Denied

By Noel Hansen

The evening sun caused the room to look almost golden as it washed in from the window. It caused the curtains to look as if they were carved and chiseled seems of gold in a mine, instead of just laying a hospital room. The room had a clean smell; too clean, the kind of smell a room takes on after a thorough scrub have been given to try and address horrible odors that once permeated. A chemical smell, of bleach and antiseptic, completely unnatural and slightly unnerving in its unnaturalness. It’s a smell you grow adjusted too, but never grow to enjoy; you always notice it, even if it doesn’t cause immediate disgust.

It was the smell more than anything that kept me awake in that room. It certainly wasn’t the patient. The old fart had been in his coma for nearly a year now, and was quite obviously brain dead. The family just couldn’t pull the plug though; I was in the room when the attending physician discussed the option with them, they had some very strong “religious objections” to it. They had the money to support him too, so they wouldn’t just let the family patriarch die. I have no idea where a preachers family got that sort of money, but they did. Must have been from the wife I always though, she always came in with the best clothes and the finest jewelry I had ever seen. Much better than what I had at home, certainly much better than my husband could ever afford to buy me.

The man was one of my easiest patients too, so I was not in a hurry to see him shuffle off this mortal coil. Spending time watching him gave me time to read and draw, and in a day that is filled with rushing and stress and struggle, the time to pause and take a breath was nice. There was no sign that would ever change as well; every day he just lay there, muscles atrophying more and more, never opening his eyes, breathing only with the assistance of a machine. He well and truly seemed completely braindead.

Which made it so odd when one day he started to scream. The screaming came out of nowhere while I was reading, and startled me so much I dropped my book, not even able to mark my page. I rushed over to his side, to try and soothe him, but his eyes where already open and he was trying to rip the breathing tube out of his throat and the plasma out of his arm but was obviously having trouble due to the atrophied muscles. Switching back over to “work” mode, I quickly administered some medication directly into his bag to calm him down.

Once the medicine took effect I tried to soothe him, and slowly took the breathing tube out, telling him not to move too much that his muscles had atrophied and that I would inform his family to come over at once. He gave me a mean, angry glare the entire time but remained silent, never speaking even after I left the room to phone his physician. The look on his face as I left… I have seen many people come out of comas, some very long comas. Most are overjoyed, or at the very least surprised. He seemed very deeply hurt and changed, there was no joy or love or passion on his face, no emotion whatsoever. It was disturbing, made me think of how sharks are always shown as being in movies; no emotion, just hunger.

The doctor was in the room with the reverend for a long time, longer than I had ever seen him be with a patient before, especially one that had just come out of a lengthy, deep coma. I had no idea what they were talking about; patients in a coma for that long typically have a hard time chewing their food, let alone jawing with a doctor. The doctor was in there for nearly 45 minutes all told, and when he left he looked pale and a little sick, like he had just ate something that was causing a stomach ache. His face was plastered with a look of stern concern, as if he was turning over a problem in his mind that seemed like it had no solution.

He turned to me as he walked out of the room, and said “Reverend Burnaby has completely recovered physically it seems; aside from muscle atrophy his body is still in a healthy state and his mind is still quick and able to speak and reason. But the man is still obviously under significant mental strain from his recent struggles and has not fully recovered mentally. Give him whatever he requests and let him walk in the atrium, but he isn’t to leave the hospital yet. And he will need significant care for a while still, in the usual manner of patients who experience significant muscle atrophy. I will leave the details of his care with you, and will schedule visits with a psychologist to help his faculties recover. But until then, he is not allowed to speak to anyone but staff! I am afraid he is not in a state where he can handle, ah, ‘casual conversation’, so to speak; he would just upset people. Do you understand nurse?”

He looked very seriously at me after he said that final sentence and I only nodded in reply.

“Good good”, he said and waved me away back to my duties, before briskly walking off in the direction of his office, his hands clasped together behind his back, that same slightly pained look never leaving his face.

I turned back to the room and walked in, intending to let the Reverend Burnaby (such an odd last name, and one I never realized I didn’t know before now; I had always heard him, somewhat callously referred to as “the vegetable in room four”) know who I was, let him know the rough recovery plan, and hopefully get him anything he would need. I stopped right before the door and straightened my clothes before heading in.

