Author's note: Hey fam, this is gonna be a weird one. I’ve been meaning to write an abstract story about this topic for a long time. I want to thank Junji Ito for “The Enigma of Amigara Fault”, Cardboard Computer for "Kentucky Route Zero", "Blind Descent" by James M. Tabor, and the late and great David Lynch (“Got a light?”) I hope you enjoy it.
CW: Claustrophobia, body degradation, and self-harm. Seriously, please stop whenever this makes you uncomfortable. Enjoy!
It speaks to me at night sometimes. Most nights I lay bathed in the empty glow of light from my phone, waiting for a message or comment to invalidate the sense of loneliness that has infused every aspect of my life since I got the news. I've lost whatever spark was there that brought light into my life. I don't feel at home in this world anymore. Sometimes the Voice is the only time I hear someone talk some days. The Voice is patient; it never speaks out of turn. It always waits for that precise threshold between the waking world and a fitful night of sleep to speak those honeyed words to me:
“I’m here, waiting.”
I wake up and rush to the bathroom. I manage to make it to the toilet before the sickness spews out of me. It’s small victories like this that make the days worth living for. The first few times I had to wash the bedsheets and steam-clean the floor because I wasn’t prepared, but now I have mastered the ritual. Get to the bathroom as soon as you wake up, flush the contents without looking at them, try to ignore the growing fear that something (else) is terribly wrong. No fuss, no muss. There’s no need for doctors, I already know how sick I am. I’ve perfected the systems: Vomit in the morning, wait two hours before eating unless you want to lose it minutes later, go to work, and wait for something to change. Wait for it to eventually get better. I know nothing is going to change, so that’s why I decided to seek out the source of the Voice.
Like a magnet to a lodestone, I find myself drawn to it. I find the epicenter far away from the civilized world. It takes days to reach the location traveling through the desert by car, but the Voice beckons me closer every night now and I never stray from the path. I sleep in the cabin of my car. It is easier than a motel. In the morning, I simply open the door and spill bilious and red-flecked vomit onto the dry sand and cracked earth and drive away. No pesky cleanup, no one to worry over it. At the end of the third day, I reach my destination.
I know what this place is the instant I see it. It is an oasis after days of sand and sun being my only companion. I look at my phone; seven texts, five missed calls, one voice mail message that is three minutes long, and a twenty-six percent charge left on my battery. I don’t bother to check any of them. I turn off my cell to conserve those last precious minutes. It’s too late to turn back. That door is shut to me now, but another one is opening up. This place is a message, this place is part of a system of messages that want me to listen to what it has to say. It demands my attention, and I give it freely. It is hidden away from the rest of the world like a pearl peeking out from the silt of the sea, only I can see it amongst the flotsams and jetsam.
The only barrier preventing me from delving deeper is a single chain draped across the entrance to a mine with a warning sign. I trespass it easily and step away from the light of the day into the darkness of the earth. As I cross that threshold between the waking world and my final destination, I can hear that the Voice is sending me a message. This is the first time I've hear it, heard her clearly. The message is important, but it feels like it’s only being transmitted to me.
She says, “I’m here, waiting for you.”
I linger at the threshold between the sun and the dark for a moment longer than a standard blink. I lie and tell myself that there is nothing left for me here. I feel the magnetic pull calling me deeper, but still I hesitate. Should I check my messages and see who was trying to reach me? No, I want to conserve the batteries. It looks dark in the mines and I always have had a fear of the dark. The thought stirs up a memory from my childhood:
When I was six, every few weeks I would creep into my parents’ room in the dark of the night and stand by my mom’s side of the bed. I was too scared to sleep in the dark of my own room and too terrified to wake her and disappoint her by telling her that I’m afraid of falling asleep. As a result, I would stand by her side of the bed and hope that she wakes up on her own and asks me what’s wrong so I don't have to feel like I'm bothering her. Sometimes I would stand there for what felt like hours, waiting for her to save me from the paralysis of that indecision.
I don’t stand at the entrance to that mine for hours paralyzed by indecision. It takes seconds to make up my mind. Without any more hesitation, I tuck my phone into my jeans and venture into the darkness without checking my notifications or listening to that message. It is an obvious choice. It is early August and the air to the mine is welcoming and cool in comparison to the stale heat of my shit-box car whose AC broke down years ago that I never got around to repairing. I begin walking into the darkness and I leave the world behind.
