J. Mitchell - The Severed Tower

Ravan watched Mira squirm. “Don’t make too much out of it, you were just in my way.”

The dark around them was thick and weighted, and the girls’ flashlights painted the interior with circular globes of brightness. It was another concrete square, like the shaft they were just in, but bigger, thirty feet across at least. In the dusty air, Mira could see strange, hulking shadows on the floor. The closest one was a large rectangular shape covered in a thick layer of gray dust, but there were still patches of soft green that showed through. Small pockets sat along its edges, three on each side, evenly spaced, and several wooden rods lay haphazardly on its top.

Ravan recognized it before Mira. “A pool table.”

All around them more and more shadows were revealed. Two arcade games, an old television set, a refrigerator, movie posters—all of it dust-covered and falling apart where it stood.

“It’s a rec room,” Mira realized out loud.

Ravan grabbed one of the old pool balls on the table… but it didn’t budge. She pulled harder. Nothing. It was as if it was seared in place.

“Those won’t move,” Mira told her. “They’re artifacts now.”

Ravan looked at her. “These pool balls are artifacts?”

“Everything in here is. When the Strange Lands formed, it fused them to whatever they were touching. Takes work getting artifacts back to the world.”

Mira studied the room closer. It only had one other exit, straight ahead of them. This door, unlike the first, already yawned open, framing more of the heavy darkness that lay beyond.

The dust was getting thicker. Mira took the pullover she was wearing off her T-shirt, and wrapped it around her nose and mouth. Ravan did the same. It seemed to help, though Mira’s eyes still stung. There was nothing to do about that.

“You know, eighty percent of dust is human skin,” Ravan observed.

“I could have done without knowing—” Mira cut off as the arcade machines suddenly flickered to life, their dust-covered screens lighting the room in pale, crackling, blue light. The girls jumped in fright as the television behind them lit up in a burst of static.

Mira’s heart beat frantically. “Damn.”

Ravan looked around them at the flickering screens and machines. “This place still has power.”

“Yeah, but how? Generator?”

“One hell of a generator, to still be working after a decade.”

Mira moved for one of the arcade games and brushed off handfuls of grime. Underneath the screen flashed and flickered; the image was scattered and fragmented, but she could still make it out. A list of high scores scrolled up and down.

“If we’re trapped, at least we’ll have something to do,” Ravan said.

Mira almost smiled. It was easy to forget the girl had been a razor’s edge away from killing her a few minutes ago. And Mira remembered why. “I don’t believe you, you know. Holt wasn’t in the Menagerie.”

Ravan shook her head in contempt. “You certainly are naïve about how things work, aren’t you? Must come from living in this crazy, fantasy world.” She touched more pool balls, all of them melded to the table. “I live in the real world—where survival is everything and nothing is pretty or fair. If you know Holt at all, you know he lives there, too.”

Ravan was partly right, of course. That was exactly who Holt had been when Mira met him, but he’d become much more than that. Hadn’t he?

“Holt was not in the Menagerie,” she insisted.

“You’re right. He wasn’t,” Ravan admitted, “but, he almost was.”

Mira hesitated, staring at the black-haired girl, unsure. “What does that mean?”

“It means that things, as they often do, got complicated. And when they did, Holt ran. He left everything… and everyone.” Mira wasn’t sure, but she thought she detected a slight note of bitterness in the girl’s voice. “And that, as they say, was that.”

Something moved in the hallway outside, past the room’s other door.

Both girls spun, aiming their lights—but now there was nothing, only shadows.

Mira felt her pulse quicken. “You heard that, right?”

Ravan nodded and unslung the rifle from her shoulder.

“Don’t bother,” Mira said. “There’s not much in the Strange Lands a gun’s good for.”

“I’ll hold onto it all the same, thanks.”

Slowly, carefully, they moved for the hallway, Mira wielding her flashlight, Ravan her rifle. One step. Two. And then Mira stopped as a sudden wave of dizziness filled her head. It was so sudden, she almost lost her footing. It lasted a few seconds—and then receded.

When Mira looked at Ravan, she was clutching one of the old arcade games for support. “You, too?” Ravan asked.

Mira nodded. Whatever had just happened, it had made both her and Ravan dizzy at the same time, which meant it was environmental. A thought tried to rise in her mind, an important one, but she lost it. As though she knew exactly what had happened, but couldn’t remember.

Mira and Ravan moved into a hallway of more concrete, that held only dust and shadows. The girls’ flashlights scanned around it. It had a few more doors on the sides, another one at the far end that looked like thick, reinforced metal, and that was it. The hall was empty.

“No. There was something here,” Ravan said. “I know there was.”

There was movement in the corner of their eyes, like a black, floating ooziness.

They both spun, lights raising—and realized they were looking back into the rec room. Like before, it was empty; just the old pool table and the dim light from the same screens.

“That’s impossible,” Ravan said tightly. “We were just in there. It was empty.”

More sounds from behind them. They spun again, their lights illuminating the inside of an old shower room. Something globulous and dark disappeared as their light found it. Or was it a trick of the eye?

“What’s going on?” Ravan asked.

The dizziness swept over Mira again. She didn’t lose her balance this time, she just shut her eyes and tried to think. Making her mind concentrate was difficult all of a sudden. Her thoughts came at a glacial pace or not at all, dissolving away before they materialized. She knew what this was, she was sure of it, but it was so hard to remember…

Mira unslung her Lexicon and set it on the floor. She unlocked the big book with her necklace and ripped it open, flashlight in her mouth. She turned to the binder of Unstable Anomalies, flipping through them almost in a panic. Corkscrew. Corporeal Flux. Corporeal Ice. Dark Energy. Dark Matter Tornado. Dark—

Dark Energy! She ripped open the section, studying it, fingers tracing the pages of notes and equations, and as she did everything she remembered about the Anomaly came back to her, and it was all very, very bad. “Oh, God…”

“What?” Ravan demanded.

Mira shut the Lexicon and slipped the strap over her head. “Turn off your light.”

Ravan stared at her like she was insane.

“Do it!” Mira told her sternly. “I’m going to turn mine off, too. For just a second. When I turn it back on, you do the same.”

“Why?” Ravan flipped off her light. The illumination diminished by half.

“There’s something I need to see. Just pray I’m wrong.”

Mira took a deep breath—and then flipped off her own light. Everything went completely, utterly dark.

And in that darkness, shapes were revealed.

Floating bubbles of blackness in all shapes and sizes, all throughout the air, bouncing in slow motion into each other. So dark they somehow stood out.

And other things. Worse things. Things roughly humanoid —but not.