The man was sitting up in his bed when I went in; he obviously didn’t have much strength left, but it appeared he had just enough strength to reposition himself in his bed, and I silently thanked my lucky stars I wouldn’t have to do that for him when I saw that. He was looking out the window, into the courtyard of the hospital. It was a fairly sunny day early in spring, though it was still so early most of the flowers that were planted there to cheer up the patients hadn’t had a chance to bloom yet. That didn’t seem to matter the Reverend much, as he had a gentle smile on his face as if it had been a lifetime since he had last seen the blue skies. And I guess it had been, but from what I would expect the man to be ecstatic instead of seemingly just quietly content. There was a strange look in his eyes as well, a watering around the edges that seemed to imply some deep melancholy was hanging heavy in his recently awaked mind. This was another thing that confused me, as I had met several individuals that had been in long comas and gotten out, a few even longer than the reverend, and the one thing everyone noticed about them immediately was their good humor and lust for life. There was none of that here, instead he looked like he was thinking over dear memories of a friend who had passed on years before.

I went over and pulled a chair in the room to the side of the bed and sat down, but he did not acknowledge me, seemingly still absorbed in whatever was going on in the courtyard.

I cleared my throat to get his attention and said “Reverend Burnaby?”. At this, he turned to look at me, but said nothing in return. His expression didn’t even change, still that queer little smile and that gently sad look at the edges of his eyes.

“Reverend Burnaby, I will be your attending nurse for the duration of the rest of your stay here. My name is Jaquelin, it is a pleasure to meet you”, I said. I waited for a few seconds for any response from the reverend, any further acknowledge of my presence besides his turning to face me, but none was coming, and so I continued.

“If you need anything, anything at all, please don’t hesitate to call me. There is a button next to you that connects to a beeper on my person, and when you press it I will come in to assist you. I can assist you with whatever you need, and I assure you there is nothing to fear”. He did nothing but continue to smile as I said this, then turned to look back outside the window, ignoring me.

I shrugged my shoulders to myself, got up, and left the room, leaving him to whatever thoughts where occupying him so intently. I figured at the time that his brain was still “warming up” after the coma, and he was still having a hard time getting used to being alive, much less recognizing other people and conversing. Though I did wonder what then took the doctor so long in his room when he woke up, and what had perturbed the doctor so. Working in the medical field you don’t always get answers to everything, I knew, so I thought it would just be another one of those odd stories that are good for making conversation at parties.

The reverend turned out to be a very quiet patient indeed. He hardly asked for anything; he never even asked for food, I fed him regular at the same time as my other patients at the levels the doctor had prescribed, but he would only ever pick at his food, rarely did he ever finish a meal I brought him. He did eventually speak to me, although only haltingly, in stuttered, short sentences, never trying to engage me in conversation, never trying to learn about what the outside world was doing. He never asked for books or magazines, never asked for films, never even asked me to turn the television on. It was like he was just a shell of a human, only doing what was necessary to keep the body alive, but with no engagement of the mind. Almost as if he was trapped in his mind still, as if he had never really came out of that coma.

Such where the thoughts that went through my head as I worked with him, gave him his meals, changed his bed clothes, bathed him (as he had not yet gotten enough strength in his limbs to be able to move far on his own), and took him to physical therapy. The entire time he was silent or almost silent, the entire time he had that queer smile and sad look in his eyes. The physical therapist noticed it too, he would never talk to them; he would simply follow the instructions as given, with no complaint and only minimal feedback when absolutely necessary to express the limits of where his abilities currently lay.

He seemed to be making progress physically at least. After a week he was able to stand on his own for a few seconds and lift his arms above his head for a few seconds more. He was getting to the point where he no longer needed the wheelchair by the time his first visitor, his lawyer came to visit. They spent hours talking together in that room, and every time the lawyer left with that same look on his face as the doctor had when he had left. It seemed strange that he saw a lawyer before his family. These where the people who had been paying to keep him alive for so long, right? Wouldn’t they be the ones he would want to thank for believing in him, the people who loved him that would want to see him the most?

Eventually his family did arrive, one day. They were a somewhat odd looking bunch, though they certainly fit into a certain stereotype I had in my head around the families of clergy. It was obvious to tell from a glance the head of the family in the absence of the reverend was his wife, an older, rather severe looking woman who wore very traditional clothing; she wore an extremely modest blouse in muted colors (mostly blues and grays) paired with sensible shoes and a floor-length skirt that looked almost like a converted a pair of curtains. She had her hair pulled back in a bun so tight I almost thought she had it pulled back like that to try and pull back the skin on her face and smooth some wrinkles, and she had a permanent scowl on her face.

The rest of the family wasn’t much better. All the women wore similar outfits to the matriarch, and all had similar scowls or permanent expressions of embarrassment or vague panic, and all had small crucifixes hanging from loose-fitting gold-chain necklaces. The men wore similar old-fashioned clothes, sensible button-down shirts with long sleeves tucked into brown slacks with the waits worn high, looking almost like they stepped right out of a photograph of an anti-civil rights rally from the ‘60s. There were no children with them; I had assumed that the older children were babysitting the younger ones, as I had seen the type before and couldn’t believe that these women weren’t popping out babies as quick as their husbands could put them in them.

