I stop running. The streetlights are bright enough that I feel silly carrying a torch.
How does one douse a torch though. I don't want to just leave it burning, but as I look around the method escapes me for extinguishing this thing. I blow on it and it glows brighter. I try to roll it on the ground, and it still glows brighter. In the end I find what might have been a Volkswagen and stick the handle end of the torch into the hole meant for the top of the strut, which has long ago been confiscated perhaps to put a suspension on some underground dweller's donkey cart.
I smack my hands together and look around some. The buildings are urban, brick and concrete. The skies are phosphor gray. Towering four and five stories above me and all around me are the remnants of the suburban architectural foothills of an outer belt business district of some sort. I try to gauge by the sky how far this cavern looms beneath the grove and the river, but I cannot. It doesn't seem to end, which I assume to be some sort of visual hallucination.
Silhouettes move behind shaded glass lit from amber rooms beyond. These nondescript lives behind screens, they seem routine enough, as though no one were worried about the monsters in the movie theater. How can they possibly not know about that thing? They're in these apartments living like the world hasn't ended. I lean into one of the windows, which is closed, and try to listen through the glass to what conversation might be happening on the other side, but I get nothing. Strangely, the occupant shadows seem to notice me and they freeze in place, then they disappear. Maybe they aren't as comfortable as they seem.
I listen to the street. Breezes blow and topple empty bottles in the alley to my right. Then voices are carried up out of that same alley. I walk cautiously between the two buildings, straining my eyes into the bleak darkness before me. I see a light flicker briefly and make a noise like all the air being sucked out of a bottle, Phoomp!
I stop dead in my tracks to contemplate the will-o-the-wisp that just revealed itself at the back of the alley. The mice ate his shoes. I hear a voice say.
Great, these mice are everywhere, I mutter. Moving forward into the circle where the alley opens up into a sort of courtyard, there is a metal drum cut in half, filled with phosphorescent crystals giving off some heat and light. A ring of hobos surrounds it. They are drinking hooch from unlabeled glass bottles. I approach, but they don't take much notice. Either I'm boring or I'm an apparition from one of the bottles and not to be trusted or assumed to be extant in any degree. I try to open a conversation by saying, have any of you guys been to the movies lately?
They sit in relative quiet, ignoring my question. I think I'm not going to get any answer until one of them turns and looks at me. Finishing his appraisal he says, oh, it's you. Yeah, I went just last night, saw A Nightmare on Grove St part twelve. I can't tell if he is pulling my chain or not.
I say, is that the one where you end up in an underground movie theater and get chased by a ceiling dweller into a black sky city?
That sounds about right, he says. What do you want? he asks as he holds an empty bottle up in the light of the crystal fire and strikes a match, dipping the tip into the mouth of the bottle, creating a plume of flame shooting out and a wall of blue fire crawling in, while the noise resounds, a hollow vacuum suction. It sounds like a man getting the wind knocked out of him.
I don't know, I say. I had more money than I could ever spend. I suppose that's still waiting for me somewhere.
What good is money you can't spend? asks another one of the vagrants. I can smell his breath turning to acid across the fire. The flames turn green momentarily, then flicker back to a bright black glow.
I don't know, I say again. What's the point of all this then? Trying to scare me?
What makes you think you are important enough to be the center of attention here? You think everything is designed personally with you in mind? To either please or terrify you?
I look at him. At this point I am used to getting no respect from anyone who I encounter on my journey.
What you saw in the theater, he says, what do you think it was?
I don't know. I was hoping you'd tell me, I say.
What makes you think we know? he says. This place is feeling more unfriendly than I had hoped. Lightning flashes across the fluorescent gray sky. It lights the faces of the men at the can fire. They are all board members from my former company. I can't remember their names. They have never been that important to me.
Wanna drink? asks another one. He holds out a bottle of yellow liquid with an animal fetus growing in it.
I gag. They all laugh horrendously. Fine, I say. I take the bottle. They look at me incredulously now. I tip it to my lips, all the while my eyes watching them around the edges of the bottle as they anticipate my reaction. The liquor touches my lips. It produces a warmth in my face greater than that of the phosphorescent flames. It tastes vaguely of mushrooms and smells of piss. I take a long guzzle. The fetus in the bottle is moving, alive. I try to discern what animal it is that would grow in ether. Look at its two arms and two legs, its tail, its head, and decide it had to be something like a man, though clearly not entirely.
