Decay Inevitable

“Do you think it’s safe to be here?” Emma asked.

He turned to her; she was watching his face. “I’m sure it is,” he soothed. “How bad can their monsters be? I’m sure they’re just seeing little flashes of what it’s like back where we’re from. Maybe they’ve forgotten. They see a bus or a plane and, well, if you didn’t know what they were, I’m sure you’d be scared too.”

“I am scared.”

Sean kicked her playfully in the seat of her jeans. “Come on. We’ve got to find a door.”

They moved around again to what Sean guessed must have been the rear of the building, abutting as it did the edge of a thicket of dense purple and green reeds. There was no obvious route up to any of the windows, which were, in any case, much too narrow to squeeze through. Sean was about to suggest that there might be a more prosaic means of entry, similar to their passage to Tantamount, when Emma noticed the stream.

It was a paltry affair, piddling between the reeds like urine pissed into the woods by a drunken camper. Yet it was constant, and it ran down through the thicket to a point where it met the ziggurat and ended. They spent five minutes dragging away the reeds and ferns that were clustered around the base of the ziggurat. A metal grille, badly corroded, framed the water’s route into the building; they could see the trickle disappear into a throat of black. Sean worked his fingers between the struts in the grille but he didn’t need to pry it off: it broke under pressure.

“I don’t think I can go in,” Emma said.

“It’s okay,” Sean assured her, snapping more pieces of rusted metal. “We have an escape route, don’t we? We can pull ourselves out of it at any point.”

“I don’t like it. I just don’t. The thought of pushing myself down a tunnel. We might get trapped.”

“Are you listening to me?” Sean asked, pausing to look at her. She was sitting back on her haunches, her hands clasped in front of her, arms outstretched, as if she were offering him her wrists to be bound. “We can get out at any point. Whether it’s monsters or claustrophobia or a need to pee. We can do it.”

Emma breathed deeply and nodded. “Okay.”

Once Sean had cleared a hole big enough to accommodate his shoulders, he edged his feet over the hole and slid into it until he was half-way through, keeping his body levered upright with his hands either side of the grille.

“It might be that once I let go,” he said, “I’ll go very quickly. It feels as though it’s pretty well greased up underfoot. So come in soon after me, yes?”

Emma nodded.

Sean blew her a kiss and lifted his arms.

There was no light whatsoever. But there was plenty of sound, the sluicing of the water and the hiss and chatter of unseen animals nesting in little ledges and bunkers off the main chute. The clank and throb of machinery was closer, echoing through the tunnel, causing it to vibrate as Sean slithered along on his backside, trying to keep himself from going into a spin. He heard Emma close behind him, yelping as the tunnel took unexpected turns left or right. Sean only became aware that the sides of the tunnel were closing around him when the water started showering the top of his head instead of providing a frictionless cushion for his back. He hit his head twice against the metal duct, but even though he drew his body in as tight as he could, he was slowing down. Emma’s feet slammed against his crown and he saw stars for a second. When everything became clear again, they were stuck and Emma was wailing.

“This is fucking it,” she cried. “We’re going to be here for ever.”

“Relax,” Sean said. “We’ll opt out, easy, and then we’ll come back in again and try to find another way. Portion of micturate, as we used to say at my posh school.”

Emma said, “Okay, okay, okay, okay.”

Sean pressed the cuff of his sweater against his mouth and felt for the pin secreted there. He withdrew it with his teeth and transferred it to the thumb and forefinger of his left hand.

“Ready?” he asked.

“Too fucking right,” Emma said. He smelled her breath, hot and sour with panic. He stuck the pin into the thin flesh of his wrist, relishing the bright pain and the tiny bubble of blood that appeared there.

“Fucking Einstein,” Emma said, her voice screechy with panic. “Fucking Einstein.”

Sean tried again, using the point of the needle to score his skin rather than puncture it. A beaded line of blood popped onto the surface. The pipe did not retreat, nor did it resolve itself as something else from the world he preferred.

“Something’s not right here,” he said. “Something’s gone wrong.”

Emma wasn’t listening to him. She was thrashing around like a beached fish. He reached up and tried to stroke her legs, imbue her with some of the impossible calm that he was feeling, but she wasn’t having any of it.