Falling

Dharrsheena challenged Elizabeth Strange and I to write a story based on the meme below.

It also is influenced by the Genesis song "In The Cage" from "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway".

This is my attempt.

Yes you had opened the cellar door, tripped and fallen, but you weren’t in that cellar now, you turned to go back but you were at the top of three stairways all leading down, there was no way back up. You looked up hoping to see something familiar but there was just a red fog or cloud and some flashing lights. You didn’t know if that was the building you had fallen from or whether you were just still in traumatic shock from the fall and this was your mind trying to make sense of it for you.

You felt you had fallen into a computer game like “Doom” or “Quake” (showing your age there), but there were no signs of any demons or devils, just three staircases leading down, in different directions but would they end up in the same place?

Taking a step down and it collapsed and you fell again , you end up at the bottom on a square landing with three flights leading up. What was this geometric hell ? At the bottom of the flights you realised that these stairs formed points on a huge geometric structure almost like a star.

There were big gaps and then you saw that there were others on the stairways and if you fell off the stairways then you fell into the centre of the star structure. The more you looked you then realised the structure was a monstrous cage and what it contained was even more monstrous.

There was something down there with an unhealthy glow, and it moaned. This moaning was getting into your head as you started up one of the stairways. Again a step gave way and you fell in what you thought was up the stairway but in this Escher-like creation up and down, left and right , east and west , north and south had no meaning whatsoever.

Were you in Hell? Were you in a dream or purgatory or had you been kidnapped, but you know you just fell.

Then you saw figures leaving the stairs, falling down and down towards the pulsing flesh in the centre of the planet cage. Was this going to be your fate?

There was no way out, there was nowhere to go , there was no one to talk to , everyone you could see was either falling down steps or falling into oblivion and probably death. You are not religious but you thought about praying but you were becoming hopeless and that moaning was still going on. It didn’t stop.

It wasn’t threatening, it wasn’t even frightening, it was just there and you knew this was going to drive you mad.

How long have you been here now? You were going to say down here weren’t you? But direction and distance have no meaning here, the only thing is the inevitability of what is going to happen.

You are not prepared for this, you have no defence, you have no escape, you know it is going to happen.

You traverse the stairways and fall again knowing that one of these falls will see you go over the edge, as you see more falling to oblivion or will it be falling into nirvana and becoming one with the universe? That is your only hope.

The moaning is frying your brain, you fall again except this time there is emptiness at the bottom of the staircase as you become one more of the fallen.