Free In the Valley of the Kings: Stories by Terrence Holt Page A

carry the memory within me even now: beside the thing that burns there, as durable as pain.
    In the darkness, something struck me. For an instant, I rang like a bell: into the very core of me I rang, and all throughout that ringing I was not ringing, I was not falling, I was nothing but the sound of ice that rang. I was the falling, and so I could not fall.
     
     
    AND EVEN THIS I tell you only after, speaking of a place where words can’t follow.
     
     
    IN THAT MOMENT, a door opened in me, offering me the chance to pass between I am and I am not, and in that passing end this fall.
    In that moment I chose to return to the Ring and the Fall.
    In my blindness, I turned from what had struck me. I drove the wedge of my self between us, breaking from the fall that is not falling, that has no center and no end, no self to fall, no space to fall through.
    I turned from what had struck me. I turned to give it a name. I called it ice; I called it other; I called it Ring, and pain. I called it Saturn and the sun, I called it home. I called it falling, I called it life and death, I called it love, and in that calling I began to fall again, through the world where falling is the price we pay, the cost of all we are and know, in the bargain that we never made, but makes us, all the same.
     
     
    THE ICE FALLS sleeping, swept by time and what first impulse I do not know, only that I fall with it, and in my falling find myself, and, finding, fall, and lose myself again.
    I mine the ice, growing heavy with its harvest, and in her time Aurora comes to me, and takes the ore of my refining homeward. I look homeward now, toward that double star that falls around the sun. There where the sun falls also, among the stars that fall.

EURYDIKE
    …rolled in mid-current that head, severed from its marble neck, the disembodied voice and the tongue, now cold for ever, called with departing breath on Eurydike.
    — GEORGICS IV: 485
     
     
    S omething terrible has happened Ive looked everywhere but all the rooms are empty I see signs I cannot read not even this Is anyone here Can anyone read this?
     
     
    SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAS happened. I have looked everywhere. There is no one alive.
     
     
    I have never seen this place before.
     
     
    There were people. There are rooms with beds in them. Some have been slept in, but every one is cold. They might have been like this for years.
    Everything feels cramped: the ceilings are too low, the corridors too narrow, but I cannot say why.
    The clothing I woke in looks strange to me as well. There is writing on it, a block of lettering above the pocket.
    I cannot read the letters.
    It is the same in all the rooms. Objects lie about. Some of them I recognize: I know clothes, I know clocks, but many I cannot name. I cannot understand the clocks. What is 835066? Is that a time? 835063. A temperature? 835060. Or is it something else entirely? Does it matter that they are running backward?
    I have moments—they flash and vanish—when all these things seem about to take some shape that I will understand. This terrifies me too.
     
     
    I know something terrible has happened. There were people here, but now they are gone. Only I am left.
    Am I? At times a white mist forms between me and the world. It sends cold straight through me. Am I a ghost?
     
     
    My memory is empty. It is as if I never lived before now.
    I fear there might be worse things than forgetting. What if I have not forgotten at all? What if everything conceals only emptiness?
    My vision flickers; the world vanishes for a moment.
    What if this self I seem is only an effect of something else?
    The air is cold. The floor is yellow. Knowledge inhabits me, so scattered it could be mere flickering, like the screens that flicker senselessly in every room.
    I do not know this flickering is senseless. Maybe it is trying, like everything, to tell me something.
    I don’t know how much longer I can stand this.
     
     
    My hands move, filling up the screen