When I saw them, they were being led by another nurse, obviously from reception, walking in the general direction of the room. I had just come back from checking on another patient, and as soon as I saw the group heading down the hall, I knew exactly who they wanted to see. The nurse leading them looked almost relieved to see me standing in front of the door and gestured to me from afar before walking back in the direction of reception.

The group walked up towards me, led by the matriarch. She stopped in front of me and looked me up and down, obviously looking for something to judge me on; probably on the fact I wasn’t covered in nearly as much fabric as they would want me to be. She stopped, obviously satisfied in some assumption she had made about me from my appearance.

Without changing her scowl, she started to speak. “Are you the nurse who has been looking after my husband since his little… accident?”

“Yes I am ma’am”, I said, trying to be polite and not letting myself get annoyed at the obvious disdain in the woman’s voice and the sneer crossing her face.

“Good, good. Can you open the door and do what you need to do to prepare him for us? We intend to speak with me”, she said to me dismissively.

“Yes ma’am, you can just go inside, grab a few chairs, and talk to him directly. I will stay in the room to monitor his vitals, if that is alright”, I replied.

“Yes, yes, that is quite fine”, she said, impatience in her voice as she walked past me and opened the door to the hospital room.

The reverend was sitting up in his bed, looking quite healthy considering his condition, but looking outside the window. He turned and looked at the door and the small crowd as it filtered into the room, but didn’t say a word, then turns back to look out the window. This obviously annoyed his wife, as her sneer deepened into a full frown at this, but she continued on unabated. A few of the men grabbed some chairs lying against a wall and arranged them around the bed for the reverend’s wife and the rest of the women (presumably daughters and/or daughters-in-law) to sit on while they discussed whatever they wanted to discuss with the reverend.

The reverends wife sits down primly with her legs crossed. She chose the chair closest to the head of the bed, right next to the reverend; it is obvious she plans on being the one doing most of the conversing, I thought to myself as I leaned against the wall opposite the window, observing the show. The rest of the women sit down in the other chairs around the bed, carefully sitting down one after the other according to some obscure internal family hierarchy based on what I imagined to be decades of tradition and drama. The men all take their places standing behind the women, presumably matching each women to her husband (though there were two or three additional younger men among their group that stood in between the others, careful not to get to close to some of the women).

The reverends wife brings a closed fist up to her mouth and clears her throat. This causes the reverend to turn and look at her, that same sadly serene look upon his face remaining unchanged at the sight of his wife after a year in a coma. At first I thought he didn’t even recognize her, which wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for cases like his, comas can often affect memories, but that assumption was erased when they started conversing.

“Darling, it is good to see you alive and seemingly well. I trust they have been treating you well here? We certainly pay them enough to”, the reverends wife said, in an annoyed monotone.

“Yes dear, the people here have given me the best of care and treated me with the utmost respect, I have had no trouble whatsoever” said the reverend, speaking the first words I had ever heard him say in all the time I had been attending him. His voice was surprisingly high-pitched; looking at the man and knowing his profession, I had suspected a richer and more baritone voice, a voice with a lot of power and bravado. Maybe that was what he had at one point in his life, but obviously no longer. The man sounded like he could barely sustain a tenor if asked, and there was a nasal quality to his voice that made him sound unsure of his words. Honestly the voice seemed more accustomed to the stage at a comedy club than the pulpit of a cathedral, and yet no one else in the room acted taken aback when they heard it, so I brushed it off.

“Well, I am glad to hear that, at least. It is always good to hear that good money has not gone to waste” the wife said in a huff, not seeming to mean any of it. “How have you been? What was it like?”, she followed up with. This seemed to be the heart of her reason for starting this conversation with her husband, for as she said this she leaned forward slightly and having her expression shift minutely due to her widening eyes and lips peeling back exposing more of her teeth. It was obvious she was trying not to seem excited or eager, but coming across as obviously both due to the contrast this lack of control had with the rest of her actions up to this point.

The reverend seems not to react to this request at first, but after a few seconds of silence with his expression unchanging, he finally begins to speak.

“That evening was difficult for me, as you know. I think it ended up being difficult for everyone!” He chuckles at this, a brief little joke only for himself as no one else laughs. “After I took the pills and sat down, a heaviness came over me and I found it more and more difficult to stay awake. Finally, I just gave in, I had not the strength to resist the oncoming rush of blackness. I think that was just as your Charles rushed into the room, in fact.

I don’t remember much immediately after that. It is funny, but it feels like there is a blank spot in my memory; things just skip, from one moment to the next. One moment I was falling asleep here, the next moment I was awaking there. I can tell there was a gap in between, like you can tell that time has passed as you were sleeping, even if you are not aware of anything that has transpired during that time; just an innate feeling of time having moved on, though it didn’t feel like long. Waking up was gradual as well, it was not the rush of consciousness one experiences when waking up to an alarm or sudden movement, it was a gradual thing. At least, until the confusion sets in, confusion at where you are and what happened.

