Chapter 58: Cinder Alley

We arrived at the final door. It capped off the end of the hallway we’d been exploring. Past a series of mostly empty storerooms. Past a series of Third Eye puzzles and children’s game traps. I didn’t see any more puzzles on it, just a sign overhead in the runic script. I didn’t expect any more traps, either.

The door was like the one from the tunnel. Metal, with a push bar to open it. I wondered if it would have the same handle on the other side, bookending the space we’d just passed.

I say “the other side” like I didn’t already know, or at least suspect, what we would find out there.

For some reason, Zhizhi had been satisfied by Miguel’s answer about the arcade. She hadn’t said a peep since. Either she understood what was happening or she’d contented herself with waiting to find out.

Once more, I inspected the door for a puzzle. Nothing. I stepped back and waved at the push bar. “You want to check this, Miguel?”

He didn’t say anything, didn’t even nod, but he took my place in front of the door. He stared at it. Smoke curled over his head.

The tokens in Lena’s hands clinked as she shifted from one foot to the other.

That broke the tension, and Miguel pushed on the bar. The door opened.

No more traps. Seemed we were past that part of the experience.

The space beyond looked terribly dark. No lights, in or out of Third Eye.

Miguel shone his phone light over it. The space seemed to swallow what feeble illumination the device offered, but we caught hints of what awaited us.

Crumbling, pitted, dark brick walls. A concrete ceiling, covered by cracked paint that had lightened to a charcoal color where it hadn’t chipped away. It wasn’t lower than the one we’d been walking beneath, but it felt so much more so because it covered a wider area. Perhaps strangest of all, even the floor was brick, like some nineteenth century avenue.

“What the shit?” Lena muttered.

Miguel asked, “Do you remember, Cameron?”

I snorted. “I was a toddler, dude.”

He dipped his head.

Miguel was only a few years older than me, but for purposes of this place, they were the most critical years. To Zhizhi, younger than us, and Lena, who grew up out of state, this meant nothing. To me, it was a legend.

To Miguel? A memory.

He stepped out into the darkness.

I glanced back at Lena and Zhizhi.

Lena frowned. “So this is Miguel’s...?”

“Seems like,” I said.

“How do you think that’s going to work?”

I swallowed. “No clue. Let’s just try not to collect anything that isn’t ours.”

“Cool,” Lena said, and that could have been the end of it. She hesitated to step forward, though. “Doesn’t it seem like the kind of place that might fall out of the beta? I wasn’t worried about it before, but now I’m starting to get the same vibe as the construction site. Maybe the same thing happened there.”

“It’s hard to imagine someone having an intense emotional connection with that place.” I tried to grin. Maybe it worked. “At least before it turned into a monster-haunted liminal space.”

“On the subject of liminal spaces,” Zhizhi said. She followed Miguel into the darkness and made a slow pan with her camera. She didn’t shudder, but she was so pale it looked like she wanted to and only resisted because she’d been trained to hold the camera steady above all else. “Is somebody ready to explain what this place is?”

“Cinder Alley,” Miguel said.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

After he said it, I followed him out into the space.

We stood in a side passage. The main concourse was even wider, but with the same low, uncomfortable ceiling. Out there, some of the walls were stucco and faux wood, Tudor revival, not a million miles off from Lena’s old apartment building. Idly, I wondered if there was some architectural throughline, if someone on Third Eye’s dev team harbored special fondness for these kinds of designs.

In the dark, everything was pitched just at the limit of claustrophobia. I could imagine being charmed by this space, delighted by it, especially as a little kid who wouldn’t feel the ceiling pressing so close. Either our phones didn’t show off the starscape painted overhead, or the white paint had worn away faster than the darker backdrop, but even so I thought my child self would’ve been able to imagine he was walking through some enchanted alleyway.

If I’d come here as an adult, though, I think I would’ve understood why it closed before I got the chance.

And it was closed, a weird dose of reality and modernity against the 1990s memories, the 1960s design, and the construction meant to evoke something a century older than it was. Whenever one of our lights passed over the door or window of a little shop, it reflected off of a folding metal gate that had been pulled down to block off the space. The fake streetlights held no bulbs, the paint had peeled, almost all the signs were gone from over the doorways, and everything looked covered by dust where it wasn’t colonized by mold.

