The first cracks appeared just as the ground began to rumble beneath their feet. A gentle shake at first, but it escalated to a tremble that rattled the windows in their frames. The loose fitting shelves in the closet fell from their holdings, creating a strange sound, muffled by the unusual atmospherics of the building. It sounded haunting and melancholy. The line traced its way around the outline of the square, not following the faint but crisp shape, but rather tearing the floor open. Wooden splinters shot into the air before they rained down around them like Lilliputian arrows fired at invading giants from another world. Helen flinched, ducking backwards, Becky remained stationary, while Marcus stood tall, watching the scene as it unfolded with a curious intensity.
“Get back,” Marcus said as he stepped before both of the women, spreading out his arms and holding them in front of them, creating a temporary barrier. His block soon turned into a swimming motion as he pulled his arms backwards, sweeping the women with them, just in case. The crack made the first turn and sped towards the second. Its speed along the third straight slowed, even stopping twice. Yet each time it started again. Reaching the third and final turn without any further problems, the line then decided to straighten out, moving crisply and cleanly towards the finish.
All three of them held their breath as the vibrations that shook the room increased, and until it was a tremor. The building seemed to shake in fear of what lay ahead...lay in wait.
“Becky, get back a bit. We don’t know what’s going to happen,” Marcus called. He found himself shouting even though there was no real need for it.
Becky ignored him, or so he thought. In reality she didn’t hear him. She heard a faint sound, like someone talking through a wall, or underwater. Becky heard her name – or the last syllable of it at least – but her focus was elsewhere. She watched as the crack in the floor spread, first becoming a thick black line in place of a thin grey draft. She looked on as it widened; with it came the voices. They hit her like a rush of air escaping a recently discovered tomb opened for the first time by eager scientists and archaeologists whose only interests deep down are to better their own names.
At first, the rush of air sounded like the wailing song of the helpless, a truly lonely sound that Becky was sure would break her heart in two all over again. For hidden within the mournful cry, she heard her daughter. Crying as she left her womb, ripped into a world that was destined to look down on her. She heard the cry of a baby’s first teeth and first fall when learning to walk. She heard the crashing sound of a bicycle falling, the tears of a child with knees scraped and bloody.
The gap spread, opening like the legs of the crack whore she once was, and with it came the howls of disbelief, of refusal, as her daughter was told who her mother was, hearing the truth that her real father was just some bum, who was bored with his own wife and kids and too spineless to leave them, yet couldn’t keep the itch in his pants. So he had offered a girl half his age three times the going rate to fuck unprotected. To Becky, three times meant three times as much escape and so she had accepted without hesitation.
She heard her daughter scoff as she was told her mother didn’t care. They told her that he could have fucked her all night wherever he wanted for just a small rock or a few hundred bucks and a cup of coffee.
She didn’t feel Marcus grabbing at her as the crack spread further, cutting the square from corner to corner like a sandwich. She heard nothing other than the cries of her child before they turned into the wails of a woman, a woman so desperate to avoid her mother’s life that she unknowingly ran harder towards it.
The screams turned to moans of pleasure and ecstasy. Then screams of terror and pain as her legs were spread against her will. Men, sometimes in groups – she could hear their taunting laughter – ploughed her young body with their own instruments of torture.
Becky heard the weeping shallow breaths of depression as her baby took her first hit from a crack pipe handed to her by some pimp in an alleyway. Becky clasped her hands to her ears.
The square disappeared, revealing a black void, and in the center a dot. A dull yellow light fought its way through the darkness. To Becky, it didn’t look like the light at the end of the tunnel, but rather the headlight of the oncoming locomotive ready to meet them halfway. The light cast long eerie shadows on the walls and Becky screamed as her daughter’s weeping turned itself to the guttural screams of terror that brought back the images of the endless rows of bodies being burnt, turned on roasting spits, helpless and at the mercy of the merciless, flames forever licking at their wounds. She could feel the heat of the fire flicking through the floor, tasting the air for her scent. It was then that Becky understood what waited for her in the dark: Adramalech. His burning, fire filled eyes would fill the void, and the festering open wound that was his hand would reach through and pluck her from the group, just as King Kong first abducted Fay Wray’s unforgettable character from the safety of her hotel room.
It was then that Becky felt the tremors, felt the floors beneath them begin to melt and roll as if they stood on a waterbed. She threw out her arms for balance as the screams in her head grew worse. The cries of those who were left behind, strapped to their tables for however long their sentences were deemed to be, the cries of her daughter’s life, marred and influenced by the absent parents, the mother who cared so much for her baby and died in a fight to keep her, and the faceless father who didn’t even know she existed. Becky’s world became vague, her head became warm and heavy, and she was sure that she cried out her daughter’s name before the darkness consumed her.