by Harley Carnell
Although I hated not finishing a book, I had to now. About that cult where entire families had been born and raised in a large network of caves, what horrified me most, even more than the violence and the abuse, was the thought of those children living their entire lives underground, and thinking that there was nothing else. I had stopped finally when reading of an especially tall boy who had developed neck, spine, and developmental problems due to the need to continually crouch.
“Even though I was in agony all the time, I never thought that much about it. It just made sense. This was our world. Of course I’d have pain all the time, because I was tall and I had to bend. The caves, they weren’t designed for people like me. But that was just the way it was, that was just what life was.”
By this point, around a third into the book, I had read all manner of horrific and unspeakable things that had been perpetrated by the cult. I wasn’t sure, therefore, why I should be so especially disturbed by what happened to him, but I was.
#
The train driver said something over the intercom, but I didn’t hear it. Whatever he had said, it had to pertain to delays. Squeezing my head from under some guy’s armpit, I contorted myself until I found my phone and emailed my boss that I’d be late again. I sighed as the woman behind me continued to breathe into my hair and I resumed my fruitless search to locate the source of the overpowering BO that I could taste as well as smell.
A combination of the confinement, stress, having been stood up for almost two hours, and the sunlight reflecting off the windows and slicing into my retinas made me dizzy. If I wasn’t entombed in a wall of people, I might have collapsed.
At this point, there was another announcement when, from my peripheral vision, I saw movement outside. An array of maintenance people were walking alongside the train. They were dressed oddly. Rather than the usual high-viz and hard-hats, they were wearing what looked more like hazmat suits, albeit with fish-bowl helmets.
As I was contemplating this, a loud screech wailed from the intercom. The train filled with groans and cries as the noise circumvented our ears and penetrated into our brains. Then, there was another sound – a large crashing. I turned around and saw that the doors and windows were being smashed in and torn open by the maintenance people. As I looked over at them, I saw that there were many more of these people scaling and abseiling down the apartment buildings that abutted the train tracks. Now that the windows and doors were open, there were the clear sounds of sirens, screaming, and assorted other noise.
Passengers were being dragged out of the train by the maintenance people, literally kicking and screaming. For all my confusion and exhaustion, my adrenaline kicked in. I jumped out of a gutted window, and began to run on the tracks.
Now outside, I could see that the sky was dotted with all kinds of what I could call helicopters, but only by analogy. It was from these that the ringing emerged. It became louder, until it was just a single, long, tinnital whine that blocked out everything else. People were being pulled from the smashed windows of the apartment buildings, and carried into the ‘helicopters.’
I ran quicker than I thought I could in my work shoes and with my state of unfitness, but within a matter of seconds I either tripped or was tripped.
#
In the next moment, for that’s how it always is, I ‘woke up.’
I use this advisedly and descriptively. As I would come to see, there were many things that I would be unable to explain, even as they were happening.
Because it seemed less like I woke up, and more like I both was awake, and had always been awake, despite having clearly lost consciousness at some point. In the same way, if trying to describe it, I might say that I ‘saw’ a light or that I ‘felt’ calm. These were certainly the closest approximations to what was happening, but they were not strictly true. Closer still, if still far off, was a sense that something was happening to me. I could not explain it, even to myself, anymore than I could explain calculus to an ant. Similarly, the ‘conversation’ that followed cannot be rendered by me saying I spoke to someone or they spoke to me. Instead, the words simply occurred, and they occurred all at once, tumbling like an avalanche, even though the conversation took place over many minutes and perhaps hours.
“Where am I?”
“You are here.”
“And where is here?”
“You are home, for the first time in your life.”
I knew that I was not home, because I knew that I was not anywhere. I was not blind, and yet I could not see anything.
“What do you mean? Am I dead? Is this Heaven?”
“You are not dead. And whether this is Heaven, that is up to you. In many ways, Heaven is a designation, not a destination. However, if you are asking if you are in any of the Heavens as rendered in your philosophies and theologies, then no, you are not.”
“Then where am I?”
“You are finally in the world. You have been pulled away from the shadows.”
This description seemed odd, as I couldn’t see anything, even though I could see.
“How is your back?
“My back?” I said, before realising that my back hadn’t ceased to throb and ache because I was distracted, but because it, and its pain, was not there. Years of office work, and the arduous commuting to and from it, had left my back a vulnerable shambles. My fingers had a constant ache that I hoped was some kind of RSI but could easily have been presages of the future arthritis that had so debilitated my grandmother and rendered the end of her life unliveable. At times, it hurt even to lie down. And I was young. In my office, some of the older people were constantly seeing physios, were on a cocktail of medications which were all in a perpetual skirmish with each other. And the thing that had always disturbed me the most about this was that office work was not manual labour, or physical in any sense. Of all the jobs you could do, it was the safest and cushiest. Yet even it could lead to these complications, and I dreaded to think the kind of problems that came with more hazardous employment that so many people had to suffer simply to keep themselves alive.
