Tales from below Block City: Entry

...and down the spiraling steps he crept, wary of the disappearing noises of life above and the mounting darkness below. soon, only the faint reflection of dank condensation on the moss under his soles offered any indication of where his foot should land next, or if it would land at all. the air hung damp, thick and cold; it almost seemed you had to part a curtain of hovering vapor to advance. Rats scurried around in the darkness, the luminescent glow of red eyes darting here and there in their muted symphony of angst.

an errant step on crumbling stone made his heart jump as he desperately scrambled to brace himself and prevent a headlong tumble into what was now almost sheer blackness below. chest heaving as the fingertips of his left hand violently clawed the step behind and his right hand scraped along the wall to his side, he finally managed to stay his body. the echo of falling shards colliding with the wall far below gave an unmistakable indication of the calamity that he'd just narrowly avoided.

wiping the sweat from his cold brow and curling his frigid toes inside soaked boots, he leaned back against the slimy wall and glanced above at the pinprick dot of pale, filtered light far beyond. what on earth was he doing down here, all alone, following cryptic signs from an unknown source, heading to an unknown place?...........

......as he figured it, the strange saga had started to unfold months ago. Treading tired roads under gray skies those days, his eyes started to play this trick where the buildings morphed into enormous slabs of dirty-rust colored jello that slowly wobbled in an endless, unbroken shuffle. The surreal monotony plagued his deranged soul. Doubting his own sanity, verity bleeding into verisimilitude and back again, he launched himself headfirst at a nearby slab in an attempt to breach the glossy walls, only to stumble away amid the stifled gasps of passersby with a reeling, bloodied head. Still the gooey blocks wobbled away. They mocked him with their cold, removed laughs of knowing disdain; impenetrable fortresses of drab that stretched as far as the eye could see.

And then he'd awake, shake his head and look around. Unable to decipher dream from reality, he'd set off under the gray skies and see the Block City in its usual, solid form. Yet when darkness started to descend, the same vision would revisit him as the buildings would slowly, almost imperceptibly start their wicked metamorphoses....until he woke up again, head pounding and vision blurred.

So it continued for unknown days that bled into weeks and beyond. Afraid to confide such disturbing thoughts in those around him, he conversed, instead, with the ever-vigilant pages of a spiral-bound journal that never left his side. Sheet after sheet filled with detailed accounts of his wanderings; vivid recollections of different locations where the psychosis, or whatever it could be termed, had taken over. He paid such attention to the minutest details, including intricate maps and figures, in his neurotic drive to record these recurring circumstances that his increasingly wartorn journal read more like the laboratory notebook of an assiduous alchemist than the lonely scribblings of a nondescript denizen of Block City. Without fail, the final note in each entry read something to the effect of, "long shadows gather around now, the air grows quiet and people shrink away into a muffled distance. stand at exactly 27 paces SSE from Post 3.2 in the Subsquare J. i feel the warmth within and know they beckon. jesus, it's beautiful. fuck...fuck..." So the siren song played and played.

But then something devastating and auspicious transpired that changed the whole landscape of our troubled gentleman's story. He awoke one morning in his usual state of aching paranoia to find that his one link to reality, his one anchor amid the swelling tempest inside, had abandoned him. The journal had disappeared.

Desperately, he tore through the few spare rags that constituted his possessions in a frantic struggle to reclaim the only thing that could possibly matter to one in his state. But a tornado doesn't build a house and neither does it dislodge one that isn't there. It was gone.
Huddled in a dark corner of his self-imposed asylum, he shivered away the hours. no food, no air. sleep, but no rest. minutes, hours, days. Slow fade...

Then electricity! Clouded, bloodshot retinas focused to razor acuity. extremities tingled and saliva wet parsed lips. with the stealth of a panther he shot from his corner redoubt to crouch amid the strewn clutter. Forgotten lucidity cringed at the deplorable mess scattered about. But that didn't matter right now. that was for later. the pulse came from outside. Relentless and mesmerizing, vibrant and enraging. out the door, down the hall with torn tapestries and cobweb lanterns, around the corner, through the arch and outside.

His journal lay there on the doorstep. With a darting glance he saw that nothing stirred in the gray world; nobody awaited his arrival. The energy pulsated from the little black rectangle at his feet. With delicate touch befitting a cherished photograph or a newborn's skin he closed his fingers around the binding. A familiar warmth greeted him. It was then he noticed that the frayed edges of the cover had the slightest dirty-rust coloration. a coloration he knew well.
perplexed, intrigued, and inexplicably apprehensive, he thumbed open the cover. Two words greeted his gaze: "Your choice".

Scribed in an elegance bordering on calligraphy, the letters appeared the same dirty-rust. But it made no sense. thumbing through the first couple pages, he noticed that most of the pages appeared exactly as his hand had left them, except when one of his maps appeared. On the first map, a dirty-rust arrow pointed upward and slightly to the left, with the inscription, "1.7 m", written next to it. On the next, another arrow appeared pointing almost directly downward, accompanied by "so close, 0.2 m".

After eyeing ten or twelve of these revised maps, he finally came to one that had no arrow. Instead, a tiny, dirty-rust dot lay in the middle of the page. It took another couple arrows and inscriptions before the realization settled in. All those arrows pointed directly towards the same spot in Block City: the spot where the tiny little dot lay on the eleventh or thirteenth map!

.......and so, there he stood, hundreds of feet down a dank, spiraling staircase in the abandoned underbelly of Block City, leaning against an invisible wall of slime that offered a fleeting, but real sense of comfort. But 'fleeting' was the word of the day because an instant later the peril became real as his crumbling steps heaved their last breath and gave way to the yawning abyss below.....