The wood cracked.
Cracked, near the knob where the bolt that held the door impregnable would’ve been placed. It loosened its hold on the stone, no longer an overwhelming reinforcement but a wounded guard. With vigour renewed and not fuelled this time by fear nor rage but need I recommenced my pummelling around the handle. With each rasp I felt the wood retreat a little, more beaten slightly each time. Many minutes passed, a furious flurry of indestructible flesh against this unequal adversary. Then in an abrupt snap! the bolt gave way. The door had opened at last!
I fell forward in my suddenly unhindered momentum, landing on all fours on another stone landing. There was light in my new environment, and I could see nothing but shadows as my eyes, jolted from the lack of blanketing black, took time to adjust. Once my vision had returned – a grateful, joyous and impossibly enlivening! – I could view this new scene. The room was small, square, and with walls of stone; a single torch, mounted on an oily bracket the wall opposite of me, illuminating a bare room smaller than my height if I were to try and lay down. There were no other doors, no other entrances or exits save the one I had broke. This disconcerted me, and I looked to the heavens for some explanation. There, I beheld, was a door – a trap door. Opened from the floor above and more of a glassless window than a entrance. Twelve feet and out of my reach it was, impossible to get to.
Maniacal thought played with me, a dawning realization that jeered all my effort put forth.
I had heard of this notorious room. It was well known. It was used only for the damnest of prisoners. And this landing…
This landing was not its end, but its beginning.
My mind reeled, whirled, horribly accurate, unavoidably unrestrained. Fate was cheating, sneering at me, insisting its plan thwart my will, revealing the horrid err I had made. I here stood in a prison, a cell where the inmates were to be forced through the door above and descend, perhaps forever, the stairs. The torch lit to see the door… the door that was to be unbolted from the inside, the treacherous descent beyond a final, tantalizingly empty hope. A hope meant to toss out one’s senses into the black madness, the insanity of blindness, the heartlessness of nothing beyond…
Yes, I know the plot, Fate’s evil, twisted promise of Death, its most intimate and treasured companion. Yes, I knew, indeed, I knew this room. A familiarization came to me now, a vague but almost corporeal vision, intercepting my emotions and cutting through them with now-unhindered memories flashing through my being and becoming clearer now, ever clearer…
Slowly, without conscious meaning, I revolved around the room, turning a gradual circle, taking in the details… I had been here before. I know not how long ago now. Yes, indeed, I had been here. I had dropped, painfully, still in my night clothes and bare feet from the trap door above, thrust in by rough, merciless hands. And ere the gap of forgetfullness was closing, the journey between my lavish, comfortable sleep in my own familiar quarters to this wretched hell… it came to me as embers spark renewed into a monstrous flame…
Murder, they had said, mercilessly, the formless voices harshly crying in my ears. I knew not what they accused, my mind was groggy with slumber, and I did not comprehend that their proclamations were directed at me. Murder! they screeched again, and I opened my eyes. It was dark outside the windows and in the my quarters and there were bodies around my bed. I lay beneath thick covers in a feather mattress and those blankets were torn from my protection, stripped away in anger, in hatred, though I knew not why… They – the men, the policemen – grabbed me, shackled me like a wretched scoundrel, and, once secured, half-dragged and half-carried me out of my own house. A prisoner. No explanation was offered, there seemed to be nothing to pronounce, by their sure, poignant strides and brisk features. Six men surrounded me, two gripping my upper arms, two leading and two following. They took me away. They glanced at nothing but ahead, blinking hardly at all as we progressed through the streets and into a side alley. There, one of the two ahead of me turned and in a hoarse, grim voice stated more than asked, “Do you deny you have murdered your wife?”
I looked into cold eyes as he glared back into mine. His words echoed inside my skull, reflecting off its internal walls, distorting the sentence into minute, marrow-chilling phrases…
Deny … Murder … Your wife…Do you deny … Your wife … Murder…
What did they mean? What dare they speak about? My wife? Darlene? She had gone out this night, to meet with some colleagues. Yes, she was perhaps due to be home by this hour, but she couldn’t possibly be… She was merely late, likely now on her way home… What were these men saying to me this night so late?
Despite these thoughts I could not speak. My throat was dammed, and I began to tremble. What did they mean? What sick perversion were they meddling in, what cross humour could possibly arrange such lies?