That was exactly how I experience it anyway; I awoke slowly, to a growing sense of confusion. Yes, I awoke on the other side, and yes I remember it clearly. After all that happened, how could I not? But we will come to that soon enough, since you are so eager to learn all I now know. But anyway, I awoke in an understandable confusion as to where I was and what happened. I knew I had sat down, but I could not connect the time from me sitting down to me waking up, and what happened to me to bring me to that place for a while.

The place itself did not have much in the way of answers. I awoke into an empty room, laying on a stone slab that was raised a few feet off the ground. The entire room was pearl-white and smooth. I could tell it was stone by the coolness and hardness I felt when I touched it, but there was nothing on it to indicate it had ever lain in the earth, no veins or striations of coloring; it was like it had been created in this shape and had always existed. Almost like a 3D printer had printed it out using molten stone, but the craftsmanship was far greater than anything a machine could create. Almost like it was shaped by hand.

I got up off the table, and stared at it all in a mix of wonder and confusion. Why was I here? And what was this place? I remembered the pills I had taken and rush of blackness, but still couldn’t connect the dots. Was this a hospital? What sort of strange hospital was this? I looked slowly around the room, noticing no medical equipment, no furniture, nothing but myself, the slab I had woken up on, and a doorway at the other end of the room. There was no windows, and strangely enough no light fixtures either, though the room was not dark at all. It was actually pleasantly lit, as if the walls themselves where emitting light. There were no shadows anywhere to indicate a light source, and no switches on the wall, it was as if the walls where glowing with some sort of natural phosphorescence.

I looked down and noticed I was not wearing the clothes I had lost consciousness in. I was wearing a set of pure white robes with nothing underneath. The robes where simple and unadorned, but incredibly soft and so light it felt like I was wearing nothing at all. I looked all over to find a tag or manufacturer, to get more information about my predicament, but I couldn’t even find a seam. Again, it was as if the robes had appeared out of thin air, appeared perfectly created from nothing. I checked all over my body, but I found no injuries of obvious maladies. In fact, I felt better than ever, I felt years younger and could move with much more ease than I had ever been able to. I decided to leave my room and explore the area, to see if I could find some people, or at the very least more information about where I was.

Exiting the room, I walked into a long hall. The hall was made of the same material that the room was, as if it was all somehow formed from the same piece. The hall had a high ceiling, a ceiling so high I couldn’t actually see the end of it; it just disappeared into what looked like fog beyond a certain point. Lining the walls at even intervals as far as the eye could see where more doors shaped exactly like mine. I walked into one of these rooms and spied a room that was a copy of the one I had woken up in, in fact. Same material, same slab, and in the same place relative to the room. The only thing was, the slab was empty. I checked a few more rooms on either side, to the same result. After I did that, I couldn’t even tell which room I had woken up in anymore since they all looked the same!

The hall itself was long, the longest hall I had ever been in. It extended as far as I could see in both directions, it almost seemed endless. The sheer scale of the area and uniformity of the area started to scare me. It was quickly becoming obvious I was not in somewhere natural. Certainly it did not seem I was in some place made to be inhabited by people, and it seemed less likely the place I was in was man-made. Was I captured by aliens? This did not look like the movies I had seen as a child, but I could not think of what else it could be.

Regardless, I seemed to be all alone in this strange palace or compound, at least for now. Aliens or not, I still felt a burning need rising in my chest for answers. The matter of what needs to be done to get back home can come after I know where I am. I decided to pick a direction and set off to find some, and so I started walking down the hall, figuring that one side is a good as another.

I walked for what seemed like hours. I could not tell for sure, since I had no watch and there were no clocks in the place, nor did the light ever change the entire time I was there; it always stayed that same pleasant overhead white, no matter what or where I went. My feet didn’t even feel sore from the walking, and I did not start to get tired or hungry. At first I chalked this up to the general feeling of young energy that I had noticed when I waked up and had not yet left me, but as I continued to walk and time stretched, it started to become obvious I was never going to tire no matter how far I walked, nor would my feet or knees ever start to hurt no matter how far I walked. Somehow, that made me scared; it seemed to indicate that the familiar way I had become accustomed to things working, the things I knew to expect, the rules themselves no longer applied in this place. And a darker thought with that as well: if I could not go hungry here, there is the possibility that I couldn’t die here either. I do not know where the thought came from, but the sense of dread it gave me was greater than anything I had experienced in my life.

