Stephen M. Hull

I was transfixed by a pillar set in the water, its base obscured by the depths. I grew dizzy looking over the edge of the boat and into the still, clear ocean. We had been approaching this pillar and an uncountable number of others in the vast stillness of water for days. It wasn’t until we came closer, and our little rowboat drifted over the peak of a nautical mountain, that its magnitude bore down on me. The bottom of the rowboat nearly scraped the peak. I reeled for a moment and fell backwards, as though the earth’s gravity had reoriented itself somewhere deeper in the water, someplace inscrutable, cold, and inhospitable below. The sailor who’d volunteered to come with me grabbed my shoulder roughly. Take a breath, he rasped, and he shook me. Take a breath and look at your feet, he said. I did. When my heart slowed, I took another glance around. The water lapped the boat. It wasn’t enough. I still felt off balance, and couldn’t get out of my head the vision of something so immense many miles below me.

We hadn’t seen a bird in weeks despite our proximity to the shore, and the sun hadn’t come out from the clouds since we reached these seas. I glanced back at our ship anchored behind us, the crew below decks perhaps to hide from the sense that the world would finally crumble inward and crush them. Each pillar was taller than the last, until we reached the ones we’d spied days ago, thin carved pillars reaching up past the clouds, jutting out of the water and stretching beyond sight below. They clustered tighter and tighter together until the sailor threw a rope around one and pulled us up to a gravel beach. The boat crunched against the gravel, and we both flinched. The quiet had become so pervasive it felt jarring to break it, as if we’d interrupted a prayer. I stepped out of the boat and the sailor handed me my bag. He nodded at me and watched me go.

A few pillars had crumbled onto the beach, and while they were thin from a distance, their diameter was still taller than me, and I had to find my way through the cracks and over where they’d crumbled. Before long I had streaks of white chalk covering my clothes, caking my boots, and lining my cloak. Just beyond the beach were large hills of bulbous stone of the same chalky material as the pillars themselves, through which was a narrow gravel path. In some places a narrow space had been dug, so narrow I got wedged inside, and almost panicked before I thought to exhale as much as I could, and made myself just narrow enough to fit. I had caught enough glimpses of forbidden knowledge to know the shapes of those who carved these spaces were not like ours.

The Queen had refused to even hear my insistence. She repeated what the priests had told her, that my proposal was blasphemy. The high scholars hadn’t named a successor before they died, and so the knowledge must pass away, not be pawed at by some acolyte. I knew as much as I needed in order to fulfill my calling, she had said. It was the first day of winter and the throne room was frigid. My knees ached from prostration on the black tile. In those days she refused to allow even her confidants to approach closer than 500 feet, and had ordered the range to be extended the week prior. Even from that distance her deep, rich voice carried to my raggedy person. I only caught glimpses of her in her narrow, gleaming throne, practically a statue in her grieving clothes with a train like a river of black velvet reaching all the way to where I knelt. I could have touched it. I longed to, as a person longs to leap from a cliff after peering over it, against their own will. In the end it wasn’t a decree from her that allowed me to come here, but a priest risking his life to smuggle me onto a ship and a declasse Black Knight willing to verify it.

The path I now walked on moved into a low, narrow tunnel formed by a haphazard pile of enormous boulders. I lit the little torch I’d brought with me and ducked inside. My heart raced. I could sense the weight of stone around me as if via a new sense altogether. A wisp of cold air blew past me and I realized my skin was already damp with sweat. Just a few hundred more feet, I thought. If that wretched old monk was right, just a few hundred more feet. My fist, which held the little lantern aloft ahead of me, smacked into a wall of rock. I yelped in fear and pain and dropped the lantern, which shattered and was snuffed. I dropped to a crouch and pressed myself against a cold stone wall. I clutched the metal knot I wore around my neck and squeezed my eyes shut. I said the prayers, counting each one — “Endless perfect work of the being” — until I lost count. After a moment I stood slowly, running my hand up the lumpy rock wall. I followed it slowly, and heard the crunch of the lantern underneath my feet. I felt the wall I’d bumped into and ran my hand down it, and found a small opening at the bottom. I would have to push myself through it.

