Standing at the edge of darkness, filled with disquiet, restless and cold, how dull and insignificantly small the moon had looked in his eyes that night. His heart ached terribly. No friends, no intimacy—nothing. All of his past came back to mind. All the shame. Had anything good ever happened to him in his entire life? When was the last time he had genuinely smiled? The repressive silence only grew louder, and louder, and louder, until he could bear it no longer. He had to look away.
Seven concentric rings of radiant runes encircled the sun of this world. The moon had no sisters, no siblings, no satellites, but was a solitary monolith unrivalled in a starless night sky. Ten times larger, what light there came was all from her own, and was not borrowed, like the moon he once knew, from a celestial body of dawn she could effortlessly dwarf.
Misshapen clouds, not misty, but distinct in their borders, did their best to obscure her sight, but her visage, not one to be overshadowed, nevertheless bled through them albeit diffused. God-rays pierced through the clouds which must’ve been miles thick, and it were as if a myriad of silvery glinting eyes were staring back at you from the countless cliffs of fog.
Then there were the airships; the same ones he had fleetingly seen in the afternoon’s light-blue sky. Now, silhouetted by the moon—the mast of these flying frigates had nowhere to hide. Even in the clouds, their looming shadows betrayed where they were. Their floodlights, harsh and heavy, trained at the lower-city, swerved down in set patterns—miles-spanning arcs and slow gyrations—giving the cityscape an uneasy tension, an atmosphere, of a dystopian police-state, or a nation at a cold war, where the state had to keep a close eye on its citizens for spies, traitors, informants, border-crossers.
He took a step back from the guardrails and looked down at the pavement. His body could not stop swaying from vertigo. Intoxicated, once his sense of balance returned, he craned his neck out again; this time: his eyes trained at the city below.
A few hundred meters below him, maybe more, burgeoned a city thereon which bore no semblance to the one he had so far forayed. Roof-shingles gleamed white in the moonlit night sky; havens of light twinkled like stars in a sea of abyss; only campaniles and belfries of cathedral rose above the jagged-rim; fly-overs, viaducts, and industrial pipelines grew out like veins of the dark and lifeless wen; and farther north, was everything industrial. No signs of smog, no pillars of smoke, but from its dark and foreboding outline, it was irrefutably industrial: stripped bare of any embellishments, gutted out of walls or even floors—a failed district of half-built ruins and unfulfilled dreams, casinos and foundries—the slums of Ednin.
Silence, all, was all he could hear here, other than the distant drone of airships and the wind wrapped round his clothes. Westwards, the sheer cliff of battlement walls run on till it met the horizon, where it gently levelled off with the city below. Satou mutely followed the guardrails until soon it led him to one of the many bulwark that jutted out over the lower-city. There, parked by the side of the road, he saw a car. “Is this a cab?” Satou asked him, knowing the answer beforehand.
“Yes, ma’am. But I’m off-duty.”
“Oh. Is there a hotel, around here, not too costly?”
The cabdriver pointed him onward, to the only hotel he knew in a mile, but no soon after that did he get lost again.
He had to backtrack, but, wasn’t there a turn here, before? He realized he was thoroughly lost.
The moon could not reach him, wherever he was. It was dark where he stood, and awfully quiet. He came across a sign that read, ‘CITY LIFT No. 057’, which at first confused him. Warm and humid air blew up to his face as he stood there, on the threshold, peering in. Indeed, it was what it said it was. “A lift. Here?” Just standing near it made him feel isolated from the world, cut-off. He had no intention of getting on, just check it out; but in the end he didn’t get to choose.
The city-wide blackout ended right as he took a step inside. Something hard and heavy fall into place, far below him; like the sound of cogs grinding. The ground shook, or maybe it was the lift. The lights then began to flicker. And before he could even get a chance to understand what was going on, his fate was sealed. The lift was descending, taking him along with it!
A light pang of fear did begin to build up in his chest, but nothing he couldn’t repress. He tried not to panic, and keep calm. Quickly, he reached for the lever and tried to turn it the other way—up—but it did not budge, no matter how hard he pulled, pushed, on leaned against it. Maybe there was safety mechanism, somewhere, that he wasn’t holding down first. If there was, then he didn’t find it until the meter above the doorway had reached G5.
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When he got to G5, somewhere deep underground, a collapsible gate barred his way out.
