Leave Something for the Archaeologists
Kom Ombo
2005-02-27
9:58 pm
Through the Looking Glass...
I was a child - maybe 8 or 9 , and there was a door over my bed. And everything was wrong. My parents were divorced, and my mother was going to remarry - a doctor from tv who was buying a great big house for us to live in. And my father, encouraging me to go to my mother's house and to behave in this new family. I was angry, and everything was wrong. I couldn't understand why my parents were suddenly divorced. None of it made sense.
But then it was explained to me. Although I didn't remember doing it, somewhere along the way, I had gone through the door - the one over my bed. I had gone through the door, and the world was different on this side of the door. And as soon as I knew - as soon as I understood that this was not the world from which I'd come, the world grew dark, and I began to age.
I looked in the mirror that made up the wall. Another door perhaps, as even as I looked at myself reflected, I knew another world existed in that reflection. The world from which I'd come. But that world was barred to me now.
The world had gotten dark, and earlier, as I had walked barefoot throught the tunnels, lined with damp, black earth, I sensed the creatures that waited just beyond my vision. And that one, dark figure, standing in the doorway, at the threshold between the light and the shadow. Arms crossed before him, securing a black cloak tightly around his shoulders. Dark hair obscuring his features. But his gaze burns fear into my breath, down my back. I know you.
And as I gaze into the mirror and see the me of this world looking back at me, I hear the warning in my head. "You must find another door..." And I suddenly feel the weight of time, a needle in my heart. I must leave NOW, or be trapped here forever.
I turn and look behind me. A staircase that had not been there before, leading up into the light. Up to a window, shaped as the line of vision over water. In sudden realization I rush up the stairs and run to the window, I feel true terror as I realize I am waking up. The window reveals its true nature, a green mist - neither water nor air - where the angry dead scream and seek vengence in their confusion. I press through the window's silken membrane and am gripped by a woman, made of white mist and hate, but the sickening fear of knowing that I am running out of time, that I must pass through this gate before I wake, pushes me towards her, as I claw with animal fear and screams, shredding spider silk and mist, and finally breeching the barrier that seperates the worlds, and leads into mine.
I hear her fury as I move beyond her grasp, and race to seal the gates behind me as I rise into sunlight and a bed beneath me. And the understanding that this time I have barely gotten out in time. I look at the window just above my bed and realize it's been used as a door. I wonder what world was created in that instance, and what the alternative could have been.
I wonder at fate. And the unlikeliness that I should be in this world at all.