“I almost wish we’d brought Ben,” I said. “I think he was old enough to remember coming down here.”

“Perhaps another time,” Miguel said.

“Wait,” Zhizhi said. “This is a real place, not a Third Eye thing?”

“It was,” Miguel said. “The lower level of Cinderella City Mall. Quaint and fanciful Cinder Alley. Quite the local tourist attraction, until it wasn’t. Of course, its prime was in our parents’ time.”

“Wait, I remember this,” Lena said. “Didn’t you want to do a virtual tour of it, Cam?”

“Couple years ago, yeah, for the anniversary,” I said.

“But this can’t be the real place,” she said. “We’d be, what? Right under the library and the police station?”

I tried to picture the geometry. “Probably under those apartments we like.”

Lena cocked her head. “Wow. So it’s a pretty big space down here.”

“Yeah.” I had a lump in my throat and didn’t really understand why. Borrowed nostalgia? Was that a thing? “You’re right, though. This can’t be the real Cinder Alley. They demolished the mall. I’m sure the underground area didn’t survive.”

“So what are we looking at?” Zhizhi asked.

“My Realm,” Miguel said.

Zhizhi spun the camera to him.

He glanced over his shoulder. To Lena and I, he said, “Am I wrong?”

“Don’t think so,” Lena said.

“I’m not going to ask what yours was, Lena,” he said. “Less discrete people on the wiki have described their own as quite... personalized.”

She toed the floor. Bernie stirred in his sling and she reached back to stroke his head. “That’s one way of putting it.”

Miguel stabbed his cigarette out in one of the abandoned ashtrays over a garbage bin. If the presence of an ashtray in such an enclosed space didn’t scream that this had been ripped from a previous century, I didn’t know what would.

He said, “Come. I don’t know how this will turn out, but I think it’s fairly obvious where we’ll learn.”

“That’s where these come in?” Lena shook the tokens in her hands.

Miguel nodded. “I don’t know which to criticize more. Third Eye rooting around in my head, or them dredging up such a banal interpretation of my psyche.”

Lena pursed her lips, but offered no comment.

Zhizhi caught her expression on camera, though.

I didn’t have to.

Lena’s Realm had reflected a snapshot of her mentality at one of the darkest points of her life. It seemed to have done a disturbingly good job. More than that, confronting it had forced her to face some truths she’d wanted very much to bury.

I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to say Third Eye had saved our relationship by means of that Realm.

What would the game do with the Realm of a player who was no longer playing?

I had no idea. None of us did.

All we could do was follow Miguel into the darkness.

Lena pushed closer to me, arm to arm. Zhizhi drifted next to us as well, clustered tight beneath the warmth of Lena’s wings.

I got it. Something about the artificiality of the space freaked me the hell out. It was a copy of a copy, a fake version of a fake street.

I wondered how distorted the space was, and by extension, the time. At the construction site, time had run faster and faster for us relative to the outside world, the gap growing more extreme as the space inflated. How far off were we as we explored an entire duplicated mall?

I realized I could check. Back then, we’d had to borrow Matt’s pocket watch, but I’d since downloaded an app to track time locally without checking in with an off-site atomic clock. I compared the app’s time with that of my phone’s regular clock.

The two were off, but only by a half hour. Which didn’t make a ton of sense to me, but I supposed was for the best. Just to be sure, I checked that the date was the same on both apps, and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that it was. I hadn’t considered it out of the realm of possibility that we would’ve disappeared down here for a month, or a decade, like people in a fairy story who wandered through the wrong mushroom ring.

Maybe I thought of fairy tales because that was what Cinder Alley had been meant to evoke when it was originally built. I doubted it, though. The abandoned version was plenty weird, but almost all the whimsy had leached out of it.

Our footsteps echoed endlessly on the brick floor, bouncing at odd angles. Those and our breaths, plus occasional burbles from Bernie, were the only sounds.

I thought I found the silence unnerving.

Right up until the laughter started.