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

“Just leave?”

“Just leave.”

“Together?”

“Together.”

Afterward they spend a while by themselves on the roof in a night dream. The sky caves off and a timeless zone without modern technology is reached, a completion. The Milky Way is a bridge above. At various points in their laughter, their clutching, their kissing, they break to look down off the roof or to lie on their backs. One time Carmen stands and, laughing wildly, screams off the roof to the empty streets below in excitement, and Kierk, following her lead, does so as well, and they listen to their echoes chase and reverberate. Other moments they spend huddled next to the small ledge together, heads touching. Carmen keeps rubbing his shaved head and chuckling, or kissing it.

It is so real at this moment for them, so obvious of a future, a thing completely decided—can’t you see them even now? You’re crossing the Pont des Arts and you pause in the middle of the bridge to look out over the Seine, the river itself reddened by the setting sun and moving like heart’s blood through the beautiful grandeur of the buildings rising around it; from afar Kierk is that lone form dangling his legs off the point of Île de la Cité that juts out into the Seine, bent and writing in a notebook but occasionally looking up and out at the Seine and toward your direction, the fall verdure of the Square du Vert-Galant an impressionist painting of gold and red behind him, and he has just finished jotting something down when a long-legged form comes up behind him, dipping in for a kiss before procuring a bottle of wine, Carmen settling down next to him, and in a break of a great cycle of history the two are just lovers in Paris talking about all the mundane but beautiful and true things they will do together.

Back on the roof, at the point where their lips are bruised from kissing and Carmen’s eyes are swollen from crying and her voice hoarse from laughing, they have both reached a state of bone-tiredness. Neither knows what time it is, only that dawn has not yet come. There is a last glance at the stars as they stand, under which Carmen spins out in dance and Kierk spins her back, dips her, and they kiss again, bruising a last time. She has not let go of the rose this entire time. Then finally they make their way, still holding hands, to the door, shove aside the cinderblock, and enter the dark stairwell. There’s a clang behind them as the door swings shut on its hinges.

The light from Carmen’s phone illuminates the otherwise pitch-black stairwell, going down like an endless maze below them. They are just half a flight down when the knock comes from behind them.

Explosive, loud, and three times. Carmen grabs at Kierk, the light from her phone frenetically bobbing up and down on the door, which is a metal monolith still reverberating. The sound goes all the way down into the depths and echoes back up. Carmen muffles a scream. Kierk’s heart jumps tachycardic, a thin beat in the dark, a connection stretching out, racing away.

They are both frozen on the steps, looking at the door, waiting in the hot dark.

“It could just be someone trapped on the roof,” Kierk says, unsure, his adrenaline rushing over him like mad already, but Carmen is shaking her head quietly—“How? Who? Behind us? We have to go. We have to go now.”

The booming knock comes again, and Carmen shrieks, grabbing at Kierk. Her hands are randomly clutching at him, her legs shaking. Kierk, his eyes wide and fixated on the door, slowly begins to climb back up the stairwell.

At this Carmen moans, whispering harshly, pleading with him, going up with him a step, trying to stop him, but he still reaches it despite her pulling on one of his hands. He no longer thinks this is an illusion. A terrible curiosity has overtaken him, a monomaniacal drive to witness what waits on the other side, the inexplicable source of the noise. What is it? A tunnel to everywhere? A carpet of stars? A minotaur slavering to chase them down and root around their corpses in some shadowed corridor of the building? Perhaps nothing at all, an empty roof just how they left it, or really nothing, a silent void of it like the null set had pushed up against physicality, a bauble of the blackest black pushing out . . . or perhaps a great probing unblinking eye surrounded by a wall of white rubbery flesh that fills the entire doorframe. He must know! He must open the door. Beyond will be a new Babel. A last and perfect language, syllables made from the sound of Bruno’s flesh reknitting, unburning. Beyond is Descartes waking from a science-fiction dream of a glittering city in a new world, a new Amsterdam, amid the monoliths of which some rough beast is slouching toward birth . . . Kierk knows that he must not open the door . . . must abort this creature clawing its way out from somewhere unthinkable—yet I am going to open it. For behind it there is the thing itself, the answer, Carmen, I am so sorry for this—the deafening knock comes a fourth time, even louder, and faster, a growing impatience. Carmen jumps at each individual sound which go off like rapid gunshots. The light she’s holding is violently shaking as she’s still silently tugging at Kierk’s shirt as his mind ricochets between possibilities—I am not going to open the door. I cannot open the door. If I do it will eat us up. Consume us. I must not open the door. It will dig open our insides and spread them around the stairwell but before it jellies my eyes I will see its face and I will know. I must open the door. Just so I can know. I am going to open the door, to