Call of the Depths

After an especially lengthy lapsation of time digging in those tight corridors, the labourers had finally reached what I expected they would. I spent my time down there with them and watched them, observing with overbearing torchlight and a gathering impatience. The duration of the labour felt incalculable, any amount of days or weeks could have been spent down there without any mnemonic of the when. But finally, the dirt and stone was parted to reveal exactly what that man had prognosticated, a sodden and stygian tunnel created of heavy grey bricks and slabs boasting all sorts of cracks and leaks. With the labourers sent out of dig, beaten and battered by my palpable impatience per my curses and abuses and the unremorseful giving of permission to the overseers’ liberal use of the whip after so long, only silence sat beside me and a few accomplices who’s names I care not to recall. Devoid of the whimpering and the complaints of the foul vapour, not reserved to just the labourers, that erupted from the tunnel once pried open, I myself approached the mephitic avenue hesitantly.

With slow progress I arrived at the caved hole and observed the opening. The damp air and the unilluminated abyss accommodated kindly for all sorts of strange fungi, arrays of moss-riddled surfaces, and coatings of slime, and supplemented by sundry things that crawl. The space was small, but generous; a man of larger statue could surely fit within if but slightly curled. Oscillating my head once inside to grapple with the claustrophobic walls either side of me, I found turning my body would prove difficult with larger overcoats and other trinkets attached. Scanning the alternative, a wide turn was made apparent with liberal use of firelight. The darkness suffocatingly choked the burning vitality of the torch, the flames stifled dim by the cistern’s corrupting atmosphere of a quantity of moisture inordinate for an ostensibly forsaken network of aqueducts.

Gazing into the narrow corridor to the left, the wide turn just beckoned me. So removing my coat and shuffling awkwardly into the opening, my body was pact tightly between the adjacent walls and my arms forced to my sides as my shoulders scraped the boundaries. The large, rounded and weathered stone bricks seemed to reflect and reverberate all manner of senses, the torch in my forward-forced hand having its essence reflected off the horrible coatings of slime and the noises of cascading drips reverberating of the queer chunks of stone. After traversing the wide turn a peculiar deviation in the waterway presented itself, a left way and a right variation. Both boasted the familiar dank environment present for the last thirty metres, but each was characterised by subtle nuances.

The way to the left boasted much heavier dripping, the sounds of water seeming so near credent to the reverberation. Although, peering right I could illuminate only a continuation of the cold stone and yawning darkness that preceded every step and lick of the flame. After a short period of indecisiveness, an icy zephyr pelted me from the right, and I bore the brunt of the gale without my much more insulating overcoats and fabrics. As the wind dimmed by torch before the latter reclaimed its purchase, I was reminded of the brevity of my stay, dictated by the dwindling fuel I had on me.

So, after more justification, I made progress down the right, intrigued as to what caused the brisk winnow in such a tenebrous place, yet my imagination frightened me in equal measure. The aqueduct, as I noticed only due to the lessening of reflected light, became more arid, the ostensibly salty atmosphere purging all kinds of moisture. The dankness in the air receded as I continued through that liminal darkness, applying all senses to navigate the seemingly single-pathed corridor. I was eventually relieved as the way began to widen, my shoulders loosening as the compression ceased. Although, I was furtive still by the fickle torchlight, which provided barely more information than my eyes would render in the dark. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for down there, but I could sense something elude my presence, always crawling away every instance of a corner or turn. But, with enough time and the expenditure of my torchlight, I came to an incredible expanse.

Depositing the final scraps of tuft and kindling into my shoddy candelabrum and igniting it, the magnitude of what preceded me was both confounding and magnificent. A great cavern with smooth, pale walls and a flattened ceiling. The locale was devoid of any of the aspects a cavern like this would regularly feature. It was lacking a familiar sodden nature, the stone creating the boundaries were dry as dirt, and completely smooth. The absence of any geological normality was profound. No stalactites, no sharp juts or extruding fragments of rock, not a single stone littered the floor either. Ostensibly, I was not in a cavern, but a room. The edges, I observed, curved up before creating a perpendicular conjunction, giving the space a rounded feel. My fickle guide did not erase the entirety of the darkness, only equivocating just a few feet in front of my being, the smouldering candlestick only showing a pitiful distance with its petals aglow wilting. So, practically hugging the bizarrely smooth walls, I shuffled around the room, the measurements confusing me as the seemingly cubical space introduced walls and boundaries once inconceivable. I traced the room again, and again, the square nature being hinted at – teased – but never confirmed, my idea of the boundaries growing familiar but always blurring. My hands ran along the walls, the texture was rough as stone intrinsically is, yet the smoothness of the walls was not just appearance. I could press my hands against the wall, running them along the material to feel they would glide, but applying sufficient pressure would grind my hands as if on sandpaper. They were grey in colour, but with a dull exactitude that deflected the torchlight, refusing its radiating colour and denying all impurities on its uniform of sullen grey and aberrant nothingness. My attempts at mathematical intimacy with the space never manifested, and I feared I had to stop circumnavigating the enclosed space and chart the centre of the room, which cloaked itself in the amorphous darkness.

Jousting my blazing instrument inwardly, the darkness retreated, unearthing more of that perfectly cut stone; and most horrifyingly of all: the pit. The pit was something almost splendorous, a mechanically perfect, square shaft that extended downwards much further than the lambency would deliberate. Approximately four feet wide by four feet long, I peered down into the chasm, a shoot so lavishly denying all geological precedent. The conclusion of a structure carved and shaped intellectually over geographical errancy was becoming all too clear, the blooming channel of thought twisting amongst my psyche, searching for recognition and consolidation, but being inanely rebuffed and rejected with confusion, madness, and fear; all in approximate measure.

