Standing was hard. The mud beneath me was the sucking sort of wet mud that could steal a shoe, or let someone sink in to mid-calf level, and refuse to let them go. As I dug a foot in, struggling to find traction, I created an opening that let the freezing water in nearby pools flood in around my foot.
My clothes were heavy with moisture. My winter jacket, ostensibly waterproofed, was sodden, and my clothes were worse. Wearing some suit made of snow would be better, because snow insulated to a degree. This just carried the cold right through to the core of my body.
The mud insulated, I noted. I pulled myself to a sitting position and blinked the water out. I ran my fingers through my hair, and found my hands stiff to the point of being wooden. I’d hoped to clean them, and found the mud on my head made it impossible. With dirty fingers, I plucked at flecks of ice that were sticking to the eyelashes of my good eye. I blinked the resulting bit of dirt out of my eye.
Which reminded me… I tried to look with my Sight.
Nothing. Nothing at all.
I was partially blind in a way that went beyond one eye being fuzzy beyond the point of use. My one good eye saw darkness, the bad one saw everything through a milky gray veil, like a badly scratched lens, but neither eye could See.
All the same, a cold darkness in the very core of me told me what I’d expected to confirm.
I felt alone.
The rain and this loneliness weren’t so unusual to me. They were recurring themes for me. The dirt, too, being filthy, on several levels.
I expected to be weaker than I was. Which wasn’t to say I was strong. I still struggled to stand, with nothing firm to set my feet on, my body weighing twice as much as it should with the caked on mud, bits of ice and collected moisture. Various small injuries decided to wake up as I moved. My fingertips were scraped here and there, and a throbbing pain at the meat of my left hand insisted on nagging at my attention.
I raised my face to the ‘sky’, and let the rain pummel it, running through my hair and over my face, washing away the worst of the grit and blood. The wind hit me, changing the direction of the rain, and I swayed, one foot very nearly skidding in the mud.
My one good eye revealed a sky of sheer darkness. It was less like a starless night, and more like I was in a cave, the roof well out of view. The rain could be from some lake or ocean above the cave, leaking in, threatening to break through some thin layer of rock and snuff out everything beneath in one swooping motion.
That pretty much summed up the effect that the darkness had, here. An omnipresent weight. The roof of this place could have been twenty feet above my head or completely absent, only a limitless nothingness above.
Like the rain, it pressed everything down. It made me want to crawl instead of walk.
The only light, when there was light, came from a single old, orange lightbulb in a cage housing, mounted on a wall of irregular stone and mortar. It flickered, spending as much time off as on. I couldn’t make out the rest of the structure from the distance.
All the same it cast the faintest of light through the darkness, lighting up my path, or the lack of a path. The bits of mud that crested and rose above the puddles were shiny in the light, the briefly revealed humps and ledges suggested snakes, centipedes, squid tendrils, or crocodiles lurking with only traces of their bodies above the surface of the murk.
Here and there, grass or weeds stuck up. They were sparse in a way that only reinforced the desolate nature of the place. That grass could grow and couldn’t. Wouldn’t.
I shivered, and continued my lurching progress through the sloppy mud.
The light marked the arch-like entrance to a tunnel, its sister bulb on the opposite side of the entrance fritzed out, permanently off.
My good eye studied the interior, searching for any possible trap. I could make out another light further in. Around a bend, just far enough that a portion of the tunnel was unlit.
I stepped into the tunnel, just one stride inside, and got my bearings.
The mud, it seemed, formed a gentle ditch, and the collected rainwater was being directed into the tunnel entrance. The water frothed, oily black in the darkness, only the periodic foam catching the flickering light, and it churned against heaps of objects that had been dragged into this tunnel. A shopping cart, rent and ripped, so the prongs stabbed skyward, a few planks that were nailed together in what might have been an old loading pallet. A bit of fence. On either side, the ledge was only about two feet across, a half-foot above the water level, where water flowed in a steady, incessant stream. The water itself formed a gap maybe five feet across.
The walls were wet and slimy, and resembled an old tunnel wall that predated cars, rounded stones set in place with cracked mortar. Where stones had crumbled, they had been replaced with brick. That brick remained older than I was.
A drain.
My hands didn’t feel like my hands as I pulled off my jacket. They felt like puppet hands I was operating by remote control. Obeying my instructions, but not in any clever, effective way. I still managed to hold on to my jacket and wring it out, careful to maintain my footing. I couldn’t even hear the water I squeezed out hit anything, over the dull roar of the flowing drainage.
There was nowhere to put my jacket where it wouldn’t get dirty, so I put it down in the muck just outside the drain’s entrance.
I pulled off my sweatshirt and shirt as one single entity. One of my hands hurt – I’d smashed it somehow, and my shoulder hurt where I’d taken some impact.
Stupid, maybe, but I couldn’t imagine getting any colder.
My inside-out shirt and sweatshirt dangling from my hands, I saw the light flicker on briefly. Inviting me to see.
I saw the dirt that had leaked inside my clothes, and I saw the dirt move.
Bugs. Not all of it, but some. I’d imagined seeing great centipedes in the muck, and I saw small ones here. Earwigs, centipedes, pillbugs, all things I’d expect to see under a rock.
Even on my arms-
The light went out.
I stopped, waiting, my arms shivering from cold and the tension of holding onto the wet fabric.
The light flickered on again.
No, not that many bugs on my arms.
Great black tracks marked the surface of each arm. They were great thorny branches, grown mature. No birds, but innumerable feathers, one bird’s skull with a branch growing through the eyehole. Here and there, the branches stood alone, as if they’d broken off and fallen to earth. Not a healthy tree, but tinder, the limbs of a great tree frozen and cast to earth by the weather.
The branches crawled up my arms, past my elbows. One reached to my shoulder. I couldn’t see how far up my neck it traveled. The other was denser, painting my left arm black and brown with branches and feathers, respectively.
I touched a spot where the darkness was especially deep, on my left hand.
A crack, not a branch. Running from the spot between my middle and ring finger to my wrist.
The light flickered off.
I tested the wound, prodding my ring finger, pushing the two halves of my hand apart.
The light flicked on.
I could see through the gap. A yawning wound, effectively cutting my hand in half. The ring and pinky finger were especially stiff. The bits of flesh in the gap were nearly black, not crimson. It barely hurt.
The wound on that same hand was an old one, a puncture wound I’d made to draw blood. The scratches on the fingertips were self-inflicted, made for the same purpose.
Wounds I’d healed with glamour. The glamour had been left behind, the wounds had yet to heal properly. I’d only forestalled it, painted over it. Why would my body heal a wound that wasn’t there?