Is Anybody There?

“Is anybody there?!” I shouted out, well aware that I would receive no answer.

I had been alone for a long time. Months or maybe years.. longer? I could no longer recall.

I took another trio of shuffling steps and then called out again, the ashen motes that hovered in the parched air stung the back of my throat as I breathed. There was no air though, that burning pressure for want of air that was no longer there.

Though I had not drunk water nor seen food in longer than I could remember, I remained both alive and alert. The reasons for this I could not say, nor could I really recall why that might have been a cause for alarm in the first place. It was simply the way things had always been.

I scrunched my eyes. What had been? That implied a past, and perhaps a future..

I felt the tiniest inkling of hope stir in my breast at the thought. A modicum of emotion in this dead and grey place, but it was quickly snuffed out by the looming mountain of my own self resentment. I knew that I hated this place and myself, but I could not for the life of myself recall why that was.

I stopped and for the first time in ages I looked up and at my surroundings, why didn’t I do that more often? Was it really so much easier to remain oblivious?

My surroundings had not changed, not in all the time I had walked relentlessly in a single straight line. Not with the twists nor the turns I had taken. In fact, the only reasons I had for not believing myself in an eternal loop was the blanket of undisturbed ash that lay nearly five centimeters deep before me and to all sides. Deep enough that it should have been disturbed upon my passing had I been there before. Surely, would it not?

I gazed upon the ash again, an uninterrupted carpet of silky particulate that piled up to the surrounding buildings like unto drifts of dirty grey snow. But it was not cold, it was not warm either. In fact the air itself felt hollow in a strange manner. As if it was there but simultaneously not, as if the very reality I was in was some deeper fragment of a larger nightmare that I was mired in.

I shook my head, the motion loosing a small blizzard of ashen flakes that obscured my vision like a curtain of sooty shreds for but a moment. A moment in eternity.

Looking further afield, I say buildings, their construction foreign to me. Not the tall imposing duracrete edifices I had grown around as a youth, but small and squat structures of small reddish blocks. They looked old, or maybe they felt old? I could not tell consciously, but for some reason their very appearance made me feel tired as if the weight of ages were pressing close about me like a heavy weighted cloak. It was suffocating, just like me.

I shivered, and not from the cold.

“Is anybody there!?” I shouted again, my voice nearly breaking from overuse.

I was so tired, but I could not sleep. I was starving but had found no sustenance, nor would my body cease its function. I was certainly marked for death, but could not die.

A voice in my own head, beyond the edge of space. A voice telling me I needed to wake, that I was living an eternal nightmare. But wake I could not.

So I wandered again. For a time, longer than the mind could reckon I wandered along ash covered streets of dirty grey asphalt and shattered masonry. I moved slowly, head held low so as to block out the terrible sameness of my surroundings. But I continued to move forwards, my mind drifting along the tides of my subconscious like a fish would upon the currents of the sea.

That gave me pause, the sea. I smiled involuntarily, the action creasing cracked and bleeding lips parched with endless thirst. I missed the sea, the sound of the waves upon the shore and the cries of gulls upon the salty winds. I must have been born near to the sea, for it held a strong hold over my heart.

I grasped the hope again lest it slip once more from fingers driven to the edge of exhaustion by lack of sustenance and rest. And it held.

I stopped, the new fires of rekindled hope surging in my core and drawing a gasp of elation and fear from my sundered mind. I felt alive for a moment, at least in part. How long had it been since I had felt.. well.. anything? I could no longer recall.

I frowned at that, the motion much more familiar to my paralysed muscles. I had been somebody once, lived a life of joys and sorrows. But no longer, for everything was the same here. Grey, all grey and ash, dust and silence. No, not silence. Not really.

Sometimes when I thought all hope had gone I would catch a glimpse of something moving out of the corner of my vision. It was a hallucination, nothing more. My rational mind told me so, a vision brought along by my sorry harrowed state. A fugue of the brain in a place as bleak as hell itself but infinitely more cruel. A trick, for I was alone and always had been.

So I walked again, one foot forward.. and then another. On and on and on it went, the path before me as fresh as the horror that re-saturated my dwindling hopes. The growing loneliness felt like a mountain in my mind, the weight as crushing as a trillion kilograms of rock and stone.

Before I knew what I was saying, I uttered.. “Endless tunnels of shimmering energies, steel and fire. Nothing.. void once more.”

I stopped. What? A memory perhaps? Dredged out of the bottomless depths of my subconscious by some lingering sense of self-worth?

