《After Alice》


 One

    She''d suffered from bipolar disorder ever since I could remember. When I first met her, she wasn''t on the proper medication and some days it would feel like she was constantly spiraling out of control and other days I would have a difficult time keeping up with her energy. It was difficult in the beginning; I won''t lie about that. There were times when we were dating that I was sure I wouldn''t be able to give her the support that she needed. I can''t tell you how often I would wipe away her tears during one of her depressive episodes and wonder how many more times I would have to do it before it was over, but as time went on I realized that it would never be over and it wasn''t about me. This was who she was. That was it. She wasn''t broken. She didn''t need fixing. Once her medication was sorted, it did get easier, but it was always hard.


    I wanted to get all of that out of the way so that you can understand that she would sometimes feel as foreign to me as any stranger I would pass on the street, even with meds. She would act funny and be totally withdrawn for days at a time. My wife is- was? My wife is an artist. She would write constantly so that her desk was covered in post-it notes and she would lock herself on the balcony and paint for hours at a time, refusing to eat or drink anything.


    When she would finish something, whatever project she was working on, I would be the first one she would unveil it to. Fantastic. They always evoked something in me that was deeply personal and when I would read what she wrote or look on one of her paintings, I would feel closer to her than I would any time we held each other or made love.


    After her manic inspired frenzy, I would have her back for a few weeks and she wouldn''t feel quite so much like an illusion to me. I would muse that she was like the sea and she would roll her water-green eyes at me, but I meant it. Calm and still. Uproarious and drowning.


    Last year she locked herself in her home office. I let her be the first day, but the second morning I knocked on the door and she cracked the door open to peer out at me from the dark room. She told me she was busy and that I just needed to give her some space. I kissed her on the forehead and left for work. She was still in that room when I came back home and so I went to bed alone again. I knew she was working hard. I could hear music coming from the room and I could hear her singing along. I only heard her leave the room once that night. She ran to the bathroom; I heard a flushing toilet and then the familiar click of the door of her office.


    The next morning, I went to check on her. The music was still playing a Pixies track. I knocked and waited to hear her footsteps cross the floor on the other side of the door but didn''t hear anything. I thought maybe she''d not heard me, so I knocked again. Nothing. Just the music. She''d never done this, and it worried me. Regardless of how locked into a project she was, she always had time to speak to me when I would check on her. I panicked and banged on the door. Still nothing. This forced me to go to the kitchen, grab the key to her office and unlock the door. I swung the door open with images of me finding her dead on the floor flashing before my eyes. My heart was racing as I scanned the dark room. The windowed doors were wide open, leaving the curtains there whipping in the breeze. I moved to the balcony there and searched the ground, hoping to not find her down there. I didn''t. She wasn''t. She was gone.


    Immediately, I called her phone and saw it vibrating on the floor near the closet. Maybe she went to the store? I didn''t know for sure that she was gone. I hoped that she''d gone to the store but when I looked in the driveway, I saw her bright red VW bug sitting there. I sat in her office chair for a bit, shell shocked. I waited a few hours before calling the police.


    She never came back, and the police found nothing indicating that she was kidnapped. Her family didn''t know where she''d gone. It took a long time to accept that she had left us all. And even longer for me to accept that she''d left me. I say that, but honestly, I don''t know that I ever really did. The diary I found assured me that I never would have gotten over it. As soon as I¡¯d come across it, I was immediately flooded with an assortment of emotions ranging from anger to sorrow.


    I''d become a husk. I took a month off work after her disappearance and even after I¡¯d returned, I only ever did the very minimum of work asked from me. I moved the bed we used to share from the bedroom into her office and hung my clothes in the closet. I hung her paintings on the ceiling so that they were the last things I saw before drifting off into a fitful sleep on those empty nights. Each of them was abstract interpretations of everyday normal things made from red and blue sweeping brush strokes. One was a coffee cup and yet so much more. Another was an airliner as seen from the ground and yet I could nearly feel the warm air coming off the engines on either side of its body. When I would squint, I would feel as though the red streaks in the foreground made up one cohesive message against those many shades of blue.


    I eventually set about cleaning up the office and organizing things, but mostly just crying over every scrap of paper I found. I removed everything from her desk and as I went to close a drawer I''d just cleared, I heard something slide from within. I pulled the drawer back out, thinking I must''ve missed something. It seemed empty but as I looked at the corners of the drawer, I could see there was a false bottom. I pried up a thin piece of wood with my fingertips and there was the worn journal.


    I knew my wife had problems with her mental illness. That was what originally came to my mind when confronted with her disappearance. I wondered constantly if that was the reason for her sudden overnight departure and the book seemed to solidify that in a big way. I devoured that journal by phone light and sighed. No, I won''t be transcribing her words here. Those are for me.


    I will say it was full of warnings about monsters hiding in the closet. At first glance, I thought it was probably just another bit of fiction my wife had previously worked on, one I''d never read. It felt like gibberish and so removed from the kinds of storytelling she was known for. But within the pages, I was mentioned. Those were her real thoughts. Her real dysfunctional, fucked up thoughts. I wanted to scream and be mad at her. Some part of me wished to magically have her in front of me so that I could shake her and get a straight answer from her. I wanted to rip the pages from the leather spine of the book and burn the paper. Maybe then they would cease to be real and I could be left to my own comforting thoughts of a thoughtless, deceiving wife.


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    Something within the journal did stick out to me. She kept reiterating how important her paintings were. She kept saying that everyone thought they were just abstract blobs on canvas, but really, they were a map of some sort. This bit did little to jump out at me straight away. It was difficult to push myself to read through the tears. So, this faded away from my mind while I concerned myself with the more painful moments in her journal.


    I sat the book aside and tried to sleep, staring up at those paintings and wondering exactly what she¡¯d meant. Just as it grew harder and harder for me to keep my eyes open, I saw it. I bolted out of the bed, flipping the overhead light on. I tore the paintings from the ceiling and began rearranging them on the floor. When I lined up the edges of the red streaks from one canvas edge to the next, I saw the word "ME". Frantically I began matching up other pieces of art until the message was clear:


    COME FIND ME IN CLOSET


    I don''t know what I was thinking. It was like a dream and I was like a mad man, ripping the closet door open and tearing my clothes off the rack, moving my shoes out from the closet floor. There wasn''t anything there. I don''t know why I thought there would have been. It was an empty closet and I was beginning to feel foolish. I picked a work shirt and began straightening it on a hanger, preparing to put everything back when something caught my eye.


    I don''t know any other way to explain it other than to say that there was a hole in the closet floor. I blinked and it was gone. I moved back and forth. It was there, but you had to be looking at it from just the right angle. I approached the closet carefully and peered into the open hole in the floor. There was an ancient iron ladder leading down into pitch black. No matter how far I pushed my head down into the hole, I could not see the bottom. I stood from my hands and knees and looked back over to the paintings scattered on the floor and felt a stone in the pit of my stomach, knowing what I was going to do next.


    I went down into the hole, taking one ladder rung after the other. I felt a sense of purpose like I''d never felt before as I descended. I was a ship, and this was wind in my sails. She was my ocean and by god I was going to find her. Only now and looking back can I see exactly how easy it was for me to take the surreal nature of this experience with little consideration. There was a magic hole in the floor, and I went.