In spite of the hours I walked however, nothing had seemed to change. The corridor still seemed to stretch off in either direction forever, the doors on other side still evenly placed, and when I bothered to look into them, they still had the same slab in the same location. I never saw another soul during that time, nor did I ever see any real variance in my environment. It was hard after a certain point to tell if I was even making any progress. Since nothing around me changed, I felt almost like I was just walking in place on a treadmill.

Things did eventually change, though it too a few more hours of walking. Eventually an end to the hallway appeared, the horizon finally caught up to it. I breathed a minor sigh of relief when I saw that; somehow know that this wasn’t all there was, that there is some change even if what the change brings is unknown, that fact comforted me. As I walked further and saw what the end was, I felt my spirits left even more.

At the end of the hallway was a tall, thin pair of double doors. The doors stretched all the way from the ground to the ceiling (presumably; the height of the hallway had not changed in all my time walking and I could still not see the top of the corridor) and where just as white as the walls and floor around me. The doors where plainly made, with no ornate carvings or ostentatious murals on them. There was, as I got closer, one thing that stood out: each door had a golden handle that stood out like a sore thumb against the white of the body of the doors. The handles did not appear to be ornamentally carved either, both seemed to be in the shape of plain doorknobs, but they where so shiny and well polished that they shone like the sun in that all-white corridor.

Eventually I got closer and was able to observe the workmanship more closely. Both had not lost their lustre, both looked as if they had been just shined that day. There was no dust on either of them, which made me realize I hadn’t seen any dust in all the corridors or rooms I had been. All the rooms had been scentless as well, none of them had the distinct musty smell that comes with age as a place settles. That fact struck me as odd at the moment, but since I had nothing to connect it to, put it out of my mind. The knobs where laid into the door expertly, I could not see anything resembling a seam on them. It was if they had grown out of the face of the door like plants growing out of the ground.

I gripped them in anticipation, ready to swing back the doors and see what is beyond. The handles where neither cool or hot, they where both room temperature. That made me notice that the entire corridor didn’t seem to have a distinct temperature; things where neither cold nor cool nor warm nor hot, they just where, and these knobs where the same. It was as if the concept of temperature did not even exist in this strange realm I found myself. Yet that was just another in a series of strange things about this place, so I put it out of my mind; I could only keep so much in my mind at once that was strange about this place before I would be overwhelmed by its alien nature I had realized, and in order to keep my sanity, some things where best left alone and not contemplated.

I flung the doors wide open, only to find they led to another corridor almost identical to my own, with the exception that these wide double doors where set into one of the walls, in a space where one of the rooms should be. This was about the most disappointing thing I could find, as it showed that there was some pattern and layout to this place, but it was not one that was going to become apparent for a while. It seemed almost like the corridors where set up like a maze. Remembering how I solved corn mazes growing up in the country, by turning right at every available opportunity until I got to a dead end and them doubling back, I turned right and proceeded down my corridor, growing more thankful that whatever mysterious power that spirited me away to this place also saw fit to ensure that I would not grow tired or hungry or thirsty.

The second corridor was indistinguishable from the first, aside from the door that was my entrance into it. It was so similar in fact that I became to grow bored as I walked down it. As I walked down that first corridor, I had mostly been tense and afraid the entire time, anticipating horror or revelation (or both) at any minute. As some shape of the place began to enter into my mind, as I began to realize it did actually have a shape to my relief, it became more known to me, and from that my mind began to wander out to the other questions surrounding my circumstances and fate, and I began to grow impatient. Whatever was coming for me, I was getting furious and frustrated at how it was wasting so much time getting here! A foolish feeling to be sure, completely unrational without doubt. I was in a situation where rationality seemingly had no place, and certainly would not change my direction, so for the moment it seemed to fall to the wayside in my mind, seemingly as useless as a broken hammer.

I continued on this way for what seemed again like hours, just walking forward and letting my mind wander. Eventually I came to another set of double doors at the end of the corridor, just like I had before. I steeled myself for a moment, not sure if I should anticipate more corridor behind it or something else, then opened the doors.

Beyond the doors lay a grand hallway, the doors placed seemingly right one end of it. I could not see the other end from where I stood, though that did not surprise. Nor did it surprise me that I couldn’t see the ceiling, since it was shrouded in the same sort of fog that covered the ceiling of the corridors I had just left. The hall was incredibly wide, easily 5 football fields in width, and like the previous corridors it was all made of a weight material and completely bare. Unlike the previous corridors, there where no doors lining the sides of the hall, only indentations of what appeared to be windows high up the ceiling, right below where the rest of the walls disappeared into fog. I could tell they where windows as well, as they where obvious open to some other area (most likely the sky, I hoped).

The change in scenery did wonders to lift my spirits though, and I started walking down the corridor to the other end. In spite of the massive size of this place, I obviously felt it shrinking in my minds eye, as I began to map out everything. The vast unknown void that had previously felt like it surrounded me was slowly disappearing as more and more of it took on shape and form.

