“Say! In the dark? Here in the dark! Would you, could you, in the dark?”
“I would not, could not, in the dark.”
-Dr. Seuss, “Green Eggs and Ham”
________________________________________________________________________________________________
The silence is overwhelming. The building seems empty in a way that I can’t really articulate- despite the presence of the earlier… thing, and the fact that this place doesn’t feel empty, but there it is. There’s no skittering, no dripping water, no awkward creaking and groaning of old wood. The place is just quiet, quiet in a way that expands through the space and demands that all communication come in the form of whispering. Beyond the danger of being seen or noticed by something (which is silly, we’re waving flashlights around in the pitch blackness), there’s a sort of pressure, pressing down on Jay and I and demanding we not breach the sacred quiet.
I pause at that.
Sacred quiet. That’s… not how I’d describe it. Right? It doesn’t feel… divine? Why did I pick that word specifically?
My foot accidentally kicks at a cracked piece of wood, forcing sound to echo through the dark hallways again, and I wince, forgetting the thought.
Past the entrance office, locker room and storage spaces, all equipped with the ruins of old crates and packing materials and loading bays, the hallway continues for just a few more paces. Air perfectly poised between dry and moist, and always cold, fills the space, briefly breezing past my skin as I reach the end of it, and turn the light to see…
A fork in the road.
Left and right.
There are signs, arrows pointing to both sides, but like the face of the man and his… girlfriend? Wife? back in the locker room, they’re worn away, somehow more eroded than the rest of the space. Like something rubbed at them specifically, or like the forces that seem so absent in this space were allowed free reign against specific portions. So far, always the portions and pieces that might provide answers.
Down one of the two hallways, to the right: a big set of double doors, locked with a chain and a heavy latch. Two blurry windows stare out at me like blind eyes, cylindrical cataracts glowing faintly from the light of my flashlight.
To the left of the two hallways: a big set of double doors, locked with a chain and heavy latch, and no windows. Just wood, this time, unlike the plastic and glass and metal of the doors to the right.
Both equally foreboding.
So, I stall.
“Do you think you could get through those latches?”
Jay looks over my shoulder, checking all around, and then into the T-intersection proper.
“Is it ok to touch them? Or are they going to, like, bite me?”
“I… I don’t see anything alive on them? Like, at a first glance? It should be fine.”
He nods, and then takes in a deep breath, psyching himself up. I can’t really blame him: “they don’t look alive” isn’t exactly a reassuring thing to say in the best of cases, less so when you’re actively about to fuck with the aforementioned “they”. Still, he takes the initiative, making my decision for me by heading to the doors with the windows and the metal rims.
“Should be fine, but it’ll take a few minutes. Heavy locks need more force on the pins, but it actually doesn’t make that much difference for finding the right spots. They just need you to be a little rougher than normal.”
Don’t say it. Don’t say it.
“That’s what they said.”
Damnit.
Jay just snorts, not even gracing the joke with a look over his shoulder. He crouches and pulls from his jacket a little black box, unlatching it to reveal a series of metallic implements I don’t recognize, but which look vaguely familiar. Like something you might see in a movie, except less overwrought and shiny.
A series of small clicking noises sound from that side of the hallway as Jay gets to work, leaving me to watch our retreat and the other door.
The wooden door. Unpainted, without even the leftover patches of beige on the wall to obscure the material. Without the chain, I wonder if I’d be able to actually notice the knobs and seams of it.
It seems more like an office sort of door, as opposed to an “industrial” style door, but… I don’t regret Jay’s choice.
Keeping the light on the door, I approach. When nothing shifts or threatens to bite me, I step closer.
The dark of the wood makes it feel like an optical illusion, like it should be further away from me than it is. But it’s not. It’s here, right in front of me, ten steps forth from when I started.
Holding my breath, I lean close, and put my ear to the door.
I don’t hear a heartbeat or anything. No wet, fleshy meat-wall sounds, no sounds of cracking, no sign of something alive. It sounds… it sounds like a pair of wooden doors, perfectly still. Not even the sounds of swollen wood, pregnant with mold and mildew and creaking under the weight of the life it harbors. It’s just silent.
I let out the breath I was holding, and-
There.
An echo of my breath. Nothing confirmed. Nothing. It’s silent.