The policeman moved to the side, unobstructing my view. A lantern flickered behind him. On the ground, with arms sprangled unceremoniously over her head, reposed my wife, my dear betrothed, my precious Darlene, my love… A smile lined her throat, a horrible sneer that was purplish-crimson; out of it trailed a scarlet path that pooled to the side. Her eyes, once beautifully alight with cloudless skies, remained open, dark, empty.
O, the slanderous pain! O the tumultuous fright! I fell to my knees, was immediately caught by my escort, and dared not hold back my tears, my agony. No! This could not be! Hell and Heaven unite to propose such terrible love depart! I could not bear this sight! But lo! I could not dispel this coat of black paint imprinted on my soul. Paralysis stole my muscles, utter grief spoiled my very breath. My mind was rusted brown; rotted was my heart! Could I defend myself, speak forth against this atrocity? Nay, my tears bore out of dams that merely leaked the flooding turmoil within. My will was knotted and snapped; I dare not resist my captors and their wary assumptions, so stirred into my cantankerous internal well was I!
And so, dreary of tragedy, my escort lead me into their dungeons. Blurred streams of city streets, deep and dark, passed me as I was dragged to their lair. They believed me false, conceived and convinced that my strife was an act; an unauthentic ruse, a ploy – O how heartlessly blind men came to be in the tear-filled eyes of myself! They held no remorse for my pain, nor did they hesitate in my punishment. I knew not how the evidence voicing this ignoble deed, this foul treason, implicated me. But did I, could I speak forth? I say with hollow pride and stout pity, Nay – I did not – I could not! Such instinct, such intuitiveness fades when one such as I is immersed as I was in his own grief. My surroundings, my senses, faded into oblivion; they were trivial and insufficient in the red barren land where my soul had been dispersed. And so they threw me down, through the square hole, the trap door. For seconds, minutes or hours I stooped and did not rouse but merely cried out my madness and my innocence to the bare walls. Then, in immeasurable, unbearable return of instinct, I sought escape: I proceeded to descend through the door and into the darkness. I walked with demons, shapeless and vile, down, down, down, in a loose, seemingly nonexistent spiral. Down, with the demons, not seen, not heard, but felt. Felt by my heart… In time unaccounted, I had reached the smoothness, flatness of a platform, a landing – the bottom of the stairs.
Blinded, half-delusional, fragile, I attempted to further my journey. But I was weak, yes, fatigued, famished, overstrained. I do not recall falling down, collapsing like lead weight, nor do I remember thinking of falling down. I had merely blinked, the darkness beneath the lids a little lighter than the darkness without. I thought longingly, hopelessly, of my dearest wife Darlene, almost – but not aware of – wishing to join her, to be enveloped, reprieved, delivered by the substance of darkness, by the stone, the place that kept all secrets…
I then awoke, in this damnable state of blindness. I had walked, I know now, the wrong way; went up instead of down, withheld this madness in vain, vaporous hope! I had gone backwards, away from salvation, back to the beginning of my terrors…
I could not comprehend this, much as I could not be fully aware of my fleeting wish for death. Perhaps my sanity, in a desperate attempt of salvaging my mind, had banished my memories of how I came to be here, had ripped up my thoughts and threw them astray, into the darkness. It wasn’t the stone that held the secrets of eternity, not the cold stairs that hundreds had tread before me – no, not the stone, but the dark… The dark withheld the memories, the pain, the screams and cries and sights of its prisoners. Like a beastly draconian creature, a devil, hoarding its treasure, sniffing for its next feast, always clawing, always patient…
I was to be part of its need. I was to join the criminals and scoundrels and traitors before me.
Join… to come together, to be as one, O how I wish now that such was possible, to join my dearest love…
And so it was:
A hope –
A true hope, a real hope, not false nor sneaked nor blemished –
I, to join my love!
I then turned to the gaping maw of black that had before been my entry into this room and which was now to be my egress. With sure steps, not weak, but stable, I walked to the edge. Breath had fled me, as a sailor would a sinking ship. No matter… I was ready, I was hopeful… What I was about to do, at last, felt enticingly right.
I jumped, off to the side, away from the stairs… away into the darkness, so hallowed and welcoming…
Into the arms of the Keeper of Secrets I fell.
The Compendium 