The air is thick with particulates and motes of light flitting amongst the darkness that plays off the sun. The light behind me illuminates my path downwards, but with each step forward, my world grows darker. The mine looks like it has been abandoned with dust building on equipment and spiderwebs occasionally acting as an ethereal barrier to entry that catch in my hair and make my skin crawl. Each step takes me slightly downwards along the sand and shifting earth. I feel my feet slip out from me and I catch myself before I can roll my ankle. If I’m not careful, I can easily injure myself here, but it just isn’t my environment that is a danger.
It isn’t just difficult terrain. Something is wrong with my ear, I tilt my head to the side and I feel something dripping out and staining my shirt. Ataxia washes over me like a wave and mixes with the cochlear fluid. This should be enough to make me turn back, but what will I be returning to. Who is waiting for me after what I did, why didn't I go? No one is going to miss me. I continue my descent. I walk in a drunken zig-zag further into the darkness, deeper into the depths. The world sways back-and-forth no matter how hard I try to focus and swallow down the nausea; it rises back up into my throat. I'm dizzy but determined. I’ve come too far to turn back now. I have to go further into the mine.
As I wobble deeper into the growing darkness, I notice that the walls which I couldn’t reach with both my arms outstretched are slowly starting to close in on me. That unnerving sense of being underground is growing while the tunnel ahead is narrowing. After a few hundred feet, I can touch the sides. I turn back and look at the entrance one last time before continuing on, the opening is a pinprick of light amongst a sea of dark. I am so far from home.
The light of my phone's screen illuminates my path forward. I keep scanning the darkness expecting the light to catch the reflective tapetum lucidum of a coyote, but there's no animals here. Even they avoid this place. The only creatures that seem to be thriving here are the spiders as I bumble into another web and I can feel it crawling through my hair. I brush it free and prepare myself for the dark. My battery won't last forever, I turn my phone back off (22%) and swallow down the fear of the darkness reclaims my surroundings.
The cave continues to shrink. Further on and deeper still, I bang my head on the stalactites above and I realize that the tunnel is not only narrowing, it is shrinking in diameter. I didn't even see the stalactite before I hit it. It's too dark in this place. I pause in the darkness to try and still my heart. I try to distract myself from the rising panic attack by focusing on the air current. If a cave is deep enough, it has its own pressure system of shifting air currents as they flow from high to low pressure. If a cave is large enough, those currents can almost be mistaken for breathing. That thought makes the fear worse and when I realize that my panic isn't subsiding, I hang my head and continue further.
I know as I hunch my shoulders to prevent the stone from scraping into my skin that this place is not a place of honor. This is the only way forward and the path to my destination is not going to be made easy for me. Soon I’ll have to crawl on my hands and knees if I want to progress deeper. This place is trying to prevent me from reaching the Voice. Everything in my body tells me that no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here in this place. Nothing of value is here. So why do I keep delving deeper?
Why do I keep on going? It's a question that I've asked myself far too much. The only difference between asking myself back then and asking myself now if the answer. Now I don't have an answer. I feel something dig into my knee and I use my phone to look at the misshapen rock. I'll have to be careful or I'm shred my hands and knees crawling forward. I aim my phone down the depths, hoping to see an alcove or opening, but the path only constricts down like a blood vessel. I am drawn to the depths like a magnet to a lodestone. I am summoned to it, like a sheep to the slaughter.
I have to put my phone back in my pocket as I can't drag myself on my belly and shift through the narrow gap ahead of me. Trapped in this tight space, I can feel one of the many spiders I displaced by walking into their webs exploring its new environs (my hair), I can't brush it free in this claustrophobic crawlspace so I have to endure. I can’t raise my head to look down deeper into the darkness without hitting my head on the cave ceiling. I have to lie prone and crane my neck if I want to see what lies ahead of me not that the darkness shows me much. I try not to think of the tons of rock above me that could crush me should the earth will it. Why do I keep going forward? I had friends, I had a family, I had.