Welcome to the board, says the first man, his face a sunken wreck. His clothes a shabby version of a cheap suit left out in the weather on a plaster dummy which begins to melt and seep white mud into the weave. His companions cheer in report. My head feels like an expanding balloon, the skin of my face stretched tight across a burgeoning skull. I hand the bottle back and they pass it around and empty it. Then the last man to guzzle lights a match and makes the ghost jump in the bottle again.
How long have you guys been down here? I say. They don't appear to have aged fifty years like everyone I met topside. In fact, they look rather well preserved.
Mice ate our shoes; time stopped on that day; we have no more records, are three responses uttered in order by three different respondents.
I look down at their feet. They are wearing shoes.
I say, if the mice ate your shoes, where'd you get those?
Target, up the road, says one man and he laughs so hard he chokes, coughs, and spits into the crystals which sizzle and steam. A hiss rises from the circle. He has a face like a jaundiced beach ball, his five-o-clock shadow tearing pill out of his oxford collar.
I think I see movement on the brick walls above and look up. In the shadows, there is no stillness. the dark seems to swarm and squirm beneath the radiant glow of the cavern roof. I say, do these things bother you? and point up.
We don't look up, says another man. His eyes in fact not leaving the ground in front of him as if to demonstrate his commitment to the idea.
I feel something lick the back of my neck and I jump.
Have another swiggle, says the man and hands me another bottle without looking up. I take it in my hand and this time the embryonic tenant looks me in the eye and winks. I toss back the whole thing and watch the circle gape in awe at my chutzpah. I feel the little homunculus swim down my throat with the stream. He takes up residence in my belly and begins giving lessons to the digestive system on how to play a marching song entirely on an orchestra of tubas.
I toss the bottle to one of the men. It hits him square between the eyes, and he falls forward with his hands over his face, blood trickling out from between his fingers. Owww, he moans and rocks back and forth. The others look around nervously from side to side.
Shoulda looked up, I say. No one laughs. The bottle rolls on the ground in front of his feet. The man next to him picks it up and completes the ritual of releasing the spirit. I feel the homunculus in my gut squirm and die as if his soul has just been torched.
Well, I say, you guys have been no help at all.
Cheers, they all ring out except for the one I damaged with the bottle. He just looks at me with one burning eye from between his fingers pressed to his face. His gaze is hurt and angry and I think for a moment he might get up and stab at me with a shattered bottle in his grip like some avenging drunken master. Then he utters, far out of sync with the others, cheers, in a small croaking voice, as though he were going to cry about it.
I look behind the group and see a door. Where does that door go? I ask.
They all turn, except the hurt man, and look at the door. One of them with a large pimple on the end of his nose says, that door goes inside that building. That building is not a great place to be, but it beats the movie theater. This elicits cacophonous laughter from the group. The hurt man mutters something.
I ask, what?
He looks up, tears his hands from his face, all pale and streaked with dark blood, screams, the mice will eat your fucking shoes man! Then goes back to contemplating his inner palms.
I walk around the group. My feet kicking bottles out of the way. They go ringing off into the dark corners where something slides down the wall and slurps them up with a tongue the size of a wacky noodle. I feel the wet spot on the back of my neck. It is warm and slick. The door pulls open and a hallway stretches out in front of me, lit by a string of construction lights and full of boxes of paperwork covered in dust. Some kind of archive. The door shuts behind me while the circle of jerks is laughing uproariously about another joke, and the hurt man glares in my direction with one eye from between his fingers.
I lean against the wall for a moment, my head spins lightly, like a big windmill turning very slowly on a still day. I feel my vision has to be constantly adjusted by a half a degree change every six seconds or so or I'll simply tip over and wind up with my head stuffed in one of these boxes.
While I'm leaning, I flick a cardboard lid off one of the boxes and rifle through the folders inside. It's all numbers. There isn't a single letter in any language. All numbers arranged in paragraphs and sentences, headings, file labels. Even the suggestion of a photograph is done with numerals arranged so that the gestalt pattern forms a picture, and that picture is of the numeral seven.
I have been hoping for something useful. Instead, I feel violated. I pick up the cardboard banker's box in the heft of my arms and throw it into the hallway. It hits the ground and comes apart, stacks of sheets of paper covered in meaningless numbers cascade across the cement floor like spilled liquid, stopping when the surface tension of the meniscus overcomes the momentum of the puddle. A light above my head, bare bulb hanging almost in my path, flickers. I turn it with my fingers first to tight, which does nothing, then to the left to loosen and to turn it off altogether. There are plenty of lights in the ceiling, I don't need that one.
