Richie’s foggy vision faded back into color by gradual degrees, followed grudgingly by alertness. He stared up at a greenhouse ceiling, through which the hole he made with his falling body was clearly visible. The pain came next. Richie groaned as his whole body ached all over, making his earlier suffering from the exertion of fleeing the phantom threat of capture and incarceration seem paltry by comparison. He wiggled his toes, then his hips, and gradually pulled himself up into a sitting position. It felt like he had been run over by a truck, but miraculously no bones seemed to be broken. The same couldn’t be said for bruising, and he wouldn’t be able to sit right for a week on account of his struck tailbone. Wincing as he stood and propped himself against one of the tree trunks, he got another good look at his surroundings. The greenhouse or whatever it was was divided shoddily into rows of different planter boxes, but any division by species and type there may have been was long tangled over with the rest of the overgrowth. Everything had run together and merged into a humid, greenlit muggy chamber that reminded Richie uncannily of a tropical rainforest, or maybe a dry patch in a swamp. Giving the ceiling another glance, he realized the oddity that he had struck treetops before he had broken through the glass. Indeed, several panes were already missing long before his arrival, and the untended-to trees had simply kept growing, straight through the top.
“What is this place?” Richie wondered aloud, taken aback by the unexpected appearance of a boxed wilderness in the middle of a modern city. Wandering along a clear path to a back door, he opened it onto the edge of a disused parking garage consisting of maybe a half dozen concrete floors, arranged by number. He had guessed at the function only by appearances, as there were no cars left to be found parked anywhere. An eye-catching handicapped space marker confirmed his assessment. Stifling the urge to call “hello” to hear the strength of the echo, Richie continued ambling along in silent wondering, head panning back and forth to get running looks of the stone enclosure and all of its little details. There were spidery cracks in the walls, and miscellaneous splotches and streaks of grime and unidentified stains. Copious graffiti tagged long stretches of the place. Richie further suppressed the groans of his pained body long enough to scale to the second tier of the garage, and from there sated his curiosity with a look over the edge toward what should have been a street. Instead, Richie found he was looking between two blue wooden walls, standing straight and rising at least as high as the garage.
As best Richie could tell, his accidental freefall had taken him to the bottom of a seemingly ancient greenhouse that had long since reclaimed the human architecture into untamed wilds, crammed up against a similarly concealed parking garage, itself adjacent to what seemed to be some kind of old-fashioned housing project. Richie went ground level again to get a better look, hopping over the concrete barrier and passing through overgrown grass and weeds into the yard of what he now recognized for an apartment complex. The place was a series of sky-blue duplexes whose primary color scheme clashed with the gritty chrome and slate gray of the surrounding cityscape. The units had enclosed balconies and carved oak doors sunken into the recess created where the floor and the stair-level platform paralleled each other. From here, decorative lines of bushes stretched out from midway between doors facing each other in each section, dividing the walkways. The entire complex itself was shaded in the leaves of interlocking tree branches, just like the greenhouse before it, leaving only a select few, starkly vibrant patches of blue sky between them. It all gave Richie the curious feeling of being simultaneously indoors and outdoors at the same time. The image of Russian nesting dolls came to mind.
With the immensity of the abandoned property all around him, Richie would have expected an entire colony of homeless numbering in the hundreds. Yet, there wasn’t another soul in sight for as far as the eye could see. Somewhere, a wind chime jingled in a faint breeze, and Richie could catch a whiff of burning incense. He continued walking, stopping every few yards to peer into the kitchen rooms visible through the front balcony sliding glass doors. All empty, all spacious, and relatively intact and untouched by the elements, in stark contrast to the exterior. More and more it dawned on Richie that he had the whole place to himself, and that no authorities or realtors had patrolled this place in untold ages. He could very well make his roost here so long as he could make discreet excursions for food and supplies. If he could snag a few packets of seeds, he could tend to his own gardens and tick fresh fruits and vegetables off the list of essentials to survive on. There might even be edible plants to harvest for this purpose back in the greenhouse. Just as he was thinking about the possibility of hunting wild game for meat to accompany the hypothetical produce, he came to the edge of the complex territory - a trailing brown picket fence that ran the length of a narrow strip of grass, broken here and there by white stone steps that broke the strip into lower elevations. Following the fence, admiring the knots of deep brown that showed up now and then in the aged planks, Richie eventually came to the end of the barrier. Here, the wooded area beyond the fence ended, giving way to a large lake whose perimeter bank was reinforced with inward-facing concrete - a man-made reservoir?
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The fence cut a sharp right angle where the complex units ended, but beyond the portion Richie faced, a perpendicular section of fence merged with the main one, cutting the forest and the lake into distinct, divided quadrants. This shouldn’t have struck Richie as odd - certainly no odder than the rest of the place - but it did. Peering through the gap left by a loose and displaced board, he soon realized why. Richie could see clear through the gap to a tunnel of green, a space through which he could just barely crawl if he hunched. It was like a subway of coiling green ivy squeezing against each other so tightly that the vines formed a solid surface. Far at the end of the tunnel, bright white light shone, implying a clearing. Richie looked through this tunnel and over the top of the fence through which it cut over and over again, but no matter how many times he looked, it didn’t add up. The tunnel was directly under the point where the perpendicular fence should have been, splitting the forested and aquatic halves of the region beyond the complex. In other words, it was a tunnel which should not have physically existed. Its light beckoned Richie all the same.
Something took hold of him again, as transient and unexplained as the urge to kick the homeless man had been. He felt like he was a little kid again, a kid who believed in fairy tales and neverland. Throwing caution to the wind for not the first time today, Richie crouched and passed through the hole.
He remembered next to nothing of his venture within the impossible place, save for a feeling of being lighter than air, of having his path predetermined in a cradled and novel way, like a roller coaster on its tracks, and of being spotted once or twice by a shimmering ebony-furred wolf with piercing blue eyes that exuded tranquility and benevolence.
Richie didn’t know when or how he had emerged from the waking dream to find himself on the junkyard hill at the southeast side of the city opposite from whence he had fled and he didn’t care. He was drained, far too emotionally, physically, and spiritually wiped to make heads or tails of any of it now. For now, he needed sleep. And he found it, found it in a rusted-out scrapped car left conveniently open for him to find on a mound of rotting parts. It was reasonably free of vermin, though it lacked a clear place to lay down, the backseats crammed with boxes of random junk. Richie was too tired to complain much, and fell instantly into slumber against the leather.
Richie’s sleep was deep but not carefree, peppered with snippets of some distressing dream. He was at a table. His mom - he had a mom? - was making breakfast. Waffles. No, now she was schooling him. Was he homeschooled? Then there was a feeling of being watched through his window, and of mom going to investigate.
Don’t go, mom.
When Richie woke up, he had a gun in his face.
“Wha-?!” he froze up, petrified.
The boy looked into the hardlined and unsympathetic face of a policeman, glaring daggers at him. The all-too familiar flash of red and blue lights, and the shrieking of the sirens was all around him again now. Then he heard the dreaded words he thought he had escaped when he sprang on the urging of his premonition;
“Son, you’re under arrest.”