I thought for a moment what I could do instead. I could go back to the ship and say the entrance was blocked, but the Black Knight would simply kill me. There was no way to survive on the cold, sterile island, so I would starve. Better than starving while trapped in a cave, I thought. But it was not better than facing the island’s night visitors. In the darkness then I could not stop myself from imagining them, their claws scraping the stone behind me. I would struggle in the tunnel, but the rock constricted my chest and I could barely breathe, I could feel its claws on my legs, helpless to move or escape — 

“No,” I yelled into the dark. I said the prayers again. Death in every direction, but if I could make it through…

I swept the broken glass and metal frame away as best I could in the dark, and removed my cloak and outer shirt. I put them inside my bag, which I shoved into the little hole ahead of me. I laid down onto my stomach, put both of my arms forward, and began to shimmy like a snake, pulling myself forward with my shoulders. The hole was too narrow for my arms to rest at my sides. It was slow going, but inch by inch I pulled myself forward until I was in the tunnel. I felt the low roof against my heels when I kicked them up. My breath was shallow. When I took a breath my chest filled the entirety of the cavity. Panic was just under the surface of my mind. It shrieked at me that I was stuck, that I was all the way in, that if I got stuck I wouldn’t be able to go backwards. I gave my bag a shove, but it was stuck. I couldn’t get traction. I inched forward, and gave it another shove with a yelp, and it skidded forward. I waved my hands and realized ahead of me was a greater opening. I pulled myself forward again and before long I was sitting up, clutching my bag in total darkness. I dropped my tinderbox three times before I managed to light the torch I had brought. Once lit, I swung it around wildly, in the hopes that whatever I'd dreamed up would be scared off. Nothing. I wept with fear and relief. I let myself rest for a moment. After a few moments I dressed again and stood, slowly. I held my torch aloft and moved forward. The tunnel I’d entered was wider than the one I had come from, square, carved by skillful hands, the ceiling of which I judged to be at least twenty feet tall. I had expected the pattern of the knot I wore around my neck to be carved endlessly down the walls of the hall, but it was smooth stone. The pattern represented the eternity of the Being, presence throughout all time, as well as before and after time. The still air held the smoke from my torch almost motionless in my wake, except the swirls in the air caused by my own movement. The smell of it mixed with the smell of stone, mildew, and some residual scents I could not name.

I lost track of time walking through these tunnels. Eventually I reached the staircase, the steps of which I had lost count after three hundred or so. I stopped to sleep. Days on end of this. My entire body ached. I stumbled more than once on a missing or loose step. I hissed with pain when the torch finally burned down to my hand. It clattered to the floor and sputtered out. I gave myself a moment for my eyes to adjust, but of course they did not. With my left hand on the wall and my right extended, flat-palmed, before me, I made my way down even more slowly than before. Before long I felt I must have died. This was my hell, to descend an endless stone stair in darkness, cold, alone, hungry, afraid, but never at rest, wandering in search of something I wasn’t sure existed. I began to miss my awful drafty dormitory, crammed with other nun acolytes, each a particular kind of vicious that in my naivete always managed to surprise me.

My left hand stretched out into an awful empty space. I drew it back so suddenly I lost my balance and fell to the right. My yelp echoed and again, and like watching the pillars over the water, my sense of orientation was sent spinning, like a compass near a magnet. I had become so used to the faint echo of my breath and footsteps on the wall as I descended I had almost come to feel they were another person with me, but now the sound was swallowed up in a vast abyss. I could not ascertain its size or scope, and in my mind it expanded, as if I had entered the hollow core of the Earth. Maybe I had. I let myself calm down for a moment. Without the guiding wall on my left, I risked straying left or right in the darkness and falling, but sliding down the steps like an infant would take far too long, and my rations were running low already. I had no idea how much longer it would take to reach my destination. In the end I decided to feel my way down the steps--better to take too long and arrive starved but alive than to fall into an abyss. I had heard stories about it. The monk had been drunk, and made passing mention of the special hell above which the temple was built. I couldn’t sleep for a week after I’d heard his account.

