Our Dried Voices (6 page)

X

F
rozen in place, Samuel and Penny stared dumbly as the furniture emerged from the depths of the floor, dripping with some unknown liquid. Their momentary hesitation, coupled with the weight of the whole apparatus, caused the panel to slip from their grasp. It slammed into the floor with a crash that resounded through the silent hall and shook the ground beneath their feet. They looked at each other and their eyes locked.

As one they crouched to the floor. Samuel pushed the broken latch back into the seam and raised the square just far enough to give their fingers purchase. Together they lifted the panel, not watching or speaking to one another yet perfectly aware of what the other was doing, trusting the other’s mind as much as they trusted their own. As the section rotated away from them, they struggled to lift it any farther from the end where they stood, so they stepped around the corners of the hole and continued to rotate the panel as they walked along the edge of the square toward the central axis. The section balanced in the middle, having been rotated ninety degrees from its initial position. One side of the panel was bare and on the opposite side was the furniture, a bolted-down circular table surrounded by a set of equally well-fastened chairs, all glistening wet in the midday sunlight. Half a meter below the floor the dark liquid splashed about softly.

For a moment Samuel forgot the whole purpose behind opening this door. That all the furniture in all the meal halls throughout the entire colony could be rotated into the floor, that someone or something had presumably done so, that below the surface in which he and the other colonists ate their meals three times each day there existed this veritable lake of unknown liquid—the whole thing was unbelievable. He tried to imagine how far this space must extend under the floor, what else might lie down there, what might lie beneath the floors of the other meal halls, the sleeping halls… And then, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, he stepped to the edge of the hole and began to lower himself inside. Penny gave a short shriek and grabbed at his hands as he hung from the edge of the hole.

“What are you doing?” she cried. But he had already dipped his legs into the cool liquid and was now dangling at arm’s length from the edge. He felt his toes scrape a surface at the bottom of the pool.

“It’s all right,” he told her, letting go of the floor. As he did so, the thrill of exploration was replaced by a millisecond of sheer terror. But then his feet landed safely on solid ground and the exhilaration returned.

“I can stand,” he said, chest-deep in the fluid. He stomped on the floor for good measure but the noise was muffled in the black depths.

Penny knelt at the hole and stared at him with pursed lips. Her hands gripped the edge of the opening, palms to the floor, fingers curled beneath it. The early afternoon sunlight streaming in through the windows of the hall threw an eerie glow into the underground chamber and reflected off the liquid and wet furniture that hung from the bottom of the floor, kaleidoscoping obliquely between this inky sea and low sky. In the half-darkness, the liquid seemed to flow on forever in all directions. The spectral tables and chairs cast long shadows through the weird orange-gray light and into the blackness, shadows that overlapped upon one another and shimmered with the slow undulation of the murky liquid, the empty sloshing sound only serving to reinforce the isolation of this place. The chamber had the look and sound of hollow death but the smell of freshness, of life. For the liquid was not purely water. It foamed slightly as Samuel moved, and when he put a finger to his mouth, he found it had a faintly bitter taste.

From up above the meal hall floor came a swift, dull thud. Penny glanced over her shoulder and when she turned back her face was creased with confusion and worry.

“The door,” she said. “The door…” She raised her hands and clapped them together once.

“It’s fine,” said Samuel. “I’m—we—are fine.”

But he began to make his way back under the hole nonetheless. Penny crouched at the edge and stared down into the liquid gloom, biting her lip. Her knuckles were white where her fingers wrapped around the floor, and she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. A low rumble began out beyond the darkness. The liquid started to splash about more urgently. Samuel half-walked, half-paddled through the growing current. He was about to leap up and grab the edge of the hole when the floor below him erupted.