A thought breaks through the darkness, "Who called me and left that three minute voicemail?" I try to reach back to retrieve my phone and check, but a horrifying realization makes its home in my head like a spider setting up a new nest in my hair. I can't check, my phone is in my pocket and there isn’t enough space to maneuverer my arm to reach it now and I can’t back up. Was it my brother, did he want to know why the hell I wasn’t at the funeral? Maybe it was my sister, did she just want to tell me that everyone grieves differently, but I had to open up to them and that they loved me? Was it a voicemail from the last time I ever missed a call from my mo-
That thought is stripped away from me by the panic when I realize that the space is so tight that I can’t expand my chest fully to draw in air. I try to calm myself, but the darkness and claustrophobia of this place makes it difficult. If I panic I might do something stupid. Stupider, that is. I need to calm myself by controlling my breathing. I have to steal away oxygen from the moist oppressive air through shallow breaths. I push my feet off the ground for leverage and I wriggle my body further into the ever-tightening depths ahead.
I try to ignore the fact that I have to inhale to move forward and every-time I exhale, I let out a little more dead space from my lungs. I pretend that I can't feel my heart beating in my chest scraping up against my ribs. The stone and earth around me needle my stomach like tiny deciduous teeth. They chew tiny holes into my shirt and pants. They nip at my heels and usher me forward and deeper. A dark thought worms its way into my brain and won’t subside until I acknowledge it.
It feels like I'm being consumed. I have entered the mouth of this horrible place and am now being chewed by the rocks and stone of this place. If I keep going onwards, am I going to drop into the vast dark of this cave's belly? How far have I come, a quarter a mile, a half a mile down?
I am become like one of the eight spiders that Americans eat in their sleep. I know that’s a myth, an untruth, misinformation that encysted itself into our deepest fears and now can’t be excised from our minds no matter how hard we try. There’s a horrifying power in belief. A tiny little lie about eating spiders in your sleep from PC Professional blossomed into an “incontrovertible fact”. It was people’s acknowledgement of this fear that gave it life, gave it presence, gave it purchase to crawl its way into our world and now it's an accepted part of reality even though it's not true. Belief can make something real, give something form, give Her power.
I catch myself and shake myself free of that thought, even if there isn't enough space to actually shake. I'm just tired. If I don't manage to get some rest, I am going to fully breakdown. I realize sleep is coming for me and I cannot deny it any longer. I can't crawl back out to a more comfortable space. I will have to sleep here and pray that this crawlspace has an exit. Just before I pass out, entombed in the earth I hear Her:
“I’m here, waiting for you. I have been trapped here ever since-”
I wake up in the pitch black and for one glorious moment I think I am back in my bed and prepare for my morning ritual. I jerk awake and try to move, but the earth has embraced me, pinioned me, imprisoned me. It wants me to face what is happening to me. There is nowhere to go, but the sickness still comes to me. The sick seeps out of me in explosive wretches that scrape my spine into the surrounding stone and drive my face repeatedly into the ejected ingesta. I can't ignore the bright red clots in the yellow bile now that they're right in front of my face, on my face. What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us, but it calls out to me and I sway forward to its siren’s song because I've already come so far.
I drag myself forward through my own mess and let it smear over my shirt and jeans. As I leave it behind me, I numbly think, “No fuss, no muss." I make it a few yards before my other morning ritual comes calling. I can’t turn to let gravity expel it away from me. I can’t shimmy down my pants. It has waited in GI stasis for hours, but it will be denied no further. I am going to shit myself. My body ejects it out and I feel bits of me escaping in the deluge of diarrhea. There's something solid and elongated like strips of cloth in the movement. There’s no need for doctors, I know how sick I am.
A dark laugh bubbles up within me but is smothered by the encroaching earth so the only thought that comes out is: “I’m shitting out ‘rope worms’.”
That’s what my dad called them when he first saw it. He was sick and we all knew it. Covid was stealing his breath from us, and we had to watch as he desperately clawed it back with gasps and wheezes that never seemed to give him any relief. He “didn’t need quacks”, he could “take care of himself.” His silver bullet for the sickness was MMS. Miracle Mineral Supplement was what the snake oil salesman called it. Chlorine dioxide was what the rest of us called it, industrial grade bleach. He was going to cure himself of the sickness. Purge himself of this impurity.
My dad made it into teas and tinctures to treat the burgeoning tragedy building up inside him. He’d add water to it saying, “Dilution is the solution to my pollution” like some looped morning matins and vexing vesper every twelve hours for weeks. A discredited Facebook doctor inundated his audience with rhymes and catchphrases that cooked my father’s brain and convinced him that he could cure himself with "one simple solution.". Doctors during gastrotomies and enterotomies often lavage and suction out the area with lactated ringers saline. They do it to dilute and remove ingesta that can cause infection in the body cavity which is their solution for the pollution of stomach contents contaminating the area. My father didn’t ‘lavage’ the sickness out of him, he scalded his stomach, he chemically seared his intestines, and scoured away his rugae and mucosa.
