1. A lifting descent.
The room is grey in the afternoon light, the beams glinting wanly of tin foil, glass and steel. A forest of accessories and ingredients sprawls across the coffee-table, and beyond this sward there is a couch. A young woman lies there, her short raven hair slicked-down by sweat. Her face is glowing, her breath shallow but regular. Umbral crescents swell within her armpits.
Her eyes are open, staring into the ceiling and a thousand miles away. They glaze, as her breathing deepens. Across her face a smile is slowly crawling its way, spreading like moisture through a thick piece of paper. It is impossibly wide, almost maniac. She begins to reach out a hand as her eyes begin to dim.
The world is awash with colour, a meld akin to ink drawings dropped into a murky puddle.
It was a bright morning when Alex opened her eyes. The sun was out, beaming down on everything, and the light lanced through her eyelids and forced them open. She looked out of the window at the world beyond the curtain lace, at the house across the way. She rose, stretching, her muscles expanding and her joints clicking back into place. Her neck crackled like arid matchwood.
The first thing she noticed, much to her surprise, was a mouse.
"Odd," thought Alex, "we've never had a problem with mice before."
There was something unusual about this mouse, although this was in no way evinced by the way it moved or spoke. Indeed, its voice was quite pleasant to the ear, with a liquid, Celtic lilt.
"Tis nay good," it said, "Ah'll nay make it afore the red-rain comes!" and then it ran from the lounge room, out through the door, and into the hallway.
"How peculiar," thought Alex. She was not at all used to seeing little mice run through her lounge room, cursing time, or the lack thereof, in Gaelic accents. She got up and followed into the hallway, curious, and saw that the mouse had vanished. There was nothing to gauge its location by save for a few droppings at the base of the linen-cupboard door.
Alex opened the door, and looked in. There was nothing there. The old rain coats hung in a tangle of polyester and vinyl vines. Murky darkness shone at the back.
Alex went into the cupboard, and pushed through the bed sheets and tea towels, and after some time doing this it began to occur to her that not only was she yet to find the mouse, but that she could not recall her cupboard ever being quite so large.
Thoughts of this were put aside as a light began to shine. Alex pushed on, past duvets and coverlets, and came to a lift nestles amongst the shelves.
"How convenient, to have one's own lift in one's own linen-cupboard." It did not occur to Alex to ask herself why a lift was situated in her linen-cupboard, although a small and well-suppressed part of her had a desire to know why.
She pulled open the brass cage and stepped in, and found a little lever set on an axle beside the door, such as one sees in films from the nineteen thirties. At the top was written "Up", and at the bottom "Down", and the lever sat comfortable in between. Still curious as to the nature of this lift, Alex shut the brass cage and then pulled the lever downwards. There was a clunk, and a whirr, and the lift began to sink down into the floor. It sank quite rapidly, the ground through the cage a blur in the light of the single globe. It went on and on, and after a time it became rather dull. Alex began to wonder if perhaps it would never stop at all.
"Imagine if it shouldn't?" thought the young woman. "Then I should keep going on and on until I was swallowed up by the fiery magma beneath the Earth's crust. But it doesn't seem to be getting any hotter, and if it does then I shall simply turn the lever the other way."
After some time, things began to appear outside the lift. At first they were just cracks and little white fissures, but after a few moments lone livid scars poured light from the wall. They melded together, thicker and brighter until the lift was nothing but brilliance. It blazed painfully for a moment and then faded back into lines and cracks and razor-wide slits, and then the wall was featureless onyx.
"That was rather strange," thought Alex. "But then, this entire series of events is rather strange. I wonder if perhaps this was not the wisest of ideas."
The time to ponder this particular question passed by at that moment, as the lift came to a stop with a loud clunk. A long corridor passed away from the lift, with many large doors and many small doors and dark angles in which the shadows seemed to pool and collect and drip with heavy little sounds.
Alex pulled the cage opened, and entered. She walked down the corridor, stopping occasionally to try this door or that, and came to an iron chest. It showed no signs of a padlock or latch, and so Alex, despite what her better judgement might have said, opened it. Inside was a key, quite small and delicately-made, and quite clearly crafted from steel.
"What a sinister key," thought Alex, "and yet presumably it belongs to one of these locks on one of these doors, which leads me to assume that I can leave this corridor. After all, it appears that the mouse has passed through here, and yet I see no sign of his still being on this side of any of the doors."
Alex's evidence for this statement was the several pieces of mouse dung that were scattered in an aethereal trail along the floor. They led to the door at the end of the corridor, which was the largest and most sinister of all, and appeared to vanish beneath it.
Alex decided to follow the mouse. In such a strange place, it was best to cling to constants, (however inconstant they might be). And so she went to the large, terrific door, and tried the key in the lock. She attempted to turn it, but it didn't move a millimetre.
"Blast!" she muttered. "I wonder if there's anything fouling the lock." Alex put her eye to the keyhole and looked through, but she couldn't see a single obstruction. What she did see had a far more profound impact upon her, however. It was broad, lovely parkland of willows and fountains and broad stretches of blood-red flowers. Compared to the dark, slate-shod corridor, it was Nirvana.
Alex tore at the door. She tried desperately to break her way through. The beauty of the place, incomparable, defied easy description. Her palms were grazed from her attack upon the door.
Falling down, cursing, she began to cry. Her tears fell from her in long streamers, running along the ground, wrapping around her and dragging her down. She got up and waded through the sea of mourning, pulled-open the iron chest in a search for another key. There was a only a little black bottle, holding perhaps fifty millilitres, and carven in the shape of a skeleton clutching to a gravestone. Alex paused.
"What is this? Some kind of poison, or potion?" she took the top off and sniffed. A jet of crimson vapour shot from the vial and swirled around her head. Queer vespers seemed to dance amidst its volume. "Perhaps it is a poison, but as I am in no way particular, I shall follow through nonetheless. After all, I have never seen a poison that had ghosts in it."
Armed with such dubious logic, Alex pinched her nose and took one long drink. The potion went down like ice water, but left a warm glow in the pit of her stomach. She began to tingle all over, as though she had been lying in one position for far too long. Her nose itched. Then her skin itched. Then she was on fire. Alex fell screaming to the floor, wracked with pain, and held-up her hand in confusion. The member began to boil away in a thick incarnadine cloud. It fell to the ground, heavy like mist. It roiled around the quartet of fleshly pillars, and dragged her down screaming to evaporate in rosy hues.