I step over the exploded wreck of the box and onto the paper-slide. My sneakers leave peculiar tread marks on the paper. As I look back, I think, those look different. I kneel down and take a closer look. Each print is comprised of hundreds of smaller prints like those of a rodent, overlayed, tessellated, they seem to connect numbers to other numbers in an organic equation. I still can't read it, not having studied the STEM schools as much as business management and totalitarian ethics, etc.
The pit of my stomach is bottomless now. I have ventured out to clear my head and been sucked instead into deeper mystery. I have been up all night with recourse for rest. There is nothing comfortable about this dungeon world. I cannot be compelled to close my eyes for more than a blink, and sometimes winking through a wave of fatigue, I will only close one at a time, lest something get the drop on me.
Now I look at the soles of my shoes for clues. They look like I remembered, which is not in any sense a clarification of what I was seeing on the paper.
I look over my shoulder at the hallway stretching out before me. My neck cracks. I feel like it is headed down, imperceptibly creeping into the core of the planet. I stand up and feel a creaking in my knees; I sway a little. Hungry, probably. Tired, definitely. The path ahead of me draws me onward. Lined all the way with these stupid inscrutable bank boxes full of what feels like one impossibly long number, separated by commas every third digit. Lights that flicker when I get near, so eventually I give up trying to reset them. They are reacting to my presence, not the other way around. This place knows I am here. It wants me to know that it knows. I am uncertain how I feel about that. Looking over my shoulder repeatedly as I walk becomes a burden as it only increases the probability in my mind that something will be there when I turn around. So, I keep my head and eyes focused ahead of me. After doing this for a few minutes I become aware of my ears. They are playing jingles in my head. Maxwell house coffee, brown eggs, General's auto insurance, Allen Wayside Furniture. I feel the prick of whispers over inhuman tongues creeping out from the long dark behind me.
Looking is not going to help, I decide. Until the maddening sounds become overwhelming, I will not turn around. There is nothing there, so I tell myself that what I am hearing is the natural progression of a hallucination that had begun to form in my visual cortex being transferred to my auditory centers. The world is always singing, and I am in my hyper-vigilant state just now more aware of the changes in the tempo, volume, and melody of that song. My own footsteps leave a flat slapping sound on the concrete and do not reverberate due to the presence of so much baffling material. I walk at a good clip for an old guy with a healing leg. Time stretches and loses meaning in such a space. I feel I have been walking for hours when I come to another door. Has it been hours, or has it been fifteen minutes?
I stop in front of this new gray steel rectangle. I listen to the manic sounds in my head turn their echolocation onto establishing a pattern for what might be on the other side. I squeeze my eyes shut, put my hand, palm out, on the metal door. It rumbles with the force of life. This could be my last chance of exit for a while. If I keep walking, I might come to another door I might not see one for days. I listen hard but hear little. I try to look in the cracks around the door, either it is completely dark on the other side, or they are sealed up too tight for me to see any light. Then I noticed the keyhole is ancient, probably two hundred years old, and that means it will also work as an observation porthole.
Once again kneeling I slowly position my eye in line with it from about three feet back, just in case. I can see light. I can see faint movement as well. I am drawn closer to the hole. Each second that I am not met with a skewer being poked out at me I advance another inch. The picture is not much clearer until I am within six inches of the hole. It begins to change from a swirling mess of motion and gray-scale pixelation into a writhing mass of furry bodies. I am sucked all the way up to the hole, nearly scratching my cornea on the machined opening. There is another hallway, intersecting this one. It stretches to a similar infinite length. Floor and walls and ceiling are covered with white, gray, and black mice. They squirm and claw and now I can hear it, they squeak and squeal. I feel a shiver up my spine and through the edges of my vision see a corresponding flicker in the bulb above my head.
In my crouched position my body succumbs to fatigue momentarily. I feel a weakness, a gray-out passes over me and I lose some control of my balance. I lean suddenly and hard into the door. It punches the door frame and rebounds. This is when I notice something else about this door. The latch bolt is missing from the lockset. When I recover from my spell, I realize that the door is not and cannot be shut.
The mice take note of my presence and scramble out of the opening and into the hallway with me. They run up my pant legs and under my shirt, biting me ferociously. They nibble at the soles of my shoes as I stomp about, shaking and jarring my body to send shockwaves through my flesh to dislodge the tiny predators. Then, I run.