The jets of water stung his feet and propelled him upward until his head scraped the bottom of the floor. By the time he fell back under, the liquid had begun to foam violently. It scorched his eyes as soon as he submerged and he clamped them shut. The pure white suds exploded through the hole above him and Penny fell back with a scream. Samuel heard her muffled cry but could make out nothing else. The jets seemed to come from all directions. They cartwheeled him through the stormy liquid before he had a chance to do anything and peppered his body with the force of a hundred tiny fists. The bitter fluid surged into his nose and mouth and burned as it ran down the back of his throat. He coughed and gasped and inhaled nothing but liquid. He flailed his arms, kicked out his legs. Thousands of invisible eddies flung him about without mercy. He could not decide if his lungs would burst or collapse. He kicked out again. His feet struck something solid. He kicked and pushed and threw his arms overhead and his knuckles cracked on the unforgiving metal of the floor before the whirling current caught him again. But he righted himself this time and hit the bottom and jumped with searching hands. One found the edge of the hole but began to slide immediately under the film of slickery liquid. He threw up the other and grabbed with both hands and pulled as Penny caught him and hauled him out by his arms.

Samuel rolled onto his back and rubbed his eyes and coughed up a lungful of the vile liquid as Penny shook him and slapped at his chest and shoulders. It was not until he had partially cleared his eyes and she started to come back into focus that he realized she was not attempting to revive him. Her eyes were wide and her mouth flapped open and closed but no words emerged. Then the sound faded back in and he could hear her screaming “Up, up, up, up, up!”

He looked past her. His vision reeled as he shifted his gaze. As best he could tell, there was something moving toward them along the ground from the long wall behind her. He pushed himself up to a seat and vomited a little in his mouth. Penny dragged him the rest of the way to his feet. The ivory foam continued to bubble through the divided hole in the meal hall floor. He stared at the wall behind her as she started to push him backward. The seam was gone, replaced by a half-meter opening at the bottom of the wall. And through that hole, attached to several unfurling metal arms, crawled a flat rectangular mop that stretched the entire length of the meal hall.

It advanced toward them steadily. There was nowhere to go. They could not get around it and it had already passed the door of the hall and cut off their only exit. Neither Samuel nor Penny had ever seen such an instrument in their lives. But it did not appear dangerous. They waited until it almost covered their toes and then simply stepped over it. It continued on to the opposite wall. The section below the seam receded up into the wall and the mop ventured all the way inside the exposed chamber, paused and then drew back across the floor, hovering a few centimeters above the ground.

The mop moved faster on its return, but they stepped over it easily once more. It retreated into the wall and the lower partition slid back into place. The noise from beneath the floor stopped. The foam that had pushed through the hole shivered and whispered and began to subside. The half-turned section began to rotate back into the floor. Samuel and Penny recovered their senses long enough to catch it and hold it in place. Something near the panel’s axis ground and screeched in response, but they managed to keep their hold. All around them a series of muffled clanks sounded from below the floor. Then the force on the panel ceased, and Samuel and Penny righted the square back to neutral.

The door to the hall swung open and a slight breeze swept in. Samuel dropped to his back and closed his eyes and took several deep breaths. His eyes stung and he could still taste hints of the bitter liquid. His tunic was soaked and his skin slick and he felt like diving into the river to wash this feeling from his body. And with this thought, he realized the acrid, slippery liquid below the floor must clean the furniture. He could think of no other explanation. And since no one in the colony realized the furniture never grew dirty, no one thought it must somehow be cleaned. Even Samuel had to admit he had never noticed that the furniture in the meal halls—in fact all the furniture in all the buildings in the entire colony—was never really dirty. He sat up. Penny glowered at him, unable to speak.

“Come. Let’s turn it back,” Samuel said.

They walked to opposite sides of the hole, their movements efficient and tense. Together they rotated the platform about its axis and returned the furniture to the meal hall surface. The square stopped abruptly just centimeters before settling into the plane of the floor. They gave an extra push, but the final few degrees of rotation had been blocked at the side where they had first lifted the door by a metal bar sandwiched between the underside of the floor and the furniture-side of the door.

“Turn it back,” Samuel said, and they lifted the platform to balance halfway, the table and chairs hanging off one side like some wild host of giant alien insects clinging to a tree in a storm. Samuel knelt to study the obstructing bar and found that it slid easily under the floor. They resumed their positions on the sides of the platform and rotated it back into place, returning the first set of furniture to its natural position in the meal hall.