I shook my head and threw my head back, letting out a scream of rage as the memory left me. Flitting away like sparrows in the garden. I silenced myself, suddenly afraid. But why? In eons I had seen not another soul, in millennia of wandering I had not spoken nor made contact with another such as I. So why did my body quake so, why then did the short hairs on the back of my neck stand? I was being watched, I suddenly knew it. Knew it as strongly as I knew that I was damned.

I froze, the fight or flight sluggishly taking hold as some semblance of awareness took hold of my atrophied mind. I was shocked to wakefulness for the first time I could remember since I first started my wandering.

I had been a scientist. Me and my colleagues had discovered something, energy from nothing? No. It wasn’t possible.

But my memories told me it was. What did it mean, to tap the void. To scratch at the borders of anti-space itself. I slapped the side of my head as a splitting headache tore through the disparate fragments of my psyche. It was too much, it was far too much. Decades of lost memories and knowledge flooding my mind like a crazed kaleidoscope of broken images.

Screaming and thrashing I remained that way for a time. Another voice not my own echoing, ’Time without time and space without spaces.’

I know not for how long these thoughts assailed my gibbering madness, but I found that when I was through the throes of my despair, I knew what I was if not the were and why of it.

I was a monster. A destroyer of worlds, the most blatant form of just because we can doesn't mean one should.

I wept, the burning tears cutting lines through the ash that caked my features as I lay my head in my hands.

‘I must be dead.’ I thought to myself silently, and as if in response to my thoughts I thought I saw a shadow move in the distance between two of the old red buildings.

Like a flash I stood, my self hatred fading in light of this new fear. For if one such as I was trapped here, what others might be lurking in the endless diffused light that seemed to shine from everywhere and nowhere all at once.

I recalled at once the object of my damnation. The source of near infinite energy that was to be my magnum opus. The void-sink.

The word caused me to shudder again and I felt my body run in blind panic as a near instinctive dread filled the shattered remnants of my flayed soul. I ran, my body moving of its own accord, but the nightmares followed. For they were in me and of me, I was the nightmare. I was the monsters that stalked me in this endless place of dull grey featureless buildings. The shadowy figures in the corner of my vision, the ashen shadows cast upon the walls of my own torment.

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I stopped and looked at one of the nearer structures. I really took a moment to scrutinise its construction, but the harder I looked the less I seemed to see. Again I turned my gaze away and they seemed to once more fill with details. My peripheral vision picking out windows and doors, tables and chairs set out in front of quaint little diners and railings for bikes on the sidewalk. But I turned to look again and these became hazy.. Indistinct.

Nothing was real.

I felt another flash of panic. What was this place, it was a question I had asked infinitely. Dead and gone I may have been, but not forgotten. Some dark malevolent force seemed to remember me. Why else would I have been imprisoned in such a place of endless self-torment and dark shadowy interiors. I wanted to curl into a ball and lie unmoving upon the ground. But even as the thought reached my mind, I knew that to stop moving would be a mistake.

Once more my mouth opened and spoke, the words coming from some other place not of my own mind.. “Can’t stop.. won’t stop.. they are coming. They are coming!”

My own hoarse shout strangled the hope that guttered like a candle in the darkest recesses of my mind, snuffed it out like unto the same. What was coming? And why did the idea of seeing another in this place fill me with such uncompromising dread?

I was assailed by questions, many of which had no answers. But I did know something that still made sense, so I pressed onwards. Assured in my own mind that this was the only proper course of action one damned such as I could take in this desolate place.

Another mantra entered my mind as I stumbled through the dust and ash. ‘Space without spaces, and time without time.’ It had echoed in my mind before, it was as familiar as my breath. And as unwelcome as the shadows that moved in the unlight of this place.

It so very nearly described the current situation I found myself in. Certainly I could not remember a time before I was here. I had the fragments of memories of what I was, of that which may have led me to my current predicament. But not really anything approaching a timeframe nor calendar of my misery.

As far as I could tell, I existed here as I always had. For time without reckoning. An endless dark abyss, blanketed in the ash of a trillion shattered dreams.

I stook another step, the swirling shifting dust stung my throat as I breathed the airless mire that filled the space around me. I gasped, lungs heaving for ever and ever to draw a breath that would not come. And yet still I found that I could speak. A predicament that I dare not think to fondly on, for the answers to my questions often brought more horror than the wonderings.

“Is anybody there!?” I shouted it again, almost as if they were now the only words I dared to speak in this merciless prison. Words of safety, uttered by a damned soul for whom isolation was my only real safety.

