changes
and
it’s
just too
much
to
take
in
and
I
pass
out
.
I wake up and I can’t see anything. It is dark in front of
my eyes, but it’s like the darkness carries a physical weight, making
everything heavier.
I raise my hand in front of my face, but I can’t see it.
I am lying on the ground, but it doesn’t feel hard. It feels
soft, as if I’m lying down on the grass in a park on a summer’s day. It’s
comfortable and warm.
I climb to my feet, a little unsteadily. At least the
spinning sensation that overwhelmed me when I stepped into the circle is gone.
“Hello?” I say quietly. I look down and I can’t see what I’m
standing on. “Hello?” I say again, this time noticing more of an edge of panic
in my voice.
I grope around blindly, looking for…I don’t know. A wall,
maybe. A wall means a door somewhere, and right now, a door sounds like a
useful thing.
What is scaring me the most right now is how comfortable
everything seems. It may be dark, but I’m warm and enveloped in the darkness.
It feels almost like I’ve returned home to the womb.
Well, I think, with the first smile since I’ve woken up, I
worked out a way out of there…
Moving forward carefully with my arms outstretched, it
strikes me that I must look like someone doing a bad Boris Karloff Frankenstein
impersonation. I wonder if I should say “Frie-e-e-nds” while I try to find my
way, and the idea makes me want to giggle.
Some survival instinct deep inside me kicks in, because I
stifle the giggle. Don’t laugh, it
tells me. Laughter leads to laughter.
Laughter to hysteria. Hysteria to madness, and if you go mad here, you’re lost
forever.
“Hello?” I shout this time, and this time, I hear other
voices responding.
“Hello?”
“Hello?”
“Hello?”
Most of them are young, and some of them are panicked. They
feel far away and close at the same time but as more and more answer, I realise
that something else has joined them, and there is something else in the
darkness that is repeating it and calling out, mocking us.
But it’s given me some sense of direction. Some sense of
where the voices are.
And the mocking makes me angry, and I move towards it.
“What do you want?” I shout, and the voices respond to me.
The voices of children first.
“Hello?”
“Who’s there?”
“Hello?”
“Dad?”
“Hello?”
“I’m down here!”
And then the other voices, speaking more as one now.
“we want you don’t you
know that we want you just as you want us”
“What have you done with them?” I shout, anger beginning to
blind me more than the darkness. “What have you done with me?”
“we brought them where
they wanted to be where they wanted to be where they wanted to be”
I am now running towards the voices, with no idea what to do
when I reach them.
“What do you want with them?”
The voices begin to laugh now.
“just to dance”
And now I have them, and they feel so close.
I stop running.
“What are you scared of?” I ask. “Why the secrecy?”
“we are not scared no darren
we are not scared”
“So let me see you.”
“is that a command?” they
ask and then they laugh again.
“Let me see you.” I say, and this time, I try to make clear
to them that a command is exactly what it is. My anger and my fear are lending
me more strength than I realised.
And then the lights come on.
I am in something that appears to be the inside of a dark
cave, with deep crevices in the cracks in the walls…no, roots, that’s what they
are, roots… stretching upwards, but it also seems to be like I’m standing in
the middle of a field on a summer’s day.
Everything feels near and far at the same time, and I can
feel my brain trying to make sense of what I’m looking at.
“it is difficult for
your sort to see us do not push against it easier if you let it be”
I try to stop fighting the illogic in what I’m looking at,
and just accept it. And then I see them more clearly. They are standing around
me.
Hundreds of them.
Thousands maybe.
They stand in crowds around me, both larger than I am and
smaller than I am, and they line up in the crevices in the roots, and now I can
hear the music, which is underneath everything.
Everything.
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