Samuel had never before witnessed mechanical precision of this scale and his mind trembled at the slightest thought of the effort that must take place, unnoticed, behind the smooth veneer of the colony at every single moment of every single day. But he grasped enough. The entirety of each hall—furniture and floors—was cleaned periodically in the manner they had just witnessed. The hall doors would close and lock of their own accord. The tables and chairs were washed beneath the floor, the floor was mopped, and then the furniture was flipped right-side-up and the main door reopened. But during this most recent incident, a bolt under each floor panel had been slipped into place to ensure the panels could not complete their full rotation and return the furniture to the upper surface. The result was an empty meal hall with conspicuous seams surrounding clusters of protrusions in the floor. The presence of these bolts under the floor meant the doors could be opened from the surface only by lifting them from the bolted end. But once they had been removed, the doors could rotate as usual, and the meal halls could function as normal.

Samuel and Penny spent the rest of the afternoon turning over all the hidden doors in all the meal halls of the colony and releasing the bolts that blocked their rotation. The underground ocean remained calm as they worked. The hall door stayed open and the mop remained in the wall. And when the last bolt was removed, the last door turned, the colony’s untroubling façade was restored once more.

* * *

Samuel did not see Penny for several days after that. He came across her as she exited a meal hall one evening, meal cake in hand. Her face flickered to life when she saw him, but the light there seemed just a bit fainter.

“Wait for me?” he said, and she nodded.

He took his food and met her outside and they sat atop a low, rolling hill from where they could see the sunset. The shadows of the halls overtook them as they ate.

“Those doors…” Samuel began, after they had finished their cakes.

“Yes,” Penny said, staring at her hands in her lap. “But you fixed them.”

“We fixed them,” he said, hoping to draw her out. She looked down and said nothing. “But the holes, the water, the… the…” He mushroomed his hands to demonstrate the foam rising out of the hole. “The lock…” He turned to her helplessly.

Her stammer returned. “I… I… do not know.”

The sun dipped halfway below the mountains. Samuel struggled against the thoughts that surged up inside him, growing and collapsing all at once, fought to crystallize them into a single, solid idea.

“The lock,” he said. “Someone put it there. But wh—”

“I do not know,” she repeated, and her voice had the same stale quality as the colony’s bells. She was gone now, dissolving in the softly waning sunlight. When she turned back to him, calmly and without intention, her old smile had returned, creeping blindly across her lips, melting her face into an empty mask. The softness threatened to embalm him, but he fought it now, his mind hardening to a single point, his emotions close behind.

“But you were there.” He wanted to shake her. “You saw what I did. Don’t you…”

He seemed almost to reach her, for her brow began to wrinkle. But then the mask slid into place once more. The words died in his throat. He stared at her for some time, refusing to believe this was the same woman who had turned open the secret doors of the colony with him just a few days ago. He said “good night” then. He could not bear to look at that face one moment longer. Feeling as though the strength had been sapped from his legs, he stood up and walked away. The sun set. The colony grew dark.

XI

T
he sun rose the next morning and brought light back to the colony. In the early morning rays, the edges of things shimmered, mirage-like, and it was not until the sun was high in the sky, its sharp beams pounding down upon the meadow, that the lines would harden again and become distinct. Shortly before the morning meal, a colonist endeavoring to cross the river in the center of the colony noticed the bridge he was about to use had been shattered straight down the middle. The colonist did not bother to see if the other bridges might still be passable. Though he had spent much of his life frolicking in the cool currents and could easily stand in the center of the stream without his head dipping below the surface, he did not attempt to swim or ford the river. Instead, he withdrew from the bank with a few stumbling steps backward, tripped over his own feet and fell to a seat on the ground. The morning breeze tiptoed through the high grass along the river bank. The colonist sat with his knees hugged to his chest as he stared blindly at the broken bridge and rocked back and forth, trembling like a frail leaf in the wind.

Samuel did not notice the broken bridge until that afternoon. He had spent the morning as he had spent the previous few days, walking aimless and alone about the colony. When the sun waned in the afternoon sky, he climbed the tallest tree he could find and gazed out over the meadow. He noticed the crowds along the river at once. Just beyond them he could see the bridge cracked neatly down the middle with its two broken ends dipping into the stream. Farther down the river he could just make out the fracture in the center of the next bridge. He shimmied down the tree and set off, jogging toward the river.

The crowd had dissipated by the time he arrived, so there was no one to disturb Samuel’s study of the broken bridge. It was a modest construction, yet remarkably sturdy. Two arced wooden planks spanned the river with more planks laid across them to form the walkway. But this bridge had been completely shattered, much of the wood ripped free altogether and long since borne away by the lazy current, leaving only the two ends stretching out hopelessly from opposite shores.

