We used to test our mother. I’m Danny, I would say, and Danny would respond, No, I’m Danny, you’re Doug, and You’re Danny and I’m Doug, and so on, until finally we could not be certain even ourselves which of us was who.
One morning we squeezed through the cleft to discover an even dozen arch-ways radiating from the atrium. By then we’d procured supplies for exploring the corridors: sweatshirts against the cold, knapsacks to carry spare batteries, a snack, a thermos of our mother’s tea. And though we’d grown confident that all paths circled back to the atrium by some mechanism we could not understand, we did not that day care to venture the dark.
After that, we used red spray paint to blaze the walls with arrows, like Hansel and Gretel scattering breadcrumbs to mark their way.
I parked in the gravel turnout where Danny and I had once stashed our bikes and climbed toward the highway. I heard it before I saw it: the rumble of behemoth trucks downshifting on the long grade out of the mountains, the tyre-hiss of cars darting among them, nimble as pilot fish. I scrambled up the final slope, digging for purchase, and stood at the guard-rail, watching the traffic slip eternally past.
Our mother insisted that we dress identically. Even afterward, she shopped in duplicates.
We were too old for that kind of party.
I had trouble finding the culvert. I had to work my way through dense brush before I stumbled upon the drainage ditch that paralleled the highway. I walked alongside it for fifteen minutes, studying the embankment. Even then I almost missed it. A thicket of weeds and junk trees had sprung up in the stony breakwater below its concrete apron, obscuring the culvert’s black and abiding eye.
The last time we pushed through the crevice, there was but a single archway in the atrium. The tunnel beyond was broader than any we’d yet taken. As we walked, it broadened still, so that we could no longer touch the walls with our outstretched hands. After a long time, it steered us into an immense square. An elaborate fountain—angels with trumpets, long dry—stood in the centre, Italianate buildings and arcades to either side. Winding streets branched off here and there, lined with vacant shops. If there was a ceiling, our flashlight beams could not reach it.
That was the day after our thirteenth birthday.
We crossed the square and took a narrow street. At each intersection we marked our way. Meandering alleys delivered us into lavish piazzas, endless colonnades, stately domes and galleries: the city of our dreams.
I stood at the mouth of the culvert, knuckles nicked and scarred from the climb. Ducking my head, I stepped inside. Nothing had changed. The same half-inch of stagnant water, the ruin of rotting leaves.
Danny! I called. Danny! The culvert shouted back at me in diminishing echo, until it no longer sounded like a name at all.
We walked the cobbled streets and after a time they became the same streets, crowded and narrow, with the same turnings of the way and the same buildings leaning over them and the same fathomless sky between. Time and again we found ourselves in the same square with the same ornate fountain at the centre. No matter how many forking paths we took away from that place, they always led us back.
When I took my first college girlfriend home to meet my parents, she studied the photos of my brother and me that my mother had propped in their dozens around the house. I didn’t know you had a brother, she said. I didn’t know you were a twin. We broke up six months later.
How long we wandered that labyrinthine city, I cannot say. We ate the last of our snacks on a balcony overlooking that central plaza, we drank the last of our tea. Exhaustion took us. We slept curled together in the anteroom of an opulent palace, and woke unrested, to terror and despair.
I remember a time my father took my mother in his arms. I want to know what happened to him, she wept.
I must have slipped ahead of Danny—a few steps, half-a-dozen yards or so, no more, that is all I can know or surmise. But when I turned to find him, a maze of branching streets intersected where before there had been but a single way. My brother was gone. The red arrows had evaporated. Jackdaws had eaten our crumbs.
I have studied the blueprints for the city’s drainage system. The highway sweeps out of the mountains far above. There are no tunnels there.
They are there. They are.
No photos of me without Danny adorn my parents’ house.
How long I sought my brother among those shifting streets, I do not know. I called for him until I grew hoarse. But the city’s acoustics betrayed me: my voice boomed back at me down empty avenues and across abandoned courtyards. His name sounded like any other name.
Sometimes I think of all the things Danny never got to do.
She was a pretty girl, lithe and blonde. I can’t remember her name.
The way narrowed, the city fell behind me. I descended a cramped defile, the arched ceiling close above me. It wound finally back to the atrium. Twin tunnels converged there. The fissure cleaved the stone on the other side. Danny! I called, Danny! The corridors threw my voice back at me, the name indistinct; it could have been any name. It could have been mine.
Perhaps he was waiting for me on the other side, I recall thinking as I squeezed through the crevice, but he was not there. When I turned to look behind me, the fissure was gone.
Three times I walked the culvert end to end. Two dozen times I have walked it since. The walls are smooth and uninterrupted. If there is a crevice in its concrete length, I cannot find or see it.
I will never leave this city.
I wish I’d never had a brother. Sometimes I think I never did.
Two of us went in. Only one of us came out. And dear God, I don’t know if it was me.
Richard Gavin
THE PATTER OF TINY FEET
RICHARD GAVIN has authored four volumes of supernatural fiction—Charnel Wine, Omens, The Darkly Splendid Realm and At Fear’s Altar—with a fifth collection due in 2016. His stories have been selected for several “Year’s Best” anthologies and have been translated into Finnish, Italian and French.
In 2015 he co-edited (with Daniel A. Schulke and Patricia Cram) Penumbrae: An Occult Fiction Anthology. His esoteric writings include the study The Benighted Path: Primeval Gnosis and the Monstrous Soul and various essays, and he has also published poetry and examinations of the horror genre. He lives in Ontario, Canada.
“I have always been something of a searcher after horror,” explains the author. “Wayfaring through neglected locales is one of my greatest pleasures. One summer evening, some twenty years ago now, I was enjoying an off-trail hike with a friend when we happened upon an abandoned house. It was so decrepit it seemed ancient. There was no door in the doorframe, no glass in the window apertures.
“Much like my protagonist, my companion and I let our enchantment get the better of us and we brazenly (perhaps foolishly) explored the house inside and out. Fortunately our discoveries were far less dramatic than those in my story. Nevertheless, I vividly recall how unworldly the house seemed, with the smears of dried mud and curled leaves carpeting its floorboards, and the morose patches of floral wallpaper that tenaciously clung to the water-damaged walls.
“What struck me most indelibly was how incongruous the house appeared, standing there surrounded by untamed wilderness. Though the landscape had undoubtedly changed in the decades since the house had served as someone’s home, I couldn’t shake the notion of an utterly isolated abode being deliberately built where there were no roads, footpaths, or farming fields in sight.