Universe

We were stunned.  They were right.  The rumours were true.  Jarvis shook his head.

“No,” he inhaled sharply, eyes glazing over upon his hooded reflection in the deep plateau of ice beneath our boots.  “This is wrong.  This is wrong!  This is-“

“Shut up,” I reprimanded with severe haste.  “Say what you see.”

“I see…” He stammered.

“Go on.”

“I see… I see IT.”  He gaped coldly, teeth clanking together in the arctic wind, his face smattered with snow and dirt.  “It exists.  It’s here.”

He seemed more concerned about the issue than I; for I had come prepared.  I had come prepared with the knowledge that chance might rear its ugly head, that common sense may eat its own face and scurry into the recesses of darkness.  And all was dark, now.  The sky grew a pallid grey, a quiet storm blossoming in the architecture of clouds… the atmosphere prising open its maw as if to gape upon the great secret that we had unwittingly unearthed.

It was as if nature were more shocked than we.

I rubbed my gloved hands together and glanced back to check on the dogs.  Sleeping.  Unaware of chaos.  Unaware of terror.  Unaware of universal fallout.  Oblivious.  Sweetly oblivious, and defiantly happy to boot.

I coughed for a good three minutes.  Jarvis stood there, positively aghast at his and his companion’s unearthing.

The plateau was cyan blue, and deliciously opaque.  We knew what was underneath it.  We could make it out.  I am taken back to the seminar, in the classroom, in the halls of laughter that echoed throughout the institution.  I am taken back to the sheer pits of schadenfreude, to the bowels of mockery and of mirth in the knowledge that common sense is and will always be the ruling monarch.

I was thrust forward into regret, and that infamous sinking feeling… that mingled concoction of dread, of realisation and of lumps in one’s throat.  I was wrong.  I was wrong and I’d felt good about it, for a time.  I never knew of the truth, I just assumed… it comes to pass… that self-reflection is perhaps only a reflexive notion when universal fallout is a sheer possibility.

He spoke, finally.

“Get the axe.”

I turned to him, having stopped choking on my own tongue a few seconds prior.  “I’m sorry?”

“I said, get the axe.”  He tilted his frost-hit head darkly to focus upon my bewildered eyes and equally withdrawn mouth.  “We’re doing this because we have to.”

I remained slightly aghast, though defiance was brewing in my outward countenance faster than my consciousness could immediately allow.  “What about choice?”  I philosophised. “Where’s the ‘have’, Jarvis?  Have ‘could’ and ‘might’ become extinct all of a sudden?”

He sullenly lowered his head and viewed me with some disdain, his pupils tilted into the upper pockets of his bitter, white eyes.

“Yes,”  he croaked, as though he was pushing up a word through force of will rather than through choice (though, he had already rendered this system of ‘choice’ dead in the water).  “We have to.”

Under less tense circumstances, I wouldn’t have dared to question him... but, this time, I did.  Something within me that day wanted me to escape the tundra on my own pins and die alone, feeling my flesh rot against the grain of the alien winds, domiciled and left behind in some secluded bear cave… something told me that legends were there to be left alone, never to be proved.  Never to be examined, nor identified, nor analysed.  We’d done that… right here, right now, we’d opened the box.  We were about to.  I had to stop Jarvis from turning the key.  I had to.  No choice.

“We don’t,”  I stated bluntly, beginning to turn back to the dogs.  “If we open that… that thing, we’ll live to regret it.”

At this point, he grabbed my arm reflexively, as if to force me against my own will.

“C’mon Bill… where’s your sense of curiosity?”

I ripped my arm away from his nyloned hands and eyed him in a frozen venom.  “You can’t be serious,”  I spat.  “You opposed this as much as I did!”

“I STILL oppose it, Bill..”  He grinned, now preparing to collect the axe from his rucksack.  “I just want to know what all the fuss is about…”  He proceeded to fetch the pickaxe from his bag, hoiking it over his right shoulder, before stopping to look at my now concerned expression.

“If you don’t wanna be part of this anymore, leave,”  he snarled, now poised to take a swing at the thick window of ice in the ground .  “Go on.  Take the dogs.  I’ll be fine.”

Part of me wanted to.  Believe me.  But this would’ve been bowing to his demands… which I couldn’t face.  Not now, not ever.  We’d grown apart.  The trek to the pole had separated us as friends and glued us in unison as bitter rivals.  I hesitate on using the term ‘nemeses’, for I believe I shall never hold that bitter a regard for any living creature.  They call me a doormat.  Perhaps I am.  But I’d rather be a doormat than dead.