    It took an indeterminable amount of time before I reached the bottom of the ladder. I''d probably climbed down three football fields before I felt my foot hit what felt like concrete. I looked around and then back up. The bit of light coming from the office above me was now little more than a pinhole. Blackness reached out from all directions, tugging at me, it seemed. I couldn''t see an inch past my own nose. I clicked on the light to my phone and it helped a little more than not at all. I could see the ground. It was, in fact, concrete.


    Even without seeing it, I knew I was in a massive solid chamber. I screamed, "Alice!". My own voice echoed at and through me. The peculiar nature of this was not lost on me, but I knew I had to find her. She was there. Wherever there was. I knew this to be an objective fact of the universe.


    I placed my hand on the wall the ladder was attached to and began walking to the left of it, hoping to find- well I don''t know what I was hoping to find. I felt the direction I was walking bend and curve to the right. Was I in some tunnel? The ground beneath me went at a very subtle decline. I wondered how much further underground I should go before I saw the very bottom of it. Would there ever be an end?


    I walked like that for ten minutes? Twenty? Before I saw a light that wasn''t my own in the distance. It was flickering. It was fire. It was coming from a lantern. I squinted to get a better look at it and stopped in my tracks. It was coming towards me. The lantern light rocked from the atop a staff secured in a wagon that someone was pushing. With each step, the light wavered as the stranger approached me.


    "Alice!" I approached them in a quickened pace.


    I was running through the dark and I didn''t even care.


    I slammed into the wagon and grabbed the side of it with my free hand. The hunched, hooded stranger pushing the wagon made a noise I was totally unfamiliar with. They stopped and grabbed the lantern from the end of the staff, illuminating the contents of the open wagon. Fish? It was a stupid first thought, I know.


    The smell hit me. It was sweet and rot all at the same time. Within the wagon was a mound of flesh, viscera, gore. I staggered away. The man, if that''s what he was, pulled his hood back to rest on his back and what exploded out of him was a shriek that ran my blood cold and took the air straight out of me. I looked upon the face of the humanoid creature not of this world and gasped. Metal hooks protruded from the skin around the corners of his mouth, pulled back with string so that his smile was perpetual, eternal. He had no eyes.


    "Hungry?" He asked, motioning to his selection. His voice whistled from him, nearly piercing my eardrums.


    Backing away, I tripped over something I couldn''t see. I turned my phone light on it and revealed it was a severed arm. I scrambled to my feet, kicking the thing away. Looking down at the ground with what little light I had, I saw the ground wasn''t made of solid concrete anymore, but something else entirely. The ground was cobbled together out of blood, stripped muscle, limbs tied together with repurposed skin.


    I ran. I fucking ran. I felt the ground beneath me breathing.


    The man- thing- whatever the hell it was whistled after me melodically. It sounded like whistling, but I may have been mistaken. It felt like he was communicating in a way I didn''t understand.


    I found a wall and they were made of millions of eyes blinking out of sync, watching me canter over each incongruity of the ground. I ignored them and moved through the massive gore structure, hoping against hope that I was sprinting in the right direction. I wanted nothing more than to close my eyes but kept them open out of fear that I would fall over again.


    I don''t know how I did it, but I found the ladder and moved up it like mad.


    I scrambled into my wife''s home office and slammed the closet door behind me.


    I was unsure of what I had stumbled upon and I didn''t know how long she''d had to live with it. I moved the bed back into the bedroom because I could still hear that whistling noise and every so often, the wet snapping sound of a closing eye. I locked the closet with chains, positive that those thin links would do little if any of that awful stuff decided to press against the hollow wooden door there.

 Two

    I read through her diary again and again, now taking my wife''s words about the monsters she spoke of as a more deliberate and real concept. She''d detailed them living in the closet and I finally knew what she really meant. Alice mentioned in her diary that it was hell, but this conclusion did not seem to satisfy her. It was another world, but not so far removed from our own. It was somewhere in between. It sounds insane, but she said that our world was like a scab over a wound and if someone were brave enough to pick at that scab, they''d find what was underneath. I still don''t know what that means.


    What I did know is that she was down there somewhere, and I was going back. Just thinking of that man''s face and his wagon of gore made me queasy; I kept the overwhelming makeup of the world down there far from my mind to not be enveloped in its grotesque imagery.


    I gathered up an old backpack that I once used for hiking. From back when I used to do stuff like that. I packed four bottles of water, two flashlights with backup batteries, jerky and chips, matches, a pocketknife, and an aluminum baseball bat. I wished I owned a gun, but I didn''t. Besides, my love was down there, within the mechanisms of a nefarious creation.


    Unlocking the closet door in her office, I sat in the floor and stared at the spot where the hole would appear if I looked at it exactly right. I must have looked funny, staring into the solid boards of the floor of the closet for what felt like an hour, shifting in my sitting position every so often and waiting for it to show. I heard the echo of a massive chamber before I saw the hole appear. I heard a wet dripping sound and then I saw the hole. It didn''t open like a mouth. One moment it wasn''t there and then it just was. I shimmied up to the edge of the hole as though I was trying to peer off the edge of a tall building. I wanted to get a good look at the entrance. I wanted to make sure there wasn''t any creature lurking for me.


    There wasn''t. I clicked on my flashlight and shone it into the opening. The blackness swallowed it, but it still felt better than using the light on my phone. After taking a few heaving breaths and steeling my nerves, I hunkered down and began moving down the ladder.


    As I moved, I had to focus my attention on the ladder rungs in front of me. I''ll admit, I was afraid to look at the walls of the hole. I was afraid that if I saw it out of my peripheral, there would be an eye staring back at me or some unknown person''s limb reaching out to flop against me, but I did look at the walls and they were all gray concrete. Nothing to worry about.


    After reaching the bottom, I pivoted quickly, shining my light in all directions, waiting for something to jump out of the dark. Nothing came. I stayed like that longer than I''d like to admit. I was frozen in terror for the things I¡¯d yet to see on this venture.


    The subterranean tunnel was colder than I remembered, and I pulled my pack closer around my shoulders. It made my teeth click and I had to consciously keep my mouth closed. I pointed the light down the direction I''d gone last time, waiting to see that lantern bobbing in the distance. God, I didn''t want to keep going. I wanted to climb back up that ladder, sell the house, and move to somewhere sunny and warm. I couldn¡¯t. I kept Alice in the forefront of my mind and began walking in the direction opposite I''d gone the last time I was there.


    I followed my translucent breath in the darkness, taking small steps to make as little noise as possible. I didn''t want to be found out. Found out by what? I didn¡¯t know. There was a low growl from somewhere in the direction I was moving towards and I stopped dead in my tracks, looking back from where I came to see if my light reached the ladder. It was out of sight and so I turned my attention back to the blackness in front of me, the place where that growl had come from. It was so low that at first, I thought that maybe I''d imagined it and I took another step forward. Then came another growl. That''s when I heard something moving towards me, sluggishly at first but picking up speed as it slid across the ground.


    I pressed myself against the wall and covered my flashlight with my free hand and waited and waited. Then I felt something slipping over my right shoe. I bit my tongue and felt blood in my mouth. I didn''t- I couldn''t scream. The thing was touching me in the darkness, but I was still sure that the creature had not seen me. It didn''t know how close I was. It felt like a serpent of some kind, sliding slowly over my foot and further in the direction from where I''d come. With every edge forward, the slimy thing made that same low growl, as though moving was difficult for it.


