Dreamtime

It was an underground prison, and stifling.

It wasn't hot, or damp or drippy, not like a cave or a sewer. What hit me most, and really got to me immediately, was the proximity of the ceiling. At 6'4", I was just brushing underneath. I didn't have to stoop to move, but was doing so anyway, and within minutes my back and legs were tired. This had to have been on purpose, and it was brutally ingenious.

I had no idea how far down we were, but I had the distinct sense that we were underground. It seemed like way down. No sounds from outside at all, no sunlight at all, no indicaitons of the outside world.

There was no smell of filth, no smell of rot or decay. No smell or water or sewage. It was almost dry, the faintest smell of dry concrete powder. The place seemed clean, but I couldn't tell. I could smell a little bit of hydraulic fluid somewhere, and needed to find the source.

The light was faint, just enough to make you squint just a little, but not dark. Already my eyes were gettin tired, and I noticed that little bit of cruelty. Already I wanted to meet the designer; he was someone just like me.

It was all concrete, poured concrete everywhere. There were many large, very large rooms, with no central support beams or columns, just huge, low-slung rooms, with small doorways at each end. And not very many others around. Not a lot of guards, either, but then again, why were they needed, given this place?

I had to find a way out, and thought I'd found a way. It was going to take a lot of dangerous work, and a lot of faith, but what did we have to lose? I had found a corner in one of the huge rooms, hidden by some massive stray block or maybe forty tons, where the walls did not meet in a perfect joint. There was poor meeting, and we were going to exploit it. We'd chip through the wall, however thick it was, to the earth outside and dig our way up the foundation and out. Who knows how long it would take, but it's all we had.

And as I wandered the cavernous spaces, hunched over, I became aware of a metallic clinking. It was something I knew, but faint, and unfamiliar, a soft background. It seemed to be all around, and it just tinked, tinked, tinked away in my head. As much as I didn't want to get my hopes up, it sounded as if someone was outside the walls, chipping their way in. I couldn't figure out why the guards--where were those guys anyway?--hadn't heard and come looking.

And one day (night?) as I passed a small passageway, a connecting corridor to another one of the massive rooms, I saw the dust-streaked point of a cold chisel, squirming from its hole, like some kind of worm. There they were. All I could think of was that there'd be no way to hide it or wait patiently before the guards would notice and intervene. That knowledge was painful, truly painful, to have to sit and watch, just to know that the hole was there, there was something outside, and we were never going to touch it, let alone get out.

But no guards came, and it seemed like seconds, minutes at the most, and there was a shiny new vault door in front of me, all steel and pinions. The guys working on it seemed to be public workds guys, just normal guys doing a job. And they'd just sort of happened to stumble on this gigantic underground concrete obstruction to their work. They were totally wrapped up in how to work around it.

So engrossed were they in their predicament that they didn't even notice me slip past them. I was in a wonderfully new tunnel, large, with a ceiling that was feet--feet!--above my head. There was carpet on the floor, a deep, evocative wine color, and I could feel an unknown spring as I walked, padding. It was wonderful, incredibly luxurious. I was reminded of walking through an airport jetway in the mid-70s, holding my dad's hand, so incredibly far away now, viewed even in my mind as if looking through a cardboard tube.

I rushed up the passage, sloping up. Another scraggly inmate shot past me, soft mutterings coming from him as he gave his all to making it up and out before anyone could find out. I had no idea where I was going, where I was, or what I'd do when I got there. I turned a slight corner to my left, and was on an open balcony. It was a massive outdoor walkway, all along the upper floor of a massive older building. We were on maybe the third or fourth floor, but the building curved around what appeared to be a natural valley, dropping away from us and opening the most incredible panorama of rounded green hills. The sun was low, right in front of me, and I realized I had no idea if it was dawn or sunset. The sun hurt, even on my skin. The other inmate who'd passed me was a tiny rambling speck in front of me, hundreds of yards ahead on the walkway, hunched over from the light as well.

An incredible sense of relief hit me, and I began to weep. It was wracking sobs, the beauty of a world I'd not seen anything of in years, decades maybe. The sun and the piercing impossible blue of the sky were too much, and I couldn't bear to look. Suddenly, too much pain, too much memory of what I'd lost, what I'd been missing, down below inside the concrete.