Free Fiction: THE GREAT BELOW, Part Ten: The sun came up behind my eyes, and a million burning stars blazed across the sky. The people crowding the platform around me flitted in and out of existence, jerking and jumping like the soldiers you’d see populating old newsreel footage. And all the while, I had the sensation that I was falling, falling, with no hope of ever reaching bottom. I could no longer feel Fogg’s hand around mine; for all I knew, he might have never even been real in the first place. Even my own thoughts and memories felt false and detached, like things I’d read in a book at some point in the past and adopted as pieces of my own life. There was an odd, hollow, roaring sound here—wherever HERE was—filling the air around me, a sound like an endless line of waves crashing on some distant beach; loud enough to make out if I chose to focus on it, but easy to lose track of if I tried to turn my attention elsewhere. I could feel some sort of unseen pressure against my skin, a sensation like being underwater while a current nudged you gently from place to place. I called out for Fogg—and this time I could hear my own voice, coming from miles away—but there was no answer. I couldn’t imagine how long I was meant to be here, or how I would know when to leave, or even how I could leave when the time came. Maybe I was meant to be here forever, in the place Fogg had called the great below; maybe spending eternity here was my new piece of the puzzle, my final contribution to the vast and unfinished reality of the cosmos. I was about to scream out Fogg’s name again when one of the people on the platform suddenly slowed down and stopped in front of me. It was a young woman, probably in her late twenties or early thirties, and she looked more solid and substantial than the rest of the transparent bodies around us. She stood perfectly still in front of me, and her eyes narrowed, and I realized that she could see me somehow. “Hello?” I said. “Are you—” She parted her lips and the sound of radio static filled the air, growing louder and louder as her mouth continued to open wider. I tried to back away, and all at once, a barrage of images filled my thoughts. I saw a man standing alone on an empty highway, and a young girl burying something in the dust, something that moved and wriggled beneath the sand. I had a sudden, fleeting glimpse of a man chained by the ankle to the floor of some empty structure, screaming and screaming, while something I couldn’t make out came rushing towards him. I watched as a young man pulled an intricately carved urn from a hole in the wall of a damp and musty cellar. And I saw a car engulfed in flames, burning in the middle of a desert, and what looked like a glittering silver suitcase, and then— --and then I saw myself. The sound of breaking waves fell away to a whisper, and the rest of the images disappeared. And there I was, a single speck in the swirling eye of space, but somehow, now, I felt myself burning brighter than the stars around me. I saw myself as a part of it all, a necessary piece now in the fabric that held everything together. And when I blinked, I was on the platform again, with the strange woman still watching me. She was staring at me, studying me. She came closer and peered deep into my eyes, and whatever it was she saw within them now, it brought tears to her eyes and a scowl to her face. She opened her mouth again, and her voice came out in bursts of static, formed into words that I could actually understand this time. “I can still feel you,” she whispered. “Even so far away….” And then there was only blackness, and the sound of falling rain. End of Part Ten, copyright 2015 Brad J. Boucher
Posted on: Sun, 18 Jan 2015 22:49:34 +0000
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