minotaur

Participants:

elliot_icon.gif wright_icon.gif

Scene Title minotaur
Synopsis And he was afraid, and said, How dreadful is this place! this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven. —Genesis 28:17
Date June 11, 2021

Somewhere Beyond the Sea


So much of this is strange, is frustrating, is feeling helpless. Questions people won't answer push Elliot even further outside the realm of being part of a team. People carrying on a fight while he's trying to explain that everyone on the rig is about to die. Was about to have died. Died and then never did. Wright died/lived and it was less important than…

He shakes his head. This isn't exactly an environment that fosters level-headedness. So there were non-divergent alterations to events and he's supposed to not think about it. Yeah, just don't. So easy for people who only remember the way things were. So he sits on the floor, back against the wall. He tries to make sense of this as suddenly composite memories are overlaid with other, altered composite memories. Four points of perspective, two against two. It's like touching an electric fence at the edge of a pasture. Like falling down an escalator heading up.

It's only easier for Wright because she's busy scrubbing Gates's blood from her arms, her face, her clothing. Clothes, donated by a hospital staffer in the vague neighborhood of her build, lay on a chair just outside the bathroom door. She feels each of Elliot's collisions with her memories, but doesn't stream them for now. Black box black box: quarantine, do not share. Hands clean enough for now, she grabs the offered clothing, locks the bathroom door. Strips down and steps into the fiery oblivion of the showerhead.

"This is so fucked," she says, hands and head resting against the wall in front of her.

Yeah, Elliot replies, eyes still cautious for lookers-on in this cramped space. Everybody looks too exhausted, afraid, heart-broken or dying to see his hands move. He keeps his sad sigh quiet as he adds, The book, hands shaking slightly as he signs. The Anchor.

Wright sniffles, sympathetic but unable to help. To let Elliot feel it at least through her hands. No word yet if it survived the expansion of the anomaly into the Looking Glass chamber, even in the less-catastrophic version she remembers. She pushes herself upright, crosses her hands over her chest to rest her fingers on her collarbones. After a brief reverie she sweeps her hair back and pushes the water loose, turning away from the faucet. "Wasn't expecting Castle to… Whatever happened to Castle," she says with the helpless laughter of confusion.

It brings Elliot back to what he's been avoiding; waiting for a moment of secrecy before addressing his dread. If the voyage could do that to Agent Castle, what could it have done to the Palace? He listens to the shallow breathing of those in the room. Ancillary, he finally signs.

Wright's eyes clench shut in resignation. “Tumbling,” she replies. He doesn't blame her.

Mechanical. Elliot enters the Palace.


The Palace


Elliot walks through the empty expanse of the Mill, the tall outlines of windows now filled in with more red brick. His feet don’t make sound on the wooden floor. He opens the cargo elevator where the Piano sits, its cloth cover itself covered in undisturbed dust. He pulls the door back down by the strap to close it, counts to three, and opens it again.

Elliot floats through the meandering and narrow hallways of the Apartment Complex for what seems like an hour, ignoring the spirals of black mold creeping across the bare sheetrock walls. Ignoring the doors and their placards (Pitcher Plant, Lightbulb, Anthill). All but the door at the beginning of the end of the beginning of the hall. He pushes open the door—bloated with layered, flaking coats of white paint—marked Collins Glass. The door pops and groans in protest, but opens to the loci nonetheless.

The Collins Glass doesn’t sit upon a proper pedestal, rather high upon a car lift. The glass is cracked; are more pieces missing? He counts the shards on the floor in their sparkling constellation, indeed larger than it was before. The memory here is unstable, and also a trap. He didn’t come here for the Collins Glass or the Garage. He closes the door, touches the doorknob, then lets go; touches the doorknob, then lets go; touches the doorknob, then lets go.

Elliot crosses the Garage to stand with his back against the cold cinder block wall beside a red standing tool chest. He looks at the wall to the left of him, then the wall to the right. He closes his eyes and steps backward into the passage. Flies the few feet up and forward, a space which should be back in the Garage but isn’t. He nudges the table as he takes his seat. Always nudges it, never moves it. He opens his eyes.


The 0bservation Room


Elliot sits in the 0bservation Room. He is resigned to this old dread. Head resting in his hands, he looks up at the brittle specs of dry foam and scum where the high tide of time has left its mark on the room’s two-way mirror. Where the fog presses against the other side of the glass with force, seeking form. Seeking sitting down.

The battered door was once locked from top to bottom: broken chain slide locks, missing latches, rusted padlocks, deadbolts knocked from the frame, seized knob locks, cut strips of tamper-evident tape. Only four locks remain unbroken: the lock Elliot makes by forgetting the people he loved. The lock Wright makes by setting down the glass even though it’s still full. The lock they make by looking at Ames’s fascinated smile. The lock they make by lying; by lying; by lying.

Elliot places his palms on the table, careful not to touch the loci’s three sacred memories that lie before him.

The Deck of Cards that Yancy used to make a living off of New York City’s tourists—0000.1.3

The CD Walkman that Tala used at work even though she could remember every song perfectly—0000.1.2

The Wooden Horse that Bastian carved that his father made him burn to make him cry—0000.1.1

He looks over to the door labelled SWITCHBOARD as the phone behind it rings with spiteful anticipation.

A strange thing, sudden, out of place, makes its way to his ears as the memory of a sound. As remembering what it sounded like when a piece of wood clattered to the ground on the alternating red and green and slate gray tiles in a hallway in a place he doesn't know. Doesn't remember. Until the remembering arrives as well. That's…

But it can't be. He stands from the chair, rotates the 0bservation Room to align with the position he must hold to access the exit. He nudges the table as he stands. Always nudges it, never moves it. He closes his eyes.


