(Found in scrolls on the Plain Of Lies)
You might not understand, being where you are, just how it feels to be sucked in through that gaping maw, so let me break it down for you. I myself have entered it, and once I did I left a changed man. You now find me in canteens and closets, under stairwells, screaming for nobody to hear. They will not know my truth. Perhaps you will.
The first thing you notice when you enter is just how quiet everything feels- compared to the outside world, The Door offers a brief respite of silence. Eventually, though, this becomes grating. You start looking over your shoulder and counting your footsteps. You begin in a long hallway, and you can see the room on the other end, way out past the dark void. The walls are some nameless solid quartz-esque substance.
The room approaches. Upon entering, and as the feverish desert winds outside cease completely, you know that you are in a larger structure than you ever could have envisioned, and that the transition from your world to this has created some psychological effect within you. It is difficult to place or name the exact source of this effect. You only know that your acquisition of it is a direct result of your having chosen to enter The Door of your own accord. Soon, in addition to the silence, you begin second-guessing yourself. Your confidence is drained. Decisions become paramount.
Take the foyers which branch out from the room. They lead to more rooms, more areas which nobody will ever explore. They all lead somewhere, but nobody will ever know all of them. You are a finite being and you are faced with infinite choice. For the first time in your pathetic life, you have some agency in what goes on before you, and this is unsettling and novel, and it intimidates you.
If you take the passage to the left, you will emerge in a Greco-Roman Atrium with a fountain gurgling carefree in the middle and a delightful marimba waltz echoing over the PA system. This is the music of the old time.
In the center is a short flight of concrete stairs with a metallic handrail. These make one sharp turn to the right and then end at a brick wall. If you put your ear closely to this mortar installment, you can discern a faint sound not unlike the splashing of teardrops off stalactites in forgotten chambers of commerce which have eroded and given into lime decay. Stay in this position for at least 5 seconds before returning to the lobby.
The passage on the right contains signs written on papyrus sheath, postcards and pictures of places which don’t exist, and a striking geometric pattern on the carpet. The carpet is smooth and flat, vacuumed regularly by an invisible agent. It is so quiet in this interior of interiors that your breath feels warm as it exits your lips and your every move is one of caution and reservation. The passage goes on for as long as a passage can extend.
In time it rises, gradually slopes up like a hill, flanked on both sides by rows of permanently locked doors, all with identical handles and peepholes. If you turn around you’ll notice that the lobby has vanished and in its place is an impenetrable glass window through which you can witness a small development complex in the years before the Fall. It is nighttime, or otherwise very close to nighttime, and the shining windows of the neighboring apartments and the faraway vista of a sweeping city between two corners sets you into a reverie.
As you see this, a young boy will come along. He will put his hand up to the glass and stare at you for a few seconds, and you will scream at him to let you out, although of course the glass cannot be penetrated. In time he will resume his slow meander, and you will continue yours. This is an inaccessible moment in time for you.
Now will come the shifts in gravity. Do not be alarmed when this sensation begins- it could as easily have started out in the foyer. The hallway will tip and you’ll find yourself first standing on the walls, then on the ceiling, and your feet will break those archaic lighting fixtures into small glass shards, and the spinning of the hallway will continue. You are being held in the palm of a giant as this otherwise heartless architecture becomes alive with motion.
The order of the behavior is difficult to ascertain- while the Door is undoubtedly a living creature, a sentient organism with feelings and cravings, its modus operandi is notoriously cryptic and the answers it provides are seldom useful, let alone practical. For this reason it should be assumed during the process of navigating its infinite sprawl that it does not consider you significant, and that the gravitational flux is a gastrointestinal disorder.
Listen closely and you can even hear furniture being tossed around in the apartments. Photo albums, couches, bureaus, all strewn end upon end as the alignment reverses itself and you topple, head over heels, along the corridor, every impact jarring and every sudden increase in inertia a disturbing precursor of what is still to come.
If you manage to crawl from the long uphill battle you will find yourself in a small, dimly lit room where the lighting is monochromatic and a thin wisp of smoke rises from a candle which glows in the center. A hooded monk sits on a small marble bench adjacent to this modest shrine. No words are to be exchanged. You get down on your knees to watch the candle drip and eat away at itself, its wick gasping for oxygen. It is a welcome respite.
At the rear of this room is an urban mess of pipes and cogwheels, struts and backdrops, and you climb through them limb by limb, all the while hoping that the gravity remains consistent. Your thoughts wander back to the settlement on the mesa. Then as quickly as a hint of the exterior came in, it is gone. You are alone and contorting yourself along brick walls and steel plating and above you are infinite windows leading to absolutely nothing. Is there a sky? It depends entirely on what one would consider a sky.