“It feels good. Well, it doesn’t feel anything. I have no pain.”
“And this is usual. You will have no more pain.”
“But pain is a part of life. It sucks, but it’s just part of being human.”
“You have been pulled from the shadows, but the shadows are still with you. If you spend your whole life in water, you will think that all is wet.”
I strangely felt that I knew what this meant.
“But the world is all there is.”
“It is not. Imagine your desert, a sea of clean water always behind you as you always walk away from it. Naturally, you will say ‘I have seen no sea, so therefore there is no sea!’”
“So this is the sea?”
“This is the sea, and it is the palm trees, and it is the birds, and the fish, and the people.”
I had been so focussed on myself, and my lack of self, that I had not even thought of people.
“Where is everyone?”
“You have been wandering in your desert and you are thirsty. To drink all at once would be to drown.”
“Okay, I understand that.” I remembered, or perhaps had implanted into my head, that old parable about the desert straggler given water to drink, and sand being thrown in it so that he did not drink it too quickly and become ill. “But I will see them?”
“You will see them, and they will see you, and you will see all manner of people. But only once you and all have become accustomed and acclimatised.”
“Where are they? My mother, she’s fragile, and – ”
“Your mother has been pulled from the sea, and placed onto a boat. When you see her, she will walk to you.”
For the past ten years, since a botched hip operation, my mother had been in near-constant agony. A series of increasingly more useless treatments, coupled with our hospital’s ‘treat only when it is too late’ policy meant that while she was not immobile, walking for even a short amount of time was difficult for her.
“My mother couldn’t walk ten feet without crying. If you had her, you’d know that.”
“That is in the old understanding of reality, where she had a body that could be broken.”
“Where am I? Where is she?”
“You are in the world.”
“You’ve given me some hallucinogen. I’m dreaming.”
“Your grandmother never could draw again.”
This derailed me. Although not a professional artist, my grandmother had loved to draw, especially after my grandfather had died. I knew now that they must have my mother. How else could they know this?
“But it came too late for her.”
“What did?”
“The rescue. You are not hallucinating, nor are you dead. All that has happened is you have been brought into the world, and been taken out of what you thought was the world. We are happy to show you all how you have been harmed by the reality you thought was reality. But we mourn, and we deeply mourn, for all those who came before you.”
I knew that none of this could be real. At the same time, I did not feel my back. Nor could I feel anything. It was as though I was totally numb, completely comprised of pure consciousness.
Yet this was not true. I did feel something. It was a sensation, one of pure and unencumbered peace, like the happiness you felt in the moments before sleep when you were awake enough to appreciate it.
“You are on no drugs, and you cannot feel in dreams.”
This startled me. The first part anticipated a thought I had not uttered, and the second one I had not thought yet. Because the latter did come to me now: the troubling recognition that you couldn’t feel sensations in dreams.
“But if this is the real world, what does this all mean? If I believe you, for the sake of argument, what will happen now?”
And then it came to me.
Although I had not finished my book, I knew the story. I knew that, at some point, police and rescue teams had flooded into the caves. Those who had been kidnapped were returned to the world they knew. Then there were the children who had been born underground. They had seen the world for the first time. The rivers and the trees, the sunshine and the rain, the sand and the snow.
“We wish only we could have come earlier, to save those who came before, but we are here now. You will not know pain, and you will not know sorrow. You will not know hatred, and you will not know fear. You will not know work, and you will not know hardship. All these things that were as inevitable to you as the damp and dark of the caves will be shorn away, and once you have adjusted your eyes to the new sunlight, and your lungs to the new air, and your heart to the new peace, you will finally be able to see the real reality.”
~
Bio:
Harley Carnell lives and writes in London, England. His fiction, which has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, has appeared or is forthcoming in Vastarien, the Drabblecast, Riptide Journal, Shooter Literary, and Sarasvati, among others. His critical work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gamut, L’Espirit, the Lovecraft Annual, and Aurealis. He can be found at www.harleycarnell.com
Philosophy Note:
‘The Caves’ is a refraction of Plato’s ‘The Allegory of the Caves’ through an antinatalist lens. Following on from another story of mine (‘We Are Here’ – After Dinner Conversation, October 2024), it examines the extent to which suffering is a necessary and inevitable component of life. My understanding of antinatalism is highly informed by the work of David Benatar (Better Never to Have Been) and Thomas Ligotti (The Conspiracy Against the Human Race).