I don’t exhale again. I need to listen. There’s something.
My throat closes, my lungs starting to ache just the slightest bit (fuck, I’m so out of shape), and…
Nothing.
I take a breath, turning away from the door, and-
clink
The sound of metal shifting on metal, ever-so-slightly.
I turn, fast enough that the light from my flashlight leaves a blurry afterimage in my eyes, and stare at the chain on the door, swaying ever so gently.
Gently enough that it could have been jostled by me, when I leaned against the door, maybe. Gently enough that I know nothing’s pushed against the door, not really, not in any meaningful way-
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It’s still silent. But somehow, it’s not the same silence as before. It is not an empty silence.
There’s something behind the door.
Something swims in my eye, and I reach out towards the door, the fingers of the Glove extending almost unconsciously-
CLICK.
“Got it!”
I snap out of the fugue, taking in a shaky breath and whirling back to Jay, who throws a hand over his face, blocking the light I just shone right into his eyes.
“Fuck! Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you, I just- the lock.”
He lifts his hand, showing me the five-pound hunk of metal in his hand, its arches hanging open and shifting under the authority of his motion. Behind him, the chain is still intact, but it’s already loosened, drooping a bit closer to the ground as if ripe and ready to fall.
I take the light off his eyes, turning back to the door. The wooden door, with something behind it.
The chain is the exact length and position as it was before. It’s unchanged. There’s no evidence it ever moved.
I move back from the door slowly anyways, just in case.
“Ilia? Did you see something?”
“...no. Maybe. I… just got a really strong impression that something’s behind this door.”
“...Ok. Scale of one to ten?”
“I…”
I pause. How sure was I actually? Was I-
What is in my eye? I rub at it, but it remains, something weird swimming in the jelly of-
Blinking, I stop what I’m doing and summon up my character sheet.
Instead of the usual page of stats I see, it’s a single line, holding just a few words.
GLIMPSE BEYOND HAS GROWN!
I… I don’t know what that means. Is that… did I get some kind of level-up? On a skill? I don’t remember doing that before, did I-
“Oh, shit. Jay, can I look at the back of your head? Real quick?”
He blinks. “...Um. Sure? That feels like a bit of a weird segue but-”
I’m not listening. I’m already behind him, turning his head just a bit so I can look at the cut on the back of it.
It still looks the same. Identical to the last time I saw it, but -
The pupil is moving.
Oh, fuck.
The eye is still closed, it’s not like that has changed, but… I can feel a bit past it now. A bit deeper, just by an inch or two, down past the cut and the skin and the blood. The pupil of the eye behind it is darting around, actively, as if in the midst of REM sleep.
Was it always doing that? Or maybe doing that less, before? Is this what the “level up” means? I don’t… I don’t feel different, but I didn’t feel different about my SYNCHRONICITY, about any of my stats. It hasn’t been a factor, since I took off the haptics last week.
“Everything ok back there?”
“I… yeah, I think so. It’s… it’s like it’s dreaming, but it doesn’t seem like it wants to open or anything.”
“Well that’s horrifying to hear. I think. You mean the… the thing? The eye-thing? The… right! The cut? Anything to be done?”
I snort, but shake my head. “No. No, I don’t think so. I… I just sort of noticed something about the door, and then my eyeball-character-sheet gave me some kind of update. It says my skill has “grown”, whatever that means. I just wanted to check if I could see how. It might be helping me notice stuff that’s… deeper down, maybe? Or like, under a layer? I don’t know if it even does anything.
“Before I forget, though: six. Sixty-ish percent sure there’s something behind that door. We should check this one out, see if we can find another way into that side of the campus.”
“Won’t hear complaints from me,” Jay says, his eyes tracking the opposite doorway almost as closely as I track the back of his head. “Want to do the honors with the chain, since you’re the one with the extendo-hand?”
It’s… hmph. It’s not an extendo-hand, it’s the Glove.
Still, he’s got a point.
I pull the chain, and it unravels easily, the links clasped together by the lock slithering undone and making a ringing sound as they fall from the handles and onto the floor.
I wait, putting my ear to the door and checking…
Nothing. No sound, and not the sort of pregnant silence I briefly felt against the other door. It seems, in theory, clear.