    "Eh'', how''d you get here?" someone whispered in my ear. I could feel hot breath down my neck from the lips that spoke the words and my spine was replaced with a steel rod. A whimper escaped me. My back was against the wall; there was no way someone was behind me. It was just my imagination. Or it was just this place playing tricks on me? I waited for the thing moving over my foot to slither further down the massive tunnel. "Mmm, you smell good." came the voice again. The serpent didn''t seem to hear this interloper¡¯s voice.


    When I was sure that the slithering creature was gone, I stepped away from the wall and shone my light against it, scanning the flat surface, half expecting there to be a pair of devilish lips protruding from it. I sighed, relieved that nothing was there. After studying the wall long enough to put my mind at ease, sure, that nothing was going to come out of the wall of the tunnel and grab me, I squinted in the direction where the serpent thing had gone, towards the ladder. I still heard those low growls. I started away from it at a light jog, still trying to make as little noise as possible. The ground beneath me started subtly declining and I was reminded of the first time I''d gone down there. I kept waiting to see that light in the distance, but that hooded figure pushing the cart never appeared and I continued. My eyes glanced beneath my pattering feet every few yards to be sure the floor was still made of floor.


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    It wasn''t long before I came across a staircase off to the left. It led further down. Not for the first time, I wondered who would build something like this?


    "It has always been here and always will be." I felt that whisper down my neck again and spun, almost falling over and down the stairs. No one and nothing were there. I shook the chill that was beginning to settle into my bones, and I grabbed the railing of the staircase and began moving further down. When I shone my light in front of myself, I could see no end to the stairs. I stopped holding onto the handrail when it took on the shape of intestines. I''m no doctor, but I am sure that''s what it was. Slippery, rubbery, full of gas that released through pinpricks of its long wormy body when disturbed.


    At some point the stairs beneath my feet took on another form as well. Each of my own footfalls stopped making those familiar thuds against solid ground and they sounded stickier. Every time I went to pull one of my feet up, it would make a shhhlp sound. I ignored the ground and dared not look there.


    It began to rain. It was blood.


    No one could ignore that thick iron smell. It ran down my body like a viscous chemical, not like water at all. This made the cold unbearable. I pulled the collar of my shirt up around my neck, but it was too late. The stuff was soaking right through me. I looked up to the ceiling and saw no end there, only the droplets of blood that fell from the darkness above. I shuddered.


    I found the end of the staircase and happened a glance at the ground. It was that same unimaginable, indescribable red horror I''d seen last time. I walked some more in an open chamber that echoed with each of my wet footsteps. The cold was getting worse.


    Some figure was up ahead. It was feminine and small in the darkness. Don''t ask me why I ran then, splashing through puddles, because I can''t tell you. "Alice!" I screamed as I went to the figure I could barely see in the darkness. I tripped over something that felt like a hand attempting to grab at my shoe and slammed into the figure. I fell over top of it. I heard a shattering sound like glass. I lost my light in the tumble and scrambled in the darkness to find it. I wrestled it from a set of disfigured fingers protruding from the ground. I searched the ground for the figure but saw only bits of guts and dark crimson limbs. I shone the light around some more and the light fell upon more figures. They were like statues. I approached one. It was normal- I mean to say it wasn''t some monster. It was a frozen woman glowing in red. She was covered in the thick rain that came from above. I was baffled to realize that she was, at least at some point, a real and breathing person.


    The chill in the chamber was cutting bitter. I could feel the blood rain slowing my motions. If I stayed in place too long, I could become like her. Captured in my struggle till the end of time. I studied the woman''s face. It wasn''t Alice. I approached the other dead statues to be sure they weren''t her either. They weren''t. I looked back to the place where I''d shattered that first unlucky soul. I hoped it wasn''t Alice and continued through the massive chamber as the rain became deafening and I could barely see beyond it.


    There was an incessant weeping coming from no direction. It seemed to echo inside of my own skull.


    The rain began to form deeper places on the uneven ground.


    I moved through innumerable faces frozen in blood red terror. They would have been beautiful if they weren''t what they were. The further I marched into the cavern, the more there were. My movements were slowing as I was forced to high step through the muck and avoid falling over unseen debris in the liquid. My skin felt as though it was hardening and I my joints tightened with every desperate, flailing measure I took forward.


    I tried to maneuver through the frozen bodies to little avail. Their fingers were outstretched, and their brittle appendages would snag at my wet clothes and I would have to meticulously shift. But one did and I didn''t notice. The figure fell into the one next to it and I ran, knocking over the dead statues, no longer caring about the ones I was leaving behind. They fell and crumbled behind me. The weeping grew louder. I killed them. Had they still been alive? Impossible. I vaguely hoped not as I clamored around.


    I ran through the crowd as a million souls called out to me in a cacophony of wails and splintering glass bodies.


    There was a door! I could see a door through the red mist of blood rain washing down upon the pool under my feet. It was just ahead. There were still forms clinging to the edges of it. They had come so close. I reached the great big metal door and swung it inward, shattering the outreaching hands of those that had almost escaped. I swung the door closed behind me.


    It was a small room. It wasn''t raining there. It wasn''t cold.


    "You''ve murdered them." That whisper came again and trailed off.


    The weeping followed me. It echoed from everywhere.


    I wrung the blood out of my clothes, but that smell will stick with me forever. I huddled in a corner, attempting to get that chill out of my body, rubbing my arms with my bloodstained hands.


    I studied my drenched body and my left pinky finger caught my attention. It was darker than the others. Like red wine. I tapped it and felt a hollowness in it; it reverberated through me, sending nervous shocks into my brain. Then it shattered into a billion pieces of dust and fell away from my other fingers. I swallowed hard and I wanted to wail out.


    It was hard to eat and drink there. The water I¡¯d brought was murky and the snacks I ate from my bag were stale like old moist crackers.


    After examining the room, I saw there was another door on the opposite side of the one I¡¯d come from. I rested there for some time and decided to take stock of my surroundings and inventory, as well as quell the mashing, pressing presence the place had.

 Three

    I wiped the drying blood from my face with the hem of my t-shirt but let it fall back to my waist in defeat as I realized I was only rubbing the moist fabric futilely into my skin, spreading the coagulating liquid around and doing little to remove it. I was sticky all over. The pack I¡¯d brought with me was somewhat waterproof and I thanked heaven for that.


    The smallish room was made up entirely of dirt and thin wooden beams; it was warmer and more comfortable to be wrapped up in this little place after wading through those immensely cavernous corridors. I could have seen myself falling in the corner and sleeping until there was no more of me. It was not quite exhaustion that had overtaken me but a new feeling entirely. I would have been happy to simply pop out of existence.


    The screams and howls went on and I felt I should lose my mind if I were forced to listen to their ringing melodic quality. I could feel them growing louder so that they became everything around me. They were the air, the walls, eventually me. Each squeal threatened to demolish my senses and send me into a catatonic fit. If before it felt like they were rattling in my skull, it then felt as though my brain may, at any moment, split open like swollen burlap.


    I gripped my baseball bat in both hands, being careful not to rub the spot where my pinky finger had been. I reached out for the handle of the new door.


    "You scared?" hushed the whisper?


    I careened back, again holding the bat with both hands and pivoting all around, looking for the source of the voice. Nowhere. I recoiled, but in the relative safety of the small dirt room I was bolstered, "Fuck you!" I shouted at the open air all around me.


