Deeper down, and once his eyes have grown accustomed, he sees that what had seemed only space without light in the passage isn’t just solid, but has fiber to it, layers to it. Where there seemed walls there, a language holds the space together hard, so many syllables collected in the same pixels it feels impenetrable. The dark, then, is not actually solid, but so overrun it has no choice but to present nothing.
Up close, though, Flood can read. He finds the walls of the passage imprinted in the same way as the floor had been above him, wherever that was, in god our blood the word of blood in god the name of god in god the name of god, the layers of sentences laid atop each other often obscuring each beyond a language Flood feels he knows. The text is so thick it’s hard to make out any word unless his eye is right above it, tracing where the lines of one letter break free from those beside. It wraps around his face like a loose mask. It brings him nearer.
Each string of language contains small softer sections, Flood finds, like buttons lodged in on a monochrome piano, open wounds. As before, some of the words can be pressed down with pressure aimed in the right way, though now the action is clearer, more like life. He has become acquainted, inculcated, opened, but it had always been this way, in every surface, always. In every surface and word and shape and face ever remembered, ever touched.
Among the black knit, there are panels shaped with different outlines: letters that turn to new shapes as he sees; ring-shaped, star-shaped, squares and diamonds. Each button causes an alteration to the surface just beneath it, the exposure of a branch. Pressing down on the word wished, for instance, in one of its many repetitions along the surface, right before his face, causes the wall right behind him to come open. There is no sound. The wall simply slides away, almost so calmly you could miss it.
Behind where had once been wall is now a shaft, extending far on into its own dark cavity. The walls at the mouth of the shaft are the same white as the main passage, quickly disappearing into black.
Flood hesitates some long second standing staring down into the hole he’s made open. For some reason, he can’t immediately bring himself not to continue into its eye, despite the fact that he’s already surrounded by unknown in totality, all directions. There is still the latent fear that once behind it, the wall might close. He could become sealed in down here. He could be made trapped for the remainder of his life. Even in the dark beneath a killer’s house, he worries about his own preservation, if only long enough to hesitate a beat before giving in, again, toward what, he does not know.
FLOOD: All the colors in my eyes. All the machines inside the machines in my body, the other bodies. I swear this is not me speaking. I cannot control my mouth or hands. The nightwave knitting though the fields, coloring [his name] in the space between me and where I am, which is becoming several more places every minute. It is splitting. We are splitting in it. No. Each of the strings of images begets the next. No. Try not to think of me as disappearing, but simply always being. Where I am, there you are. This is not me. I did not want this. I will not believe this. It has gone on this way for all of time. Stop it. It will go on this way for more than time is, every instant, so loud I cannot hear. Stop.
Inside his sleep Gravey turns over to face up along the ground rather than face down.
He hears the word inside the curd inside the blood inside his skull.
He lifts his head with both hands to see the ground beneath him.
He barfs a liquid colored like the inside of a sun.
He eats the liquid back into him.
The hair grows on his head.
He grows.
The incline of the opened passage, unlike its central mainspring, slowly ascends. The wet under Flood’s feet recedes and follows him as footprints only briefly. What air there is is thick. The walls remain in darkness for some time, through which he wanders hands out before him, until there becomes a kind of light natural to the ongoing. Colorless, controlling. Beneath his feet Flood sees the white of the emerging surface turn to wood grain, then to carpet. The carpet is deep red, soft enough that it seems almost as if he isn’t walking on it. The passage continues.
Flood realizes he feels calm. Blissful, even. Easy. The higher he ascends into the branch, the less he aches from where he fell, the less he can remember the blood pouring inside him. Soon he can feel no pain in his body, and almost nothing there inside the work of moving, being.
The passage resolves into a wall. The wall is flat and mirrored, reflecting the orifice of the passage back into itself as if to make it appear forever going on. Flood does not appear reflected in the surface somehow. No matter where he moves, there’s only more of the passage headed back on where he came. He touches the mirror, feels its silence. There is a small latch attached to the edge of the mirror marked with a small burn mark, round like the world is, and hollow centered. When undone, the latch causes the mirror to open outward into what behind it.
What’s behind it is a home. On the far side of his mirror, Flood finds a room there opened up, having become accessible on its own side through a point where on the wall another mirror had been hung — a mirror to cover over the mirror through which Flood’s entered, or perhaps the back side of the same, either way a seeming point of unknown entry, linking his passage free into the house.
The room is decorated for a family. There is a sofa and a TV. There is a window covered with white curtains, bleeding light through. Bookshelves line the back wall filled with volumes whose titles Flood realizes he can’t read no matter how carefully he focuses. It is as if the room is slightly endowed with a blur, as if the lenses in his head have been set just out of focus.
He realizes, also, that here he can’t bring himself to touch anything the house holds. As he reaches for a light switch along the wall to fill the room up, he finds the blood inside his limb becoming heavy very fast, tingling in such a way that the closer he comes to touching anything the room holds, the more difficult it is to move. At the edge of where his hand stops, even just there fractions of an inch off the wall, it is as if he is being pressed back at by a great force. Once he stops trying to touch, his arms go easy again, and he can continue freely into the space. It is like this with all items there collected in the house, the decorations and the weapons and the food and tools and furniture and junk. His flesh feels cold. It’s as if he’s there but not.
It does not feel strange to walk naked among the home of strangers. This way his skin can breathe, and he is more open to understanding. He can’t remember anytime he hasn’t ever been just skin like this, breath like this.
There are other rooms off the first room. There is a kitchen and dining room and a half bathroom. Off a slightly longer hall there are two doors to separate bedrooms. In the first room a child is sleeping, the air around him illuminated by a single pink-swathed bulb low to the ground. Images cover the child’s walls every inch, as if trying to cover the flat white space out with shiny famous faces and cartoon bodies. The child looks like any child, the way all children do to Flood, never having been a parent. The child sleeps clutching a toy camera to his chest; a camera instead of a bear or blanket, as if at any moment he will be called on to document the world.
In the second bedroom there are two adults side by side, facing opposite directions. Across from their bed, a mirror, doubling their image, and the image of the open door. Again Flood does not see himself reflected in the mirror.