Yes, here are the residences of nobody, built for spectres, operating on the willpower of the masses. And you are in the middle, in an alley which is mercifully cramped and smells of sweet death and looks vaguely like old human architecture prior to the Brown era though you know no human hands have touched it. It was brought by malevolent imps who play games with your head and compel you to see exactly what they want you to see. As good an explanation as any, isn’t it? The boards continue, much like an artificial bramble in a forest. Traffic cones, stop lights which have been uprooted from the asphalt laying their inner wiring to rot in the sulphur, and the many geometric wooden creations which lay half-submerged in wet cement. And above it all those windows stare down at you like a million infinite cornea.
They all lead out to the infinite void, and they all contain a randomly generated sequence of shutters and panes, all unique in their own way, all lit and all in rows and columns which continue past your line of sight, and it’s then that you come to the sudden realization that if the gravity were to shift where you’re standing right now the struts would do little to prevent your fall. You would be sent hurtling down those bricks into oblivion. After a while of this fall, you would no longer feel as if you were falling. The windows would become repetitive, there would be no bottom to the expanse, and eventually you would die of starvation or thirst. Falling. Can it be termed falling when there is no point of reference to fall from or towards?
Of course, the malevolent imps award you your dignity and after some time the planks let loose and you see an immense wall crafted from satin and velvet, a curtain hung on nothing but which contains a small hole. You feel the fabric and hold it to your nose. It’s been a long time since you felt fabric this soft, this sheek.
You are far into this place, deep into the catacombs, and as you descend further into the maelstrom you become ever more apprehensive, the air turns sour and the rooms, one by one, progressively become more bizarre and unhinged, as if the structure is strategically designed to get worse. In one room you find lights which come from nowhere, projected shadows of hungry things eating babies alive and a deep pocket of amethyst in the wall which extends as a narrow crevice toward eternity. In yet another room a few past that, you discover a strange exhibit of boxes with unidentified mutilated flesh rotting inside them. These boxes have formed a self-contained ecosystem, a biological festering swamp of flora and fauna, mold and fungus, larvae and pupae.
And this continues for a long time- a day, perhaps, or two days, though not more than two days. You are thirsty, hungry, without sleep because no place in here is safe enough to let your guard down and your curiosity drives you forward into this limitless expanse. Like all explorers, you wish to conquer what cannot be conquered. You crave cheap thrills without a full comprehension of what your behavior entails. You are reckless, and bloodthirsty, and far reduced from what you were when you entered.
And sometime on the second day you arrive in a deep chamber with mirrors on both sides, and your reflection stares back at you as it repeats itself off into the darkness. There are many iterations of yourself and their slothers are all ripped to shreds and their eyes have bags and their mouths are sore from the bleeding, and all over their flesh you can see bruises and scrapes from the constant shifts in the structure’s gravity.
You hold your arm out and these doppelgangers all lift theirs in unison, and their hands are withered and dying. You were out in the irradiated wastelands too long. The ochre desert has eroded your flesh and your lips and left you reduced somehow. A generic name brand.
Yes, the sands of that world have taken their toll. They eat at you at all hours of the day, small teeth swirling in a bitter maelstrom. It’s better in here, in a certain way, although there is even less food and no water and nowhere to hide. Your reflections idly mock you and confirm this, as their cataracts gaze forward with a hostile and unmistakable intent. You can’t conceal yourself, can’t outrun it, and you knew exactly what you were asking for when you sought The Door out. You wanted an escape.
Of course you did. The place you came from was inhospitable, you were treated as less than dirt and your sanity was crumbling. If there were an easy exit from such a scenario, a lit green sign at the rear of the theater, and the theater were ablaze, who wouldn’t rush for the nearest outlet to preserve themselves?
You stand there for sometime, listening out into the void. Footsteps. Some kind of footsteps. Some entity prowling around out there, some nameless courier, some messenger of the blessed night skulking in unseen passages. You’re not meant to know who they are, and you never will. All you know is that there’s a mirror behind you and a mirror in front of you, and they all display the truth, fractured as it may be.
You reach out to touch the glass and find that you can pass through it, that at the point of contact your fingers bend and ripple the glass like waves on a small pond. As you step further toward the mirror your hand vanishes and then your eyes are submerged in that prismic liquid, and then you’re standing in an identical chamber with just as many versions of yourself before you and just as many behind.
You soon realize that you can repeat this process ad infinitum and never get anywhere. Every room leads onto the next room, and the next, and the next, and while before every room carried some variety in layout and design it now seems that all these mirror rooms are one and the same. You cross fifty, a hundred, two hundred mirrors before you lose count, and every time as you walk onward into the translucent gel there seem to be as many of yourself ahead as there were behind.
Finally the number of mirrors ahead dwindles and you approach the last few with a remarkable confidence. You’re almost out, it wasn’t so hard. And you see the last mirror and it has only one reflection. One final barrier.