I walked for a little while before I saw the first things since my awakening that put me on edge. In front of me where slowly appearing new forms in the hall, things that seemed to be made out of the same material as the walls and floor. As I got closer I realized they where great tables and benches, each as intricately made as the walls and floors, and each as featureless. However, unlike the floor, there was something obviously off about the furniture. Most of them where turned on their side and stacked as if to form a barricade, or smash as if hit by an incredible force, or laying in odd angles as if they had been flung. There where no scratches on their surface, no blood or other indication of those injured in whatever happened or other signs of battle besides the destroyed furniture. The furniture was shattered in such a way as well that every break point was clean, as if cleanly snapped in half or cut with a sharp sword. And such a sword would have to be extremely sharp, as I could feel from reaching out and touching the damaged furniture that it was as hard as stone, if not more so!

This sight horrified me. For much of my journey thus far, I had thought of the place I was in as peaceful, if abandoned. That if I where to find anyone else here at all (which seemed less and less likely as the journey progressed), they would at the very least be ambivalent to my presence. Now it seemed like there was some struggle among the former inhabitants here. Or perhaps they where invaded by some outside force and forced to mount a defense in an area not intended for it? Regardless, I could no longer assume that any being I would meet in that place would not automatically harm me at sight. Even if this battle had taken long ago, as it seemed it may due to the lack of any extra detritus besides the broken tables which I suspected where made out of a material that would not decay, battles do not make a society more trusting of mysteriously appearing strangers. I continued down the hall hoping to find an exit to the outside, this time proceeding more cautiously and more slowly.

As I continued, I started to see yet more signs of battle. It looks like makeshift barricades had been set up pretty evenly from the tables and furninutre all along the hall. The layout almost reminded me of what I had read of trench warfare in the first world war; the barricades where evenly spaced apart, so that every advancement would be a siege, and every retreat would have the promise of safety. This conferred to me that whatever beings had lived here, they had some knowledge of military tactics or where clever enough to come up with such tactics on the fly when faced with an advancing enemy force.

This made me start to wonder again what the beings that live in this strange place (or at the very least make use of this place) are like; certainly they are human enough that they can either copy our military strategies or come to similar conclusions. And certainly they seem bipedal if they make use of tables and benches, as is evidenced all along the room. Do they eat? Was this a vast dining hall? Or was it merely a place for them to gather for some other reason? A discussion and study room perhaps? But if it was such, where were the books? Certainly the beings where strong, as evidenced by their ability to move the tables. To continue my desire to understand my strange area, earlier I had leaned over and tried to pick up a bench and found it impossible; despite my enhanced vigor and newfound youthfulness, I could not make it budge, it must have easily weight more than one thousand pounds! There wars and battles must have truly been climactic as a result. But the beings must not have been much taller than normal humans, based on both the height of the benches and the height of the tables. Taller, certainly, but not massively so. I was reminded almost of gorillas or bears or other such large, strong animals while looking at all the evidence around me, and shuddered at the thought of meeting an angry one here, all lone with nothing to defend myself.

Progress down the hall continued but was slowed by my newfound sense of caution. I kept on encountering the barricades regularly, and they seemed to become more disarrayed and ramshackle as I went farther down the hall, as if the invaders had come from the far end of the hall and surprised the inhabitants, and the initial barriers had to be constructed quickly while subsequent barriers could have more thought put into them. This did nothing to tamp down my fears of whoever else was out there, but it did confirm that the hall eventually ended, and that fact gave me enough hope to carry on my journey in hopes of finding an outside to this complex.

Soon enough, I began to see the end of that long hall coming up in the distance. At first vaguely defined, it slowly became clearer as I continued to walk and the mist around it began to dissipate. At the end of the hall where a wide set of double doors, similar to the ones I had encountered in the hallways previously but much wider. Unlike the doorways in the halls previously, these doors where inlaid will gold in lines snaking up and down, 3 pillars to a door, and had giant round gold knockers instead of handles. They also differed from the previous doors in one key way: they were flung wide open, though what lay beyond was obscured by the rubble of a final barricade that had been erected in just small ways away from it. This barricade was massive, the most massive one I had seen yet, and was obviously the result of a quick struggle to erect the biggest defense possible against a rushing enemy, before the defenders had had time to think through a more considered plan of action.

I picked up my walking pace and hurried to the door, eager to finally see what was outside. It was still a long ways off, but I quickly covered the distance as I started to run, the first time I had run in nearly 30 years (and certainly the longest I had ever run, thanks to my newfound energy). I crawled my way through the shattered remains of that barricade and made my way to the other side, eager to get more of an idea where I was, and hopefully uncover more answers.