My heart is in good shape. My joints are frequently stress tested at the gym. I live an active lifestyle. I usually run in my neighborhood or on a track at my gym. This tunnel is nothing like the controlled environment of that track but I am spurred by the horde of angry mice at my heels I dodge low hanging pipes and light bulbs and hip check boxes into the path behind me, hoping to slow them down. They are a flood; a wave of thinking molecules bent on the task of tearing me to pieces bite by tiny bite. Why, oh, why had this not been some sick inside joke when I'd heard it. I had no idea this was a literal hazard.
Having been a runner in a highly controlled environment gives me a great deal of knowledge about my body, enabling me to time with certainty, what would otherwise be an indefinable space. I am well aware of the pre-quarter mile shin splints and ankle creases that are calling for my system to produce and deliver the cortisone shots to those extremities which are experiencing duress. I am also prepared for the three-quarter mile drop in blood sugar that precipitates the feeling of hopelessness that always gives me the inevitable irrational fear that I am wasting my time and I should just quit. At two miles, I hit my stride. My breathing and heartbeat will have adjusted to the rhythm of the movement, and all my systems will have produced enough hormones to repeat the task at hand. A typical run for me is about ten to twenty miles depending on the day of the week. A lot of people say running is bad for your joints. Those people are typically overweight or dumb enough to run on concrete or asphalt. Oops. Well, at least I'm not overweight. At about ten miles my body will begin to shiver as it runs low on the chemicals it had initially pumped into the system. This is the signal that it is time to produce more such chemicals. In my typical environment, the atmosphere is conditioned to optimal temperature and humidity for this kind of workout. The room is sixty-eight degrees, with a humidity index of 45 percent. This tunnel feels clammy. It is cold and wet. When I sweat, I feel it tearing the strength out of my core, my heat, and I feel my body has to work three times as hard to maintain comfort and homeostasis. The constant ducking and weaving around obstacles changes the rhythm of the steps to an almost unrecognizable breakbeat. I feel like I'm moving to dance hall reggae while being chased by an army of tiny clones.
I am able to keep ahead of them, even just barely is a swiftly challenged comfort. I feel the two-mile plateau coming, as the climb to a regular pace evens out. I squint ahead at the deepening run, perspective points converging into a single dot, parallel lines are an illusion of mathematics to me now. My adrenaline and sympathetic nervous system determine the rules of reality at the moment. My nostrils are flaring in and out in the mildew laden air. Try not to imagine being colonized by tiny black particles with psychic field manipulation. Try not to imagine getting some undiagnosable brain cognitive disorder from this long hole. Try not to think about Hanta virus and anthrax being kicked up by my heels into swirling clouds advancing as surely upon me and as quickly or quicker than the wall of fur and teeth behind me, the turbulent flow of particulate matter in an atmospheric system somehow getting ahead of its propagating force as if by use of magic. A rooster tail of biological hazard back-drafting down the hallway in a debris trail of meaningless figures tallied and crawled over by the eighteen toed menace which is slower than me, and not by much, and surely can overwhelm my advantages by pure number in an enclosed space.
The two-mile feeling has come and gone. I am still running. I don't have to look behind me, the sounds of scampering soft padded feet with sharp claws and the whispering squeaky breathing of trillions of tiny lungs confirms that I have not outrun my assailants. I feel fear in my heart. I feel despair. If I have not been able to outrun these creatures in five miles. What makes me think I can do it in ten or twenty? And what about after that? I've never run more than twenty miles and that usually on a Sunday before brunch and a huge afternoon nap, followed by cocktails upon waking. This is set to be an underground marathon through the shit and piss of a legion of filth, under threat of death by a thousand rabid cuts. All I can do for now is run. I push the other thoughts to the back of my mind, where they shout over the walls I build around them, nagging me, pulling my concentration away from the path ahead of me.
I get so overwhelmed by my own doubts and managing inner turmoil that I trip over a broom stick laying across the floor. I don't have the time it takes me to wonder who in fuck's sake has left a broomstick here, here where it is apparent that nobody has done even the slightest amount of upkeep in a number of decades. A broomstick is some sort of irony I can spend days laughing about, if I get out of here, but not now. If I take the energy needed to laugh, combined with the helplessness of a laughing man, I will be covered in fur and chisel shaped bite marks before I can end my hysterics.