Samuel inspected the other bridges in the colony and found that all five had indeed been broken in much the same manner. But on the fourth bridge he visited, he discovered a small scrap of paper caught between two of the broken planks. There was a picture drawn on it by some rough black implement, and it was torn on one side.

Samuel picked up the scrap of paper, studied it for a moment, then folded it and placed it in the pocket of his tunic. He did not see how it could help him solve the problem at hand, but he resolved to examine it more closely later. He went to bed that night looking forward to the next morning when he would find a way to repair the bridges.

* * *

When the sun rose, Samuel scampered out of bed and waded into the center of the river. He managed to lift the fractured ends of one bridge over his head, but the two halves no longer even met in the middle. He would need to replace the missing middle section entirely. He climbed back ashore and examined one of the broken halves from the river bank. He had never noticed the well-worn nail heads that lined the edges of the cross planks before now. Samuel turned one of the little metal spikes over in his hand. Many of them had been ripped out when the bridge was destroyed and he had no idea where to find more of them, nor how to affix them to the bridge. As such, the task before him was more than daunting, but no more so than the problem of the missing meal hall furniture. And in this instance, he at least had some idea of how to proceed. He decided to ignore his lack of nails and tools for the time being and focus on finding wood.

He was drawn immediately to the few trees in the meadow, noting the similarities between their stubby, twisted limbs and the material that made up the bridges right away. But he was not strong enough on his own to break off any branches of sufficient size to both connect the two ends of the bridge and withstand any substantial weight.

A handful of colonists drifted about nearby. “Hello,” Samuel called to them. “Can you help me?”

They returned his words with blank stares. He gestured to a nearby tree and made a breaking motion with his hands. They turned their backs and shied away. Samuel started to go after them but stopped, knowing he could never reach them.

He resigned himself to looking for other sources of wood. Starting along the river, Samuel moved outward through the colony, searching along a path of concentric circles. By the time the bells sounded for the evening meal, he had come to the fence that marked the outer boundary of the colony. The fence consisted of rough cylindrical poles driven into the ground a meter or so apart. Two cylindrical cross poles joined adjacent fence posts and were fitted into holes on each support post. This fence surrounded the entire colony. Beyond it, several kilometers in the distance, the dark mountains rudely interrupted the verdant landscape. As far as Samuel knew, no colonist had ever crossed beyond this border.

He had found the wood supply to repair the bridges. Yet Samuel hesitated for a moment before disassembling the fence and harvesting the poles. Someone must have built the fence for a reason. The thought of so callously tearing it down inspired some faint tug in his stomach. He wondered if he should not frustrate that mysterious purpose, whatever it was. But what use could such a fence possibly serve? Anything it was meant to keep in or out could surely pass over, under or through such a basic construction. He rested a hand on one of the support posts and gave it a tentative push. The post shifted sideways. The top cross pole began to ease out of its hole.

The meadow around him was empty. The mountains loomed closer than they had ever seemed before, powerful and timeless across a short expanse of lush green field. Samuel put both hands on the post and pushed hard. The pole leaned sideways under his weight. He pushed until it tilted far enough to remove the top cross pole from its hole. The other end of the cross pole slid easily out of its place in the opposite post. The upper cross pole in the other direction came out with even less effort, and then the lower cross poles after that. Samuel worked methodically for the rest of the day, neglecting his evening meal. When the sun set, he lay down next to the fence and slept. He awoke with the sunrise and continued his task. Soon he had removed more than two dozen poles from the fence. The morning bells reminded him he was hungry, and he set off for the nearest meal hall. As he walked, he estimated that he must have enough wood to at least make a start on repairing the bridges, even if he could not complete all of them. He now needed to move all that wood from the fence at the very edge of the colony to the river in the middle, and once there, attach it to the remaining framework of the bridges.

Despite the time it would take, there seemed no alternative to carrying the poles by hand from the fence to the river. Samuel knew there was no hope of enlisting the aid of the other colonists, and after their last conversation he was not sure whether to ask Penny for help. He resolved to do the job himself, so he devoured his morning meal and returned to the fence to begin the task.

