I felt time rush forward, and as it surged, the force of it was pulling me apart. I was myself. I was Marie. I was her father. My mind and soul stretched between all three, but I felt myself being dragged into the last. The man named Solomon who still mourned his wife and daughter, but had been willing to work for their murderers all the same.
I caught glimpses of the next few years. Flashes of his new tasks in the lower echelons of some group called The Kin. He had worked for them before without knowing, but now he was on the inside, learning and doing impossible and terrible things, and I could feel his ambition and excitement, his fear and self-hatred.
This last was always strongest when he visited the woods. His daughter’s grave. The memorial site for the day he gave up the last of his soul out of cowardice and greed. The fact that he hated himself made me like him slightly more, but I still relished his suffering. Not just because he betrayed his family’s memory, but because of all he’d done since in the name of necessity. And because in those moments when I forgot that I was reliving memories, I was him, and I knew in my heart that I deserved every drop of self-loathing.
When Solomon first started visiting the site, it was just a freshly covered hole that slowly filled in with grass. It wasn’t until the fifth year that he started to notice the change. At first it seemed like the grass was giving way to a rock formation of some kind. Solomon thought it was being uncovered due to erosion, but he couldn’t see any signs of it anywhere else. Seeming noteworthy enough to report, he did so, and when he asked for a response, he got none.
By the end of the next year, he saw it wasn’t just natural rock pushing up past the grass. It was flat, smoothly carved slabs of marble, and when he began to experimentally dig around on the surface a bit, he saw there was much more down there. That afternoon he got a call from Kalinsky. The doctor told him his job was not to dig or interfere with the process. Merely to observe and to report. To visit his daughter every day without fail.
Things progressed faster after that. In less than two years from when he’d been told to stop digging, the place had become a fully-formed stairway that led down to a red metal door. Above it, a green-lettered sign said Mind the gap.
Solomon felt the breath go out of him as recognition flooded him. He’d been watching this all grow impossibly out of the earth for months, but it was only now that he realized the why of it.
This was the place. The tube station where Marie had been taken. Where she’d watched her mother die. Recreated in exacting detail by…what? The dead girl laying down in the ground somewhere?
Maybe. Or maybe she was behind that door, just waiting for him…for me…to go and finally get her out. Choking back tears, I reached for the knob and felt both relief and fear when it turned. I knew better than to go in. The sign, the door, these features had just grown in overnight, and even if there was something behind it, my superiors would never be okay with me just going in. Whatever this was, it was all too important to them. And yet…
And yet it was still my little girl they stuck down in the dark. And maybe this was her way of helping me find her again. So fuck them.
I turned the knob further and opened the door. I wasn’t surprised when I saw the dark outlines of the hall leading into Marie’s remembered version of the London Underground behind it. The door itself, the sign over it in that way…none of that actually existed at the tube station when Marie was taken. And as I went further in, I saw other oddities and lapses.
The map on the far wall of the hallway had no station names, for instance. And as I went on into the station proper, I saw advertisements that were blurred beyond recognition. It was strange—most everything was faintly visible, though how I didn’t know, as there were no lights on anywhere that I could see. But stranger yet were the dark patches. Walking onto the dead train I saw more of those, and it suddenly occurred to me what they were.
They were parts of this remembered world that Marie couldn’t see on that day. Almost every detail of that place had been seared into my little girl when she was taken and her mother was murdered, but only those details she could see. Whatever she was now, wherever she was, there were still gaps of darkness in her incredible creation because she hadn’t been on the train that killed her mother, hadn’t likely made it to the far end of the platform that lay similarly cloaked in shadow.
At the end of the day, despite all her wondrous power in that grave, she was still a terrified little girl that couldn’t forget the day her life was taken away.
Sobbing, I began calling out to her. I knew it was stupid. She was long dead, and whatever part of her still lived, that still gave this place form, was beyond knowing me or even being human. I’d told myself that for years, every day that I came out to this damned place, and I’d almost come to believe it. But here and now, in this place, I was…
I was in the mind of a terrified little girl, and it was all my fault.
“Marie? Where’s my Marie?” My voice sounded hoarse and shrill as I called out to her, and when it returned to me, it was distorted and strange. “M-“
“She’s not here, Solomon.”
Letting out a startled cry, I turned to see a small, keen-faced man pointing a gun at me. In the eldritch not-light of that place, I didn’t recognize him, but I still knew who he was. He was like me. A tool of The Kin. Sent to stop me from breaking my leash.
“Oh no. She’s here. She built all of this, you see.”
The man rolled his eyes at me. “I’m aware. But I’m on a very limited time table, so you need to go with me now.”
I frowned at him. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to see what my daughter can show me.”
Letting out a sigh, the man gestured to his cheek. A reddish-black stain lay across it, and as I watched, it seemed to ripple and spread closer to his nose. “I don’t have time for this bullshit. I know you have enough clearance for what I’m about to say, so let me be blunt. I’m not from here. And the process they used to send me over…well, I don’t have much time if I’m going to have a chance of making it back at all.”
“You’re talking about the Bowl, aren’t you?”
He smirked. “See, I knew you knew some stuff. Though I think that’s above your paygrade. So what I’ll tell you is this—in the where I’m from, there’s another guy named Solomon. He’s my boss. And he told me to come over here personally and take care of this. I have a place already set up, but I’m about to get improvisational if you don’t come with me right now.”
I stared at him for a moment, dumbfounded. “So this…this other me sent you to…what? Kidnap me?” I glared at him. “Because you can go back now and tell him that this is my world and my job and my da-“
The man cocked the gun. “No, you still don’t get it. You’re done. You’ve done your part. And my boss? He says one of him is enough.”
And that’s when he shot me in the head.
I sat up, gasping, feeling my head for a gunshot wound as I looked around in the dark train station. Somehow I was back on the platform, and I…I wasn’t Solomon. I was me. I was…
There was light coming from the dark mouth of the train tunnel.
Standing up, I began walking shakily along the platform, but I couldn’t get a view of what was glowing without getting back down onto the track. Even then, I had to walk on into the tunnel proper before the source of the light started to come into view around the bend.
It was a door. A red door twice the size of the entrance to The Burning Hour, and ornately carved from something that looked like red bone shot through with webbed lines of glowing silver. This door…this thing…it was worse than the station. It led to something worse than the station. I had to get away, I had to go knock and ask to get out and get away from this place before…
From somewhere behind the door, a bell chimed out, cold and clear.
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Credits
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