The broomstick slides under the impact of the plantar arch of my foot. It bites into the ligaments in that soft spot between my heel and big toe pad. It hurts like a son-of-a-bitch. That pressure point screams up my leg, tightening every muscle and tendon I have managed to loosen up in my miles long run, and I fall forward, my leg collapsing beneath me in a shower of pain and expletives as I tumble out the momentum into a cold sprawl in a heap. Boxes of numbers on paper topple and spill over me in a cascade as I flounder and skid up to a ready-set-go again before I'd even come to a stop, hoping to carry some momentum from the tragically comic accident into a second wind. I go forward on a contused ankle and a barking shin. Now my rhythm is hobbled by my own displaced balance as well as the obstacles in my path.
The mice have closed the gap, and I feel them sinking their jaws into the rubber of my heels. Feel their skulls popping underfoot as I roll onward, hoping to regain my lead, working out the injuries in motion. Another fall like that and I will be consumed. Now I am struck paranoid about the path ahead. I measure my steps more carefully; it becomes gut-wrenching to step into a darkened space beyond a stack of boxes in the shadow of calculations I have not worked out. I hear the voices of the mice in my head doing trinomials, derivatives, and integration functions in tandem. They are trying to take me down again with their multitudinous thoughts. My brain is bigger than a hundred of theirs, perhaps a thousand, but they are dividing the processing load over a network of trillions, perhaps an infinite number of nodes.
I feel my pace quicken in panic as the shivers at mile ten bring with them unexpected discomfort like having red hot knitting needles inserted beneath my scapulae. If I puke, I have to keep running through the heaving of my diaphragm. Is that even possible to puke and run at the same time? The pain makes me sure to find out soon. I feel the warmth rush back into my spine and gut as the spigot of resources within me turns on for its regular scheduled dump of new and intriguing hormones into my system. I throw up into my mouth and spit it, spray it in a ghastly exhale to my left, leaving an explosive mark of bile and not much else upon the wall.
A few mice who are crawling along beside me are drenched in barf, which again, might be something I can laugh about someday. But not now as I careen along and those few hapless targets of my projectile vomit find themselves blown flat against the concrete wall of the tunnel. They drop off in disgust at what has happened to them, for even to a mouse this seems an affront to decency. They are quickly overcome by their brethren who, unable to smell the mousiness of their mates, eat them alive. A mini-bloodbath scene in my wake as two or three mice are rendered into a snack for two or three hundred more who find my bile enticing or delicious or just alien enough to warrant annihilation. The terrified squeals of those two or three lost in sacrifice are not audible above the din of the remainder. They are infinitesimal.
In the winking lights of the overhead bulbs I see something change in my pinpoint horizon. As I continue to converge in fractal intimacy with what appears at last to be the end of the tunnel, I feel a push to give myself enough time to breach whatever barrier lays in wait. I change my stride from a loping long distance gait to a sprint, kicking my heels all the way up to my anus and burning through the last of my reserves to close the last quarter mile or so in about sixty seconds, which is extremely fast for a sixty something year old white dude considering there aren't any brunch lines around here.
At the end of the tunnel, I do not look behind me. I come slamming up against a solid door. I feel the knob. It turns. I push, nothing. I pull; it comes toward me as the fastest of the mice begin to crawl up the backs of my pants. I swing around and inside and shut the door hard on the spines of several gutsy fur-balls, their livers and spleens and hearts and eyeballs channeling themselves into some kind of jewel encrusted slime upon the jamb. The door stands strong as a million tiny bodies press up against it. I look around the room and am stupefied to realize I am not alone.
The mice didn't eat your shoes, did they? he says, looking through his kaleidoscope at me, or the door, or some fucking astral projection in his imagination.
They sure as fuck tried, I say, inspecting the filthy soles of my runners. The concrete and basement mildew spores swirling about them have created turbulent patterns of black dust and the once white spongy rubber are now a filthy gray. There are grass stains on my toes, presumably from being dragged out of a river and laid out to dry like primitive laundry. There are bloody splats where I've crushed mice to death.
That door won't hold them forever, he says casually.
What the fuck do you mean, I say? Are you fucking kidding me right now? Mice are gonna knock down that steel door that I ran into full speed and almost broke my wrists on?
Yes, something like that, he says. Let me read your cards.
Let you what? Read my what the fuck?
Your. Cards. He is unusually lucid and assertive. I note that he wears a crown today, and that it is squirming, no swarming about his skull. Bits of it crawl over his cheeks while he speaks, their little hips covered in lemon pollen.
Fuck me.
I don't think so, he says, and holds out a deck. Choose.
H-h-how many? I can't believe I am participating and feel it is certainly under duress.