I made my way even more painstakingly than before. I was sore, my clothing was torn. I wanted to cry but my body was made for one thing only now, which was to descend these awful stairs. I extended my feet into what felt like gravel. It shifted under me. Before I could stop myself, I began to slide down. I could feel my legs swing over the left edge, and I managed to twist my body onto my stomach and scrabble on the steps, but it was no use, I grabbed handfuls of gravel. I hit my chin on the edge of the steps as I slid over them, tumbling end over end, not in free fall but rolling down a pile of loose, small rocks. I slowly arrested my fall. I was lying on my back, spread eagle, breathing hard. I could hear the rocks continue to slide downward in the stone avalanche I’d caused. My heart beat wildly, I couldn’t slow my breathing. I moved my hands about for my bag but couldn’t find it. I gave in to my panic for a moment, shrieking and trying to find belongings. I lost my balance more than once there, causing smaller stone avalanches, until I regained a portion of composure. The clatter of stone slowed until it was a soft, uniform patter, like rain, which echoed for a long time. I was laid flat on my back, but the gravel incline was so steep I had to dig my heels in a little to keep from sliding. My naked, blind eyes stared forward into the abyss while I reclined as if in the torturer’s chair. I could feel the light breath of air on my face. It was no longer still but brushed against me like a corpse’s dressing gown. Under and behind me was an unfathomable depth of earth, before me an incomprehensible void my eyes could barely stand to take in. I felt as though I was laid bare before eternal, hostile scrutiny.

I lay there frozen for some time. It was impossible to gauge how large the space I lay in was. Chalky dust covered my lips and coated my throat, and my coughs were lost in the darkness. I was sure I was bleeding and my chin ached from where I had hit it on the ledge. With slow movements I drew my feet up with the intent to inch back up to the stairs I’d fallen from. As I pressed my feet down to move myself up, the loose gravel gave way and loosened the gravel underneath me, and I began to slide down again, but this time I shoved my hands into the stones and arrested my descent. Again I tried. Hours, maybe, of slowly raising myself like a crab up toward the steps, losing precious inches to the loosened stones and regaining them with blood and ragged, dusty breaths and hearing the scrabble descend. I hit my head against solid stone and almost wept with joy. I found I could swing my arm back and hook it over the ledge, and pulled myself up. I felt another wild stab of fear as I pulled my feet up, picturing some bony thing clutching at my now tattered boots.

Back on the steps, I curled up onto myself, feeling hundreds of cuts. My face and my right wrist ached, my back scratched and torn, but I had pulled myself out. I must have fallen asleep, because I jerked awake after some unknowable amount of time, cold, hungry, sore. I knew then I would die on this descent. My pack had been lost. I reflected on how it would likely sit somewhere many miles below for as long as the air and stone would let it, undisturbed for long after I was dead.

