Visions From the Depths

Master's gnarled hand trembles as he holds me between his forefingers. Muttering curses to himself, he produces from his tackle box a still writhing tube of undulating flesh. The small worm struggles to escape Master's hand as he guides it through the biting autumn air to me.

I pierce its flesh. So begins another descent.

Master affixes me to a thin strand of material, my lifeline to the surface. With a prayer, he lowers me into the battlefield. Cold envelops me immediately, the setting sun scattering into a chaotic fire around me, shattered by the water like a vase dropped onto concrete.

It is beautiful here.

But I am not meant to stay here.

I need to go

deeper.

A weight attached to the thin vein connecting me to the surface allows me to push further into the darkness of the lake than my diminutive stature should allow. An unnatural means to access an unnatural place.

The light is consumed, replaced by a thick, fog-like darkness here, approaching the bottom. Down here, the dark is a physical presence, smothering and otherworldly. All around me floats a nauseating particulate; dirt, sunken garbage, and the dissolving ephemera of a million dead things, all coagulating in the place where all light fades and no life lasts.

On my descent, I see the hulking ghosts of long-dead structures. Homes, cars, street signs. Grown over and slowly joining the rest of the lake in its song of decay. Things, people, once lived here, eating and playing and getting into fights and doing all the myriad things that make living things different from things such as I, a soul trapped in a metallic prison. All of that life, driven away by domineering industry, cost/benefit analyzed away because a hydro-electric dam upstream proved more profitable than this quaint hamlet.

The people moved away, built new lives.

But their things never left.

And things don't die.

Down here in the dark I wish I didn't exist. I wish I wasn't conscious, wish I didn't speak the silent soul-language of objects.

But I am conscious, and I hear the cacophony of the long-abandoned diaspora. These things, hateful and insane from the long decades of abandonment, see me, a humble curved piece of metal, descend from the heavens, and they cry out. They wail like the souls of the damned, some begging me to take them away, some jeering and throwing whatever hateful words then can conjure up at me, and others -- the vast majority, simply shriek in a language of despair and agony beyond any hope of comprehension. People and sanity have long abandoned this place, this hell at the bottom of the lake. Here, without light or hope, a symphony of things suffer without masters to fulfill their purpose. Houses yawn and grown, starving for anything to dwell within them. A basketball gasps, having long been bled dry of air, a simple slap of skin emptied of all its life-giving substance but nonetheless unable to die.

And as I reach the bottom, I find a shoe. Singular, not even a partner to bring it comfort. Circumstance has brought it here, to this graveyard of rage and despondence. As I caress the half-buried thing, it whimpers. Pathetic and lonely, I can feel it latching onto my presence in the hopes of finding any shadow of comfort. I pierce its hide and it yelps in pain. The line binding me to my master goes taut.

"Finally," he must think, "I've got something."

I can feel his summons, and I struggle in place. My shape has bound me to this prisoner at the bottom of the lake, though more and more the pull threatens to draw me away. Tension and potential energy build as we wait, and we both know that this can only end one of two ways.

I bring it with me on the return journey, or...

Its bonds are too tight. It cannot break free. A shriek pierces the bottom of the lake as the shoe's tongue explodes from its body, zooming up with me on my flight. Oh, if shoes could bleed.

I ascend, leaving the hell at the bottom of the lake behind, with only the viscera of discarded footwear to show for my troubles. Eventually I break through the surface into the cold air, the purple evening sky a welcome sight after my nightmarish journey. Master takes one look at my prize and sighs.

"Well, shit."

And with that, he removes worm and shoe fragment alike, casting them into the water.

He seals me in my dark, warm box and I try to forget what I heard.

At least, until I must go again.