05-02-2018, 06:15 PM
For the next trip, Dexter bought an inductance flashlight. Inside the flashlight there was a magnet and a coil. Shaking the flashlight moved the magnet through the coil and generated a current to power the light.
“I want to go deeper,” he told Harmony. “This light won’t go out.” The voice still called to Dexter, seemed closer the deeper they went below ground. He rationalized it as a subconscious urge, an inexplicable emotion amidst an avalanche of inexplicable emotions. If he went deep enough, Dexter supposed, maybe he would understand.
They started off using Harmony’s flashlight and switched to Dexter’s when hers burned out on the third level down. Dexter was not surprised when, after a short search through adjoining rooms, the decrepit floor of a bar produced a trap door leading down into a rubble-strewn cellar on yet another lower level.
As they descended, Dexter laughed, and Harmony soon joined him. He felt they were the only ones ever to step into this place, that somehow it was theirs. They left two pristine sets of footprints in the thick dust. A little further in, Dexter found he was having a hard time thinking. The distant voice turned to a roar in his head. He had to develop a pattern for how to take in his environment, a routine way to move his eyes around, and it seemed only by luck that he discovered the next stairwell leading even further down. Trying to get to the stairs, he stumbled on a brick on the ground and had to lean against a wall to recover his breath and his balance.
Briefly, Dexter’s eyes met Harmony’s. “Deeper?” he tried to say, but his thoughts were floating amongst incoherent images of weeds and apples and bowls. Still the voice echoed in his thoughts, and he couldn’t form the sounds he needed.
Harmony understood. She nodded.
Dexter had to support himself against a wall as he made his way down the stairs. How many levels down were they, he wondered. Did the Seattle Underground have an end? Had they entered some alternate universe trending forever downward into an abyss of confused thoughts and emotions?
The room at the bottom of the stairs looked just as dusty and dilapidated as the one above. The walls were falling to pieces. Bricks formed random interference patterns on the cold, stone floor. The only familiar object was a mirror, coated in a layer of dust, somehow still upright in the far corner of the room.
Dexter had trouble breathing. A dull shadow echoed his movements on the mirror’s surface as he made his way forward. One step. Two. Then the flashlight went out.
Dexter shook the flashlight and the magnet inside it made its sharp clacking sound, but there was no light. He didn’t understand. He approached the mirror, leaning in close to inspect his dust-coated reflection.
“You are now entering the quantum realm,” Harmony joked in a Twilight-Zone voice from behind him and laughed.
Dexter tried to laugh as well but somehow, impossibly, he was stepping down instead of forward, and his knee knocked into something hard, and there was a crash of things falling, cascading onto the ground, and it went on much longer than any linear avalanche of items should, and nothing made sense besides Dexter’s instinctive urge to recover his balance and run to her, but which way? Then the air finally stopped ringing and Dexter staggered blindly through open space. All he wanted to do was reach out and touch Harmony, to make sure Harmony was all right, that Harmony hadn’t been hurt, and Dexter loved her too—he had loved her ever since she laughed in the communal garden outside the physics auditorium—, and his mind was screaming that she had to know.
There was nothing there. No one there.
Dexter was alone in the darkness.
“I want to go deeper,” he told Harmony. “This light won’t go out.” The voice still called to Dexter, seemed closer the deeper they went below ground. He rationalized it as a subconscious urge, an inexplicable emotion amidst an avalanche of inexplicable emotions. If he went deep enough, Dexter supposed, maybe he would understand.
They started off using Harmony’s flashlight and switched to Dexter’s when hers burned out on the third level down. Dexter was not surprised when, after a short search through adjoining rooms, the decrepit floor of a bar produced a trap door leading down into a rubble-strewn cellar on yet another lower level.
As they descended, Dexter laughed, and Harmony soon joined him. He felt they were the only ones ever to step into this place, that somehow it was theirs. They left two pristine sets of footprints in the thick dust. A little further in, Dexter found he was having a hard time thinking. The distant voice turned to a roar in his head. He had to develop a pattern for how to take in his environment, a routine way to move his eyes around, and it seemed only by luck that he discovered the next stairwell leading even further down. Trying to get to the stairs, he stumbled on a brick on the ground and had to lean against a wall to recover his breath and his balance.
Briefly, Dexter’s eyes met Harmony’s. “Deeper?” he tried to say, but his thoughts were floating amongst incoherent images of weeds and apples and bowls. Still the voice echoed in his thoughts, and he couldn’t form the sounds he needed.
Harmony understood. She nodded.
Dexter had to support himself against a wall as he made his way down the stairs. How many levels down were they, he wondered. Did the Seattle Underground have an end? Had they entered some alternate universe trending forever downward into an abyss of confused thoughts and emotions?
The room at the bottom of the stairs looked just as dusty and dilapidated as the one above. The walls were falling to pieces. Bricks formed random interference patterns on the cold, stone floor. The only familiar object was a mirror, coated in a layer of dust, somehow still upright in the far corner of the room.
Dexter had trouble breathing. A dull shadow echoed his movements on the mirror’s surface as he made his way forward. One step. Two. Then the flashlight went out.
Dexter shook the flashlight and the magnet inside it made its sharp clacking sound, but there was no light. He didn’t understand. He approached the mirror, leaning in close to inspect his dust-coated reflection.
“You are now entering the quantum realm,” Harmony joked in a Twilight-Zone voice from behind him and laughed.
Dexter tried to laugh as well but somehow, impossibly, he was stepping down instead of forward, and his knee knocked into something hard, and there was a crash of things falling, cascading onto the ground, and it went on much longer than any linear avalanche of items should, and nothing made sense besides Dexter’s instinctive urge to recover his balance and run to her, but which way? Then the air finally stopped ringing and Dexter staggered blindly through open space. All he wanted to do was reach out and touch Harmony, to make sure Harmony was all right, that Harmony hadn’t been hurt, and Dexter loved her too—he had loved her ever since she laughed in the communal garden outside the physics auditorium—, and his mind was screaming that she had to know.
There was nothing there. No one there.
Dexter was alone in the darkness.