In the end, the remainder of my descent must not have lasted more than another twelve hours, but by the end of it I could barely stand. I extended my foot robotically in the darkness to feel for the next step and jolted to realize there was no step, just a flat surface. I reached out farther with my foot, feeling for a drop-off or another step, but felt nothing but floor. I stood tentatively and shuffled forward, my hands outstretched, but I knew where I was. I had read about it in a book I had stolen from a pile about to be burned the year before. It had been a foolish impulse. I was so grieved by the loss of the library to the revolt I took a risk and pulled one out before they were set ablaze. I hid it in my robes and smuggled it back to the abbey. It was a short volume that collected interviews with those who’d been to the Deep Chamber, a thoroughly heretical document because of its candor about something so sacred. It sat in my dormitory for a week before I could steal away for a moment to read it, but I committed it to memory as best I could. One particular account stuck out to me--the subject was a Nun of the Sickle, like me, who had accompanied a monk to the Deep Chamber. She was just a girl when she made the journey. By the time of the account, she was an old woman on her deathbed, and by the time I’d read it, long since dead. While the civil war entered its fourth year on the surface, the two of them had been tasked to read from it by the shrinking contingent of real devotees and bring back a Word. They’d come with four others, three who’d been lost to the old predators who used to occupy the island and one lost to the abyss. But the book was there, intact. She described the chamber as smaller than she’d expected. It was circular, perhaps 20 feet in diameter, with shelves lining the walls. Their torchlight gleamed on its strange surfaces. The ceiling was perhaps eight feet high, all of it smooth, polished, united stone. In the center was a pedestal, on the pedestal under a stone shell was the book. The book’s age was unknown now. The old woman described how she had to open the book and read it to the priest, whose eyesight was failing. The words are immortal now, of course, but there, suspended just above an enclosed infinity, they were spoken aloud for perhaps the first time in a hundred years.

I groped forward in the darkness. I shuffled my feet on the ground to keep from tripping on debris. Before long my hands reached the cold stone. I felt around, slow, agonizingly slow, until my fingertips found the entrance. I pushed my hands past the entrance, into a still emptiness. Forward still, through the doorway, groping for the pedestal. The sound enclosed me now. My shuffling steps and ragged breathing bounced off the walls and gave boundaries to my world again. My fingers brushed against the pedestal. I stopped and said the prayer. The prayer traditionally ended with silence and stillness. Here in the pit a deeper silence seemed necessary, so I stilled myself and held my breath for a moment. I reached out and got my fingers under the heavy overturned stone bowl, lifted it off, and set it on the ground. I picked up the book. It was done. I’d brought tools to break the chain that held it to the pedestal, but it wasn’t necessary, the chain had rotted away long ago. I clutched the book to my chest, and repeated the prayer, along with the silence. In that moment, I heard a shift in front of me. Breath. My skin pricked, I felt my pulse quicken, the animal panic, something was before me on the other side of the pedestal, I could practically see it in the dark now, a fullness, invisible but unbearably present. I took a step back, but there was nowhere to go, just the abyss on either side of me and days of travel ahead of me. I crushed my own breath inside of me and listened to it. I heard a soft clatter on the pedestal, and again my skin crawled, but my feet were anchored to the ground. I began to shudder, I gripped the book so hard it hurt my fingers. The rest of the world fell away, my eyes, already starved for light, strained so hard to see the being in front of me they ached. As if a stone was lifted off me, I felt alone again. I cannot explain how, but I knew it was gone. I reached out to the pedestal. On it was the unmistakable feel of a canteen, my canteen. My shaking grew more violent. I sat on the cold, polished ground and set the book next to me. I took a moment to breathe and steady my nerves. I opened it and smelled. I tasted a small amount. I began to gulp it down but forced myself to stop. Just water. Cool, pure water.

