Monday 15 April 2013

Magic Falls Part Fifteen


                                changes
                                                and

                                                                                                it’s

just        too
                                much                   
to

take                                     

                                                                                in

                                and
                I
   pass
out
                                                                                .



I wake up and I can’t see anything. It is dark in front of my eyes, but it’s like the darkness carries a physical weight, making everything heavier.

I raise my hand in front of my face, but I can’t see it.

I am lying on the ground, but it doesn’t feel hard. It feels soft, as if I’m lying down on the grass in a park on a summer’s day. It’s comfortable and warm.

I climb to my feet, a little unsteadily. At least the spinning sensation that overwhelmed me when I stepped into the circle is gone.

“Hello?” I say quietly. I look down and I can’t see what I’m standing on. “Hello?” I say again, this time noticing more of an edge of panic in my voice.

I grope around blindly, looking for…I don’t know. A wall, maybe. A wall means a door somewhere, and right now, a door sounds like a useful thing.

What is scaring me the most right now is how comfortable everything seems. It may be dark, but I’m warm and enveloped in the darkness. It feels almost like I’ve returned home to the womb.

Well, I think, with the first smile since I’ve woken up, I worked out a way out of there…

Moving forward carefully with my arms outstretched, it strikes me that I must look like someone doing a bad Boris Karloff Frankenstein impersonation. I wonder if I should say “Frie-e-e-nds” while I try to find my way, and the idea makes me want to giggle.

Some survival instinct deep inside me kicks in, because I stifle the giggle. Don’t laugh, it tells me. Laughter leads to laughter. Laughter to hysteria. Hysteria to madness, and if you go mad here, you’re lost forever.

“Hello?” I shout this time, and this time, I hear other voices responding.

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

“Hello?”

Most of them are young, and some of them are panicked. They feel far away and close at the same time but as more and more answer, I realise that something else has joined them, and there is something else in the darkness that is repeating it and calling out, mocking us.

But it’s given me some sense of direction. Some sense of where the voices are.

And the mocking makes me angry, and I move towards it.

“What do you want?” I shout, and the voices respond to me. The voices of children first.

“Hello?”

“Who’s there?”

“Hello?”

“Dad?”

“Hello?”

“I’m down here!”

And then the other voices, speaking more as one now.

we want you don’t you know that we want you just as you want us”

“What have you done with them?” I shout, anger beginning to blind me more than the darkness. “What have you done with me?”

“we brought them where they wanted to be where they wanted to be where they wanted to be”

I am now running towards the voices, with no idea what to do when I reach them.

“What do you want with them?”

The voices begin to laugh now.

“just to dance”

And now I have them, and they feel so close.

I stop running.

“What are you scared of?” I ask. “Why the secrecy?”

“we are not scared no darren we are not scared”

“So let me see you.”

“is that a command?” they ask and then they laugh again.

“Let me see you.” I say, and this time, I try to make clear to them that a command is exactly what it is. My anger and my fear are lending me more strength than I realised.

And then the lights come on.

I am in something that appears to be the inside of a dark cave, with deep crevices in the cracks in the walls…no, roots, that’s what they are, roots… stretching upwards, but it also seems to be like I’m standing in the middle of a field on a summer’s day.

Everything feels near and far at the same time, and I can feel my brain trying to make sense of what I’m looking at.

“it is difficult for your sort to see us do not push against it easier if you let it be”

I try to stop fighting the illogic in what I’m looking at, and just accept it. And then I see them more clearly. They are standing around me.

Hundreds of them.

Thousands maybe.

They stand in crowds around me, both larger than I am and smaller than I am, and they line up in the crevices in the roots, and now I can hear the music, which is underneath everything.

Everything.

“dance with us”


Continue to Part 16

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