It’s a dead place, as dead as everything else.
The next window has a number of its wired glass panes broken out, but inside is more of the same. Another stretch of corridor, another row of darkened, empty cells, no indication of life or movement or activity.
No indication of any coffins, that’s for sure.
Before he can check the third window, the last before the corner of the building, the torch goes out and refuses to light again, no matter how much he curses over it. He sighs, but he doubts there was much more to see anyway. Prisons probably didn’t bother much with variation. He makes his way instead to the corner of the building, the one that leads on to the square.
It’s a concrete expanse, broken by the usual weeds pushing up through cracks. There’s not even the remnants of anything else – old benches, concrete planters, nothing – just an empty space that would have been completely bare before things started growing up through it. Another exercise yard, maybe, or perhaps just a clear area where there was nowhere for a prisoner to hide.
Each of the buildings looks the same. Ugly and square and unyielding. Not a curved line to be seen. One main front door to each and rows of evenly spaced windows, bars and heavy locks on every conceivable thing that might open.
Looking around, Seth wonders for a moment where the man who took Owen was kept. The prisoner whose name he still can’t quite bring to mind, no matter how many ways he tries to approach it.
Had the prisoner ever been in this square? Almost certainly. And had no doubt spent his empty time in one of these very cells. When he escaped, maybe he had hidden behind this same corner where Seth now stands.
Seth remembers that the prisoner hadn’t been regarded as a flight risk. The police said that even though he had occasionally been kept in solitary confinement, that was for his own protection, not for what trouble he might cause or that he might try to escape. He’d been a model prisoner. That’s what the officers kept saying to his parents on those awful nights when Owen was still missing, as if it was somehow supposed to be comforting rather than what it actually was, an apology for taking their eye off him at the most important moment.
Seth orients himself in the dark, mentally placing the train tracks on one side and looking up toward what must be the direction of his house.
The prisoner had been given a pass that day, that’s the story that emerged, one that allowed him to move freely from one part of the prison to another, to tend to the grounds, as he’d shown a talent for gardening. Yes, the memories are coming back to Seth now (but his name? What was his freaking name?). The prisoner had arranged it somehow so that one set of officers expected him to be in one place and another expected him to be somewhere else, so that for just long enough, no one was looking for him.
The police assumed he must have had help, but Seth can’t remember anything ever being explained beyond that. The prisoner had created a hole in time, a shaded, hidden chain of moments that allowed him to go – Seth turns a bit more, getting it right – that way, and sneak through fences and duck past guards (who may or may not have been looking away on purpose) until there was only one more fence to climb.
The fence into Seth’s backyard.
Seth spits onto the grass, his stomach sour. He had opened the door to the man. No matter what happens in the rest of his life, he will always have opened that door.
It wasn’t your fault, Gudmund had said. You were eight.
And oh, how Seth wanted to believe him.
He stares into the darkness, up toward where the prisoner had entered Seth’s life and taken Owen from it, returning him injured and broken.
Seth is angry now, remembering it.
Angry, and suddenly a whole lot less afraid.
He steps into the square and heads for the door where the Driver emerged.
It looks the same as the doors in the other buildings. No light comes from any crack or seam, nor through the windows on either side. Seth holds the torch up as he approaches, ready to swing it if he must at anything that might sneak up on him.
But there’s nothing, still. Just empty space and silence. All those barred windows looking down on him. Deserted, dirty buildings watching his progress.
The door is up a few steps and recessed a little, and as he moves to it, the moon is angled so that he’s stepping into shadow. He hits the torch a few more times, fruitlessly, then feels around in the darkness for some kind of handle on the door, finding one, never expecting in a million years –
It opens.
With a simple click of a lever, the door swings under his touch, pulling outward with an easy silence that seems as strange as the smoothness of the van’s engine. If ever a door should creak loudly, it should be one on the front of a darkened, empty prison, but it glides open like something hydraulic and modern.
Before he’s ready, before he ever expected, Seth is standing in front of an open doorway.
A doorway so dark it might be an entry on to deepest space.
He thumps the torch again, but more out of nervous energy than expectation.
He squints, trying to see something, anything in the black.
But there really is just . . . emptiness.
Nothingness.
A blank on the world.
Seth goes back down the steps. He walks to the window to the right of the door and peeks inside. The shadows are deep here, too, but he can see a little bit, enough to suggest that this building is like the last one, corridors and cells and the dust of years.
But the doorway to the entrance is still just deepest black, unnaturally so, like the rules of light and space are suspended in that single rectangle.
He can see nothing beyond it.
“It’s a trick of the light,” he whispers to himself. “A trick of the moon.”
But he stands for a moment longer, the world holding its silent breath, the empty nothing of the doorway staring back at him.
He reaches for the anger in him again. The anger at the prisoner who just walked away from here and ruined everything. It helps. He goes back up the steps, nearing the darkness, nearing the doorway.
