#tma encore 13c

[rainbowchewynuggets]

TMA Encore #13c

Freezing.

~

Sasha is slipping. She digs her fingers into the jagged broken stone that rises from the whirlpool of red. Her muscles strain to pull her upward under the weight of her soaked clothes and hair. She reaches higher, stretching her arm to find purchase on drier rock. She falls. The rushing fluid pulls hard at her legs toward certain death. She’s so tired. It would be so easy to just slip away. The roaring behind her, eagerly awaiting her exhaustion, draws what little she has left to the surface. The pool howls with laughter. Laughing at her for wanting to live as so many others are sucked down. For being stuck where she didn’t choose to be. Her throbbing hands grasp at the roughest parts of the wall she can reach, and she begins to climb again.

~

The sea is vast. Its waves are strong, as if the island itself were driving the current to keep the occupants of the Lonely shore away. Martin’s limbs are frozen, barely operational in their sockets. Fighting through the waves and riding the smooth water afterward feels like a net neutral action. His only measurement of progress is the size of the island itself. Its menacing presence only grows larger, regardless of what Martin does. The cold keeps Martin centered on finding shore, rather than what could be waiting on the island or beneath the waves. Implausibly, his limbs keep moving even after he thinks he’s drowned.

~

Tim cuts at his strings with a sharp piece of glass. Elbows, knees, neck, waist, shoulders, ankles, head, hands. Whenever he thinks he’s got them all, something jerks at him and his feet slide closer to the cliff. His brittle skin peels away like paint. His joints creak and bleed as the tethers inside are pulled apart. Blurs of his own reflection pass at the edges of his vision in the slivers of shattered mirror all around him. He catches flashes of others. The clown Joseph Grimaldi who killed his brother. Robert Smirke whose face is etched in Tim’s mind from researching the theater where Danny was killed. The thing that Tim had seen on the theater’s stage that hadn’t quite been his brother. The thing that pretended to be Sasha, though he’s never seen its face. Their smiles are painful to look at. The strings continue to pull. His heel slides over the lip of the cliff. He can’t pull it back. He’s losing. Cutting a string at the right of his collar gives one at his left full tilt. He turns over to face the cliff and is met with the broken plastic countenance of Nikola Orsinov–a stranger to him. He instinctively knows what she is and uses the force that would carry him to his death to drive the piece of glass through the center of the mannequin.

~

Martin pulls himself out of the water and approaches the outer crust of the island. He discovers an opening by pushing aside a loose pile of rubble and squeezes inside.

It’s so red. The corridor he finds himself in is a narrow gap between floor-to-ceiling clusters of mulched brick, cement, and plumbing. It looks loose and wet, but it’s sharp when Martin brushes past some of it. The passage morphs as he navigates. Its mass bulges outward into the negative space, either growing itself or being moved out of the way from the other side. It makes him nervous. Trying to avoid dead ends slows him down, and the room is closing up behind him. As he sidles sideways through a narrow pass, the undulating red mouth bites down on the arm that drags behind him. He gasps. Wriggling only makes it worse. The mouth bites harder, pressing on his chest. Terror wrests control away from him, wasting the time he has left to act. Martin shuts his eyes and focuses on the lingering numbness from the icy water. It doesn’t dull the pain or the pressure, but it feels further away. Separate from himself. What his nerves are telling him isn’t important.

He pulls steadily and hard, and he slowly, grindingly comes free. Martin darts forward the instant he has mobility back. The sound of rushing water guides him along as the mass juts outward around him. He uses his peripheral vision to keep an eye on it and holds his smarting arm behind him so he can’t see it. He fixes on a closing sliver of dark red at the end of the winding crevice and makes it with plenty of time.

The interior of the island is dim and loud. An overpowering smell of iron and sediment knocks him back as he breathes it. But he can breathe. Martin takes a few deep breaths to try to get used to it. He looks around at the surviving pieces of the prison that loom like great mangled bathers in what he hopes isn’t a frothing pool of blood. Rust, clay, and hard water, maybe. He ducks into a slick stone walkway that winds among the stone giants and eventually comes to a set of stairs with some railing left. He automatically reaches for it with his bad arm.  It looks just fine. Doesn’t hurt.

As he climbs the stairs and explores the top area, he feels a cool stillness wash over him. He’s protected, he tells himself. Whatever could be hiding in the crevices of the stone can’t reach him. He’ll see it first. He can deal with it. Then, a flush of heat pushes the cold back down as the outlines of Tim and Sasha on the ground at the edge of a platform come into view. He calls out to them, but they don’t respond. He comes closer. His steps slow to a crawl when he sees Sasha’s neck. She’s limp in Tim’s lap. Tim is bent over her in despair. Martin’s heart hammers in his aching chest.

Martin: What happened?

He can barely get the words out. When Tim doesn’t answer, Martin gently puts a hand on his shoulder. The second he does, Tim’s head tips out of the socket in his neck, falling next to Sasha with a hollow “clunk”. Martin crouches down. He sees the exposed wood fiber in Tim’s arms. Sasha’s features are mottled and rubbery like acrylic paint. There’s a shadow behind the hole in her neck.

Martin gets up and keeps moving, spurning his concern and the heat that lingers on his skin.

Ahead, Martin hears Tim’s voice calling to him. He spots him trapped in a cell on a piece of support architecture that sits independently over the water. Martin hesitates. The support crumbles, and Tim and the cell are engulfed in the water. Martin steps toward the edge to see if either comes up again. They don’t. Before he can process, he hears both Tim and Sasha somewhere high behind him. He turns. They’re cradled in a fold in the mulch debris walls. The fold overlaps as the section presses down, and they’re gone. Martin moves on, starting to feel like he’s being made fun of.

He keeps his eyes forward. The thicket of concrete begins to thin out. He can see layers of shadowed forms that reach far into the distance. However large it seemed on the outside, the island is several times more on the inside. This is just another tactic to keep him out. He’d like to find out what’s so important to keep away from him.

His friends continue to die around him. Calling for help. Asking why he’s ignoring them. He moves on. Their voices overlap into unintelligible noise that drifts away into the distance. He comes to a gate. Pushing it open takes a while.

Sasha: Martin.

Martin turns. Sasha and Tim are standing on a side passage, just a few feet away from him. So close, he could touch them. Tim is staring at Martin’s fingers. They’re cut, he sees.

Without a word, Martin turns and pulls the gate shut behind him with a horrible noise. He walks down the cracked stone passage to what lies beyond with shaking hands held at his sides. Tim and Sasha call after him. He doesn’t hear.

————

I have an important message

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