between us. We have become friends.

Without any ceremony, the skeleton leaps from his place on my left flank around the top of my head. I struggle in tracking his movements. I lose sight of him, and listen. He briskly hops to the wall, where he stops. I worry once more; I feel uncomfortable without my friend in my line of sight. A tense second elapses, when I hear what I most immediately associate with scratching coming from my companion.

My thirst for awareness pushes me to twist myself in his direction, and my desire for stealth urges me to muffle my pained grunts to the best of my ability. Eventually I contort myself enough to view my partner’s actions without greater discomfort. My ears were not far off the mark: the skeleton is not scratching, he is digging. His body is concealing the majority of the forming tunnel, but with occasional swings displacing him slightly to one side or the other, I see he is making rapid progress. He is digging using solely his bony hands, and the elongated nails serve to dig into the rock-like surface without much trouble.

I ponder as to his plan, and as to his proficiency in the enterprise. It is clear this mustn’t be his first time digging the concrete forming his abode, but that begs the question: where are the marks of his past experience? and what is beyond the concrete, that he so determinedly wishes to reach?

To answer the first question, I can only conjecture that the wall below me, which I have never scrutinised very carefully, contains similar tunnels, the one being created now, and for whatever reason all other walls have been left unbored by the skeleton. After grasping some momentary recollection, I begin to imagine a more outlandish explanation.

Directly above me there hangs a lightbulb, attached firmly to the ceiling that supports it. This is particularly odd, when considered, seeing as how my means of ingress into the chamber I currently occupy was characterised by that calamitous plummet, directly through the ceiling and onto the floor of the room. That hole is gone now. Is it possible, then, that holes and other blemishes which form within the concrete faces of the room, are mended by some means, which are so precise in their recreation to leave no visible impression of past destruction on the various surfaces? Had my cohabitant, after my landing here, so swiftly closed my means of entrance, as to not allow me to notice the aperture’s closing, and somehow remain completely hidden from hearing and sight in the process? And once more, what exactly is the end of this creature’s excavation? A darkness spreads within the growing cavity, and in only a moment I cannot see deeply into it, and my companion too is concealed by its veil.

The sounds of his digging still reach me, but are becoming more distant and unreachable. I am left only to lie, and ponder; till the digging suddenly stops, a light glimmer appears at the distant end of the tunnel, and I see my companion rushing back towards me.

He halts abruptly a few centimetres above my head, nearly hitting it with the force of his pounces. He seems to briefly think; when suddenly he slips his dusty claws under my back, hooks his fingers under my armpits, and with the energy of an explosion, leaps with me through the air into the hole just created.

I scream and shout at my abduction, equally from fear of impending murder as from the pain of my flailing broken legs. My protests do not faze the creature, who drags me through the tunnel with unparalleled pace. The light initially dims—

I cannot see a thing, and the bumps and smarts from uneven clearing of the hole’s sides feel intensified—then almost immediately I am brought back into illumination, and the extensive tunnel is reduced to only a blink. The two of us fly out of the hole at a dangerous velocity, and our harsh landing serves to revitalise the pain momentarily quietened by my fear and uncertainty. On landing, I watch the orifice just left; as if of some kind of foam, a tide of concrete torrents down the passage, filling the space created by the skeleton and solidifying within an instant. The tide halts fleshly with the wall, and in only a moment, it would appear the hole had never existed.

What greets me beyond our escape from the concrete chamber, I struggle to describe. My containment in so many closed spaces has imparted me an agoraphobic propensity towards four walls, and a ceiling of some kind. It is my great astonishment, then, that this new chamber—for it still feels an entrapment—has above it a great blue, clear sky, through which I see travelling a key of birds. Below me is a lush bed of damp grass, with tiny flowers of gradient colours and hues interspersed throughout. Connecting to the wall of concrete, which from this side appears some six metres high, if not more, I am surrounded by a wall of trees: oak, from what I am able to discern, of thick trunks and low crowns, at about a diameter of some six metres from one face to its opposite, and from where I rest on the ground, there does not seem the slightest gap or opening between any of them. They form a solid fortitude around our patch of green, giving that sense of entrapment I associated before with that of my visited chambers; though I can see a small pond in one of the corners of the arboreal fencing, which has never been present before.

I breathe in the fresh forest air. It feels mending to my fractured legs, which still have not recovered from the conveyance inflicted them. I prop myself up; my elbows shake a little, but don’t falter. Behind me is my skeletal friend, walking around the unfamiliar terrain. He looks different, under the natural light; his skin seems thicker, removing some of his deathly posture, and his overall complexion appears healthier than it did under the bulb. He is wandering and glancing, and without looking at me a single time, lowers himself and lies on the ground. I wonder how it is he knew about this expanse. Had he visited it before? And if he did know, why would he ever choose the dullness of that concrete cave, over the natural boon of this beautiful oasis? The

birds have flown down and settled; settled in the trees. They chirp quietly among each other. I must say: I have never felt so relaxed and contented, as I do now. What a magical place this is.

I lie down and look into the clear blue sky. There is not the slightest blot of cloud upon the bounding azure. It is so vast, so free: I become uncomfortable with its seemingly infinite depth. It all looks so unreachable. The things out there; so unreachable. Everything by me: the sparkling grass, the ensconcing trees, my friend. They are here, and so close. Out there is so far. So unreachably far.

While gazing into the profundity, I finally pick at what has been bothering me about this otherwise perfect image. The sky is perfectly clear: perfectly clear, because there is no sun. The removal of so vital a cosmos’ organ makes the picture look coarse; artificial. I look around me. The trees, upon keener inspection, have a similar air to them too. Everything: the blades of grass, the pretty flowers. It is all plastic. While not immediately so—it takes some time to see it properly—it is all so clearly plastic. I feel the grass, and let it slip through my fingers; the flowers seem to lose all their sparkling glimmer.