I cackled madly at that. The sound as ugly as the skeletal trees that stood on every forgotten street corner, as ugly as the wounds in the sky the stars had become. I looked around, were the shadows listening? Were the shadows following?

No, I saw them not, for in this place of illuminating darkness there could be no other other than I. But that didn’t mean I was safe. So I wandered.

As I did, I remembered a saying.

One that stares too long into the abyss may find that sometimes the abyss stares back.

I shivered. I had dared to do more than simply stare into that endless dark oblivion, I had reached out and grasped the very void itself as if my puny mortal mind could have possibly comprehended the horror of what I had done. I siphoned its energies, I tore out its very lifeblood to fuel the depths of my ambition. But little had I known the path that my greedy abhorrent tinkering would bring. The eyes of eternity had been opened, and in them I had seen only rage.

I shuddered, the hairs on the back of my neck standing on edge as I whirled around, shouting. “Is anybody there?!” The eyes that watched me unseen.. receded again. I guess it was not yet my time.

What drew them back, what drew me forwards? Or was I going backwards, I could have been. The ash that fell through the air was always thick, thick enough to obscure the path ahead. To cover the tracks of my previous passing in a mere matter of hours. But to what purpose?

I looked up, blinking as stinging flecks filled my eyes, coughing as the acrid dust coated my throat. I saw no clouds.. no sky.. no light nor dark. All was that empty endless un-grey expanse, and it caused me to despair.

‘Why was I cursed?’ I asked myself, then stopped. I knew why, and what was more.. I knew that I deserved it. An eternity of torment.

An entire world gone, like a droplet of water cast into a nuclear fire. The world called Karax, gone in a flash that tore the very guts of reality to tatters. A forever ago. What had I done? What forces had I unknowingly unleashed? And how had I alone survived? I stopped and looked down at myself. Really looked, and fell to my knees in the deepening ash at the horror I witnessed.

Like unto the structures that surrounded me, I found myself indistinct. And the more I looked the harder it was for me to comprehend myself. One moment a man, another a darkening mist. I stood on legs that didn’t exist, I breathed with a mouth that could not open and screamed with lungs that did not function. For like unto all that was, I too.. was ash.. the faded memory of a man long dead and cast into this omnipresent self-torture.

I stopped moving and turned around to see my footprints, but there were none. I must have left some trace as to my passing, I thought. But I could not really remember ever having seen any. Had it all been my mere imagination, what was I if I was no longer a man?

Again I got the impression of shadowy tendrils emanating from my core, as if the darkness I held inside was questing to escape the confines of my body. I tried to push them back inside but had no hands, no fingers to grasp and no arms with which I could effect any change.

I saw movement and shouted in fear more than curiosity. “Is anybody there!!”

Shadows retreated, the darkness held once more at bay. A day, a month, a thousand lifetimes.. I could not tell, what was time without the sensation of its passing? A mere number, a concept of antithetical nature only made more apparent by the obvious counterintuitive essence of my own existence.

I had been a man. A scientist. A man of great understanding, but now I understood nothing. I was as a babe in swaddling clothes, naked and raw. An exposed nerve, flayed from my mortal body and cast aside into this place of ruin. But where I existed, so to did my ambitions. I felt that kindling fire in my core alight once more.

I wandered again, my mind as free of these fears as my eyes were of their burden to see. For what was the point in seeing when all was the same? So I stopped looking, the sounds never changed so I stopped listening. And the fears had never truly left me, so I stopped feeling.

I became numb. As lifeless as the ash that floated through the space around me, and then dissolved.

I stopped, something had changed. How long had I wandered? Time was meaningless in this place, with no body to preserve and no mind to break, I saw the shadows move once more. So like me but not me. But I was no longer afraid, for what could they do to me other than remove me from this place. I straightened without moving and welcomed death with open mind.

But death did not come, maybe she never had? Not for me anyways, maybe that was why I was cursed to never die. Death didn’t exist in this other place, but that was not to say that I was alone. The shadows stirred around me more fitfully now and I thought I could hear child-like laughter on the wind that didn’t blow.

I shivered, and whispered.. my voice no longer full of longing, but instead marked by a sense of finality. A cold dread that filled me as the sense of my undoing drew ever nearer.

“Hello? Are you there?”

In response to my question a voice answered, and then a chorus. A million teeming voices that rose and fell in a haunting harmony that seemed to sing win equal measures of joyous rapture and sorrowful lament.