Jarvis pivoted himself over the sheet of ice (where IT lay beneath, grinning at us in a sick, defiant, though obviously inanimate way we knew was never going to be intentional) and threw down the pickaxe, initiating a lucid, thin crack across the frozen plateau,  That was it.  The first-foot into a terrifying thought becoming an absurd reality.  We were Michael Jarvis and William Ross, the men who killed Earth.

I shook my head, and tried to draw away from watching Jarvis continue to crack at the ice.  It was horrifying.  Not physically, but in terms of temporality.  Morality.  Mortality.  No matter how many times I told myself, I couldn’t pull away.  A grim fascination.  Had someone planted this here as a trick?  A sick prank to drive whoever found it lusty with madness and happy to be dancing in the devil’s shoes?  Possibly.  Right now, it seemed nothing else could be more possible.  Sadly.  I dare say I would be disappointed, though the politician in me wanted to be diplomatic about the whole affair.  I didn’t want Jarvis to get at it, but really, I did.

Another slam into the ice came the pickaxe, keener than ever.  This time, large shards of it came flying out at all angles, missing my right ear by a half-inch.  Jarvis was getting dangerously obsessive about this.  I could tell.  His once pale blue eyes had burst into an incredulous and frightening orange, swirling and spinning around his pupils as if to tease them before swallowing them whole.  He foamed at the mouth.  He removed his hood to reveal his wild, hazel hair flailing in the tundra gale.  Another hit, and another, and another.

Smash.

Jarvis let out an audible cry of success and laughter that I’m half-sure was becoming maniacal.  I’m not a reader of the ‘good book’, but there was something in my companion’s countenance that was beginning to brutalise everything I thought I knew about him.

“See, couldn’t resist, could yer?”  Grinned Jarvis in my sombre direction, as I nervously flailed back and forth at his completion of the ice-shattering.  “This is going to change our lives… EVERYONE’S lives!  We’ll go down in history, Bill!  The wealth!  The fame!  The-“

“What if it doesn’t?”

Jarvis’ face fell to blank consternation.  “What?”

“What if it doesn’t change everyone’s lives… for the better, I mean.  You know the urban stuff, Jarv… that thing, it’s… it’s not good news.”  I cringed at my phrasing, but at this moment in time lexis was hardly the most prominent issue on my mind.

Jarvis just snarled.  “You’ve changed.”

“So have you.”

A quiet standoff between us was initiated.  Only the hollow wind and the howls of the dogs, freshly awoken from Jarvis’ axing, were present for our ears to pick up on.  He turned away and crouched nearer to the now broken ice, which provided a clear view to the supposed treasure that lay within its recesses.

“Look…”  said my companion with slight apology to his voice.  “We’ve come all this way…”

“Not to find this,”  I spat.  “You KNEW the mission, and…”

It dawned on me.

“I’m sorry,” He ushered quietly.  “I…”

“You knew all along, didn’t you?  This was the REAL mission!  To prove some stupid urban myth about-“

“Well we HAVE proved it, ain’t we?”  His Texan accent was beginning to grate more than ever.  “Now  we just need to get down there and open it.”

Frankly, my subconscious had had its fill of resisting Jarvis’ curiosity.  I was ready to give in.  But, for the sake of being the only responsible adult around for miles, I didn’t throw up my white flag.

“Okay… well… fine.  Do what you have to.  Just…”

“I know, I know.”

With this, Jarvis began to prise away all the remaining pieces of ice from the opening in order to get a better view of what was down there.

“It’s… deeper than we thought.”

I reluctantly sauntered over, parka and all, to get a closer look.  For once in this dire expedition, my comrade was correct.  There was at least a ten to twelve foot drop to our dreaded discovery, and Jarvis was all for descending into the pit.

“Do we have rope about someplace?”  Questioned my companion.  I zipped open my rucksack and handed him one end of a gnarled, old, but lengthy spool of rope, with which he prepared to jump backwards into the pit.

“Lower me down, buddy.  I’ll pull you down gradually if you dig your heels into the wall on the way down.”

Was I going to accept this offer of possible death?  Absolutely.  My reasoning was dying by the minute, and my curiosity was waxing more than the moon above us.

I ushered him backwards towards the edge of the drop, and he jumped therein, bouncing downwards as he abseiled against the wall of the pit that was nearest to me.  As the rope grew shorter and shorter, Jarvis finally hit the bottom of the drop and insinuated that I too try to abseil, albeit via his strange ‘forwards’ method.

