I didn’t have the strength to hold up my shirt and sweatshirt anymore, and I didn’t have the focus to busy myself wringing them dry. I hugged both to my stomach, my back touched the slimy wall, my head bowed, and I closed my eyes.
The scene was, ironically enough, bright in my mind’s eye. Memory more real than this.
Being in the factory. Realizing just how bad things were going.
Running for the windows.
I hadn’t made it.
The demon had closed around me, blocking every avenue of escape. Getting help had been impossible – my connections to the rest of the world had been severed. That I was as alone as anyone could ever be.
Or, as it happened, so alone that I couldn’t be.
The world had broken away around me, no longer seeing the value in holding me up. Cracks had yawned open around me, and in my hurry to get away, I’d fallen through.
Putting me here.
My dirty shirt and sweatshirt got dirtier as I laid them against the narrow shelf of brick I was standing on and unlaced a boot. I got one sock off, and carefully wound it around my cracked hand, tying the knot at the back of my hand. It made for a crude sort of bandage, holding the two pieces of my hand together. If I hadn’t thought I needed to use my fingers to grip, I might have stuck my whole hand inside the sock.
I needed those working fingers. I pulled my boot on over a bare foot.
My hands were wringing out my shirt and sweatshirt when I saw the first other living thing in this place.
Female, emaciated, her eyes reflecting like a cat’s might, but as pale green circles instead. She was perched on the heap of wood and the torn-up shopping cart. Only her upper body was visible, collarbone and ribs standing out with skin stretched taut around them. Her naked breasts were small, her arms tense with the exertion of holding herself up. Her hair was plastered to her head, her face looked like she was wearing a section of someone else’s skull as a mask.
The lights went off, behind me and further down the tunnel. Pitch darkness.
Only darkness. In the stillness and the quiet, I wrung out my shirt and sweatshirt further, then pulled it on. Clammy and wet and dirty on grimy, damp and cold skin.
The lights came back on, first one, then the other.
She was gone.
I shivered, pulling on my winter jacket. The mud had risen up, trying to claim it, to hide it.
I should have been scared, in the midst of all of this. I should have crumpled up into a ball and refused to move. I should have railed against the world, this fucked up unfair world and all of the wrong that loomed behind the curtain.
Except all I felt was numb.
I checked the sock-bandage at my left hand. Secure.
Where to go from here?
It was tempting to just follow the light. Outside, it was only darkness and hard rain. The mud could take hold of a foot and refuse to let go, or hide traps or waiting ambushers, human or otherwise. It could be hours of walking through a black so absolute I might as well be blind. My gut told me that the only things I was liable to find were more places like this. Vaguely hostile in layout, dangerous, quite possibly riddled with Others.
I made my way down the stone path, toward the second light.
When I reached the spot where the Other had perched, I reached over, grabbing a section of wood from the shattered pallet. A broad, flat plank, a nail stuck in the end, holding it firm…
One tug, only as hard as I could manage without risking losing my footing on slick stone, and it came free.
One end was sort of jagged. It was wet, slick with algae or slime or just from being wood worn smooth by current. It was cold, even, and bits of ice clung to the splintery bits at the frayed end.
No sign of the horrifically thin Other.
There was a dip further ahead, a downward slope. More debris sat on the slope, and with the little light that extended forward from the first light, now behind me, I could see the flowing water foam where it crashed against the debris.
A large rock. The handle of some gardening implement or broom or something, with a scrap of cloth caught on it, and the legs of a plastic or folding chair. More sat below the ramp. The Other could easily be one of those jagged shapes.
The Other didn’t attack.
I reached the darker patch, and the end of my plank skittered lightly across the stone in front of me, feeling for any tripping hazards. Progress was agonizingly slow as I checked the ground, used my hand to feel for anything jutting out of the wall.
A half-foot of progress, me shuffling forward, then another check.
When the wood wasn’t checking my route, I held it out, feeling for any reaching hands, ready to smash an attacking Other in the gut. If it gave me a chance.
If the darkness outside had weighed down on me, this was worse. It pressed in on me from all directions, making me feel impossibly small.
The numbness at the core of me gave way to a profound uneasiness.
Spelunking, the art of exploring caves, was terrifying unto itself. The idea of getting stuck, of getting turned around… even if one was traveling a route others had taken a hundred times, it was a fear that lingered.
When we -and we felt painfully hazy right here- had been discussing the factory, the topic of the urban explorers had come up. Same idea. Old buildings, the risk of getting stuck, of something happening, it was a very real concern. For an unknown number of urban explorers in Toronto, something had happened.
This was worse, on a level. All of those same claustrophobic, paranoid fears, they held true in this place. Even aboveground, it was claustrophobic.
Problem was that here, they were justified fears.
I stopped short.
In pitch darkness, where I couldn’t see anything but phantom images persisting across my field of view, I found that the path ended. There was no more ledge. A quick test with the plank confirmed. It had broken away. Crumbled.
A quick feel around, and I could confirm that there was no bridge, no passage or door to my right.
I peered forward, leaning a bit, trying to make out a ledge a bit further, or even prod it with the plank to gauge my ability to make a step.
No visible ledge.
I did see two circles in the churning water. So faint I might have thought they were phantom images.
But when all the other images danced in and out of my field of vision, my eyes remained locked on those faint green circles, and those circles remained exactly where they were.
Confidence. Theatrics.
If I earned my own demise, doing this, well, my circumstances wouldn’t be that much worse. But if I could look stronger than I felt, well…
Thin odds, but I’d take what I could. I couldn’t move forward without addressing the creature in the water, so I decided to address it head-on.
I extended my free hand, and with my finger crooked, I made a ‘come hither’ gesture, beckoning it.
My other hand gripped the plank, ready to defend myself if I had to.
The eyes rose up, and I could hear the sound of water falling free, as though someone were rising from a bath.
The eyes stopped, level with my bellybutton, over the water.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said. Her voice was airy, halfway between hiss and whisper.
The emaciated Other from before?
“You could have grabbed me by the ankles,” I said. “Hauled me under.”
“I could have.”
“But?”
A long pause. I didn’t dare move my eyes away from hers. Part of it was a dominance thing, the other part of it was that I wasn’t entirely sure I would be able to find her eyes again if I looked away.