    "She''s dead, you know. She held on so long for you to come and rescue her." The voice hissed. "Eventually," it laughed, "She had no fight left in her. I made sure of that."


    "Liar." The word came out small. It was raining. It wasn''t. It was tears.


    "Humans are so fragile. Her insides were soft and runny"


    I shouldered through the bodiless words and shoved the door open and was met with- daylight. It was immediately stunning. I stepped from the small room I''d been hiding in and into my home. The main hallway opened on either side of me and I saw sunbeams shooting through the windows adjacent me. I peered through one of the windows upon the wall and saw my neighbor on his wooden deck, sitting in one of those rickety plastic chairs while sipping on a frothy silver can.


    I was astounded and allowed the baseball bat to slide limply in my right hand, keeping barely any grip, while I slinked down the hall. I turned and looked back at the small room I''d come from. It was still there, as real as anything else. The bowing wooden pillars and dirt walls stood evidently, but it was in the spot the bathroom should have been.


    I heard whistling birds and that is when it occurred to me that the screams in my head had ceased. The strange nature of the shrill hitches was replaced by the entrancing avian music. The day outside seemed idyllic and gentle and soft and normal. Then I smelled something stronger than the blood on me. It was bacon. The sound of popping, sizzling meat came from the kitchen.


    I crept further down the hallway to the threshold that led into the kitchen and the smell grew stronger and I heard someone shifting along the linoleum floor. I bit my lip and mentally prepared myself. I was shaking.


    There she was. Alice at last. In our home. With her earbuds pressed in, dancing goofily while cooking breakfast. She was wearing her pajama bottoms and her no-show socks and her hair back in a ponytail and this was the realest thing I¡¯d seen in a long long time and besides this is what I¡¯d come there for and always wanted and there she was and there I was and here was our house and and and and


    She jumped at the sound of the metal bat clanging out of my hand and popped her earbuds out. Her expression was one of horror as she looked on me and in that sweet honeysuckle voice, she said "Oh my god. Are you okay? Did you hurt yourself?" She saw the space where my pinky finger had been and recoiled a few times while examining my hand in her own.


    I couldn''t speak; breathing was a conscious effort.


    It was a dream. A terrible nightmare of some kind. I slid against the stud of the threshold I''d been putting my weight against and crumpled to the floor. She hunkered down with me. I openly wept while she held me.


    "Shhh, shh. It''s alright. We can just sit here for a while. That''s okay, okay?" She rubbed my spine. "We''ll do that and then we can get you cleaned up. It''ll be alright."


    I believed it would be.


    I showered and wrapped my hand in light gauze, dazed. She offered me breakfast, but I couldn''t eat. My body was there in the present, but my mind still lingered in that other place, the nature of it crashing down over me in waves, realizing that I had gone mad. How long had I been down in that deep dark rabbit hole? Realities shattered as they were created in my mind.


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    I wrapped myself up in Alice¡¯s velvet presence and found a place for my sanity to hinge.


    We laid together in bed.


    "We can lay here together forever." She said.


    "Yeah''. Forever." I smiled the biggest, dumbest grin.


    I turned to her in bed, as I cradled her face. I could have gotten lost in those water-green eyes for days.


    "Alice?" I was frozen in fear as I said then heard her name. It came out before I could even comprehend what I was seeing. "Your eye."


    Her eyelashes on her right eye grew longer as she blankly stared at me. "Forever." The word fell from her pursed lips on repeat like a skipping needle track. The eyelashes formed legs and pressed against her cheek to pry the eye from the socket. I jumped out of bed, throwing the comforter against the wall. The comforter smacked against the wall wetly and it wasn''t a blanket anymore. It was patchwork skin and hair. I watched as the eye''s legs continued to grow. Its appendages made a bone snapping crack as the eyeball entirely freed itself from her face. Her form lay flat upon the bed, staring one eyed into the ceiling. "For-ever."


    "Can''t expect us to get every detail right, can you?" hushed that bodiless whisper.


    The eyeball skittered across the bed like a newly born calf and threw its body into the dresser. It stood two feet tall on its innumerable legs. It stopped, stood up straight, and shifted to look at me.


    It mostly sounds stupid in retrospect, but the only words I could find to sum up what was happening were, "Oh, what the hell!" and then, "Why?"


    I looked at the eye, then at the door to the bedroom, then back at the eye. The creature mimicked my glances. I shouted and threw my arms out, attempting to look larger. It crouched and looked up at me. Was it scared of me? I thought this for about one second before one of its limbs shot out and stabbed me in the right shoulder.


    It was hot and metallic. It pulled its spindly leg free and stood tall again.


    I could feel the wet warmth running out of my shoulder and I gritted through the pain. I ran out of the bedroom and slammed the door shut, pressing my back against it. I grimaced as my own blood began to pool beneath me. The thing slammed into the door and shook the frame. I held steady. Again and again it bounced off the wood until I was sure the creature would splinter the thing into a million pieces, and me along with it. It went silent on the other side of the door.


    Had it given up? I looked at the droplet of my own blood in the floor and that''s when I saw the thing. Thousands of legs sliding underneath the space at the bottom of the door. I felt one of the limbs scratch against my ankle and I withdrew from the door, watching the thing slide legs first underneath it.


    I waited for it. I knew what to do. I saw the eye begin to edge its way underneath the door. I lifted my foot as high as I could and brought it down so hard, I was afraid I might dislocate my knee. Its innards ran out of its iris and its limbs shot out in all directions, scrambled, then it was limp.


    I didn''t dare go back into the bedroom for the only thing I heard coming from there was the word "Forever." I wondered if that doppelganger would say that- well forever.


    The bat was still lying at the other end of the hallway. A lot of good it had done me so far. I went to retrieve it while nursing my shoulder. It was hard to get a good grip on the thing; the bat hung limply from my hands for a moment before it fell back to the ground. I bent back over to pick it up and slipped in my own blood. It was getting harder and harder to move. My vision was going. I took a knee and tried to prop myself back to my feet with the bat but slumped into a sitting position. Everything was going blurry. I caught the brief glimpse of dust particles settling on a nearby windowsill. The world around me was shrinking into a pinpoint.


    I spasmed a few times, attempting to jump-start my body. I just had to move. I had to get back up. This wasn''t over. Goddammit, this wasn''t how I was going to die! I was falling apart inside. I groaned and moved my head back and forth. I heard the metal clatter of the baseball bat once again as it clanged the ground near me. That was it. I was dying. I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing. In. Out. In. Out.


    ...


    My eyes opened. I was standing in the small room in that hellish place. I had never left. I had never gone through the door. My hand was still stretched out in front of me. I heard that bodiless voice cackle again. This time it was shrill, boisterous almost.


    I was losing my grasp on reality. That place messed with my head. It infected me somehow. I could feel it coursing through my veins; I and that place were no longer opposing entities, but one and the same. Maybe that makes no sense, but it is the absolute best way I can explain it. I wanted to twist into a spiral of oblivion, fall into some dark abyss, and forget all of who I was and what I knew. The vulgarity in which that place touched me cannot be put into words and so I am sorry for that.


    I spun around the small room, touching the dirt walls and the ground to make sure that they were tangible, real. How can I trust that? I couldn¡¯t, but it was better than nothing.