As I got close to the door, I started to hear something, something that made me stop in my tracks and realized I hadn’t heard any noise that wasn’t caused by myself in a good while now. I heard music, faint admittedly but it was identifiably music. It was played on some sort of combination of string and wind instruments, and from what I could hear the composition was incredibly complex, almost more complex than my ears could comprehend. It was almost like free-associative jazz, or some sort of atonal symphonic work; the melody and the beat could be picked out, but it frequently changed and shifted, like the instruments where going in and out of tune, and the time signature and speed at which the music was played was constantly changing. It almost reminded me of a music box winding down or a record that is warping under the needle as it played; it didn’t sound healthy. And yet in spite of that, I found the music very affecting and moving on a spiritual level in a way that is hard to describe; it is like the music was picking up and matching some wavelength in my soul.

I could tell, however, that the music was coming from behind the great door, as it increased in volume ever so slightly as I continued to make my way towards it. This did not stop me or assuage my curiosity, it only pushed me onward, if anything it steeled my growing resolve to identify the source of the music and get some answers as to what this place was, and what it meant that I had found my way here. I marched towards the door and flung it open as easily as I had the others.

Beyond the door was astonishing. All around me, a vast city stretched out to the horizon, a city unlike any I had ever encountered in my life. The building I emerged from was on top of a hill in that city, and from that door looked out high over the entire length of it. I could see other hills off in the distance; based on the height of them compared to the buildings around, they resembled mountains more than anything, but without jagged slopes or cliff faces. The buildings that lay on these hills where almost as tall as the hills themselves; gigantic gold domes with a single long white hall set into the front, with double doors that resembled those that I just emerged from, dotted all these hills, and I assume where just the same as the one I emerged from on the inside as well.

The city itself was mostly a labirynth of almost identical buildings made out of that same white material that the interior of the door was made of. I could not tell what the intended architecture design of most of the buildings where, as many of them had been damaged in the fighting that had obviously spread to the hallways in the dorms where I just came from. There was not a single intact building as far as I could see, and in fact many where completely destroyed and converted to rubble. Massive craters dotted the landscape as well, though I could not tell if they came from explosions within or weapons launched at this place from without. Despite the obvious beauty this place intended to have, it was now a place of death and decay; a valley of bleached white bones, spreading in every direction.

I was stunned at the sight of this, as I had never seen something that was just on this scale; not a city on this scale, nor destruction on this scale. It was almost more than my mind could bear. How had I never heard of a city like this, a city this big? This must be one of the biggest cities in the world, with countless millions of inhabitants. And from that, how could I have not heard of its destruction? A war big enough to damage the city this completely would have been front-page news on every newspaper for weeks on end, there would be no escaping it.

Off in the distance however, I saw something that was inescapable. It was a towering shrine or temple of some sort, as badly damaged as everything else, but still standing. It was boxed shaped, with a sloped roof and three gigantic golden pillars out front. It was bigger than all the other hills I saw, and was obviously the seat of power in the city based on its sheer size. And the fact that it was still mostly intact after all the fighting indicated that it had the best place of providing something in-tact that could provide me answers.

Plus, I could tell the faint music was coming from inside it; it somehow increased in intensity when I looked at it, even though it seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere around me all at once, as if it came from the vibrations in the air itself. It had honestly sunk into the background noise by this time, I barely noticed it now. That indicated to me either life to play the music, or power of some sort to project recordings of the music. Either way, it seemed the next logical choice on my journey.

I made my way down the slopes of the hill, down into the city. The hill seemed to be made out of a pourous stone, distinctly different in texture from all the buildings I had seen so far, and touching the stone it crumbled away in my fingers. However, I was lucky and quickly identified a set of stairs cut into the side of the hill leading down into the city and followed them down. The stairs where strangely shallow for how tall I had imagined the inhabitants of the city. I was able to walk down easily, but I imagine a being much taller than me as they must have been would have found them quite shallow. It seemed strange that this would be their first inclination, but I was greatful for whatever instinct their culture had that made them do that, as it eased my journey down.

The stairs twisted around the hill in a clockwise fashion, wrapping the hill several times before reaching the bottom. It took me several more hours, I reckoned, before I finally made it to the bottom, and yet the light did not change. I suspected that wherever I was it was eternal daylight, or at the very least incredibly long days, but I could not even see any sun in the cloudy overcast sky that hung over everything to tell for sure what was happening.

Once I got to the bottom I started picking me way through the ruins of the city. Making sure I was still heading in the right direction was actually quite easy, as the temple in the distance was large enough, and most of the buildings around me destroyed enough, that the temple was always in sight, like a mountain range off in the distance. The few times I did lose sight of it, usually behind the rare stand of tall buildings that weren’t reduced to unrecognizable rubble, it came back into view immediately once I travelled a few dozen feet, and I was on my way again.

