Once Aldous has made up her mind to leave the train at the next stop, it seems to be a long time in coming. They plunge into a tunnel, or so she assumes; but when the train brakes, she understands that the darkness is open and infinite. The platform floats in a pool of black.
But a decision is a decision. Aldous steps out into the glow of an old lamp, before a bench and a sign that just says 12.
There’s a door. As Aldous walks toward it, a moth pings feebly off the globe one more time, and falls.
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Inside are three more doors and a trap leading down. With the rising certainty of dreams, Aldous avails herself of the secret of Ariadne, and takes the ball of yarn from her bag. She was never going to finish that scarf anyway.
Room opens upon room; some are furnished, most bare. Windows hint at a dim moon, though she’s sure she shouldn’t see it in that many directions. The widely-spaced floorboards mewl beneath her weight.
It smells like dust and childhood. Unraveling her way through the labyrinth, Aldous remembers her father paint-stripping, bare-chested, a kerchief on his head.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Aldous steps from a room empty and innocent into one that is not.
The walls are covered in gouges–no, she sees after a moment, hash marks in groups of five. A prison calendar (though the door has no lock). The corners are grimy, the smell strong. Rust runs in dark blobs down to the basin of the old water pump near the wall.
Aldous summons her times tables and tries to count the days: ten thousand? Tens of thousands. What happened here? She picks up a wadded paper from the corner and smooths out a child’s drawing of a cat.
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Aldous begins to hurry, then to jog as she follows the yarn back toward the entrance–not rewinding the ball, just wadding it into her hands. She comes to the room with the chair in the corner and stops.
The yarn is cut.
The games one plays in dreams are never fair. Aldous grasps this knowledge hard, pulse pounding, as she stuffs the yarn back into her bag and turns away from the lie of its origin. She’s still not hungry. Her watch has stopped.
A labyrinth is a device for holding monsters. Aldous sets out to look for its heart.
Friday, November 13, 2009
The rule for solving a maze is this: put your shoulder to a wall and walk. This works less well for a maze with doors in it, but Aldous knows better than to try mapmaking. The rooms here don’t play fair.
The library, for instance, is stalking her. She keeps smelling it behind her, dust and wood acid and the cruel alchemy of glue. She doesn’t trust it, but it must be trying to tell her something.
She enters, finally, and pulls a book down expecting blank pages. Instead it’s full of handwritten names: Cording, Cordovan, Corey, Corinna, Corinne, Corwin, Cosette.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Aldous puts the book back and walks to the next shelf, then pulls down another. Darren Darya Daryl Dashiell–wrong way. Two shelves back. Three. Ban Barathrum. Closer. Aldaea. Alder. Aldi.
Aniridia.
It’s a misplaced word. Aldous is certain her name should be there: Alejandro comes right afterward. Someone’s been messing with the order of things.
She replaces the slim volume. It’s not a name at all, is it? Greek roots: an, without, and then Iris, rainbow, messenger of the gods. But she never claimed to be getting their mail in the first place.
Aniridia leaves the library, determined and bound.
Aniridia walks and pieces things together. This is a house with a train stop out front: however strange either construct might be, she’s sure of that. It’s not a house she’s meant to leave.
What kind of house has doors that only lead in? A prison. An asylum. Really, the same thing.
The frequency of her heart ascends, but Aniridia quells it. Prisons are just one extension of a system of control. Control implies a desire for order, and order, says Newton, implies a system not fully closed.
Aniridia snaps the handle off the pump and starts prying up the floor.
Friday, September 10, 2010
“An archaeologist is like a detective–for history!” Aniridia mutters to herself, the kind of platitude that assembles itself in your memories of childhood when you’re not looking. She wipes her dry brow; she’s tired but not thirsty. The floor is yielding up evidence.
She’s torn out a rough square of boards underlaid with dense stacks of newspaper, its print archaic and blurred with time. Monochrome faces stare up without expression. She’s filthed her hands with ink.
Aniridia is struck by the idea of one way out of this place, and then struck again, with the certainty that it won’t burn.
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Beneath the newspaper bundles there’s another room, cold and dim. Aniridia looks down, realizing for the first time that the light comes from nowhere here. None of the rooms has had the courtesy to provide a lantern.
“It is very dark,” she mutters to herself. “You may be eaten.”
The rough-edged hole she’s torn is not a way out, but it’s a way different. She thinks of her father, diving into deep cold water, holding his breath twice the length of the pool.
As she lowers herself into it, Aniridia leaves fingerprints on its edges. The newsprint looks like ash.
Thursday, January 20, 2011