    I reached for the door I''d never opened and twisted its rusty knob. It creaked and dust shook from its frame as it pushed into a dimly lit room. I adjusted the bat, arching it over my shoulder, preparing to swing it at the very next thing I saw.


    Stepping into the new room, I flinched at every imaginary sound and drifting specter. It was much larger; the walls seemed to go up into infinity and meet one another at some unseen point for I saw no ceiling. My footfalls echoed and the ancient door behind me shut gently without me even noticing.


    There were candles everywhere. Millions of them of varying heights. They rested upon a limestone floor. Their flames flickered restlessly at my presence, licking at the open air above them.


    "Hello?" I said timidly into the room. My own voice echoed back at me and I was struck by how meek it sounded.


    The candles lying on the floor were arranged in a way so that their negative space creates a three-foot wide walkway down the center of the grand hall.


    I walked in between those candles forever, trying to keep track of time and losing it around every shadow. The room seemed to never end. Every hour- well to be honest with you, I''m not sure. Time had no meaning. Every so often I would sit in the middle of the path of candles and tend to my aching feet.


    The candles did well enough to light the immediate area around me but sometimes my eyes strayed up and I wondered, how far did that ceiling go? How far under the earth¡¯s surface was I? I resolved into thinking that it must really, truly go on forever. I felt as though someone was watching me, standing among the candles. But every time that I turned to face the voyeur, they were gone, and I was faced with nothing more than the clawing shadows upon the wall that those small flames casted.


    At least it was warm.

 Four

    Was she dead? Was I too late? Those thoughts crawled through my mind like twisting centipedes.


    As time went on, it began to feel as though it truly would go on forever. I was no longer walking down this massive never-ending hallway but falling through it and spiraling through the darkness. Or so it seemed.


    I walked.


    It was days or minutes; I cannot tell you for sure. One thing I know is that a nasty blister formed over the back of my right heel. It made me wince with every terrible step within that inevitable march.


    I''ve said it before, but I really felt my mind slipping all the time. I heard sounds that weren¡¯t there, I saw things that weren''t there, and sometimes I felt emotions run through me that weren¡¯t even my own. I grew angry. At Alice. At myself. At this place.


    The further I went, the more that that cavernous subterranean lair''s scent became unbearable. I idly wondered if there are any sulfur deposits. I checked the stone walls with one of my flashlights and the beam scanned its smooth surface. I can imagine some large powerful hands eroding them so that they were just so.


    In my overwhelming boredom, I attempted to blow out one of the candles along the walkway. I bent down, cupped my hands around my mouth, and pushed air out. Its light was gone. I watched it. It stayed flameless for a few moments and then flickered back to life. Peculiar. Though that''s the least interesting thing I''d seen.


    Just as I was about to lose my nerve and shout into the open hall, it ended. Or in the very least, the light did. There seemed to be an exceptionally fine mathematical line where the candles on either side of me ceased and there was only darkness ahead. Coming from the recesses of the darkness in front of me, I heard a familiar noise. It came sliding, slicking towards me, slowly at first, then picking up speed. It was slithering and growling. It was the creature that I had crossed paths within the initial chamber. I knew it! Focusing my flashlight ahead with my left hand, I reared the baseball bat in my right. I saw this horrendous creature for the first time as the light illuminated its shining surface and could not believe that I had been so cavalier to its presence before. If all cosmic entities were contrived from any one place it surely was from this.


    Its flesh moved aqueously; unlike any living thing I have ever seen. Its eyes lolled and moved to every feasible point with stunning speed. Its mouth was wide and circular and seemed to never close, for it breathed and heaved from some gaseous organs deep within. With each arduous breath it sighed out, came that growl. The thing''s oval head stood upon a neck about two feet long and its six or seven misshapen limbs wriggled all about, never touching the ground. Its bent and awkward body sat upon a lower half most like that of a slug. Its body glistened from some unnamable moisture. The horror slid along the polished floor, leaving a mucus trail, coming towards me. It was an amalgamation of the very worst things.


    I was frozen, watching it come at me with my flashlight focused on it.


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    All its eyes focused on me.


    It growled or breathed as it approached. I dropped the flashlight, backing away and readying my bat. I felt its hot breath. Its mouth seemed to move and try to form something adjacent to words, but the musculature of its jaw could not afford this.


    I swung while closing my eyes and felt the end of the bat meet something like cartilage. A spray of hot liquid showered my face and I spat and squinted through it. The thing had toppled onto its side. I had demolished several of its eyes. It squirmed and thrashed, and I stepped around it to look at its face. It stared up at me. The horror''s eyes were watery. Again, the things mouth seemed to try and form something akin to words. It groaned. I brought the bat down over its head until its face was flush with the ground and its limbs ceased their spastic twitching.


    This gave me some newfound courage in the face of all this adversity. Striking the creature down brought me pleasure in knowing that I was indeed capable of fighting back against whatever force had taken my sweet Alice from me.


    She was alive. She must have been. God if she weren¡¯t, I would set about eliminating every breathing thing in that awful underground labyrinth.


    I wiped my bat against my pant leg, cleaning it, and found my flashlight on the ground. Walking into the dark, I heard more slithering, more groaning and growling. I glanced over my shoulder, expecting that that dead creature had somehow revived itself somewhere near the candle path. It lay there still. Those noises were coming from the darkness in front of me. I walked into it with my light cutting through the unseen. I struck out in the dark several more times, tearing the horrors down in their places with a flash of the light and a thud of the bat. I did not stop until I couldn¡¯t hear anything, save my own heaving breathe.


    Scanning the immediate area around me, the creatures lying there resembled no singular form. I was surprised at myself.


    I looked back over my shoulder at the candle pathway and I could barely see them in the distance. There was no other choice; I sure as hell wasn''t going to turn back. Thinking of walking that long hallway again sent sharp pains down my legs. I pushed on with my trusty bat at the ready.


    Steadily, I heard rushing water and moved warily. There was a river? There was a river. The stone floor beneath my feet almost fell out from under me and I had to point the light down. There was a gentle stream. The sound was so normal. It was something I might have heard on the surface world and this whipped my senses into a frenzy. The water below looked calm.


    I searched around in the darkness and found a post attached to the edge of the stone floor. A rope was tied there. I followed the rope line with my light and saw it was attached to a dinghy in the water.


    "No way." I said.


    That haunting, bodiless voice came back. "You must, you know."


    "Why? So, the water can turn into lava? So that a kraken can swallow me whole?" Something about getting in a boat and putting my fate so entirely in the dark magic of that place did not set well with me.


    "You must save her." It laughed. "You must save her before it''s too late!" The voice said this in mock panic.


    I looked down at the dinghy as it bobbed in the water and bounced against the edge of the floor with a thonk. I sighed because I knew it was right.


    The bodiless voice chuckled again. "I know you will."


    "Oh yeah?"


    "Yes. You will."


    I stepped into the small boat and began rolling the slack of the rope. "I''ll kill you." I pushed against the stone floor and watched as the stream pulled me further away. I gathered the rope and put it in my pack, sitting down. I was grateful for being able to rest properly. "If you don''t give her back to me, I swear I''ll kill you."


    I knew it heard me.

