The Space between Atoms 8

Who isn’t afraid of the dark?  Anyone sensible knows you should be.

Terah stood frozen.  A rabbit caught unawares by a downwind dog.  His own hand clapped on his mouth made him miss Mich, the younger, wiser man.  He waited, ears straining for approaching feet.  Seconds passed.  A minute.  An infinity.  No steps.

He weighed his options.  Terah couldn’t stand here for the rest of his life.  Standing on concrete was uncomfortable enough.  He didn’t dare risk the stairs without a light.  He’d never be able to find the red trail left by Mich.  Reaching out his right hand, he found the wall.  This meant the doorway was just a step back, and to his right.  As silently as his untrained tread allowed, he took that step.  A little grit grind.  Stop.  No reaction from outside.

His pupils adjusting to the absence of light, he was able to make out the slightly less black opening in the wall.  Should he risk the hall?  Where was the intruder?  Knowing that the law cares for outcasts only when it can imprison them, he knew murders among drifters happened.  Unrequited and senseless.  But you wound up just as dead.  Repenting for not reporting Danielle, Terah slipped his pack to the floor and stepped into one shade less black.  Still no footsteps.  He couldn’t help but think of horror movies when everything goes silent.  Baby step.  Baby step.  Mother may I?  Three blind mice.  No!  Thinking childhood nursery rhymes set the horror tone.  Where was Mich?

The silence felt like a confessional after admitting compulsive masturbation.  Judgment seemed worse when the priest said nothing.  He now knew your weakness.  Saw your loneliness and silently excoriated your inability to fight that unstoppable build-up of sperm when your every waking thought was a threat of bursting your somatic prison with just the simple stroke of your own fingers.  The ecstasy of release.  The wasting of seed.  Three blind mice.  The tenebrous charcoal gray wrapped him like God’s own hand.  Not for protection, but to squeeze.  Despite the judgment, he felt himself growing perversely hard.  Terah read how in death men had erections.  Was it about to happen to him?

Trembling, he made his way toward the central hall with its weird pyramid of stairs.  Step.  Stop.  Wait.  Listen.  Step.  Stop.  Wait.  Listen.  He moved through the chilling silence, awaiting a leap from one of the countless doorways before the main room.  As he came upon a door, he’d slowly peer in.  Was someone lurking there?  A silent sigh of relief.  Another step and free to live another minute.  Time had lost its anchor, and all meaning for him.  Terah had no idea how long this was taking.  It felt good to move his legs after being petrified for so long.  See how they run.

By now the central hall felt strangely familiar even as the heavy January clouds made it a mere shade lighter than the cave of a basement below.  Eyes adjusting, he glanced about, knowing that anything—anybody on the opposite side would be unseen behind the stairway.  They’d know he was here.  Too loud with the weight of years.  Hunted by a younger, leaner predator, hungry with the energy requirements of youth.  This crypt of an asylum was closing in on him.  He took a step to the left.  If he only went in one direction, the confusion of symmetry wouldn’t take him.  H’e be able to find his way back.  Another step to the left.  Was that a footstep across the hall?  Slow.  Cautious.  Patient.  Terah continued his path around feeling paced by his unseen pursuer.  Had he rounded one corner or two?  How could he forget?  Down at the end of one of these corridors was the outside door, too far to be seen in this gloom, especially with the two turns.  Three blind mice.

He knew he wasn’t alone.  Praying to a God in which he no longer believed, he fervently hoped he was wrong.  He needed some help.  Ghosts, Mich had said, were real here.  Terah hadn’t believed in them out there—but universes shifted once you stepped through a doorway.  Inside was different from out there.  New rules applied.  You were clothed and respectable out there.  Inside you were naked and vulnerable.  Ghosts preferred inside.  Terah kept moving in his clockwise orbit of the pyramid.  Slowly.  He sensed the presence directly across from him, unseen.  Three blind mice.

Was this the side he’d entered or one past?  He could dash for the door, flee this place and this predator.  The terror of not knowing convinced him.  When he reached the front passage, he’d run.  Was this it?  He tried to count back in his mind.  He needed to see the red blaze to be sure, but without a flashlight he couldn’t distinguish it.  He realized the graffiti was identical on each of the eight sides.  He could make it out only vaguely, but it was the same repeated shapes, no variation.  The feeling of being followed encroached upon him.  His shoulders shuddered.  He had to find the entryway.  The next one.  It had to be the next one.  Was this it?  Three blind mice.

Whipping his head around to see what was right behind him, his eyes grasped nothing.  A nothing he could feel.  The lie that all religions taught reaching its chill tendrils around him, He would die here.  The ghosts were inside.  The next passageway would be the front.  He would run down it as soon as he could reach it.  He bolted, convinced in his uncertainty.  It stayed right behind him.  See how they run.