As I returned to climb the stairs, I could feel myself growing stronger. It was still dark, I still had to choose my steps carefully, but the feeling of my injuries faded. Before long I was walking upright, confident, back into the tunnels, my right hand on the wall, the book under my left arm, my aching hunger strangely distant. For days I walked, until I came upon the tunnel I had emerged from. Before long I arrived at the pile of stone I’d crawled under. I felt none of the fear I’d felt the first time I came through. I pushed the book ahead of me and squirmed through. I noted it was easier this time, and wondered what I must look like. Before me was a sight so lovely I began to cry--light, a pinpoint now, but like the small amount of water I’d been given, it filled me with joy and energy I’d never felt before. I pressed forward, squinting as it grew brighter. Before long I stood in the blinding light of overcast day, clutching the book to my chest. I was covered in scrapes and dirt, from head to toe. I stared at my own dark skin, fascinated, as if I’d never been embodied before. My clothes were tattered. My boots were worn to shreds. I clutched the book, having discarded the canteen once again. I made my way slowly, still limping, through the pillars and back to the beach, where I found the rowboat I’d arrived in without my sailor companion. I waited for some time. I listened to the water lap the chalky white shore, the wind, the wholesome, lush silence. The beach was gravel, so there was no hope of seeing any kind of footprints. I tried to cry out his name, but my voice was too raw to make much noise. When I finally saw him I started and cried out. Even in the absence of sea birds, or even flies, on the island, there still wasn’t much remaining. I performed his death rites. My voice sounded alien to me, like some other stranded wretch. I forgot the last half. I strained to remember, but truthfully I’d never performed it in real life, other more senior members of my order performed it. It was rushed, I’m ashamed to admit. The sky was overcast and daylight was fading. Having escaped the darkness so recently, I was reluctant to return to it. When I finished the ritual, I scanned the area to see if he’d left anything behind, but found none of his effects. I made my way back to the boat. Pushing off was laborious, paddling moreso. My arms ached, my stomach cramped, my breath was a ragged wheeze. More than once I managed to lodge the boat against a pillar--I gave a grating shriek as my book slid toward the edge, but did not fall. It was almost too dark to see now. I grit my teeth to keep from hyperventilating in panic. All I had to do was leave the island before they came out. The pillars were more spread out now, and with my last remaining reserves of strength I left the last few behind. I squinted in the darkness to see where the other pillars were. I knew nothing about the creatures. They may be able to swim after all, I thought. But it didn’t matter. If they could swim, they could have me. At least, I might have thought it--the truth is I don’t remember any more from that night except once, striking my head against the side of my boat in total darkness and gripping the book tighter, fearing I was underground again. I braced for the awful echo that followed me beneath the earth, but no sound came save for the water, and I did not wake again until daylight.

When it came, I squinted at the horizon. There was enough light to make out the ship I’d arrived in. I wept, or at least a wretched, dried out version of it. I groaned with the effort it took to row myself closer. I could not bring myself to look back at the island and its uncountable collapsed pillars, chalky white, lying across one another like a broken spider web. Before long I arrived at the black vessel. I and the book were hoisted out. I know the Black Knight roared when he saw the book. I’m told he drew his sword to kill me. I did not have the strength to look at him, and I’d lost the will to move. The priest stopped him. It was no use. At any rate, I was only to be killed if I failed to return with a word, and I’d certainly succeeded, he reasoned. He said I’d be useful for another account of the Holy Descent. I spent the remainder of the journey below decks. I was fed little, but it was enough. I begged the rotten old priest to give me back the book, but he struck me for suggesting it. I feared him then, but I fear him no longer. I heard about him, even in prison. I heard about how he died, a decade after we returned. I’m going to die, too. Soon, I suspect. The prison doctor came around to see me, and said as much.

I said the rotten old priest failed to instill fear in me any longer, but truthfully he failed on two counts. It was the last night before our arrival at the capital. The stars had finally come out, and from my tiny cot I could see a sliver of the night sky, a silvery full moon, white stars, a rich black sky. My injuries, though roughly treated, were aching less. I heard footsteps approaching my cot and I sat up and warned the figure away. I’d taken on an air of mystery, like an angel fearful for its holiness, that I might sear the faces of those who looked at me for too long. The man did not leave, but crouched next to me and a thunk sounded next to my cot. He left. I knew what it was, and I trembled for knowing. I lifted it. The moonlight was so bright I could make out the words. It didn’t last long, I only took in a few pages before he returned and took it from me. I don’t know who it was, though in my dreams it’s the Black Knight. The popular account of my journey for the Word has me rushing up to see the port in flames, the crushed palace smouldering, but the truth is I only heard the cries of the sailors. My clearest memory was not the fall or the death of the Queen, but that night, alone in the starlight.

It grieves me to tell you I only remember part, but it’s enough. “The perfect, holy work of the being”, it begins, but that day I learned that was only half of the litany, which goes as follows--

She tried to convey the words. I wrote them down. My master, for fear of reprisal, had me strike them from the record. You will hear them someday. You have already heard them. They are inside you.