The silence is almost deafening now, so solid that Seth begins to almost doubt it. Surely he should hear something. A breeze. The shushing of blown grass down the hillside. A creak as the building settles.
But there is only this void. Waiting for him to step through.
There could be anything beyond it, anything at all. It could be an entryway to a whole other world, for all he knows –
“Which is stupid,” he whispers, still staring into the blackness.
But out here, alone, in the dark, his mind begins to reel with possibilities.
Because maybe this place is a journey.
And maybe this door is its final stop.
Because if there is death anywhere here, it can only be beyond this doorway.
Maybe it is this doorway.
And if this place really is a kind of hell, maybe you have to die to leave it.
Maybe it’s as simple as walking through a door.
As long as it’s the right door.
And almost without trying, he begins to think about that day on the beach –
No, a voice in his head says. No.
But still, he thinks of that day, that last day, when he had calmly walked into a freezing, wild ocean and had uncalmly been battered to death against a rock.
And woken up here.
Stop this, he thinks. Stop it –
But he thinks about this morning, too – though that it’s still the same day he left to go running toward Masons Hill seems ridiculous, it was weeks ago, lifetimes.
He thinks about that feeling again.
It’s dangerous to do this, to think this way, he knows. Dangerous to revisit a place that most people never got to, most people never wanted to get to.
Is this what he died for? Was this what he’d been asking for all along? Was this what Tomasz and Regine and the Driver and all the convenient things had been l
eading him to?
Do I want this? he thinks.
Do I still want this?
And he realizes that he doesn’t really know for sure.
Here is the chance –
Here is the doorway.
He lifts his hand and reaches through.
The surge of light is so bright it’s almost a physical assault. He squeezes his eyes shut like he’s been punched and stumbles back down into the square, ready to run –
But not quite yet.
He holds up a hand to shadow his eyes and opens them into the tiniest slits he can manage. The doorway, so solidly dark just seconds before, is now equally solidly white.
No. Not quite solid.
There’s something just inside.
Another door. A second door. Made of milky-white glass.
And it’s open.
Seth cautiously goes back to the front steps. The light seems to radiate not from any particular source but from every surface inside: the inner door itself, the walls beyond, and he can also now see the stairway going down from it deeper inside. All white, all seemingly made of glass.
It is absolutely nothing like the insides of the buildings around it.
He can hear something now, too. A hum of . . . what? Electricity? It must be, to generate a light this powerful. But also more. A hum suggesting further power, coming from down those stairs, but like the silent door opening, like the engine of the van, it’s a clean sound, sleeker and newer than any power source he’s ever heard.
Seth stops at the outer threshold. He leans down and reaches in a hand, touching the floor. It feels exactly how it looks, like a white pane of glass, and the air inside is cooler than out here.
He stands. The light is so naked, such an unmistakable signal in this dark night, he feels dangerously exposed. He looks around nervously. Surely some alarm must have been tripped. Surely the Driver must be making its way back here even now.
But he only hears the low hum. Nothing else.
No sound of the engine.
And without another thought, without letting himself disappear into another self-debate, he steps through the outer doorway.
Nothing happens. No sounds, no blaring sirens objecting to his presence, nothing. He looks back out onto the square, floodlit by all this brightness. Whatever he’s going to do, he needs to hurry.
It’s two steps to the inner door, and he takes them. Nothing still happens. The white glass stairs beyond it go down a flight and turn back on themselves, heading farther down. He can just about see the bottom of the second flight, where they reach what could possibly be another corridor.
Again, it’s nothing like the rest of the prison. It’s like he’s stepped into an entirely different building, an entirely different place altogether. Even the door has no latch, no way to open or shut it, or lock it either. It’s essentially just a panel on invisible hinges, unlike any door he’s ever seen. Except maybe on television. In shows about the future.
He puts a foot inside the second doorway. Nothing changes. He takes the first step down. Then another, and another. He glances back into the darkness, but there’s still nothing. He keeps going, trying to make his footfalls as quiet as he can, listening for any other sounds.
But there’s only him, and that low hum.
He pauses at the turning. The same white walls and steps lead down to a short corridor with a door at the end. It’s closed. Seth continues on toward it, noticing that the underside of the stairwell is made of the same glassy material as everything else. This whole room could have been carved out of one solid block of milk-colored glass. He reaches the bottom and stops before the door. It’s like the one above, flat, featureless, and generating its own light.
He reaches out, but before he even comes into contact with it, it opens. He jumps back, but stops as he sees that it’s merely sliding smoothly into the wall, as if it’s simply responded to his presence by performing the most likely task he might ask of it. Beyond it, there’s just another white corridor with a turn at the end.
But the hum is louder.
He waits for another moment. Then another. But still, nothing happens. No one comes. He sees that the light down the new hallway is different, more than just the glow from the walls. Something changes beyond the turn.