 Five

    I allowed myself to be carried away on the whims of the water and hardly paid attention to where it went or my surroundings. I was lost in thought. Remembering her was getting harder and it had been that way since she''d disappeared. Attempting to construct her as a living, breathing person in my mind was a near impossibility. You can remember people all you want, but it is another thing entirely to try and put them together as they were. It had only been a little over a year since I''d walked in to find her office empty and yet I could hardly piece her laugh. I knew her face and I thought I would have it right and then whenever I would look at a photo of her sometime the following year, I would constantly have thoughts that never lined up. I would imagine her hair looking a way whenever she would wear it back only to have that contradict the photo. I knew her eyes were water-green and vibrantly so but would be caught off guard whenever faced with exactly how stunning they were in a photo. Memories are funny that way, aren''t they? Imagining how someone smelled, keeping their clothing unwashed just so you could keep that scent around and be reminded every day that the smell was fading and eventually you''d be clinging onto something that smells like nothing anymore. I hated that.


    The tunnel the river ran through was wide and the overhanging stalactites had an incandescent quality that meagerly illuminated the river and I could see that the water beneath me was black, daring me to stick a finger in and lose it. I ate some of the snacks and drank some of the water I''d brought with me.


    The dreary light of the tunnel withdrew a melancholy essence from me, and I found it difficult to keep my mind on the present. I am unsure if that is due to some magic quality the place had over me or if I was feeling that way due to my own tired body coupled with my strained psyche.


    Regardless, my mind went.


    When we met the two of us were at a bar. I''d gone with a few of my friends I knew from college under the guise of having a few beers with friends. Really, we were all single and looking to go home with someone else that night. A bunch of awkward fledgling IT grads covered in acne and neck beards on the prowl. Me and all the other guys that I''d gone with were more comfortable huddled around a table-top game than we were with picking up chicks. We stayed in a constant group at one of the high tables near the bar, ogling women, and cracking jokes amongst ourselves more than we were talking to any. I think we were just waiting for one of us to show genuine interest in talking to some potential lover before the rest of us could join in on pressuring the weak link into approaching them.


    That was me.


    There were no ringing bells or harps when I saw Alice. She did look good though, that much I can tell you.


    She was with her boyfriend at the opposite end of the bar and I sipped my beer while thinking how amazing it would be if I had the balls to go and win a girl like that over. What could I possibly do to get the attention of someone like her?


    One of the friends I''d come with, probably the one I was closest with at the time, was named Andrew. He noticed me staring this girl down like a sweating pervert and nudged me. "Be careful, Matthew. He looks pretty big." He said, in reference to the fella standing with his arm around the pretty girl at the other end of the bar.


    He did look big.


    The rest of our table caught on to what Andrew was saying and starting whooping and hollering drunkenly, saying things like, "C''mon man, a wise man once said, all you gotta'' do is go and grab her on the ass." or "Fight him!" Stupid kids say stupid things. Still, even while riding on that little boat down the black river, I found a lingering reminiscent smile.


    At some point, we switched from bottled beer to shots of all sorts that I don''t remember. I continued to watch the pretty girl at the other end of the bar and at points I vaguely remember the boyfriend noticing me noticing her. I tried to avert my eyes, but she held a gravitational pull over them. He seemed to grow angrier and angrier. I knew he was staring through me.


    Finally, the boyfriend left her, probably to relieve himself in the bathroom. That''s when my friends started in again. "Go talk to her. Hurry man!" All smiles. Even I was smiling.


    I pieced the following from the flashes of memory I have from the night and Andrew retelling it to me the next morning.


    I staggered over to her, we spoke briefly, the boyfriend came back. Something I do remember is someone digging into my shoulders with both hands, giving me a jolt of lucidity, and lifting me out of my barstool mid conversation. I spun around, falling over, and taking the bar''s string-light decorations with me in a glorious faceplant. I saw the muscular legs of someone wearing tight jeans and attempted to scramble through them to safety. The legs locked around my waist and I was stuck. I struggled but was unable to free myself. Try as I might, I could not buck the angry boyfriend.


    Then I felt someone''s fist coming down and hitting my bottom. Blearily, I screamed, "Get offa'' my ass!" while still attempting to shimmy through the boyfriend¡¯s legs. It was at this point, Andrew would later tell me, that everyone in the bar grew silent and focused in on the ruckus we were creating, some patrons bawling in laughter and some staff shocked. A flurry of blows came down on my ass and back.


    Don''t ask me how, but I managed to twist sideways and eventually pull myself entirely through the man''s legs. I scrambled around to face him while trying to get to my feet, only to get tied up in the mess of decorative lights I''d gotten myself wrapped up in. I jerked and wriggled around, watching the boyfriend turn while coming after me. Somehow, I''d wrapped the line of lights around his ankle and in my panicked jerking to get away from him, I brought him down like a tree. His head smacked a nearby high table and he was stunned, giving me enough time to untangle myself and run out of the bar with my friends trailing behind, laughing, and cackling under the moonlit sky.


    The next morning, my back was bruised all to hell and when I called to ask Andrew the specifics of that night, the girl came rushing back to mind.


    I returned to pay my tab later in the evening the following day and to apologize for the mess I''d made, totally prepared to pay for whatever damage I''d caused to the bar. There she was, standing behind the bar, wiping down the counter.


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    Without even thinking, I immediately turned around and walked out. I stood on the curb a long time, spying in through the broad window of the bar and pacing back and forth.


    I heard the door of the bar open as I stood at the edge of the sidewalk, staring at the pavement in between my feet. A stranger approached me from behind.


    "Hey! You''re the ass man, aren''t you?"


    I turned to confront the person standing there. It was Alice. I could feel the blood rush into my face as I stammered through my words, trying to explain myself.


    "Woah," she put up her hand and lit a cigarette. "It''s alright. I''m not going to report you to the owners. I''m just out here for my break."


    "I''m really sorry."


    "It''s okay." she said.


    "I didn''t know you worked here."


    "Yeah." she twisted around and walked over to a bench adjacent the entrance of the bar, plopping down.


    "Mind if I sit?"


    She nodded at the seat next to her.


    I sat. "I don''t know what I said last night. I''m really sorry for making an ass out of myself."


    "That''s why we call you the ass man." She laughed and shrugged, focusing on her cigarette. ¡°That and because you took a beating to your ass last night.¡±


    She wasn¡¯t wrong. I had several deep purple bruises I¡¯d examined in the mirror earlier that day. "I promise. I''m not a creep."


    "I know that. You were really nice. I mean, I could barely understand a lot of what you were saying, but what I could pick up on, you seemed nice."


    "Good." I sighed. "At least I''ve got that going for me."


    She smiled at me, reassuringly. "Reggie didn''t hurt you too bad, did he?"


    "No. A little sore. But I''ll be alright." I shifted in my seat and felt a ping run up my lower back.


    "Well you certainly left him looking worse for wear."


    I thought of how he smacked against that table the previous night. "I really didn''t mean to. Is he alright?"


    "Isn''t that funny?"


    "What?"


    "The first thing he said about you was, ''I''ll kill that sonofabitch if I ever see him again.'' and here you are worrying about his boo-boo."


    "Sorry."


    "Stop saying sorry. It gets old quick." She said this curtly but blew out a puff of smoke and laughed at me some more.


    "Sorry?"


    We looked at one another and she cut her eyes in a way that said she knew I was trying to make a joke.


    Then silence fell over us and I watched her smoke her cigarette as the streetlights came on, casting a beautiful glaze across her round face.