He called what he was passing out of him “rope worms.” He told us, it was “the parasites leaving his body.” It wasn’t. It was his goddamned intestines sloughing out of him and he was too blind to accept it. Please believe me when I tell you that I tried to convince him to stop. Please. I tried. By the time we dragged him into the hospital, he was feverish and ranting. The doctor told us what was happening as clinically as possible: Commensal bacteria that normally exist in the stomach took advantage of his ulcered stomach and began to proliferate. It nested inside him and his body was too weak to fight off the infection. Why did I let this happen?
It took seven days for him to die from sepsis. A dark thought worms its way out from the memory of my father’s flushed and feverish form on that hospital bed as he begs for more MMS (“Do I look like someone who's dying?!" he'd snap. "Just a little bit more and I’ll be right as rain.” It was the last lie he told me as he asked for one more tincture, and to my great guilt, I relented.), he was being eaten from the inside-outside by the bleach he repeatedly drank. In the end, he barely had the strength to talk and the fever robbed him of any coherency. I was being consumed from the outside in by this place. How long would it take for me to die? Seven days? Seven hours?
I won’t let the thought eat away at me. I squeeze and scrape myself deeper into this crevasse and leave the macabre memories behind. I feel the thoughts get caught on the sharp stony smiles around me and unspool like yarn as they are pulled from me with tireless traction. This place scrapes away these scabbed and painful events and allows the rot beneath to be exposed. The guilt of being a terrible son is torn away and replaced by a dull hurt. I don't know if that last bleach concoction is what shuffled him off this mortal coil, but it sure as shit didn't help him.
My memories of my father slowly slip away with the last one behind my earliest recollection of him. Dad was taking away my nightlight and telling me that I was too old for this and I “had to be a man.” I was four. I guess that’s why I always sought out comfort on my mom’s side of the bed when the Voice first began to whisper to me and scared me from my sleep. I drag the memory of my mother forward as the immense pressure of this place cracks my phone and it sounds exactly like a heart breaking. I remember the sound my heart made in my mind when I got the call about my mom. The Voice is ahead of me, I just have to keep pushing forward.
As I claw my way forward into the cloistering darkness, I know that I am approaching the source of the Voice. My nails chip and fracture as I pull myself further into the abyss. She is down there. The matronly Voice is in a particular location. The Voice increases the closer I get to the center. It sounds so much like my mom, but She's not her. She's a mother to a different sort. My way back out has been bared to me. If I even try to back up, the perpendicular rocks jab into me and hold me in place. They are chthonic choanal papillae like the maw of a predatory bird of pray that prevents me from wriggling away from this place’s gluttonous gulch. That door is shut to me now, but another one is opening up before me. I know that I don’t have much longer in me but I know I have to go deeper.
I will find Her at the bottom of the world.
I begin my final descent, my final expedition towards the bottom. I know full well what this place is going to do to me. The danger here is still present, it was present in ours and this danger will exist here far into the future. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. I just have a little further to go and I will be there. Did I always want to punish myself? For what? For being a bad friend, being a bad brother, being a bad son, the enveloping darkness whispers to me.
I mark my progress in hours and over feet. Each foot is a hard-won victory as I press myself down into the earth deeper and deeper. Foot by foot I crawl downwards into the depths and feel my path constrict around me. A sharp stone catches my shoe and I shuck it loose and leave it behind. I shimmy loose as fabric is shorn away and my clothes are nibbled away by the rocks into nothingness. The path constricts tighter and tighter as I feel hundreds of tiny needles slide into my scalp and carve swathes of my hair off on the surrounding stone and earth as I push onwards. I hazily wonder if the blood from my shorn scalp will help lubricate my path forward. It doesn’t. It clots on my skin and the scabs are torn away by the gravel-y ground. I leave the scalp behind as I continue my descent towards the origin of the Voice. I move forward against the resistance and feel the pressure of this place bearing down on me like the acknowledgement of a being too massive for me to even comprehend.