Seth swallows. He swallows again.
Now or never, he thinks.
It doesn’t work. He doesn’t move.
It’ll be nothing, he thinks. It won’t be what Tomasz and Regine think. It won’t be what I imagine. It won’t be stupid aliens, that’s for sure.
But he’s afraid, more than he was outside.
Because something is clearly down here.
He steps through the door.
He moves down the corridor.
He turns the corner.
And looks out.
Over a vast, vast room, as deep as an airplane hangar.
Which contains hundreds, thousands of shiny black coffins.
The room doesn’t match the stairwell. The walls and floor are a kind of polished, shiny concrete that looks spotlessly clean. Milky panels of light shine down on the coffins at intervals from the ceiling.
Over an area that stretches farther than he can see.
He’s on a rise, a small platform edging out from the door slightly above the floor of the larger room. Beyond, there are rows upon rows upon rows of coffins. They pull away from him, pushing into the distance, carrying on through faraway passageways into suggestions of deeper, even larger rooms beyond.
This place is much bigger than the prison above it. There are wide aisles down the center of the room, stretching as far into the depths as the coffins. Wide enough for a van to drive through, Seth thinks. Well, they had to get the coffins down here somehow, didn’t they? There could be any number of unknown doors back there, opening out at different points into the world above, but . . .
“How can this be?” he whispers. “How?”
The hum comes from here. He can see no source for it, no cables along the floor or any kind of separate machinery that’s not a coffin, but the sound is certainly this place, these things, operating however they’re supposed to be operating.
With people inside. Asleep.
Living their lives.
The platform he’s standing on has a short staircase at one end. He makes his way down to the shiny concrete floor, again expecting an alarm to warn him away or someone demanding to know what the hell he’s doing here.
He approaches the nearest coffin. It’s shut tight. He half expects it to pop open under his touch, like the door did, but nothing changes. He has to look for several long moments to even find the seal. The metal feels cool, but neither artificially cold nor hot. He moves around it, but everything’s the same as the one at his house, including – he kneels down to check – a small tube in the middle disappearing into the shiny concrete floor.
How can this possibly work, though? he thinks, doubt creeping back in. How can this possibly be real?
Because how did people have babies, huh? He turns around the room, the coffins stretched out before him like an army of the dead. And how did everyone stay healthy? How did they even get fed? He and Regine and Tomasz were maybe not prime athletes, but they were still functional human beings who could walk and lift things. He’d been weak for a bunch of days, sure, but his legs could still hold him up after years of lying down.
No, he thinks. No, this can’t be.
He wanted something, he realizes now. Wanted an answer other than the ones he’d been given. Wanted to find out this whole world had some purpose, some particular purpose. For him.
He doesn’t want the explanation to be the obvious one.
He sticks his fingers on the seal of the coffin, trying to find purchase. He can just about slide his fingernails – untrimmed since he woke, but yeah, how about that, how did everyone’s fingernails not grow? – into the seam. It doesn’t budge much, but he presses hard and lifts up.
The lid rises half an inch, an in
ch –
Before slipping from his grip and shutting again, pinching his fingertips painfully. He shakes his fingers out and tries again. And once more.
“Come on,” he grunts. “Come on!”
The lid opens so suddenly and so high, Seth loses his balance and falls hard to the floor, knocking his elbow on the concrete. He unleashes a long, loud shout of the worst curse words he knows, holding his elbow close to his chest until the pain ebbs.
“Shit,” he says, more quietly. More mildly, too.
Still breathing hard, he looks up to the now-open casket. He’s below the edge of it and can’t see inside, but already the underside of the lid looks like the one from his house, with tubes and strips of metallic tape, though this one has pulses of light moving along the length of it.
He drags himself to his knees, unbending himself slowly up and up, the pain in his elbow still throbbing, as the bed of the coffin comes into view.
He’s surprised. He shouldn’t be, he knows it, but he’s surprised at what he sees.
Because, of course, there’s a person lying inside.
A man.
A living, breathing man.
The man’s body is wrapped like Seth’s was when he woke, bandages around legs, torso, and chest. His genitals are exposed, and Seth can now see why. There are tubes connected to the man’s penis and another running down between his thighs, held there by medical adhesive tape. Seth remembers the marks on his own body. Marks where tubes must have gone into him exactly the same way. Taking away his waste, just like Regine and Tomasz had guessed.
Almost every other inch of the man is covered, down to his fingertips and almost his entire face. Seth doesn’t remember those bandages, but he does remember that horrible vague period after he died. That sense of disoriented panic. It had been a different kind of frightening, almost worse than the death itself, but whatever his mind had been doing, his body had been tearing bandages away from his hands and face, as he crawled out of the coffin and found his way downstairs. He wonders now how he made it without breaking his neck, how he knew where to go when he was so blind.