The Revelations by Erik Hoel (e ink ebook reader txt) 📕

uncertain why he’s been driven here again—perhaps by the agent’s words, perhaps by the events of the morning, perhaps by thoughts of Carmen. Swiping his MetroCard he enters and is surprised at the ping of sound, a note, as the turnstile revolves. Examining it he sees that it is some kind of art project. A woman clutching numerous shopping bags pushes through after him and another, different note sounds, lingers.

First he paces the track for a while, timing the subway trains coming and going. The mean is every eight minutes, with a standard deviation of about a minute. The music from the turnstiles is haunting but he ignores it, concentrating instead on where the man vanished and where Atif must have died as well (given where he’d seen the toe), right by the liminal space where the subway platform ends and the dark tracks begin. The direction where the train comes from. For that space seems a dark labyrinthine siren, promising an answer. Kierk goes back and forth with himself as he paces—for no argument pro the action he is leaning toward could be summoned, only intuitions, fantastical intuitions; but under the influence of such phantasmagoria he at last makes his decision and waits at the ledge, at that dark lip, for the train to come. And after its departure, Kierk, looking surreptitiously around as the platform empties, makes his move into the black mouth as the train screeches away.

At first he is just groping blindly, one hand out, back pressing against the wall behind him, sidestepping. He eats up little space with his inching, yet somehow the tunnel swallows him whole immediately. Ahead of him lies the curving wall to his right and the tracks following that curve, lit only by distant emergency lights. The wall is an amalgam of rock and metal, grimy, while below him the shelf seems impossibly narrow, not even a foot wide really. He doesn’t know if that foot is enough space for the train to not reap him if it comes—if the sucking wind of its passage will pull him in, or unbalance him, or if there’s any hitch of metal protruding from the train that might tear him apart easily. After a few feet he’s more sure of where the ledge lies under him and so now he can scuffle sideways at faster pace.

Ten feet out and he feels like he has been ontologically separated from the lit world of the platform. That he is violating some deeper order and is now irrevocably apart.

Twenty feet out he has the feeling of being underwater and, looking back, he can see the surface, but physics is working differently here, light bends in odd ways and he feels unnaturally buoyant, like his own nervousness and expectation could lift him up and he might float down the tunnel.

Thirty feet out is a spacewalk, the light from the platform a thin lifeline already curving away out of view. At this point there is the sound of a train coming, which freezes him for a moment, but then his pinna, millions of years in their evolution, pick out that it’s coming from the other direction and will arrive safely on the opposite side of the platform.

At forty feet out the platform is gone from view and in front of him is only an emergency light glowing a biological red and the long track of metal is a gut, a lair—he’s a mere microbe in an entrail. The train that had come from the other side of the platform thunders past and from his vantage point he sees sparks underneath as it grinds away.

Coming up there is an iron girder in his way, blocking the path. He feels around it, and leaning out sees the ledge continues beyond it on the other side. Pulling back, he notices something right next to him on the wall—an opening, and with a square of light that he can just get his head through and peek into. He sticks his head into a concrete box the size of a studio apartment, lit by a halogen lamp propped up in the corner, unattended and disorderly. The floor is dusty and scraps lay in shadows, but one clear part was illuminated, the wall maybe just ten feet to his right, which he turns his head to face. There, writ large in red spray-painted letters against the far concrete wall is DOUBLE TROUBLE LIVES. TORTURE FOR TORTURERS. And beneath it, drawn in the same bloodred, looms large graffiti of a monkey’s face. But it is distorted, human-like and showing human teeth. The grin manages to portray in simple lines both malevolence and exultation. Exactly, in fact, the same look Mars Bars had given Kierk right before he had vibrated away the material of himself. The all-too-humanoid drawing seems a perfect facsimile of Kierk’s own memory. There is a shifting. Something huge moves in the corner of the room. Before it moved it had just been a shadowed scrapheap. Now it towers, unfurling its limbs, standing bipedal but wrong, too tall, with dangling arms, its enormous head towering above in the darkness, and Kierk rears back, almost falling off onto the tracks, then flattening against the subway wall with the small passage he had been looking through right beside his head. A thrill rushes through him, right down his spine, and in the mechanics of darkness his heartbeat is a piston and his skin a sheet of electricity. There is more movement; something is knocked over, a scraping, and then silence. Slowly Kierk goes to look again, not breathing as he does so. The room is empty of all but the graffiti.

Stealing a glance behind him in the dark, observing the distance between himself and the faraway platform—what had he just seen? He needs to know. Looking around he notices, on the other side of the iron girder, a larger opening created by another giant steel X, which looks big enough for Kierk to squeeze through into