Above the Vaulted Sky - Page 54

Chapter Eight:

            I stand in a cell with my hands over my ears. The screams are unbearable. Penny’s travel guide is clasped in my hand and I cannot concentrate to move. I am trapped in a room. The door is a set of bars and the walls crumble with yellow stone.

            My hand flies out to find some sort of purchase. The sounds are so loud, I can’t even fall to the Edge, travel to another place. I don’t need to close my eyes to hear the dead, because they exist all around me.

            I can feel them pressed against each other, writhing and crying, screaming and shouting for parents and loved ones long, long dead.

            I fall to my knees. I feel the sharp grain of the sand through my jeans and wish it would stop.

            I open my eyes by my vision swims.

            I have to get away, far away from this place so I can’t hear it anymore.

            I look up and the sun blinds me, directly overhead, like a lighthouse shining down on me.

            I stagger over to the bars of the door. Surely that will be easier. The bars are rough and rusty to touch, old metal flakes off to my touch and I push against them. The screams are louder here. Pushed up against the bars.

            I grit my teeth and push with all my might. Rattling the metal in front of me. I push, push, push until I feel the purchase in the atoms of the iron. I pass through and I’m in a corridor.

            I take off to the right, hands still over my ears, the travel guide pressed to the side of my face.

            So many people died here, this is a terrible place, a place of horror and death and blood and gore and I have to get away.

            I turn corner after corner. The place is a maze and every time I come to a dead end, the sound amplifies, like I’ve walked right into a speaker.

            I turn a final corner and cry out, seeing my exit, a modern door set into the wall of the old structure. I close my eyes and barrel towards it, trusting my body to take me through.

            I feel the pinch of travelling through and I travel further, the sweet relief of a layer of stone between me and the unending screams.

            I feel another pinch and then another, this one much longer, like I’m holding my breath underwater. Then the air outside. The ground is still grainy but out here it’s quiet.

            I run and run until my legs give out. From the floor with my breath catching in my throat, I look back on the place of horror I’ve just escaped from.