Your choice, he says.
I reach out, a small bee alights upon the top of my thumb and cautions me, choose well. He departs leaving a blessing in the form of a yellowish orange smudge. I grab the whole deck and pull a fistful of cards from the center, handing them to the beekeeper. He looks delighted. Here's the rest of them too, I say and hand him the rest.
Hmm, seven hearts, deuce spades, king diamonds. He pulls out a banker's box full of papers, lifts a folder from the top of the stack within, withdraws the topmost sheet of printed figures and scrawls in ink a few more digits.
At this, the sound of tiny bodies hurtling against the door ceases. A small river of blood creeps under the door. Dust settles from the lintel above. A swaying light bulb over the beekeeper's head is stilled by a long-fingered hand reaching up without looking, grasping the hot bulb. He holds it for a few seconds then releases his fingers, red from contact, and the bulb stays put. He puts my cards back into the deck and shuffles them absent-mindedly.
Aren't you going to tell me what it means? I ask.
It's not for you to know, he says, besides, you don't believe in this crap.
It's hard to maintain my skepticism around you, I say.
The mice will not be eating your shoes today. Would you like a sandwich? At this he sniggers.
No, I say. I think I've had enough of your sandwiches. Can you tell me how to get back to the grove?
I can.
Will you please tell me how to get back to the grove?
I will.
I swear I almost punch him. Then please do it, I say between gritted teeth.
He turns and looks behind him. There is a red velvet curtain. It brings back nightmare shadows from the movie theater. I go to it and draw it aside. There is an elevator door. I press the call button. Such Sweet Thunder starts playing. Duke Ellington brings a classy vibe to this otherwise miasmatic pit. I almost find myself tapping my foot but feel the amused eyes of the beekeeper upon me and don't want to lend him any more satisfaction at my own expense.
The elevator car comes, creaking and popping. The brakes engage near the bottom, and it rides a school full of fingernails down chalkboards to a thudding landing. The silence which precedes the parting of the doors is final. I look back at the beekeeper and step inside. The gates close, then the outer doors, he doesn't look up, just waves one spindly old hand over his shoulder at me, goodbye.
As I should have expected by now, the walls of the box are lined with numbered buttons, all out of order, some far longer than could reasonably be connected with any place in vertical space, unless we are going to the moon, or Mars, or Pluto. They are colorful, aged by time into hues all tinged with the golden amber of fossilized Bakelite plastic. I look around for something useful. In the midst of my beginning to make sense of things, the box starts climbing on its own.
Rather than risk altering an unknown and possibly default position, I just back away from the walls and stand at the center of the lift, waiting to see where it has decided to take me. The numbers flash from floor to ceiling as I traverse the levels of these catacombs.
My anxiety is quelled by the absence of pursuers. I am not in a hurry after my run through the tunnel. This thing could basically take me just about anywhere that wasn't the bottom of a hellscape administrator's nightmare, and I will be fine. The door could open upon a besieged children's show backstage, with actors running around faceless in furry inspired bodysuits carrying trays of human entrails and I'd probably walk out amidst that carnival and start searching for a tray of Dom, ready to take a seat amongst the most flagrantly unbelonging clowns as long as there were no sign of rodentia among them. I might permit a rabbit suit, but if Chuck E. Cheese shows up, I would probably use a chicken satay to dig his fucking heart out.
The lift goes on and on. I have no concept of space or time left, as I am not exerting myself and can't see beyond the buttons blinking in and out of sequence in front of me. I begin watching them for a pattern, but none can be established. If there is a pattern it is too big for me to register within my limited memory. I could be in this lift for a decade without knowing if it weren't for my sense of thirst which has been growing since last night outside the cave. I have not found any water, nor did I have the time to think about it when I was being run down by the vermin army, but now that my mind is wandering, it is filled with images from the dream of water and waves. I find myself greedily drinking from my own subconscious. My sense of hunger is awakened too. I wonder what time it will be when I return, if I return to the village. Will I be able to find something other than a watering can at whatever hour it will be?
I reach in my pocket and pull out my shattered watch and the pendant on a snapped chain. The movement slips out of the casing and between my fingers. The kinetic pendulum separates from its post and skitters like a bug across the floor of the box and out under the door. I look at the pendant draped over my knuckles. Prising it open reveals the pictures inside once again. The older woman in the photo now looks very familiar to me. I bend forward to attempt to retrieve bits of my watch from the floor when the bell chimes and the doors open.