After gathering a mesh of rotten old roots together and using a lighter from his pocket to ignite a fire, the stranger and I sat in a silence facing the fire without looking at each other. His tall, roughly a year or so older than I and has short black hair and sad, heavy green eyes – reminding me of how I had felt when I first came to this cruel and wicked place. Judging by his wide eyes I imagine he has already seen the fields, but I am not sure how to speak to this new comer for I fear he too is as distrusting and perhaps as violent as Cazz was when the group came across him. I hold my breath, hoping that this stranger who seems to bare a heavier burden than any other soul I had seen here will not go the destructive lengths Cazz had gone to when he had heard the truth behind this nightmare.
I realize that this stranger with such dire intensity in his eyes has not been here more than a week in my counting of time in this place and that as he sits there, frightened and confused of this world he aches to have the ultimate of questions answered, the never ending “Why?”.
“What’s your name?” I ask gently, hoping to portray a friendliness he can relax too. “Rekara.” He answers, his voice almost cracks the strength I have struggled so greatly to build around my heart and I nod, “Its nice to meet you Rekara.”
“What is this place?”
“Yeah…” I sigh as the tension tears at my chest, “This where the free souls are brought to die.”
“What?” he asked, his eyes engulfed with terror and confusion, “Free souls?”
“You don’t remember how you got here?”
“There was this…passage and people…” he mutters as his mind clearly begins to recoil the horror his eyes have witnessed and I opt to interrupt him and bring his mind back to the present, to focus.
“They didn’t have what it takes, they were broken.”
“I don’t understand.”
“None of us do.”
“Us? There are more people here, living here?” he exclaims frantically.
“Rekara this place is a punishment, a hatred on us.” I begin to try explain this ungodly place in the way I was told. “What are you talking about?” he shouts standing up, “What the fuck is this! Why am I here?”
“Like I said, no one really knows how or why we are here. All we can do is try and survive the blackness and pray that we can make it out of here, alive.” I say, trying to calm him and give some kind of ease to the questions that will never go away.
“This cant be real…it must be a dream.” He says, his eyes filling with tears, “I don’t understand.”
“You never will.” I answered softly, looking into the flames, “We can only hope we wake up from this and survive this.”
“How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know for sure, nothing here has essence or significance – no up or down…”
“How long have you been here?” he asks again, his voice breaking to his fear and desperation. “Long enough to know that the blackness never sleeps, it never stops hunting us and tormenting us.” I answer with a sadness that grips at my heart with such furious claws, “And you?”
“I think more than five days by the way I feel without sleep.”“I know how you must feel. The fear, the confusion…” I start to say when he interrupts me.
“What is this place? Why are we here?” he asks again, eager to hear something soothing and rational from me, “Where are the others you have met? What is the blackness? Those things! Those soldiers? I don’t understand any of this…”
“In life we are made to struggle, to doubt and to break to the point of surrender to the ultimate enemy that never stops hunting us and beating on us to bend and break and crumble.” I begin when he interrupts me with tears running down his face.
“What are you talking about?” he says with a numbness I try each day to hide from this world, “It doesn’t answer anything I’ve asked.”
With a heavy breath I shake my head, trying still after all this time to un-cloud my questions and thoughts and fears myself, “All I know is that when a person is completely broken, he begins to be aware of the darkness of life, of existence. This fucking place is trying to swallow our souls before we become stronger and learn how to fight back.”
“What?” he frowns, his face still riddled with fear and doubt and confusion.
“This place, everything in it…it wants to destroy our souls the way everyday shadows couldn’t.”
“Can we fight back?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know.”
For a long moment he remains standing, staring blankly into the fire with eyes so lost and tired and frightened, I wish I could bare the strength to escape us from this place.
“What did you do to be here Cook?” he asked finally breaking the stillness the cavern holds. Sighing, I shift my body down to lay beside the fire with my head on my arms, “I gave up accepting that life was set out in stone.”
He looked away from me, to the flames again, then joined the ground like me before the fire in a silence.
“Do you know why you went into that passage?” I ask cautiously. “I don’t remember going in there, I just was there.” He says softly , but his words rival that of an earthquake breaking along my skin with awe and suspense as the words from the wall back in that ghostly passage begin to rage through my mind and I sit up.
“How far did you get in that passage before the darkness brought you here?”
“I don’t know…I don’t remember anything but just being there in that place and the bodies and the screams…”
“Screams?” I ask trying to recall hearing any myself as I play back the deafening silence that passageway held for me in gloom death. “There were screams, cold and frightening screams somewhere in the darkness…and then the wave came.”
Realizing that surely this young guy, roughly two years my age couldn’t be him.
I lay my head down again trying to set my mind for a rest but the strangest of thoughts and conspiracies tumbled in my mind: Did the wave catch him by mistake and bring him here? What were the screams, another’s fight from the wave that caught him in its force? Could it be him? Does this give relevance to the sudden change in the blackness’s willingness to hunt down mortal souls?
As I lay there with these thoughts running in my head, I see his eyes close as he fades to sleep and as I close my own eyes I try to evade the biggest question of all, “Can this stranger, this guy so innocent and lost with a heart strong enough to encourage survival for five days when the blackness is out with such great vengeance – can he be the one?”
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