What's Behind These Walls

Then, I decided to take a sledgehammer to the rec room wall. For months a notion gnawed at me: there was something more, something behind there that I should know. Without exposing the mystery with a sledgehammer, I would be doomed to feel this way forever. The act of hitting a wall with a sledgehammer is satisfying. If you ever have the opportunity to do it, take it.

Was I surprised when the sledgehammer broke through the wall into empty space on the second laborious strike? Not really surprised but excited, apprehensive because my suspicion was justified. It always feels good to be right about something. But what's back there? It could be anything. Anyone.

This is where I begin the story. I have cleared an opening large enough for me to walk through. With my flashlight I have explored visually all I can from inside my house. There is a stone structure, stone walls have been chiseled through, rounded out, large enough for people to walk through standing upright. The stone is an ecru white color and the footpath is also stone with lots of grit on it. That much I can see from here. My friend is with me with some tools and weapons (just in case!). I have my digital camera with a large memory card and it's in movie mode. But I'm hesitating. I listen as hard as I can but hear only empty space. I throw a small rock as far as I can and wait. It sounds like the rock hits a hard wall, tumbles, rests. Nothing happens.

I look at my friend whose expression is inscrutable as always. Sometimes I wonder what thoughts go on in there. He listens, but he never speaks. Not because he can't, but because he won't. I move through the opening and my friend follows. We have headlamps on and loaded-up backpacks. The small rocks and grit under our feet crunch as we clomp forward into this cave-like world behind the wall. This was certainly excavated by humans, not nature. That much is clear to me. Along the way there is an opening to the left and we can see it's basically a room, complete with what looks like a niche carved out for sleeping and small nooks carved out as if for placing items and for sitting in, perhaps. We look around a bit and then head back into the corridor.

We continue passing little alcoves and chambers. In some places we find evidence of use, trinkets and pottery. But we haven't seen any bodies or skeletons of any creature. I look back at my friend and realize he has stopped following me to look in an alcove. I walk back to see what he's looking at and notice there is a slight breeze in here. I think I might be hearing the sound of water somewhere in the distance. The air in here is fresher than I expected. In the alcove my friend looks perplexed as he studies the wall in the stark white light of his LED headlamp. At first I don't see anything except the same chiseled out whitish stone that makes up this entire enigmatic place. But now I think I'm starting to see something. There is a pattern of some sort etched in the rock.

"Change the setting on your headlamp," I whisper.

He pushes the toggle shifting the illumination to infrared. I change my lamp as well. We stand in this warm glow, and the space feels strange to me. The wall before us definitely has a pattern on it. I change my headlamp to ultraviolet light and so does my companion. We see the glow of phosphors all around us. And on the wall where we've been staring a glowing pattern reveals itself clearly.

"A labyrinth?" I ask although I can plainly see it's a labyrinth. My companion nods. "I wonder if the phosphor is caused by blood, do you think?" My voice sounds unnecessarily timid, as if saying this will cause something awful to happen. My friend shrugs in reply. That's pretty much all he ever does: nod or shake his head, shrug, or look at me like I'm an idiot or a genius, depending on what I've said or done. There's an occasional smile or frown. Rarely have I seen apprehension or sorrow. I take a photo with my camera with the flash on and with the flash off in the UV light. I film the entire area a bit as we look around the space in the UV light. We both decide to keep this light on for a bit. Walking down the corridor in UV light begins to feel a bit like arriving at a rave after it's over with phosphors all over the walls and floors. It's mesmerizing. I turn my light back to normal light and my friend does the same.

We are walking more slowly. Maybe the labyrinth is in my mind. I don't think we've turned off from this corridor. Have we? Damn it. "Have we reached any forks in this path?" I look back at my friend, redirect my lamp so I'm not blinding him. The look on his face is odd. I wait. He shakes his head no.

"I didn't think so." I dig in my bag. "I have these shims in here. If we do have to make a decision, we'll leave one pointing the direction. Yeah?" I hold some yellow pine strips of various shapes up for him to see. He nods. I stuff them back in my bag, stand up and start walking again, more like trudging. How long have we been here? It suddenly strikes me that we have been descending in a subtle way. I didn't notice it before now.