And so it went for a long while. I spent what felt like months in that ruined city, picking my way through the bones of buildings and long dead lives. Never once did I see anything alive, not even the smallest insect or scavenger, not even the smallest plant. It was all dead, long dead, so long dead that not even the dust of the bones remained.

Whenever I tried to entire a building to inspect what it was like, to get some idea of who had lived here and how they had lived, I found nothing left, noting expect old furniture of the sort that they had in those halls. It was all of a generic sort too, generic tables and chairs without ornamentation. And many pieces I couldn’t identify the uses for, and many more things long reduced to just rubble. The interiors of the buildings wildly varied in sizes too, from very big and tall, to very short, almost as if they where made specifically for each individual who lived there, and all out of that same material as everting else. The layout always changed as well, and there where many rooms in the buildings I went through that I could not tell what function they served. Some of the designs almost seemed schizophrenic, with connecting rooms and halls and room shapes laid out in ways that made no sense, almost designed in a way as if they where meant to inspire dread or anxiety. Nor could the purpose of each building be identified, as houses and (what I assumed where) business and areas of craft and trade all ran together in the same space.

Soon enough I abandoned poking through the buildings, realizing there was nothing for me there and that they where just slowing my progress, and I continued single-mindedly towards my goal. I walked for days and days on end, never tiring, never growing hungry, compelled on by the promise of answers and an end. The temple never seemed to grow closer whenever I looked at it, so great was its size and so far was the distance, but the music always seemed to grow louder, to draw my attention. I could not ignore it even if I tried, I had to visit it.

I came to the foot of the temple, and it towered over me. The music coming from within (as I could tell for certain it was coming from inside now) seemed to flow over and throw me, pulsating all around me. The music was now loud enough and distinct enough that I could tell that it somehow seemed to connect to every part of the city around me; it seemed to perfectly reflect what I saw, in musical form, all the jagged edges and sharp curves reflecting themselves in the rise and fall of the various instruments and the changing of the time signature in the song. And it reflected me as well; my presence in this space created an audible blip in the music, an undeniable sense of something out of place. I started to walk up long set of stairs to the monument and the music grew more tense, less sonorous with every step I took up, almost like it was trying to drive me away, and yet still I continued up those stairs.

I made it to the top of the stairs, continuing to push my way through the growing dissonance of the music, even though every fiber of my being told me to run away. I walked in between the great golden pillars into the interior. The interior was like the hall from before, but much wider. Each wall on other side was covered in great frescos made of the same gold material as the pillars, but battle or fire or even just age seemed to have so decayed the images contained therein that it was not possible to pick out any distinct shapes or storylines anymore, just scenes here and there. In one scene, a couple standing naked in a wood, in another a man walking along the shore of a might river, in another a great pillar of flame on a mountain, in another a man yelling at what looked like an army of some beasts… On and on they continued, all the length of the hall until they disappeared from sight. The end of the hall was not visible from where I was, so I started walking to the other side.

I continued walking down that giant hall, not paying any attention to what was written in the frescos on either side of me, and as I did the music became less melodic and more like white noise, but I was determined not to be stopped by anything. Eventually I saw the end rise up before me, and saw the source of the music. A great machine filled up the entire end of the hall, stretching from both walls all the way up to a ceiling out of sight. It appeared broken and scarred by all the fighting, and while it had no speakers, I knew the music was emanating from it, as if it was generating by the very core of that great machine.

As I stared up in awe at it, I saw sudden flash of light on what part of it, followed by an explosion as one part of the machine malfunctioned and shorted. When it did that, I heard a great rumbling in the distance, and part of the ceiling of that place fell down next to me. I started up at the sky through the hole, and saw the sky had grown very slightly darker from when I last saw it. I understood then that the machine, the music, and this place, this broken shattered vision of a world, where all connected. That when the machine eventually died, this world would be gone. It, and by extension this world, was slowly running down, obviously over a very long period of time, but it was winding down. And I feared what that would mean for me, as I felt myself in that music, connected to it and part of it in a strange way; my heart beat to the rhythm of it. And I feared what that meant for the world I had left behind, as I could tell that was in the music too. Not sure what to do, I sat down and cried.”

The pastor was silent at this, and stared out the window once again, a tear running down his face. Out of fear from the memory, or out of gladness to be out, I could not tell.

“And, what then?”, demanded his wife in a reverent, hushed tone.

“Then I woke up here”, the pastor answered without turning away from the window. “Grateful I have a little time, and afraid of what will happen when I finally do pass away and am forced to return to that place”.

His family was silent at that. They were silent for a long while. Eventually everyone made excuses why they had to leave, exchanged cordial goodbyes, and departed, leaving their patriarch to stare out the window with that same smile on his face. He died a month later due to complications brought on by medication he was being given for his heart.