The Palace


Elliot flies the few feet down and back from a space which should have been in the Garage but isn't. He steps forward from the passage and opens his eyes. He looks at the wall to the right of him, the wall to the left. He crosses the room, away from the red standing tool chest. Unable to ignore the way it feels like the hair on his arms all stand on end.

The Collins Glass doesn’t sit upon a proper pedestal, rather high upon a car lift. The glass is cracked; are more pieces missing? He counts the shards on the floor in their sparkling constellation, indeed larger than it was before. The memory here is unstable, and also a trap. He didn’t come here for the Collins Glass or the Garage. He touches the doorknob, then lets go; touches the doorknob, then lets go; touches the doorknob, then lets go, opens the door. The door pops and groans in protest, but opens to the end of the beginning of the end of the hall nonetheless. Heart racing as he fights himself to not admit that he's felt this before.

He closes the door—bloated with layered, flaking coats of white paint—marked Collins Glass. Elliot floats through the meandering and narrow hallways of the Apartment Complex for what seems like an hour, ignoring the doors and their placards (Ambulance, Gumball, Thread). Ignoring the spirals of black mold creeping across the bare sheetrock walls. And then, unlike a memory but like a sound in a sacred place of silence it echoes through the hallway toward him.

Every part of him screams to run, to find somewhere safe, to pretend monsters aren't real. He gasps, because here, in the middle of the hallway, exactly where it's not supposed to be, is a door marked Turntable. A door that isn't here anymore but for all the evidence that it is. The song calls to him in a sick way, a way that makes him sick as he remembers. When he shudders in revulsion, begins to cry in silent terror, he notices that the door marked Turntable is ajar.

The whorls of mold on the walls s q u i r m begin to SPELL (but in the aquifer it seems there’s nothing here to eat but dreams) No, no, NO. Elliot releases the breath he's been holding and bobbles as his feet strike the floor. He spins the Apartment Complex to put the door marked Turntable behind him. He runs in a blind panic, missing pieces and places, sweat so cold and breathing nothing but fear. Feet skip, sneakers trace arcs in the dust yet untouched. In this sector. In this memory of a place, of places, of what it feels like to remember a place (of scintillating black abyss in which the shadows writhe and twist) Don’t look, don’t look at how the words grow, f l o w e r into the sheetrock, the broken horsehair plaster, chunk by chunk, picking and never knowing why, exposing the narrow wooden slats beneath, to hide the secret, behind the poster on the wall of

[it arrives like an animal growl, like the collapse of your childhood home, like never say no to me again]

oh no

Elliot tries to slow himself down, to stop leaving obvious traces of his passage through sectors too important to damage—

[it feels like ripples distorting the face above as you begin to inhale water, like this is what you made me do]

oh god

—the scent of his fear like ribbons of tangible, opalescent color in the air leading directly to the heart of him—

[it tastes like biting down and braking a tooth, like retreating, like forgetting, like forgiving against your will]

that part of the Church was annexed

—the tracks in the dust on the floor that he should be able to fly over effortlessly, control, spin the structure on a whim.

ELLIOT [it screams, like how your ear rings for days because you cried when you burnt something you loved]

not again

The way Elliot screams in his dreams, the way he screams upon waking. The way he wishes he could tell the truth.

[claws find purchase, part the damp plaster of the hallway, cut away doors and their placards (Locket, Marker, Oar)]

i killed him

He slides through a trick of perspective between doors at a junction of five identical hallways (and claw away at cavern walls a labyrinth of endless halls) where the flicker of the lights determines the only safe direction. He takes stairs, industrial, not supposed to be in a place like this but as familiar as the scrape of his fingertips along the flecked green paint coating rusted metal, the ring of the hollow pipe from the strum of his fingernails. He slams through the door to Apartment 406. The music plays louder, as if to mock him1, from the corner of this nothing, this broken loci. Ignoring it, he pulls aside a sunburst tapestry and hits the wall behind with force. He scrambles, panics, breaths in dust and finds the corner, drops into the well and floats forward into the office in—

ELLIIIIOOOOOOT [throat tearing roar, rage, fury, desperation, terror, the setting down of a taper candle, an unfinished meal, plastic sheet suddenly here, there?, underneath feet, crinkle, soft, wet shift, external instead of internal, forgetting the bowl, forgetting the w h y foregtttttting forgetttt forg for (each stretching on and twisting back to meet itself, an endless track) clears the throat but there's so much blood, unexpected, righteous violence, never sparing the rod, never spoiling the child, eyebrows quirking to ask where did this come from, and did you give this to me? this blood? as though being able to form words with this dying mouth could ever make right the question the cloud the black the black the black black black black black] HOW DO YOU KNOW MY SON

i killed him

He falls through the floor, hits the hard wood of the one below with his knees and slides, scrabbles, sprints, sees the rolling door of the Mill and—


The Here and Now
The Flood Timeline


—gasps for breath, looks around, tries to calm the pounding of his heart, the pressure on his chest.

“What the fuck,” Wright asks in a croak, fingernails clawed into her palms. She throws the shower curtain aside, looks to the lock on the door, crosses the room to feel the bolt of the lock with her own hands as though her eyes can no longer be trusted. “What the FUCK.”

"He's dead, he’s…" Elliot whispers, eyes darting around the room, listening for signs he’d been heard, signs he’d been screaming again.

But it isn’t dead.

“It learned something,” Wright says in dawning horror. “It learned something.”


The Palace


[the minotaur claws the walls, stalks the hallways, thoughtlessly expands the words of mold, screams]

how do you know my son



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