Surprisingly, this was a lot easier than assumed.  As my comrade tugged the rope at the other end, I slowly dug my heels and scraped forward against the wall (which, luckily, was on a kind slant) as if steadying myself down a steep incline.  Soon enough, I reached the bottom of the pit – as I looked back above us, it hit me.

There’s no way out.  This is it.  Do or die, make or break, no turning back.  Jarvis was grinning.

“This is destiny now, Bill.  Destiny.”

We took deep breaths and finally looked downwards at the fabled object beneath our feet, the one that had plagued our curiosities, fuelled laughter between our acquaintances and provided chin-wags for conspiracy theorists the world over, and for centuries before us.

We were stood on the edge of it.  It was flat, though slightly raised, and a hideous cyan blue to the colour.  It was a type of metal that looked like steel, but had the texture of viscous mercury.  It was circular, and was clearly built for purpose.  All these details, however, were nothing compared to the clincher, the sealer of deals, the one thing it had that proved everything we’d dreamed about.

It had a shining, sheening, unspoilt handle.  One that had to be twisted before pulling it to open.  A handle.  This was it.  This was the door that fable spoke of, but few believed.

“Strewth,” gasped Jarvis at my left.  “Holy shit, Bill.  Holy shit.”

I nodded and prepared to go for the handle.

“What’re you doing?”  Snapped my companion in angst and derision.  “I thought you didn’t want anything to do with this!”

“I came down the pit, didn’t I?”  I picked a gaping flaw in Jarvis’ temporal logic more times than a little.

“Well… let’s do it together, then.  You twist the handle, and I’ll pull the door free.”

I did his bidding despite the fact that there was still a now tiny voice telling me otherwise.  Yes, I was about to shake hands with the devil.  But did I care?  Oh, yes.  But not in THAT way.

“Wait, stop!”

Jarvis pulled me back.  Had he a change of heart?

“What does THAT say?”

He’d noticed a small, but vivid-after-noticing-it message, etched onto the front of the door so crudely that you had to tilt your head at a certain angle to be able to decipher it.  It didn’t help matters further that it was in French.  It was extremely imposing.


c'est la porte avant de l'univers.
nous apprécions votre curiosité.
cependant, nous insistons que vous ne l'ouvriez jamais.
autrement, nous vous tuerons.
tout le monde.


I guess it was also lucky that I was literate in a language more than the one my Mother forced upon me. 

Or not. 

The message confirmed everything.

It was terrifying.

The rumours... they made sense.  The legends that were once speculation in the highest and most fantastical of orders rang oddly true, the bell of enlightenment pealing louder and louder, rumbling and rankling within the small space that occupied my skull.

The rumours... they stipulated a door which separated universes, one which lay hidden in the sheets of snow that bind the arctic circle together... one side preventing people getting to Hell, the other side preventing Hell’s ministers from wreaking havoc upon Heaven.  It acted as a seal between universes, a slim, but essential, purgatory – one which, if removed, would bring civilisation as we knew it to its knees.

This door led to Hell.  I could taste it from the outside, the black ice splattering against my teeth, the deep, undying blue that glowed, somewhat evilly, and comfortable in the knowledge that curiosity would someday allow itself to be wrenched open by fools – and only fools.  Its grim countenance and sinister warning unsettled so.  If we were to open this door, we would annihilate everything we’d come to know and love.  The same thought rattled, and re-rattled, and conjectured around my head at the very least.  We’d come this far, we’d been told to turn away.

But something stopped me, somehow, from obeying its haunting decree.

I envied Jarvis for the first time on that expedition.  He had no idea what I’d just been told by whatever the hell was in there.  But, there was no turning back.

Destiny, as he’d said.

“What does it say?”  He re-iterated.

I stuttered.  “It says… welcome.  It says welcome.”

He was in derision.  “All them words just to say ‘come in’?”

I nodded, quietly, knowing that this was a terrible lie.  Luckily, he wasn’t blessed with much intelligence.

“Heh, that’s the French for ya I guess.”

We continued with the task at hand, my knowledge a burden upon our safety.  What had I done?  Surely I was to be condemned, now.  There was nothing around to kill myself with… so I kept twisting the handle.

Pop.

It came clean open.  I found this fact somewhat barbaric – one warning was all it heralded.  The door was not stiff, nor was it excessively heavy.  Doing the initial deed was incredibly simple.

Jarvis heaved the panel back and with a few tugs the door flew open, the metal panel flying off and out of the pit, perhaps another nail in the coffin that was ‘you’re here forever’.

The hole in front of us was dark and foreboding.  A smell of coffee, weirdly, and a faint noise I’m certain was carousel music emanated from its interior.  I had to tell him.

