A World, Forgotten

He stared into his palms, and for a moment, he thought he could see the totality of man’s existence. Etched into his cracked skin, the vermiculate lines crisscrossing and broken, embedded with a history of some forgotten age. A pathway to somewhere. Where do they end? And where did they begin? He stared even more intently, before closing his fists. His knuckles whitened. He continued to clench them tighter, closing his eyes and now he willed it for it to be over. For things to go back to as they had been before. He imagined the streams, bursting with the shimmering scales of the trout that glided beneath its surface. The skies blue, filled with the songs of birds that ached to return to their home. And the acres of forests that that had once spilled across valleys and mountains. A symphony of nature. But he knew none of that existed anymore. He knew. He relaxed his hands and uncurled his body as it sat against the concrete wall. He opened his eyes and gazed, numbly, around the room. This was all that was left to him.

The space itself was sparsely furnished. A single bed with a mattress stood in the corner, next to which a small door led to the lavatory. A metal reinforced door marked the entrance and exit. But it had never been opened since he arrived. He knew it protected him from what lay beyond it. A tomb that conferred life before it claimed it for its own. A thin, rusting divider separated the bedroom from the room in which he now sat. Next to him, a bookshelf – cracked and aging – somberly supported a small selection of books. A layer of dust decorated their surface. He had long ago rea and re-rea each item. He only needed to close his eyes and imagine the words now emblazoned into his memory. If he were asked how long it had been since he last opened those pages, he would have no answer. Time, her gentle overpowering presence, long ceased to have any meaning for him. He had noticed streaks of grey punctuate his shoulder-length hair. And the throbbing pain in his back seemed to grow more potent, his knees weaker. These were the only reminders of her existence. That each moment trundled into the next. But time could no longer be tamed by the calendars and clocks that once sought to claim her every movement. She had been liberated. The man often wondered whether time would cease to exist if there was no one around to keep it. To acknowledge it. Am I the last guardian of time?

The man groaned as he lifted his meagre frame off the cold floor. He limped to a monitor nestled in the corner of the room. A camera outside the man’s abode beamed an image onto the screen. A grainy picture depicted a gently sloping embankment flanked on either side by thornbushes. It was the only image the man had of the outside world. His world reduced to a 10 inch screen. He would watch the screen each day for several minutes. Not to determine signs of life – for that had long been extinguished - but to inject any semblance of order into his routine. To convince himself that the dreary monotony that had come to characterize his quotidian existence could not conquer the last vestiges of purpose he had tried to lend himself. After some time, he tore his eyes from the monitor. As he did so, a sharp ringing cut through the heavy silence. The man froze as a terrible dread settled over him. His eyes remained fixed on the floor in front him as he refused to turn back to the monitor. The ringing continued, taunting him. He tried to ignore it but he could not. Adrenaline helped him move and he slowly turned around. He flicked a switch and the ringing ceased. His eyes madly scoured every inch of the dimly lit screen as he lent closer. Why had the motion sensor been triggered? A thought began to form in his head. He did his best to exile it but it refused to be eradicated. It can’t be. Something twitched at the edge of the screen, just outside of the camera’s view. Slowly, in abject horror, the man watched as an amorphous shape crawled slowly onto the display. The quality of the image was too weak to make anything out. But the shape grew bigger, gently shifting and undulating as it moved into the camera’s focus. The man saw four of them. All hunched, clad in some make-shift rags that left their legs and arms exposed. They shuffled towards the door. Watching these figures move, something troubled him. Were they human? They must be, but at the same time, their humanity seemed perverse. They moved animalistically, each gesturing to the other in bizarre and aberrant mannerisms. They inched slowly across the embankment, eventually coming across the door to the bunker. The blood inside the man’s veins began to run cold. A sense overcame him. One that said that these beings could not be allowed to enter. He stood motionless as he watched the four things examine the door buried in the ground. They touched it with their feet. As they shuffled outside, the man could hear their movements just meters away from him, separated by mere inches of metal. As he observed them, one of the four jerked his head and stared directly into the camera. The man instinctively flinched and backed away. They can’t see you! He regained his composure, his fear climbing to a crescendo. Softly, he inched his way closer to the door. He could hear murmured whispers, in a language he thought familiar but could not make out. Was it even a language? He heard muffled groans, disturbed shrieks. And then the door rattled. The crash of the hinges as the metal entrance was violently shaken settled into a terrible silence. A rising heartbeat punctured the calm, like a metronome counting the implacable tension. A second crash as they attempted to enter again. The man was mute but inside him an urge to scream was beginning to become overpowering. Like a storm that needed to be unleashed. Silence, again. The man turned to look at the monitor, but it showed only the embankment once more. The four figures had vanished.

