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

line after line. These must be words, but I can’t read them. My hands grasp more than I do.
     
     
    I cannot keep my mind on anything for long.
     
     
    The numbers have changed: now they read 834883. There is less of something than there used to be.
    I look at the bed, and though I know I should lie down and sleep, I am terrified.
    Something terrible has happened.
    What if it was sleep?
     
     
    I WOKE. I ran. My breath flew away in faint white clouds. I ran from room to room, pounding on doors that would not open. No one answered.
    I returned to this room and found this screen, flickering like all the others. I struck it with my fist. It filled with words. I cannot read them, but still I understand one thing.
    I have done this before.
    I don’t know how many times I have awakened to this emptiness, run through these empty corridors banging on doors that only echo. Does time even matter in this place? Perhaps that is what has broken: time, not me.
    If time is broken, then it was I who broke it. This knowledge rises out of emptiness, but the downward count of every clock confirms it.
     
     
    I FOUND FOOD —and the remains of other meals, torn wrappers everywhere, a solidified mess in the cooker. One meal I must have tried to eat without heating. Another I seem to have crushed and mixed with water. There are dozens of them.
    It took some time to clear the debris away, chip out the black and stinking thing in the oven. I found food, drawers full of silver packets with labels I could not read. My hands took one and tore it, dumping out the contents. Diagrams on the package showed me what to do, and when it emerged steaming from cooker I bent over it, baffled. Something was missing.
    It had no smell. It had no taste. And though I cannot recall what these things were, I know that once they were a part of food.
     
     
    There are no windows.
    I know what windows are. Within me I almost see them: half open, curtains of some thin transparent substance shifting in a breeze. I cannot see what lies outside them.
    There should be windows.
     
     
    WHEN I WOKE I saw a screen, flickering. A clock with too many numbers. The blankness broke then, into then and now, sleep and waking. In broken flashes I remembered: White clouds vanishing. Steam rising from a bowl.
    What makes everything flicker so? Is it in this place, or is it me? Which would be worse?
    Could there be something worse?
    The numbers on the clocks are counting down.
     
     
    THERE IS A door I cannot open. It lies across a path my legs keep taking. I found myself before it again, blank.
    I reached out a hand. Its shadow trembled as it climbed the flat blue surface to touch my fingertips. The surface was so cold it seemed to seize me. I stood for a long time, held by the cold, feeling the hard surface beating with my pulse.
    It took an effort to free myself, and more to keep from running as I went.
     
     
    I STRUGGLED INTO waking, into light, into myself. The room lay as I had left it the night before, if that was night, if this is morning.
    Night, morning. Evening. Light flickered, and I shuddered under it, falling back almost into memory of something vast, substantial, something to which I once belonged. A moon, almost full. Its light sleeking smooth black water.
    Moon. I clutched at the word, held it, listening.
    It told me only this: I do not belong here. I come from somewhere else.
    What place could that have been? And if there is some other place, what place is this? Why are there no windows? What lies outside?
    Is there an outside?
     
     
    I WAKE. I wander. And I return each time to this screen. Like an open window, it draws me. I watch the letters flash onto the screen, rise, and vanish into what white space lies beyond its borders. I tap out messages to nowhere. No messages return.
    I understand now that no one reads this. I do not think anyone will ever read this.
     
     
    THERE IS A way to bring words back. There are keys that shift them from wherever they have