“Jarvis...”

He was too engrossed in the discovery.

“Jarvis, I lied.  We’re in grave danger.”

Oddly, he grinned.  “No, we’re not.”

Before I could stop him, he climbed into the hole and crawled down the tunnel ahead.  I was beyond saving, mentally.

But I couldn’t help it…

I couldn’t help but follow him in.

I too crawled into the tunnel, which was just as monstrous as I thought it would be.  Dark.  Lucid.  Full of noises and scents I’d never noticed on the outside world.

As we bunched ourselves inside the slim cylinder, I looked behind me at the gaping hole that led back to the frozen wasteland, knowing immediately that it was somewhere we would rather be given our eventual resurfacing in the alternate Universe.

We hardly spoke a word on our traverse down the tunnel, on hands and knees, privy to an immense, tubular darkness, drips of water and mercury saturating the strange metal that bound the cylinder together.  It was a fairly horizontal crawl, with a few dips and bumps along the way, though it wasn’t a lack of physical comfort that was pervading our (read, my) spirit so.

It was the mental anguish.  The point of no return had passed, and we were on a one-way trek through an unfathomably deep, idiosyncratically long pipe, which we calculated would take at least four hours to navigate through.

There was no light whatsoever.  The only senses allowed to reciprocate from the experience were touch, in the wetting of our clothes with the mercury that seeped from cracks inside the pipe’s flaking shell; smell, in the pungent aroma of human waste and rotting meat that seemed to surround us, rather than pervade our olfactory senses head-on; and sound.  The screams of lost souls, the indistinct pleading of tortured prisoners rattled alongside our crawling figures, running past us, then behind us, then past us again.  We surmised that there were at least five different voices, and all were experiencing a horrendous amount of pain.

But we couldn't freeze to objectify the sensory horrors being pummeled into our very souls.  We had to keep moving.  Steadily.  Without fear.  After all, this was all our fault.  Hell wasn't going to be a picnic, and we sure as hell hadn't brought a tablecloth.

I could no longer settle myself with the shape of things to come.

By the time we saw light at the end of the gargantuan tunnel, all but one screaming voice remained, giving the allusion that the other prisoners had been put out of their misery.  As were we, I assumed.  As the light drew nearer and nearer, we sped up – Jarvis in particular seemed excitable at the piercing of this white, humming apparition up ahead, which somewhat signalled that the five-hour crawl through the bowels of Beelzebub's deepest catacombs was about to reach a disquieting climax.

Jarvis scrambled out of the hole at the end of the tunnel like an adolescent in a burlesque house, whilst I swallowed every moment of peace I had left, truly, in the tunnel, where the perils of nature and the balance of Universes could not assimilate me.  As I eventually and reluctantly stumbled out of the pipe, pulled down my parka hood and stood to attention, Jarvis and I at last, sated our curiosity by taking time out to survey the New Universe that lay before us.  Where had we landed?  Had we truly opened the gate to Satan’s endless minions?  What darkness loomed in the crevices and canyons beyond the pipe, I’d wondered.  What-

This wasn’t it... surely not.

“The door to the universe…”  I whispered, as Jarvis continued to look astounded.  “They lied… that message… it was a lie…”

There we stood, in our thick, polar outfits, in… what appeared to be a forest, in the peak of summer. 

The most gorgeous forest I’d ever seen.  It was as if it had come straight out of a storybook.  Vibrant butterflies happily fluttered through strange blue thickets… a red waterfall poured itself steadily down a series of soft-looking rocks, smooth to the touch and yellow to the complexion.  The air carried the scent of chocolate mocha, and the trees hummed the odd music I’d heard back on the other side.  It was… it was wonderful.

This wasn’t the hell I’d anticipated, or been told about.  This was… this was…

“Grave danger?”  Laughed Jarvis.  “This is paradise!”

He was right.  And then, the true horror finally dawned on me.

And I wasn’t about to tell him otherwise.  He’d have to figure it out.

I could hear the dark, barrel-bellied horns of war blaring from the top of crimson peaks, the gargantuan and indefatigable swell of human curiosity, the monstrous lust for blood brought on by the destruction of a barrier, separating two worlds which had to be kept in check at all times and under all dispositions.  Hell’s poison was about to flow into the open wound of Heaven, tearing the flesh asunder, and gnawing at the once-pleasant, granite bone beneath. 

My heart began to pound with intense moroseness, my breath splintering out into the gorgeous ether.  We had done what I had feared we would, only... the other way around.

We couldn’t go back.

This was our home, now.

Forever,

And that scared the hell out of me.