This is where I begin the story. It's hard to begin a true story. How can you be sure it wasn't a dream? Or worse, someone else's dream? How many levels deep must you go before you realize you're lost? There have been dreams in which I've scaled the inside of shopping malls that turned into theme parks. I often dream that I live in an old house that seems to have an unlimited number of storeys. Each storey is filled with stories, more than I could evaluate in the space of the dream. But I knew there were many more than I encountered, even while I was dreaming. Some dreams move beyond the confines of a house or building with multiple storeys into the realm of a landscape, a meandering zoo of carnivalesque scenarios; African plains filled with zebu, lions, and elephants; race car tracks; obstacle courses; endless places to ramble. Each storey is reached by a series of stairs, sometimes long, enclosed, narrow stairwells (often quite dark) and other times a simple three-step course with a metal rail on one side to assist one down a mild earthen decline. Story of storeys. Storey of stories. A level, a floor, a storey. A tale, a history, a story. You see. It's a matter of spelling. The world outside the USA uses separate spellings while we here in 'the States' use one spelling for both meanings. It makes it more confusing. My labyrinthine dreams are the many levels of my psyche, according to Freud. That seems satisfactory. So let's begin.

"What storey are we on here in this cavernous place?" I ask my companion in a dramatic tone. He looks at me as if I've asked him to calculate the square root of a fraction (or something that is hard to calculate--I'm not good at math). Up ahead the ray of light from my headlamp seems to disappear into nothingness. There must be a large opening. As we reach the area, the sound of our footfalls begin to echo in space in many directions. I clear my throat and hear the sound of it bounce around. Just now there seems to be another source of light coming from somewhere. The slight breeze I seemed to detect earlier is noticeable now and that sound of water rushing I thought I heard is much clearer to me. Goosebumps. I'm cold. I head towards the sound of the water. A hand grabs my shoulder and I nearly jump out of my skin.

"Jeezus! What did you do that for?!"

My voice echoes back to me strangely, distantly, seems to become lost. Looking over my shoulder without redirecting my headlamp, I thoughtlessly blind my companion. In doing so I see that he has a look of intense apprehension on his face. He points towards the ground with one hand while shielding his eyes with the other. I follow the trajectory where I see that the floor of the cavern is not there. I was heading towards a free fall into nothingness. I'm looking at my companion, and I'm starting to cry. This is unlike me. I don't cry. Maybe it has something to do with the air in this empty place, the stress of being surrounded by the unknown. I don't know. I sit down and peer over the edge as best I can. I don't know why I didn't see this gaping hole in the center of this space. How far down does it go? This is one of those times I really wish my friend would talk. My feet have the same odd sensation they have when I'm on the top floor of a skyscraper. I think about the time my family and I went to the top of the World Trade Center when I was a little girl in single digits in the 1970s. We were behind a window and I imagined I could feel the building swaying, or maybe I really did sense it. My feet had the eerie sensation that the tendons were pulling back away from the arches of my feet as if trying to get as far away from the edge as they could although firmly planted on the floor.

It's at this moment I remember the day my mother died. The look in her eyes was a look of sheer awe, as if confused and trying to understand what she saw. I imagine that is how my face looks as I looked at the gaping hole in the cavern floor in front of me. My companion and I stand breathing heavily from the excitement. If I'd fallen, how long would I have been airborne? My mind races. I'm having that feeling I get when I'm driving and I think to myself, 'What if I just jerked the wheel into the path of that semi?' So, what if I jump now? Of course, I'm not going to jump. Am I? Of course not. But what if I did? What would happen? I'll never know, but I can assume I would either die or land hard and mangled, wishing I were dead from the pain. I turn away and start walking back. Fast. My friend comes jogging up behind me and holds my arm so I'll stop. We stop. We breathe. We start walking up the corridor. This is a dream, isn't it? Is this happening or not? We keep walking up the gentle slope that seems less and less gentle as we go. Hours go by. We keep going. I'm thirsty but I don't want to stop to drink my water. I'm trembling and cold from the sweat.

"Are you okay?"

I stop. He's spoken to me. With words. Out loud. And now I'm crying and have somehow turned around and am hugging him. He's hugging me back and letting me cry. This feels good, this letting go, this holding on. Living.