I push the door open, letting Jay shine a light in from behind me as I hold my knife in the other hand.
The rooms beyond stinks of sawdust, heavier than anywhere else we’ve seen. The room directly before us is large, with massive, boarded up windows and wooden doors on their far ends, ready to disgorge through them massive logs to be sawn apart and tossed back through. I see holes in the floor next to what look like some sort of vague controls, old, traditional construction brought a little bit up-to-date with some of the heavier machinery and consoles I can see, ready to assist in the carving. Up above, I can glimpse, through gaps in the 15-foot ceiling, an upper floor, which connects to the slide I saw out in the water. Where we’re standing, and for a good hundred feet ahead, we’re still over solid land, but this is the massive industrial-barn centerplace we saw from outside, perched atop the water on long stilts of wood that hold it up.
Bits of sunlight creep in from the edges of the space, the edges that aren’t quite patched shut or entirely kept flush… but still, the scent of mold and moss is mild. I can smell the lake outside, and feel how the temperature’s dropped from proximity to the water, but it still feels, above all, still. Placid.
But the space is vast, and dark, and I can see so very little by the light of my little phone.
Jay walks up behind me, and without a word, I hand him a-
“Oh hell no. What the fuck is that?”
“It’s… oh. I don’t remember if I told you. I made grenades.”
“Grenades? You mentioned but I thought you meant a pipe bomb!”
“This is… mostly equivalent. Just… you know, meatier.”
“Yes, Ilia, I can tell. I’m not grabbing the explosive hunk of raw meat, please and thank you. I’d just blow myself up. Next time we can just bring a pipe or something. Or a gun. We’re in the middle of the U-S-of-A for fuck’s sake, in deer hunting country, at least one of us should have a gun.”
“We work with what we’ve got, now take the grenade! Just… don’t pull out any of the bits of bone. That’ll detonate it. It’s safe enough to hold in your pocket, though. Emergency last case. This building is the size of a fucking football stadium, and I want to make sure you have something more than a kitchen knife, so shut up and take the grenade!”
I’ve gotten a little loud by the end of the sentence, and almost the moment it ends, I regret that. It echoes strangely in the space, muted yet long-lasting at the same time.
Nothing stirs.
Jay, however, does take the grenade, and gingerly places it in his jacket pocket, opposite his lockpicking kit.
We move forward once, more, into the dark.
It’s an empty warehouse, and I don’t know what I’m looking for, so I let my eyes wander, keep my perception open and my nerves taught and ready for-
Huh.
The floor here is… kinda squishy?
Looking down, I find my foot resting on some kind of bump on the floor. Too small to be a living thing, to soft to be anything like the rest of the space. I shift, trying to see if it’s a fabric, or a dead mouse again, or-
No. No, it’s just… part of the floor. Part of the wood, but squishy.
I…
Hmm.
I crouch down, shining my light on that segment of floor, and look really hard.
I apparently just leveled up a skill, right? So I should be able to see more. Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to feel the soft spot before that change. There’s something here, I know it.
Very, very gently, I take the tip of my knife and poke it.
Softer. Yielding, but not entirely. Almost like…
I press a little harder, and there’s a sound not unlike a very mushy velcro, low and quiet, as part of the floor sort of pulls away from the rest, lifted by the back and edge of my knife.
It’s the exact same in every way… except there’s a groove eaten into the original wood where this new material has grown in. It extends to either direction, like some sort of… not a vein. Not anything meaty, at least not at first glance. If anything, the way it springs from my knife kind of reminds me of cooking with mushrooms, maybe.
My eyes follow the direction of the strange part of the ground, and see that it begins to branch, moving forward and…
Oh.
It’s like an optical illusion. Once you break it, it’s like it was never there.
All around the room, covering it in a never-ending labyrinth, is a material that is almost wood, but not quite. It spirals out and about, reminding me of the tail coming off of that dead mouse, and…
It’s big. A lot bigger than before. And I think I can tell where it’s growing out from.
Very slowly, I signal Jay, show him the vine (he kinda-sorta manages to recognize it, tracking it with his eyes for a bit before they wander off and I help him refocus on it). Together, we follow the trail deeper into the cold and open space, walking slowly towards the water, the industrial-edged leftovers of this place, and the dark from which this strange new thing grows.
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