III - Hazel
Hazel
couldn't stop shaking. She stared into
darkness all around her and her eyes strained in vain to pierce it. She could still feel the cold, vapour-filled
air buffeting her face and the lumpy cobbles beneath her feet, but in the
darkness it seemed like she was in another world. The sounds didn't help much either.
They
had begun slowly at first. The darkness
had hit and she had panicked turning on the spot in a desperate attempt to see
something, to gain some sense of direction and find a way to safety. Then, as the situation began to sink in,
panic turned to fear and fear to terror.
She found herself frozen to the spot, unable to move out of fear that
any step she took might make things worse.
She had stood in the cold and the dark and she had listened. She thought perhaps she might hear other
people, that there might be someone who could help her, or that there would be
an audio clue as to which direction would be safe to walk, but there wasn't,
there was only silence.
Silence
breeds a kind of madness. But the
sounds, when they started, were worse.
She
heard them first a few minutes after her hope had given way. At first they sounded like someone
whispering. Hazel tried to convince
herself that it was just the wind, but as the sounds gradually got louder it
became harder and harder to do so. The
fact that the whispered sounds resembled words became indisputable.
If
they were words, they were not in English, nor any other language Hazel had
ever heard before, although she would never have described herself as much of a
linguist. The voice, or voices making
the sounds seemed neither male nor female.
They spoke with a guttural, slurred accent and would put a great deal of
stress on some of the sounds they produced, seemingly at random. They spoke incessantly, without pause for
breath or effect. After a while it
became clear that there was a pattern of rising and falling tones, like a chant
or prayer. And then more voices joined
in one at a time, first humming and groaning, then sighing and crying, and
finally laughing and screaming so loud Hazel wanted to scream herself to make
them shut up. And the original voices,
chanting their endless mantra never stopped.
Hazel
could take no more. She tore at her
hair, pulled at her coat, shook and jumped on the spot and then finally gained
the courage, or more the incentive, to run through the darkness, hoping so
desperately that she might outrun the noises.
Her feet pounded and stumbled over the cobbles. Her shoulders caught on walls and window
ledges. She held her arms out to guide
her path and felt the streets narrowing and curving as she ran, her fingertips
scratching at the granite to begin with, then her palms pushing against it and
soon after that she was forced to run with her arms out in front as the path
became no wider than a corridor and it curved like an insane organic labyrinth.
The
voices were all screaming and groaning now, or so it seemed, although Hazel
could just hear the original chant haunting underneath the other sounds. Tired and afraid of running into any more
walls she pressed onward at a slower pace, feeling her way along the cold
granite walls.
Sticky
granite walls.
Wet,
pulsating granite walls.
The
change was gradual, but no less shocking.
As her hands began to come away from the walls covered in warm fluids
she struggled not to throw up. There
was a smell also; organic, musty with a tang of salt and iron, like blood. She didn't want to keep going, but she
didn't want to stop, or go back. She
felt the cobbles mould into lumpy folds of tissue, a glass window slip into a
sticky membrane and the cold, foggy air became hot and humid
All
around her the screams and groans and chants were joined with the sounds of
rushing fluids, pumping muscles, sloshing valves and the walls pulsated in long
waves, pushing her on, making her feel sick.
She
didn't know for how long she had been crying.
The realisation made her laugh.
Her laughter was pathetic. She
thought she must be mad. She was
crying. Laughing. Crying.
Laughing. Crying. Laughing. Screaming!
The
pain was sudden and intense. It spread
in waves across her body from her abdomen and made her clutch at the flesh
walls with her hands, tearing chunks of tissue away. Staggering from the pain she kept going forwards. The pain only grew but she couldn't stop
herself. The point of no return had been
crossed long ago already and the only way was onwards, upwards, outwards.
She
blinked at first as the noise and the pain subsided and the flickering lights
greeted her. They were blurred. She raised her hands and tried to
focus. Slowly the lines became sharper
and she was staring at the blood and tissues dripping from her fingertips and
smeared across her palms. Behind, in
soft focus, the lights still flickered.
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