Outside, nothing stirred. Air stood still. Dust hung in the amber light from the lift; and beyond, was everything pitch-black.
“Halloa!” Satou tried to call for help. “Halloa!” But—nothing.
There was a telephone handset, right next to him, with rotary dials and it might’ve been his only hope. He picked it up and dialed in all the numbers he could think of: 110, 100, 911, 988, but, again—nothing. He only received static. What the hell… What had he gotten himself into. He realized he was stuck here. And for how long? Till morning, until somebody came and rescued him? The thought that he would have to spend an entire night caged here of all places made him all the more desperate to get out. Again, he tried to turn the lever to other way—up—to no avail.
He tried to pry the gate with his bare hands. He knew it was vain, yet to his surprise he found that he might just be able to push it wide enough to shimmy through. He tried it, first, by shoving his shoulder under the heavy iron-link chains that held the gate fastened and barred his way out, and found, that… He did it! Painfully, he managed to get out!
Rubbing his shoulder, he reached back for his satchel. Then he looked both ways, passageways with walls reminiscent of a bunker that seemed to go on and on and on, branching out here and there into lesser passageways, he decided to go right.
He couldn’t see where he was going, or even his hands when he brought it up to his face; but he must’ve surfaced at some point. The night sky emerged above him, partly obscured by the eaves of a dark and looming building; and behind him, towered the wall he had stood on earlier, half an hour ago, bathed white in the moonlight. Only now did it truly sink in just how far he had strayed. He had vaguely known that the lift had brought him to the lower-city. But this…
The district, or ward, or whatever he was in, were not the fashionable streets he had wandered lost in throughout the day. An urbane air pervaded the gloomy wen. Even the air he breathed in somehow stifled his lungs. The lack of monumentalism was the first thing he caught onto: something, which Upper Ednin had been fortunate to inherit; but ‘slums’ for this place was not the right word for either. Lower Ednin was not dirty, squalid; clothesline did not hang overhead; sewage did not openly flow; nor was there a smell, or flies, or discarded newspapers littering the streets like tumbleweeds. But a wear and use was there, present in the air, that unmistakably separated it from the city above, as being ‘lived in’.
The streets moreover winded, swerved, curved, and never led you to a dead end—which would’ve been the ideal, since that way you could at least backtrack instead of laying your hopes ahead; but they never did. They went on and on instead, and never led you anywhere but deeper in. The widest alleyways were often indistinguishable from the narrowest street. Not a front-garden or a flowerbed did he come across; or a yard, backyard, or even a park. Most byways served as porches for homes and entranceways into tenements. And while a car could’ve passed through, two were bound to start a jam.
As for the buildings: he wasn’t sure what to make of them. Is this what people called Art Deco? They had a flair to them despite looking awfully mundane, and it was impossible to point out what made them feel so. Six to seven storeys tall, emergency staircase scaffolded down their side, coated in black, which were almost all somewhere or the other oxidized by rain and neglect to a copper red. On the rooftops propped on iron-stilts or hanging by the side of the buildings, lit garish signs and billboards displayed advertisements that promised much that sounded too good to be true.
“Marybell,” Satou read, on one of the billboards. Selling the dream, he thought.
Even a fantasy world, it seemed, was not entirely immune from the allure of kitsch and glamor.
Gasjet streetlamps shone him the way forth, but struggled to reach very far. Their mellow red glow gave the already maze-like borough an eerie gothic ambience, under which the infrequent manholes and cracked cobblestone street haphazardly patched with broken blocks took on a new appearance: that of mystery. Some of them flickered, dying. Others outright did not work. And in such places, only the moon, if she could reach you, shone you the way forth. That, and the few lights that came down from homes: lights by which children were being bathed, late meals cooked, books read.
To the shadowy figures who still prowled the night out so late, Satou asked them, “Is there a hotel nearby?” he himself half-hidden in the dark so that no one would see his face. Mutely, these strangers would point him to keep going onward, towards his journey’s end. “At the Old Crossroads,” they answered, that it was not hard to miss; yet miss he almost did.
Dead in the middle of a three-way juncture shaped like a ‘Y’, there it stood: an unassuming weathered brick-faced corner-building, six storeys tall; its double doors were held half-open by a foldable-ladder; and the signage bearing its name ‘Edson Hotel’, lay slanted on its side, left there by the entrance for the paint to dry. This was where he would stay for the night.