He found he could carry two poles at a time by cradling them horizontally against his chest. It took him about ten minutes to move the poles from the fence to the nearest bridge and then walk back to the fence again, so it was almost time for the midday meal once he had completed the job. He ate under a tree by the river and rested.

Having brought the wood to the river, Samuel still faced the problem of how to fit and attach it to the bridge’s now-dilapidated framework. The fence poles were too long to neatly fit the width of the bridge and much heavier than the planks which currently spanned the walkway. He would have to cut them down somehow. He recalled the broken piece of the meal hall window latch he had stored in the pocket of his tunic. He took it out and struck the broken end against the nearest fencepost. The sharpened edge sunk a few centimeters into the wood. It was an imperfect tool, but it was all he could find. There still remained the problem of affixing the wood to the bridges, but given that he was already limited by available materials, Samuel decided some of the bridges would have to be sacrificed, at least for now. He scouted the five bridges in the colony and estimated he could salvage enough nails from three of the bridges to repair the other two. He promised himself he would mend the other three as soon as he could acquire the necessary materials.

The next morning, Samuel began his work in earnest. It was the first time in his life he had performed any manual labor for an extended period of time, and the small muscles of his hands and wrists quickly grew knotted and tired from hours of holding, manipulating and cutting the wooden poles. By the end of the first day, several blisters had formed on his hands and most of them had torn open. His back ached from stooping over the poles, his shoulders and forearms from chopping at the wood with the broken latch. Yet there was a part of him that reveled in this physical discomfort, a part of him that saw beyond the slow and painstaking work and envisioned the end products of his labor and all the tiny steps in between, all the pieces of himself he thrust greedily, feverishly, into his work, so that each single solitary moment during his time by the river was transformed into something that was entirely his, that belonged solely to his mind and body, nourished by his sweat and blood. He felt neither sleeping nor eating had ever been so rewarding. He savored each meal, each collapse into bed, but looked forward even more to the point when these mere physical needs would be satisfied and he could resume his labor.

Penny visited occasionally, though she kept her distance. She sat on the river bank and watched the easy way he worked, a body operating in perfect synchronization with an alert and active mind, reminiscent of those first heroes they had once admired together.

It took Samuel nearly six days to repair the two bridges. Cutting the fence poles into planks alone took almost five. Once the planks were ready, he raised each half from where it dangled in the water to align the walkways. On more than one occasion, a half-bridge collapsed back into the river and he had to raise it up once more. He used the edge of the broken latch to pry up nails from the first, third and fifth bridges, doing his best to take only those nails which held broken planks, so the basic structures of these bridges would remain more or less intact. With these recovered nails, Samuel affixed his hand-cut planks to the bridges using a large rock as a rudimentary hammer.

The repaired bridges were imperfect at best, yet quite impressive given Samuel’s relative lack of tools and building experience. The new planks stuck out haphazardly on either side of the bridges, and though he had tried to chisel away most of the splinters with the broken latch, they were still considerably rougher than the originals. Yet the bridges held. Samuel walked over them several times, rolled and carried fence poles across, even jumped up and down in the middles, and still they remained intact. Late one morning, more than a week since the day he had started this project, the bridges were complete. Samuel leaned against a tree along the river bank and rested. He tried to remain as inconspicuous as possible, knowing the other colonists had grown wary of his presence, yet he felt almost giddy with excitement as he waited for the first person to cross his bridge.

After about an hour, a middle-aged woman approached, leading a child by the hand. She stopped at the edge of the river, as if suddenly recalling the bridges had been broken. But the child, not sensing anything was amiss, slipped from his caretaker’s grasp and continued straight onto the bridge. The woman returned to her senses and let out a short, choked yelp. She glanced around, then stepped forward cautiously. By now, the child was halfway across and had scampered well beyond the newly repaired middle section by the time the woman caught up with him. She lifted the child in her arms, and only once she had reassured herself of his safety did she dare look around her and observe that the bridge was intact, that she had crossed beyond the halfway point of the river and could continue safely to the other side. She did so now, bearing the child in her arms, and looking furtively about her once she reached the other side before disappearing behind the nearest hall. The bells sounded and Samuel realized he was starving. His legs felt light and fresh as he stood and set off toward the nearest hall for the midday meal.