Behind the wall

I wake the same way I always do. Slowly. Like something’s dragging me up from the bottom of a dark lake, pulling me through layers of nothing until I break the surface and remember…

There’s nothing to remember.

Stone. That’s the first thing I see. Cold stone pressed against the flat of my back, the ridges of my shoulder blades, the curve of my spine. I know this stone. I know the way it smells—like damp earth and old iron—and I know exactly how many cracks run across the ceiling. I’ve counted them more times than I can say. Forty-three or forty-four, depending on whether you count the thin one near the corner that splits halfway. It can’t seem to decide what it wants to be.

Today, I decide not to count them.

The chain shifts when I try to sit up. A sound I know as well as breathing. They run from thick iron cuffs at my wrists and ankles to bolts set deep in the wall. They’re not long enough to let me stand. Not long enough to reach the door. Just barely long enough to sit with my back against the wall, knees drawn to my chest.

The symbols carved into the cuffs glow faintly. They always glow. A dull amber-gold, like embers refusing to go out. I’ve stared at them for who knows how long, and still, I don’t know what they mean. The lines are deliberate and intricate, wound through each other like sentences in a language I almost recognize. I run my thumb along one; my skin hums. Not painfully. Just a low, steady vibration, like a note held too long.

I don’t remember who put them on me. I don’t remember much of anything before this place, which I understand—on some quiet, half-formed level—is wrong. People are supposed to have befores. A childhood. A name someone gave them. A face they love.

I have the stone. The chains. And the forty-three cracks.

I have whatever this is.

The hatch at the bottom of the door is rusted iron, about the size of two hands placed side by side. For a long time, it opened every day. A plate would slide through. Sometimes bread—the dense, grey kind that sticks to the roof of your mouth. Sometimes something that might have been meat once, in a previous life. I ate it all without thinking too hard about what it was.

The hatch hasn’t opened today.

I try to remember when it opened last. Two days ago? Three? Time moves strangely here. There’s no window, no change in the light. Just the torches in the corridor beyond the door, flickering orange through the gap at the bottom, throwing long shadows that drift and disappear. I’ve tried to use them to measure time. It doesn’t work. They burn without burning down.

I used to scratch marks into the wall. Little lines, four, then a cross through them, the way I’d seen done somewhere. I made it to twenty-three before I realized I couldn’t remember whether I’d slept between some of the marks or not. I stopped after that. The marks are still there. I try not to look at them.

From somewhere down the corridor, a chain shifts and clanks. Not mine.

Someone else is here.

They have been for a while. I can’t hear them breathe or speak. Only the occasional drag of iron against stone, the low sound of weight shifting. I’ve never called out to them. I’m not sure why. Maybe I’m afraid they won’t answer, and that would prove I’m truly alone.

The chain sounds again. I close my eyes and listen to it, the way you might listen to rain when there’s nothing else.

It starts in my shoulder blades.

It always starts there. A warmth that blooms without warning, like pressing a bruise you’d forgotten about. I go still when I feel it, the way prey goes still when it senses something larger nearby. It doesn’t hurt. That’s almost worse. It feels like something waking up inside me.

I breathe through it. In and out. The warmth spreads, reaches the edges of my spine, and then…

Movement. Beneath my skin.

Not possible. Not possible, not real. You’re imagining it.

It passes. It always passes. I’m left with my heart racing and my wrists burning faintly where the cuffs sit, as though they noticed whatever just happened and formed their own opinions about it.

I press my back hard against the wall and breathe until my heart slows.

There’s something else, too. Not my shoulder blades. Behind my eyes, occasionally. A pressure that builds and recedes like a tide. When it’s strong enough, I start seeing things at the edge of my vision. Flickers of color, shapes that dissolve before I can name them. Once, just once, I thought I saw wings. Black as ash. Enormous.

And then black, absolute black, where someone’s eyes should have been.

I don’t know what that means. I’ve decided not to think about it, which is completely impossible because the image is always there, waiting behind my thoughts like a word I can’t stop trying to remember.

I press my palms together, feel the hum of the symbols, and stare at the forty-three cracks in the ceiling.

I don’t count them.

I must sleep, because when I come back to myself, the torchlight in the gap under the door has changed. Dimmer. Or maybe I’m imagining it.

Then it goes out.

All of it, all at once. The orange glow that has been the only constant, the only warmth in this place, simply vanishes. The dark that replaces it is total. I can’t see my own hands. I can’t see the symbols. I can’t see anything.

Has the world finally escaped you?

I blink hard, once, twice, three times, trying to force my eyes to adjust, but there’s nothing to adjust to. No gradation, no shadow within shadow, just void. I lift my hands toward my face, feel the chain pull taut, and wave them where I think they should be visible. I catch the faintest thread of amber at my wrist and understand. The torches outside are just gone. Fear leaves as fast as it came.

The silence is different now.

I sit up straighter, chains shifting, and listen. Somewhere deep in the dark, far away, there’s a sound. Low and irregular. A rumble, like the building clearing its throat.

Then, clearer: voices. Raised. Shouting in a language I don’t know, sharp and guttural and urgent.

Then something that sounds very much like an impact. Then another.

I press myself back against the wall. My shoulder blades burn. My wrists hum. The dark presses in from all sides like something with weight and intention, and somewhere down the corridor, the other chain goes completely, finally still.

The silence that follows is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.

Something is coming.

For the first time since I can remember, I’m not sure whether that’s terrible or not.