Whatever mixture of adrenaline and terror had kept him on his feet allowed him only to reach his bed some feet away before he collapsed onto the mattress. His mind tried to fathom what he had just witnessed. And all at once a calamitous cascade of memories hijacked his thoughts: he heard the cries of mothers laying over the dead corpses of their children; he once again saw the hunters whose members claimed to be men but committed acts only the hearts of beasts could conceive; and he witnessed the pallid clouds cast the sullen Earth in shadow forever. He saw all this as he stared upward onto the dreary, blank ceiling. A canvass across which his memories were splashed. A devastating cacophony of colour, where the ashen hues of misery blended with the unyielding blackness of death. Isn’t this but a poor imitation?

In the clearing, a creature lay prostrate upon the blackened Earth. His eyes flickered with colours evoking some maiden paradise, untouched. In his final moments he looked to the heavens – towards the spiteful sun that gazed back. Its merciless heat baking his skin. He cried out, either in pain or in condemnation of his Gods that had abandoned him to this fate. The sound of his despair reverberated across the world, prancing through the turbulent forests, the tumbling ravines, and the silent oceans. Until its resounding tremor became a fragile whisper which limped and died at the edge of some ancient valley. The creature lay down his head. Shuffle him of his mortal coil and be done with it. Smite him and be done with it.

The man had drifted into a fitful sleep and awakened from his dream. He dreamt, often vividly. His mother had once told him that dreams are just memories embellished with desire. He had not understood it at the time, and he hardly understood it now. For what he truly desired was to dream and never wake up at all.

For however much time had passed, the man had begun to stare endlessly at the monitor. He scoured for any sign of those four beings that passed by. He told himself it was to protect himself, to know if he was in any danger. But he knew deep within him what really motivated him: the realization that he was not alone had awakened something in him, something he thought had long left him. Like some dying flicker of candlelight doused in a fountain of petroleum transforming it into a roaring blaze that now consumed every fiber of his being. He had been utterly disturbed by their appearance. Yet, when the fear at their transient voyage subsided, an insatiable longing took its place. He thought that if he gazed intently at the screen, it would somehow manifest his desire. It did not. And the man was left, by the end, drained of some twisted hope that had sought refuge in his barren heart.

He was dreaming again. Or was he remembering? The golden locket swings languidly, as though suspended underwater. It hypnotizes him. Bewitches him. At the zenith of each swing, it catches the sunlight in a dazzling burst so bright it blinds him. Soft fingers gently pry open his small hands and upon it he feels the cool touch of metal. The same fingers wrap his hand around the object.

“Hold on to this for me.” A voice. Sweet and kind. From another lifetime. A gentle murmur responds with a question. He cannot hear it, but he knows what is asked.

“Because my heart will be with you.” The small hand of the boy unfurls to look at the locket. He unlocks it and opens it. A crimson liquid gushes out. He hears a scream and looks up and he sees her. Not as she once was, warm and soothing. Instead, she sits still on a chair in a darkened chamber. Her eyes, lifeless. Her skin, sallow. Her head rests limply against the backrest. She slowly raises it and the whites of her eyes stare at the boy. She opens her mouth, exposing decaying teeth and a demonic scream is unleashed. Her scream becomes his, awakening him and, like the sunrise banishing the last remnants of darkness, the dream turns to ashes.

The man lay silently in the aftermath of his dream. A dream embellished by memory. Almost as if to quell his doubt, he opened his hand to check for the locket. For the blood. Nothing. He often thought about her. How she used to bury him in her arms as he walked through the door. How her fragrance reminded him of a garden surrounded by a sundry hillside. Now she belonged to a world, forgotten. Forsaken. He would have wept but time had taken his tears long ago.

When exactly the idea had fully crystalised, he did not know but he knew he had to do it. His encounter with the outsiders had become impossible to forget. He needed to go outside. He ached to leave this existence behind. He willed it to be over. As his insides throbbed with pangs of hunger, he opened a can of beans – the hundredth, perhaps the thousandth, who knew – and he ate his last meal. Limping towards the door, he paused just before it. He pondered the moment. Of man rediscovering the world in its destruction. What awaited him? Civilisation? Death? He would welcome either. His hand quivered as it released the lock mechanism. He gazed one last time at his desolate, entombed existence and pushed open the door. A dazzling light. Blinding.