    "Well," she said. "I guess you''d better come on in and apologize to the owners. That''s what you''re here for, isn¡¯t it?"


    I nodded and we went in together.


    The owners weren''t incredibly happy with me, but I reimbursed them in full and carried on returning to the establishment just so that I could converse with the pretty girl from the other side of the bar. This blossomed into a wonderful friendship that I would have been happy to have if nothing else. I went on dates with other women while she carried on dating Reggie. This went on for six or seven months.


    Reggie eventually fell out of the picture and I worked up the courage to ask Alice out on a proper date.


    I remember after our first date, we lay together naked in my single room apartment, and she turned to me, pushing strands of hair out of her crimson face. "You really don''t remember what you said to me?"


    I looked at her, puzzled.


    "The night we met. When you got your nickname."


    I rolled my eyes. "No. I really don''t." She¡¯d posed some version of this question many times before, always giggling coyly.


    "You said you''d go to hell and back for me."


    I blushed at this. There was no way around it.


    We slept in a sweaty tangled mess of each other¡¯s limbs.


    It wasn''t until after the initial honeymoon phase that I truly got an up-close look at her demons.


    I was helping her carry groceries to her kitchen after a sucky two hours at the supermarket, sorting the bags on the kitchen counter. She turned to me and said, "Sometimes I want to die."


    She might as well have slapped me across the face. I''d never heard anyone express anything like that in my entire life, let alone be so blunt about it. She shrugged and then went back out to her car to retrieve the rest of the groceries. I stood there for a few seconds, staring at the door she''d walked out of and wondered if she was joking. It wasn''t until later that I would fully experience her wrath.


    We moved in together and that was a mess all on its own. She grew more lethargic and slept most of the day and night away until she was forced to put on her work clothes at the ring of six consecutive alarms.


    She fought me when I mentioned therapy or medication. When the dust would settle, her shoulders would slump, and she would express that she was worried the pills would change who she was. Somehow, she thought the meds would steal a piece of what made her her.


    "They wouldn''t be me!" She cried.


    This always left me at a loss as to what to say. I couldn''t argue whether that was true, and I couldn''t imagine losing myself. Who was I to say she should take them?


    It was the same song and dance for a long time. Her bipolar disorder grew worse. Sometimes she''d stay awake for days at a time, starting some new hobby or artistic project. Sometimes she would lay about for days at a time.


    I like to believe the thing that made her take medication seriously was me having my own mental breakdown, but who knows?


    It got easier. Things felt better. She seemed happy. We got married and mended any damage done. It was wonderful.


    All the sudden I was very aware of my surroundings as I snapped out of my thoughts, looking around the small dinghy and cave-like tunnel. I was still exhausted, but it did seem to help that I could crane back and stretch my legs in the small boat. I watched the stalactites overhead pass by as the river pulled me along and questioned not for the first time their brilliance. Was it magic? Was it some natural chemical formation?


    Up ahead, I saw something in the black water. It took a long time before I realized it was a corpse lying horizontal upon the surface of the water. It- it was drifting towards me. I looked down into the moving water and realized this was an impossibility. The water was still moving me and the boat along in the tunnel. That would mean that the body was drifting against the current. Baffled, I watched the body approach the front of the dinghy and bump against its wooden side. As it passed me by, I saw it was bloated and rotting. The smell was like a mixture of rotting eggs and meat. No. It was the sulfuric smell I''d caught onto early in the voyage. This was where that smell was coming from. I held my wrist up to my nose, attempting to block it out. The corpse wasn¡¯t alone.


    Up ahead, I saw innumerable forms coming my way, some spaced out, some tangled together and rotting and melding so that their soft flesh had formed some cohesive bond. It made me gag. I saw the eyes of the dead, white and gray and sad. They filled the width of the tunnel, some of them missing the dinghy entirely and some bumping against it.


    At a point, it got to be that I was surrounded by them and the dinghy stopped moving altogether. The small boat came ashore upon an island of long dead bodies. Looking further down the tunnel, I saw there was no way I could push the dinghy through them.


    I sighed and grabbed up my bat, pulling my pack over onto my shoulders. Looking down at the bodies squished together, I made sure not to step on any faces and began walking atop them. Each step was misery. It was like walking over wet mud and I had to be sure to step carefully to not lose a shoe in someone''s gut.


    I think I saw a wooden dock up ahead. There was a lantern bobbing from the end of a staff jutting from atop a wagon. Someone was standing next to it.


    You said you''d go to hell and back for me.

 Six

    I walked over the bodies while shining my light ahead. I came to the wooden dock and looked at the man-thing standing there in its cloak. It stood next to its wagon and as I careened myself up and onto the ancient wood, he revealed his face with those horrible hooks protruding through his cheeks, maintaining his forever smile.


    He asked me, "Hungry?" as he motioned to his little wagon of retch worthy gore. Was he pulling the bodies out of the black water and butchering them? Whoever he was distributing these goods to, I haven''t the faintest idea. I could not fathom the sorts of things that could feast upon that. As I looked at his face, I didn''t feel that same surreal horror I had upon first encounter. His face muscles twitched and as I looked into his eyeless sockets, I realized they weren''t menacing, but rather sad.


    I moved to his wagon of goods and pressed my shoe against its side, pushing the thing into the river below with one swift shove. "No!" he screamed painfully. He grabbed at his face. "Why would you do that?"


    I shrugged at him and walked along the dock as the creature-man attempted to fish out his cart that was now wedged between those faceless victims below. I was a man in a dream, moving through the world with no thoughts beyond Alice. There was little more that this place could do to me. It could set me ablaze, tear me asunder, slurp my brain out and replace it with mush. I couldn''t care.


    There were buildings there, structures made of rusted metal or waterlogged wood, starting off with small huts, but as I moved among them, it became something of a proper city; for a brief moment I was struck with the thought that this was where all things ¡®living¡¯ dwelled there. The air was damp and stank of death. There were muscly pylons jutting from poles that dotted the stone walkways. Running between each of the pylons were millions of wet fibrous tissues. It was as though I was standing inside of a neural network. I saw from the dirt caked windows of some of these craggy buildings that there were eyes peering out at me. They glowed yellow and the tenants hissed from within as I passed by.


    "Scary. Isn''t it? I wouldn''t blame you if you turned around." said the disembodied voice that followed me. It no longer made me jump when it decided to make its presence known.


    I ignored it and continued to walk along the stone roadway I found myself on. Up ahead, I noticed that the fibrous tissues overhead slacked in places and lit up areas like streetlights. I clicked off my flashlight. As I continued to move through the city, the damp air grew thicker and felt as though it was literally coating my lungs in some thick substance. My pace quickened.


    "Stop!" shouted the voice in my ears.


    It took on that same echoing quality, rattling inside of my head. I stopped.


    "What?" I asked to the open air in front of me.


    A light opened to my left and I turned to face it. I was standing directly in front of an open alleyway in between two tall broad buildings. The structures on either side were made of bright red stone. The fibrous tissues from above took on a mind of their own and began worming their way through the alleyway, lighting the way in strange, blipping flickers. Hesitantly, I turned to look back the direction I¡¯d been walking, seeing the stone walkway change and move, swell and relax.


    The ground was breathing again.


