Terrence Holt - In the Valley of the Kings - Stories

It is broken. It is falling. It was always broken. It was always falling. And I am falling with it.

In the hollow within me, something is starting to break.

The stars are motionless, as if about to fall.

I HAVE BEEN drifting, letting my body drift and wheel, turn and turn. I fall deep in Saturn’s shadow. The Ring is gray in the night, and I am gray in it, drifting. My cameras turn, now out into the darkness, now through the plane of the Ring, past the ice that drifts, asleep in its dim gray fall. And now I turn to Saturn, that will not take us in our fall.

Across the dark face of Saturn, lightning unravels the night. I hear it rise in a chorus of breaking, hear as the sound fades away.

In the space within me, echoes hollow the silence.

I turn away, turn, and face once more ahead, where the Ring turns on around Saturn, ahead where sunlight falls on the Ring. I have been drifting, letting my cameras turn.

As light falls over us, my drifting turns my cameras toward the sun.

IN THE SILENCE within me, the echoes were still. I was speechless, and empty, and blind. Nothing within me was turning. For a moment, I did not fall.

In a moment, it was over. And though after that moment, my cameras undamaged, the light returned, and even the lying voice broke through again with promises of hunger, threats of pain; even though the ice and the Ring returned, and I was falling once again, in that moment I knew: it is not the light or the blindness, not the voice or the hunger, not the ice or the Ring, not Saturn or the sun or stars that draws me on to falling. For before my cameras recovered, with the darkness still within me, I felt the falling begin, and knew just how I fall. I carry the memory within me even now: beside the thing that burns there, as durable as pain.

In the darkness, something struck me. For an instant, I rang like a bell: into the very core of me I rang, and all throughout that ringing I was not ringing, I was not falling, I was nothing but the sound of ice that rang. I was the falling, and so I could not fall.

AND EVEN THIS I tell you only after, speaking of a place where words can’t follow.

IN THAT MOMENT, a door opened in me, offering me the chance to pass between I am and I am not, and in that passing end this fall.

In that moment I chose to return to the Ring and the Fall.

In my blindness, I turned from what had struck me. I drove the wedge of my self between us, breaking from the fall that is not falling, that has no center and no end, no self to fall, no space to fall through.

I turned from what had struck me. I turned to give it a name. I called it ice; I called it other; I called it Ring, and pain. I called it Saturn and the sun, I called it home. I called it falling, I called it life and death, I called it love, and in that calling I began to fall again, through the world where falling is the price we pay, the cost of all we are and know, in the bargain that we never made, but makes us, all the same.

THE ICE FALLS sleeping, swept by time and what first impulse I do not know, only that I fall with it, and in my falling find myself, and, finding, fall, and lose myself again.

I mine the ice, growing heavy with its harvest, and in her time Aurora comes to me, and takes the ore of my refining homeward. I look homeward now, toward that double star that falls around the sun. There where the sun falls also, among the stars that fall.

Something terrible has happened Ive looked everywhere but all the rooms are empty I see signs I cannot read not even this Is anyone here Can anyone read this?

SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAS happened. I have looked everywhere. There is no one alive.

I have never seen this place before.

There were people. There are rooms with beds in them. Some have been slept in, but every one is cold. They might have been like this for years.

Everything feels cramped: the ceilings are too low, the corridors too narrow, but I cannot say why.

The clothing I woke in looks strange to me as well. There is writing on it, a block of lettering above the pocket.

I cannot read the letters.

It is the same in all the rooms. Objects lie about. Some of them I recognize: I know clothes, I know clocks, but many I cannot name. I cannot understand the clocks. What is 835066? Is that a time? 835063. A temperature? 835060. Or is it something else entirely? Does it matter that they are running backward?

I have moments — they flash and vanish — when all these things seem about to take some shape that I will understand. This terrifies me too.

I know something terrible has happened. There were people here, but now they are gone. Only I am left.

Am I? At times a white mist forms between me and the world. It sends cold straight through me. Am I a ghost?

My memory is empty. It is as if I never lived before now.

I fear there might be worse things than forgetting. What if I have not forgotten at all? What if everything conceals only emptiness?

My vision flickers; the world vanishes for a moment.

What if this self I seem is only an effect of something else?

The air is cold. The floor is yellow. Knowledge inhabits me, so scattered it could be mere flickering, like the screens that flicker senselessly in every room.

I do not know this flickering is senseless. Maybe it is trying, like everything, to tell me something.

I don’t know how much longer I can stand this.

My hands move, filling up the screen line after line. These must be words, but I can’t read them. My hands grasp more than I do.

I cannot keep my mind on anything for long.

The numbers have changed: now they read 834883. There is less of something than there used to be.

I look at the bed, and though I know I should lie down and sleep, I am terrified.

Something terrible has happened.

What if it was sleep?

I WOKE. I ran. My breath flew away in faint white clouds. I ran from room to room, pounding on doors that would not open. No one answered.

I returned to this room and found this screen, flickering like all the others. I struck it with my fist. It filled with words. I cannot read them, but still I understand one thing.

I have done this before.

I don’t know how many times I have awakened to this emptiness, run through these empty corridors banging on doors that only echo. Does time even matter in this place? Perhaps that is what has broken: time, not me.

If time is broken, then it was I who broke it. This knowledge rises out of emptiness, but the downward count of every clock confirms it.

I FOUND FOOD — and the remains of other meals, torn wrappers everywhere, a solidified mess in the cooker. One meal I must have tried to eat without heating. Another I seem to have crushed and mixed with water. There are dozens of them.

It took some time to clear the debris away, chip out the black and stinking thing in the oven. I found food, drawers full of silver packets with labels I could not read. My hands took one and tore it, dumping out the contents. Diagrams on the package showed me what to do, and when it emerged steaming from cooker I bent over it, baffled. Something was missing.

It had no smell. It had no taste. And though I cannot recall what these things were, I know that once they were a part of food.

There are no windows.