My friend is still lying on the ground, unmoved. I cannot help but notice some of his passive stress diffusing off his person. He is curled up into an embryonic ball, and although I struggle to see it at my distance, it is evident he is shaking profusely, and cannot sit still. I cannot completely empathise with his utter hatred of this place, but I am a little more understanding now than my initial confusion allowed me. I too do not feel comfortable in this chamber. It is enclosed, it is claustrophobic, it is limited: it is all the things that are true of each chamber I have visited thus far. But its crucial difference that separates it from the others, that breeds such unease in my choking bosom, is that unlike everywhere else I’ve been, that has been sincere in its obvious cruelty and disinvitation, this chamber attempts to fool you into thinking it is not like the others, and in my case it has even succeeded in doing so. This chamber is worse, because it lies. A mechanical bird alights next to me on the ground, and performs three adroit pecks before aviating away.

I lie back on the ground. The sky is a cyan canvas. The air tastes staler now. Everything seems grayer than before. I call out to my friend. Without looking, I hear him rise from the grass and walk up to me. I point to the pond in the enclosure’s corner. He appears to understand the pointing, and with gentler handling than before, he hooks onto me and drags me along the plastic flora. He leaves me at the bank of the pond, just close enough to reach into it with my hand. The mixture within it is not water: it is denser, with a greasy texture. I struggle to dry my hand afterwards. I see some robotic goldfish circle its shallow bottom.

I want to get out. Most of any chamber I have been inside, I want to escape. With every breath, I feel the synthesis entering me like an airborne toxin. In a moment, I feel I cannot breathe. I look to my friend. He still has not left my side. I lower my palm on my chest, and breathe deeply. He understands perfectly. Without hesitation, I watch him jump and cling to the concrete wall, which has become the pleasantest element of this bastard image. He climbs it with felicity, reaching its top, and to my surprise, does not stop there. His razor claws reach out and pierce the blue sky; a ceiling like any other, it would seem, with only an illusory façade of profundity and expanse. He crawls upside down till he reaches the ceiling’s centre, where, holding himself only by his right hand, he lowers his left and stretches it outwards. With the index finger of his skeletal phalanges, he primes its sharpened point, and begins slicing a line in the sky in front of him. The line spans about a metre, and is perfectly straight. Around it, with geometric precision, he slices a square, the line marking its perpendicular axis of reflection.

He draws his arm back and, curling his fingers into a fist, punches the rectangle closest to him. It budges slightly. He charges up another swing, with exponentially greater force behind it, and unleashing it in a blink into the rectangle, knocks it wide open like a door on a hinge. The piece of sky swings back down and drops past its accompanying door, dangling in the air. A similar treatment is used with the other rectangle, sending it up, and back down, and soon both doors are hanging loosely by their hinges, revealing a darkness beyond. The odd picture toys with my mind: the seemingly distant sky, with an open trapdoor so close. My friend releases his grip on the air, and plops back down next to me on the earth.

By use of some manual gestures, I urge him to drag me under the hole to achieve a better look into it, and with minimal difficulty he complies.

On my way there, the hole’s extent reveals itself to me. The walls are too dark to discern a thing, however just at the top of the opening, there is an orange hue glowing gently. I squint my eyes to better view it, but all I can see is the warm colour. It evokes some familiarity within me, though I struggle to precisely say what. It feels gravitating, like it drags me towards it.

I look to my companion, watching me regard the opening. He seems to read my thoughts. Hooking me in the familiar fashion, he slowly drags me across the grass. When we reach the concrete wall, he releases his hold of my right side, and with his left fingers, wraps around my chest to compensate for the surrendered grip. Once the two of us are comfortable with the shifted hold, my friend proceeds to use his right claw, with a strategic placement of his stick-like legs, to scale the wall.

I am uncomfortable being raised in such a manner, but do not protest so as not to frighten my carrier. My feet cannot help but dangle lightly, and hurt in kind, but I try not to notice.

My companion’s jump to attach to the celestial ceiling comes out of rhythm and startles me. He almost lets me go, but tightens his grip in time. He lowers me to his legs, and I wrap around them the best I can. They are thin and twig-like, and I fear I might break them if I supply too great a force.

In this fashion, with me hanging from my friend’s feet, we traverse what distance remains to the heavenly opening. I glimpse below us, and sense the ground much farther than it ought to be. I startle, and grab on more tightly. Fortunately, the legs do not break.

At the opening, my friend positions to its side, where there is no door to obstruct entry. Hooking onto the interior of the duct with one hand, he swings the both of us inside it, catching with his other hand just in time not to fall from the swing’s apex. The interior of the tunnel is like a chimney. A sweltering heat persists within it, and the abyssal walls are as though covered in pitch-black soot. Directly above us, at an unjudgeable distance, there is the orange glow I saw earlier. It still contains a familiarity I cannot place; but I resolve that reaching it will answer any questions I may have, and, gripping my companion the strongest I feel safe doing, I prepare to rise.

We conquer the unjudgeable distance in but a second, or maybe two. My friend hastens to carry us away, perhaps in fear of the tunnel closing in the fashion of those he appears acclimated to. I slowly fall lower and lower on my friend’s body, my grip slipping under the intense speed; the glow approaches nearer and nearer, though I only witness it in glimpses, my focus too centred on not suffering another belabouring fall; the warmth’s intensity too magnifies, and my sweat provides an unfortunate lubricant to my only means of superposition. My companion senses my struggle, and stops right before the summit to help me back up.

He climbs out the top of the chimney, pulling me from below him. I look around.

And my ink flows thick, but my notebook has run out of pages.

25.X.21