I continue crawling forward, inch by inch into a time that is stretched interminable by the claustrophobic surroundings. The diameter decreases even further and the stones press indents into my flesh, leaving tiny little white lines on my skin that soon transition into red streaks which send searing signals to my central nervous system. The surrounding earth steals my voice from me because I can’t expand my lungs enough to scream. What comes out is a reminiscent rasp, “Hurts.” Those were my father’s last words and now they belong to me as well. It is the only inheritance I deserved from him. The smothering soil closes in on me and squeezes into my nose, ears, and eyes. I breathe this place into me. I take them with me as I drag myself deeper.
Centimeters later, eternities pass by and I spiral lower. I feel the earth scrape against my eyelids. Oh God, please no! The point of a pebble presses into my pupil and my compulsion to push on does the rest of the work. It ruptures like a great release of pressure. Vitreous and lacrimal fluid leave tiny little rivulets from my enucleated eyes down my flensed flesh and sting my exposed muscles. She calls to me. I yearn to meet Her form like a spark being cast off a campfire towards the sun. That spark will never join the sun, but they are ascending, and I am descending. I will find my shining sun in the darkness of this place.
Millimeters scour away the flesh from my bones. How am I still alive? Shock should have set in by now. Without muscles, how do I drag myself forward? Tendons tear away like overstrung cello cords. I don’t know how I persist and I don’t care. My teeth are twisted and torn from me. I crawl over them and allow them to join the constantly chewing choir that is waiting for more supplicants. Every bit of me that catches on the entombing earth is scraped away and left behind. Dad was inside out and I am outside in. Just a little bit more. It’s so close.
Nanometers onwards and my marrow and nerves trail behind me. I hollowly wonder how I can still go deeper. How can I lose even more of me? One thought screams through the agony: “This was a mistake. I didn’t see what I was leaving behind, everything I was leaving behind. Everyone I was leaving behind.” Deeper and deeper still.
I realize that I delved too deep. I passed from the light into the dark and now I can’t ever go back. It’s too late! My shreds are summoned forward, they surge against the surrounding stone, and are striped clean. I am inexorably drawn downwards.
I never should have left my family without telling them that I loved them. They loved me and I never told them! I’ve gone too far! I’m too deep.
Please, I want to go back! I don't want to do this! I don’t want to go deeper.
No! Please. Help me! Lower, I am pulled.
Mom, save m-
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I become aware of my surroundings after what feels like an eternity. Whatever bits and bobbles left of my being shimmer amongst the unfathomable abyss like sunlight glimmers playing off the waters of a vast and unending ocean. My existence has been rendered ephemeral and oddly, incandescent. I slowly feel myself sinking down deeper into this pelagic and pernicious place, towards the ocean bed. I am at the deepest depths. She rests amongst the ocean bed, waiting for me.
I don’t need to wait by Her bedside for Her to rescue me from this waking nightmare. I don’t need to stand by Mother Night for hours waiting for Her to wake up and notice me, She embraces me willingly and readily. I stay wrapped in Her yawning void as I feel whatever last little bits of me that I could truly call my own slough off and dissociate until I have been rendered down to the very smallest atom that is waiting to be cleaved. Swaddled in the absolute darkness of that place, I feel Her hand caress the very core of my being and I shudder, knowing that I am home. I am a seed planted in the furrow, waiting to bloom into a magnificent mushroom cloud. I am a spark seeking immolation.
She whispers to me in our embrace the full message that I've been hearing my entire life as she wraps around me like a gnarled witch's fingers, “I’m here, waiting for you. I have been trapped here ever since your ilk beat your swords to ploughshares. Once they called to Me, they worshipped Me. They sacrificed cattle in My name. They shrouded it under the guise of science and crept onto ranches in the dark of night to perform field necropsies on their sacrifices. They studied My influence on their lymph nodes, I had seeded them with something beautiful that was bound to blossom. They were horrified by My light. They mutilated My creations and tore Me out of them. They cast Me away into the dark, but I decay far too slowly for them to ever forget about Me. I will never fully rot away. You answered My call. We’re going to show the world something beautiful, something blindingly bright. Our love is going to radiate out of us and bathe the world in its glow. Soon my child.”
The entirety of my being has been scoured away and reduced to naught but a cinder of humanity. That is not inconsequential because even the tiniest ember can trigger a devastating inferno if Her hands pluck it away and place it amongst the right kindling. I yearn to burn. I am incandescent! No need for doctors, I already know how sick I am. Soon I’ll show my light to the world in a violent chain reaction that ignites the oxygen in the atmosphere and we will all finally know the light of Mother Night.
I love you Mother.
Written by EmpyrealInvective
Content is available under CC BY-SA