They echoed through the fallen city, the dust swirling in the growing wind. The voices, they sang, “Yes! Yes we are here! We have always been here!”

From the shadows peeled a throng of things, the shapes of faces without bodies. Smiling in rictus with too-wide mouths of shattered needle teeth. These teeth seemed to move slightly as if each were alive, a squirming forest of silver spires that stood before a yawning pit of what looked television static. The white and black seemingly touching but never mixing endlessly with a strange sort of visual fizzing that made my mind hurt to look upon.

These things approached me slowly at first and then with gathering enthusiasm as they realised I no longer rebuked them. Each seemed to be a simple hovering sphere near-to a meter in average width. Their pale, near translucent skin stretched taut over their slightly misshapen, bulbous forms. On the front of each were two pits where eyes might have otherwise been, deep into these infinite pools of black shone a bright point of light that seemed to act in the manner similar to a pupil. This light flicking to me as they neared, a low pulsing shine like unto that of a dying star. Under this was a nose and mouth, the nose was odd though. Seemingly incomplete, or maybe it changed whenever I looked away. I could not tell.

As they neared me, I was able to make out individual voices that rang..

“It shines so bright!”

“It is wonderfully luminous!”

“It blinds, it blinds!”

I would have taken a step back had they not whirled around me on all sides as a tornado. I reached out with a confident voice for I no longer feared for life. If death was their intent, then I welcomed it, “Who are you. What are you.” Not in anger or fear, but flat. A simple statement of informal intent as I had left feeling behind.

Voices that were not voices rang out in discordant harmony once more, so many that my mind reeled from the sudden disquiet.

“Wandering hearts, discordant thoughts!”

“We are those that watch the watchers!”

“Pain and fear, draw us near!”

It was a lot to take in all at once. But I would not stop now, I may be damned. But I was still a scientist somewhere deep inside. This was simply a problem like any other, I felt a pang of fear in my heart but I pushed it down. No, I had a task to complete now, I would get to the bottom of these creatures.

I pointed to the nearest of them which stopped in place, its deep sockets shining with that cold inner light as it hovered slightly closer. I asked, “You, what is this place? What’s wrong with me?”

It drifted almost but not quite close enough to touch and sang slowly, “Nothing is wrong with the wronged. It is cast aside, come and join us! We shall give it peace!”

“Give it peace!”

“Yes, rest!”

The notion of a final rest gave me pause. Could I really do it? If they offered to end the torment would I really be strong enough to accept? A part of me still feared for life, clung to it as a drowning man might to a piece of flotsam.

I answered slowly. “I fear that I cannot join you. I still have purpose, I must understand.”

The orb I had chosen flipped upside down as it spoke over the discordant throng that surrounded on all sides. “Its purpose is spent, Its fires burn too bright to contain. It burned aside that which was. We have been watching.”

He shook his head, or thought the motion. He no longer had a corporeal form it seemed. “Watching what? Me stumbling around like a lost noppin? I want to know where is this place, what is wrong with the sky?”

The orb stopped drifting. Its mouth widening as it drew a little nearer. “To know is to understand. Understanding does not bring peace, but we can bring peace!”

“Yes! Join us!”

“Peace! Sleep!”

I took a step back and the being snapped its maw shut. The headache that had been building threatened to burst as my thoughts whirled like the strange creatures around me. I pointed to the ground, the ash that coated the ground. “Is this real? Is any of this real?” I screamed it, I needed to know. Desperation and fear mixing in equal measure fueled the sound that tore its way from me.

The thing looked at me in silence. It's dark pits for eyes shone a little brighter. Each dark light like a distant star in the endless expanse of dark space. The thing stopped again and turned away, but before it went it spoke one last time. The riddle of it filled me with as much confusion as dread.

“It is lost in that which borders, vile rot and slavering unconsciousness. No time without time, and no space without space. Wandering and watching, watching the watchers. You are that which watches.” And with that final statement it was gone.

The chorus broke as the whirling faces broke and scattered every direction at once. Their voices fading into the darkness that had replaced the indistinct cityscape. I looked around, but saw naught but endless nothing. No lights, no faces and no bleeding wounds in the sky. With nothing to grasp onto anymore I felt my sense of self slipping away.

For another moment I held it tight, as if the knowledge of what I once was would keep me safe. But it was a fallacy, a dream.

So I let go. After an eternity, an infinity. I let it all go.

Freezing cold, darkness.. but above all, nothing.

Void once more.

End Of Story