With truly thinking of the nature of that place, I descended downward into the column of prodigious depth. First leaning over the edge, peering down; then crouching and dangling my legs, letting them drift in the place below; then, in finality, I pushed myself over and into the pit. Each second I spent falling down that verticality was spent lamenting my decision, my mistake. After a second of falling, my legs didn’t hit the ground. After another second, they still didn’t hit the ground. Every singular second spent after that were seconds spent in hours. My brain surged with every thought it could, every question it could. The breathing from my chest accelerated, and unbridled fright followed the realisation that any impact onward was surely to be lethal. But the most frightening facet of the fall was the time it took; hours, it felt like,

falling and
falling and
falling and
falling and
falling

A loud crack, my scream, and the extinguishment of the torch followed all that. The impact shot through the entirety of my body. First breaking the legs, then the cascading shock bolted up my vertebrae and ricocheted through every bone, muscle, and ligament. That ungodly force made my arms and finger jolt and snap and whipped back my head the second I had hit the floor, and made ample space for an echoing, shrill scream that pierced the silence of the cavern and reverberated for a long while so intensely as if I hadn’t stopped at all. As my body fell to the ground, limp and numb, the shock still bounced and reverberated though all the mediums it could; vessels, bones, muscles and organs, shaking and vibrating. My chest landed and the floor battered the little air from my lungs, and as I fell my jaw crashed into the rest of my skull, chattering voluminously with the impact. Then the rest of my being shook and tingled and writhed thereafter, lying in stillness, slumped and washed in pain, if not graced by numbness.
Silence, a loud whimper and a sob followed all that. Tears streamed down my countenance, realising that opening my eyes was the same as having them closed, realising that I could not stand, realising that I wasn’t dead. Perhaps that was my punishment for all my misdeeds. Yet as only my own foolishness? Willed by something maybe. My own curiosity: what was that otherworldly gale in that tenebrous crypt?

As if acknowledging my call, I felt it once more. A cold, icy gale wailed through that cavernous room, its proportions revealed as it fled with its mangled and seemingly inane pathways. The torrent of ethereal force filled every darkly void that area had granted, and hit my flattened being considerably in multiple waves, before fleeting and surging upwards. But the source was now unmistakable, forthright and proceeding me. The origin of my quest was now mere footfalls away, and yet footfalls were not a luxury I had access to anymore. But I had to know; know the nature of the phenomena as much as understanding what cause I had contributed by foolishness to. So, limb by limb I dug my nails into the cold, hard floor and expended what little strength I yet beheld. Voluminous, shrill screeches of a serrated manner bounded across the room as my fingers dragged along the sullen flooring and making little headway. After an awful lapsation of time in that void, I managed to push again a wall and lean upon it, kneeling with my chest flat against it and feeling around with my hands. Despite the unholy night of that crypt, my bloodied nails and ground finger tips turned up peculiar depressions, rivets seething across the stone wall to form a face of a certain elegance. The depressions undoubtedly constituted a larger design, the mode of carving applied skilfully and with certain artistic intention; or perhaps the denotation of was the greater purpose present. Soon, truth would be brought to the latter.

Continuing to feel around in that inane space, still trembling with pain and almost numb with the searing cold gnawing at my skin, I managed a quite firm grapple in a certain channel, unprecedently large in magnitude of width and depth. With incredible difficulty and effort in establishing hearty prehensility in what seemed to be some queer form of handle, I hauled my weight unto an ostensibly upstanding stance with buckled knees and limp legs. After a great bout of effort and strain, I collapsed by being onto the sophisticated engravings, pushing it with my cascading weight. To both my surprise and my expectation, the depressions in the smooth, stone wall revealed itself to be a portal, and the door caved inwards with my collapsing being with a horrible scraping sound. The alien space I had fallen into was cold, much colder than mere seconds ago. The regions of my body still retaining feeling were glacially encapsulated; in not numbed by pain, the piercing cold would have identical efficacy within minutes. My skin began to pale and rime, the cold siphoning all warmth and sapping all heat everywhere, consuming my lifeblood. The floor was still that same smooth stone, mathematically exact in its attempt of perfection, no area could have been different under scrutiny, less so with muted vision and writhing, hating limbs that failed by in that moment; conscious would doubtless soon follow.

But once again, in that unknown time and illogical space, I felt it. The gelid wind, now forthright only metres away. My body was far too cold to have been affected by the gale, moving on its own accord but thankfully towards the source of that divine force. Closer, and closer, and closer. I was now inches away from what drew me down into those inane depths of some antediluvian underworld. That thing, it continued as I neared, the torrent passing through that space and wrapping around me continuously, embracing me, welcoming me. I was at the source, inside of it, but I felt not the cold anymore. It sung to me, whispering its sentiments and thoughts, echoing ideals and opinions of past, present, and future. The wind was truly no phenomena of weather, it was a voice, a mind. It had spoken to me, and it had spoken to me only. It words beautiful, warm. Its thoughts insightful, and promising. In that moment there was no need for The Lord God, only the abundance and grace of the divination before me. Perfect, eternal, pure. This being was paramount, it grasped me and hugged me and warmed me, even when pitiful things like waking awareness failed me. The shameful stupor of unconsciousness halted me not in my worship, nor its love. Perfect, eternal, pure. In that moment in that underworld, I felt warm and delighted. Although everything gradually faded. My body had lost all sensory input; I could see nothing, hear nothing, smell nothing, taste nothing and feel nothing. Truly the only reminder of vitality was my thoughts, completely washed in grace and virtue, although maybe in those moments I was not awake, and was not alive. Yet, to my dismay, it faded with the littlest haste, the essence of boundless holiness slowly fading and seething away from me.

And so I was left there, in silence and nothing, sitting on that icy pavement, dying.