As you step through it the liquid melts and you are hurtling through darkness. You are nowhere and everywhere, can see nothing but windows and furniture as you plummet, picking up speed as your body shoots like a ragdoll and your heart palpitates such that every vein stands on edge, and you struggle to suck the air in because it’s cutting at you like a knife. The gravity you now feel as you complete this, the last leg of your voyage, is a crushing force. It squeezes your bones, destroys your skin, pulls you ever forward like a marionette on a string, and you are under the impression that this structure, whatever it is, is housed in a place far larger than the Earth, as the invisible void is full of distant lights and twinkling cities, all mesmerizing in their own right, all pulled away from you in a split second as you slalom deeper and deeper. For some time you wonder if this will indeed never end, if it will be like this until you go unconscious from asphyxiation.
And then, just as you approach your breaking point, you begin to slow down. As if this were but a passage through an enormous planet, your momentum crawls to a gait as you reach the core and are caught between two opposing forces. A dead halt as you levitate in midair, nothing to stand on or walk on. Only those phantom metropolises miles out.
You take it all in now, the incomprehensible vastness of the facility, the way it stretches beyond your line of vision and keeps going forever beneath you, and you’ll never see all of it. You’ll never experience it all. And to someone who has spent their life up until these past few days going through a standard and soul-sucking routine which offers no reward, this limitless infinity is appealing and tantalizing and sadistic. You want more, but your journey has come to an end and all you can do is hang in the balance as a bright light comes forward from the gulf, making a droning humming noise as it approaches you on a basalt platform.
It is another door, though this one is not made of unassuming wood but of angelic light, a light at the end of the tunnel, a light which bathes you and keeps you warm. You swim in your weightless state toward this final aperture. There is something of finality to it, an aura of destination and not of transition. It is the grand terminal, the exodus. And when your fingers grace its illuminated frame and latch onto its blinding hinges, you feel a rush of warmth and peace, and your hunger is forgotten and your lack of sleep is no longer an issue as you make your way through this last escape.
It’s eight hundred hours and your brain is in someone else’s brain and you’re in the compound. You don’t know where your body is.
The first thing you notice, as the alarm clock rings with a sterile tick and the pneumatic shower hoses you off is that you’re smaller than you were before. Smaller, and paler, and your body, while not contaminated by nuclear waste, now possesses a compromised immune system. Your lungs, which once took in the sand and grit at a gallop, are asthmatic and fed through a tube, and your bones feel brittle.
The sergeant calls you to order and you file into the morning ranks, lines and lines of similar men and women, all with the same hunchbacked stature and sensory impairments. And the room is half as small as your tent, and even the sergeant is a weak, puny thing. If you were in your old body you could push him to one side with so much as a tap. Are these the chosen few, the lucky survivors upon whose shoulders is carried the heritage of the time before the Fall? How underwhelming they are.
At noontime your kitchenette is full of electric sounds from small boxes which squeak waffles and hum with carbohydrates, and nobody at the cafeteria has anything to say. They enter, they consume, they leave. Restless, you make your way through these shiny corridors, observing in full detail the architecture which has lasted since 77.
Somehow, it fails to impress you.
You shuffle through your work on the assembly line. Today, breathing components. Tomorrow, perhaps a filtration system, or a home entertainment console. What sort of entertainment could be derived from this group, you don’t know. You imagine it’s clean and blue. Keep at it, the manager says, holding his clipboard just so.
These Eloi begin to annoy you when one of your peers sticks his head through the door and asks for a particular device. You can just barely make out his dialect- one which is simple and direct, with no flair or color. It is the compound tongue, and it is completely foreign- and his face is small and his hands are small, and everything about him conveys the worst of his breed. A traitor to his fellows and a deserter of the world above.
And he points at the device with those frail digits and you hand it to him, and then you wait in the darkness with your timepiece slowly wavering and the minutes bleeding into hours as outside the footfall of the privileged select continues. You are completely alone and lost, and should not have utilized The Door is such a manner as to gain access. Though your descent has halted, you are still in a sense falling. To what, exactly, you can’t make out.
But they do stare. Over the next day’s report, your colleagues all look at you. They know you are incapable of the workload you’ve been assigned, that you only sit in silence and wait for the end of the monologue. Do they suspect? Are they aware of The Door, of its cosmic influence, its multitude of entrances and exits? Have there been others like you in the past who against all odds survived the gauntlet only to arise in a host?
After some time- a year, perhaps- their eyes begin to glow when the lights are turned out, they stare at you from crevices and from around corners, every unit in this festering swarm is set on your incapacitation. Your extinction.
It has been forty long years and I am a madman in this world of tomorrow, this golden ticket from the wastelands which were once the Earth. I am shunned by all society and they will not allow me back onto the surface, for my frame is ill-equipped to wander the rocky promontories and my anatomy is that of a brittle pencil. My previous body, I assume, still hangs limp in that chasm of unknowable chasms, adjacent to the glowing exit, forever without soul and without mind, and I cannot reinhabit it.
One could say that relatively, it is falling.