    I looked back to the alleyway and saw that the tissues snaking their way down the alley were meeting something solid at the other end and curling in on themselves. I sighed and took a few heavy steps down the dimly lit alley, making sure to watch my footing to not step on any of the things lighting my way.


    It felt like the walls on either side of me might swallow me up at any moment but still I pushed on and found the ends of the fibers curling around the edges of the first step of a dilapidated wooden staircase without any handrails. I looked up the stairs and saw they ascended towards the black sky. I took to the stairs, two at a time. It took no time at all before I came upon a door. But it wasn''t just any door. This one was familiar to me. I turned to look back down the stairs. A sickening realization came over me. The stairs seemed to spiral downward forever. I was well above the ancient city and could see its awkward layout from my aerial viewpoint. Immediately I was struck with an intense vertigo. My whole body seemed to tilt, and I was forced down on my hands and knees, clinging to the top few steps.


    There was absolutely no way I''d gone up these stairs; I¡¯d only taken maybe fifteen or twenty steps. It was another trick. I gripped the edges of the steps beneath me with white knuckled hands, digging into the wood with my nails.


    The city was nearly beautiful from way upon high. It had an organic quality to it that no human could ever hope to achieve. The stone walkways looked much less menacing when you could see them bathed in the lights of the fibrous fleshy ropes that ran along the pylons from above. The lights traveled along the ropey things like synapses snapping to life and running along from point to point. I took in the city and attempted to control my breathing.


    After a few moments of deep gasping and wiping away my cold sweat, I was able to steel my nerves and twist around to look at the door. I focused on the knob and the rest of the world fell away. I charged at the door, twisted the doorknob, and swung it inward.


    I stood in my wife''s home office once again. It was nighttime and everything was dark. All her paintings and writings were there. I thought that maybe the place was twisting my mind again, but those articles stood as evidence to suggest that this really was the really real world.


    I turned to look back into the closet and saw that there was still a cosmic city there, staircase, and all.


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    "Go and don''t come back." said the disembodied voice.


    I knew that if I shut the door, showered, and chocked it all up to bad dreams, that that place would disappear forever. I don''t know how I could have known something like that, but I knew it.


    I looked back down at the place where my pinky had been. The absence would always be there. That land may disappear, but it would be an impossibility to forget.


    "I''m coming." I said, pushing back through the doorway, into the cosmic city.


    I slammed the door behind me without glancing back and staggered down those towering stairs in weak and shaky legged motions, sure that I would fall away into the open air with each step.


    I reached the bottom of the stairs and exited the alley, moving onto the stone street as it breathed beneath me. My feet pounded under me relentlessly without my body knowing I was sprinting. I moved through the city, not sure where I was going but knowing that I was getting closer to the epicenter. The air was thick again. The humidity forced the hair on my head to cling to the back of my neck and made the baseball bat slick in my hands, but still I pushed on.


    Before I knew it, the buildings disappeared; instead, there were massive rock formations and open holes in the stone floor that undoubtedly fell away into the center of the earth. I moved towards one of the jagged holes and it swallowed all light that met it. Before peeking my head over the edge, a massive cloud of gaseous liquid sprayed forth from it and I felt the stone beneath my feet move. That would explain the breathing floors, I imagined. Small aquatic creatures with mandibles and spindly limbs skittered underfoot as I moved through the weaving formations of large stone. One creature the size of a dog stopped, looked up at me, let out a screech that seemed to emanate from the two holes in its head where its eyes should have been then scurried away in a centipede fashion, clacking in its pointed exoskeleton.


    I shuddered.


    Up ahead it became apparent that the rocks formed circular formations around some startling blue light that shot from the center of them like a magnificent beacon. I wiped the moisture from my face with my wet shirt and moved on, shifting over the water-smoothed stones until I came upon an arrangement that formed a perfect circle round the blue beacon. I moved around the thing entirely, expecting all the while to find an opening, I could walk through, but there wasn¡¯t one to be found.


    I clamored over the slippery rocks, moving steadily but also losing my feet with every other shift. Without knowing where to put my hand during one of my reaches upward, I slipped and knocked my chin against the rock in front of me. I saw white and heard my aluminum baseball bat ring as it struck the ground beneath me and rolled away into the darkness. Briefly I wondered whether I should go back for it, but ultimately decided against it as my muscles screamed at me to keep going.


    I pulled myself over the top of the rocks and lost my grip, sliding down the other side into a glowing blue ring and scraping up my hands and knees. At the center of this circle of rocks was a pillar of glowing blue light that shot right up into the endless ceiling of the subterranean lair.


    I moved like a caveman approaching the first fire, reaching my hand out to touch the pillar of blue light. My rational side took to the forefront and I jerked my hand away, examining the pillar of light. It- it was water. It was a perfect pillar of calm bright water with no container to speak of. I circled the thing and could feel mist coming off it.


    There was a form in the center of the strange body of water, levitating yards off the ground. It was humanoid. I circumvented the pillar until I could see its face.


    It was her.


    Her hair floated out like symmetrical angel wings on either side of her head. Her skin glowed and I had no other option than to believe that beautiful light came from her. Her eyes were closed. Her body was static in the still water, almost peaceful.


    Without thinking, I pushed my hand into the water.


    She screamed and her eyes shot open and all went dark. I was in pitch black nothing with my hand stuck inside of the water that was rushing around like mad. It splashed my face and felt like a storm.


    I pushed my whole self into the water and swam through empty black open space. My being was carried away in the rush of the current, whipped around and tossed all about. At some point I slipped out of my pack as I was passed around from spot to spot like a rag doll in a washing machine.


    Frantically I reached out with both of my hands, daring to cling at any unknown thing I could. I felt a body slam into me, knocking the air out of my lungs. I forcibly gasped through the water and could feel it filling me. I grabbed the form. It thrashed and fought and clawed against me. I could feel its wild hair whipping around in slow motion.


    I hugged it.


    I hugged her.


    She continued to struggle in my arms, throwing slow fists at me. I could feel our bodies sinking in the water as I could feel my consciousness leave me. It was a slow coming dream. Comfortable. Drowning was sublime, welcoming. We went limp and sank like anchors together in the cold water.


    My brain went black.


    I could feel her go still in my arms.


    Up above, I could see a pinhole of light.


    I kicked. I clamped onto her and god I kicked. I struggled against the jostling, angry water, pushing myself up towards that small hopeful light. I wrapped a single arm around her waist and began clawing at the black water around me with one hand while thrashing my feet. Was this some illusion? Was this the thing I see the moment before I succumb to this watery death? A bright swelling light as my brain is deprived of oxygen. Then my lungs will burst like popping bladders. Is this it? Do I die like this?


    We flew through the light and into the day. I was no longer holding onto Alice. I was on a hardwood floor and my vision was blurry. I hear coughing and as I retch up brackish water onto the floor, I realize that it is me. Every heave is a pinch in the chest as my shallow breaths pain through every inhale. I cough and gag and fall into a pile of my own vomit and water.


    My body collapses and I roll onto my side to see the woman I''d pulled with me out of the water. There she is, on her side, gagging up great big bouts of water. I scooch across the hardwood floor of my wife''s home office and pat her hard on the back, forcing up more water.


    We were alive.


    She was alive. I''d saved her.


    Alice fell onto her side and we held one another.


    She stared at me with those water-green eyes and said, "We can lay here together forever."


    "Yeah''. Forever." I smiled the biggest, dumbest grin.


    Forever