Free Abyss (Songs of Megiddo) by Daniel Klieve Page A

Yvonne’s by a slim platform that tapered off to either side. A voice – a female voice, coming seemingly from everywhere at once – had instructed them to step into the second elevator. As they did so, a bright, scanning light had swept over them from the narrow, upward gap. One more step and they were inside; the doors sliding promptly shut behind them. A steady metronome of mechanical sounds – grinding and whirring – began to vibrate and shake the elevator around them. Strangely, Dio noticed, there didn’t seem to be any sensation of movement. All the better, in his opinion: The drop-and-stop of typical elevators made him nauseous.
    “Do you really not understand why I had a reaction to hearing you talking about ‘gold stars’?” Yvonne asked, seemingly out of the blue. Dio slowly shook his head, glancing at her nervously, feeling like a shame-faced puppy being taunted by its own leavings. “Nazi Germany...?” She hinted. He nodded, signalling that he was aware of it. No recognition of a connection between the two concepts registered on his face. “Huh.” She shook her head, eyebrows raised.
    “What?”
    “No. Nothing. Maybe do a search, sometime. The internet’s there to help, Dio.” He shrugged bashfully. They both fell silent.
    After a significant period – Dio wasn’t sure exactly how long it was – the doors to the elevator opened once more, revealing a broad, polished stone platform...and beyond that, a ledge, dropping off into what initially appeared to be an vast chasm of uniform darkness. As the light in the elevator dimmed, allowing their eyes to adjust...those same eyes widened in complete and total shock.
    “So much for ‘ resourcing impediments’...” Yvonne hissed, repeating the phrase they’d both heard Wright use on numerous occasions to justify their mediocre accommodations. Dio couldn’t speak. All he could do was nod mutely. They were both awestruck. Looking upwards, and then downwards, and then from side to side...Yvonne twirled around in a little circle, taking it all in. Dio wanted to respond, but even opening his mouth and attempting to...all he could manage was a few ineffectually gapes. Yvonne was right. Wright was wrong. Or he had been – more accurately – almost certainly lying.
    They stood between the open doors of the large elevator. It really was a very, very large elevator. It would have been large enough for machinery, or mid-sized trucks, or, as Dio’s semi-delirious initial thought process noted: at least two animals of any species currently in existence. The elevator, as it turned out, also had doors on the other side. Doors which had, helpfully, also slid quietly open, allowing them access to not one but two bewildering panoramic outlooks onto the most startling, impossible, ridiculous, nightmarish, dreamlike cave-scape they could have possibly imagined the possibility of imagining.
    Stretched out below and all around them – the long period in the elevator, however absent of inertia it had seemed to be, informing them that they must have been at least a few hundred metres below ground – was a city. A dark city. A dark, vast, metropolis of a city...that stretched out in every direction, to the gauzy, pitched coalescence of the far, cavernous horizon-line. There, the smooth stone overhead appeared to converge with the flat stone beneath, creating the illusion of the cavern narrowing to a single point. Dio knew, instinctively, that this was his eyes playing tricks on him: that there was, in fact, no telling exactly how far the cavern extended.
    There must have been hundreds of tho usands of individual structures populating the space below; each pricked with tiny holes – windows; doors – emitting dabs and swathes and circlets of golden-white light. Some were a single storey – or only several storeys – in height. Most were much taller; broad-based and monolithic, like the buttressed bases of gargantuan, canopy-filling rainforest trees, tapering into