Apotheosis

Eyes opened, and nothing changed.

Black and impenetrable, the darkness formed an insurmountable obstacle to vision. He could not see, but back, legs, arms, and head rested on something hard and unyielding. He breathed in through the nose, deep. The air was stale, faintly metallic, faintly something else, a niggling odor which brushed coquettishly against amorphous recollections of...of something. He concentrated. He tried to jog the memory. Nothing.

He explored then. It was difficult. The walls and ceiling hemmed in and limited easy movement, though they were not so constraining as to prevent it entirely. He could feel around. Creeping fingers brushed over a cool, smooth surface, above, behind, to the sides. He stretched out and felt legs and feet encounter more of the same as knees and shins and toes slid across it before they were stopped. A box, then, or something like a box.

He kicked harder. The impacts made booming thuds, the sounds amplified beyond what they should be as hearing supplanted a useless sense of sight. Nothing.

The hands continued their exploration, and overhead they finally found incongruity. A lip, formed of the same material as the rest, barely half a finger wide. Fingers curled against it and pulled. Faint scraping as something overhead gave, just barely, then the fingers slipped off the narrow, tenuous handhold.

He moved the hand back, then touched the index finger of the other hand to the first and traced it along the ceiling. A second lip. Forearms pressed against the roof as both sets of fingers hooked and pulled. The ceiling shuddered and moved, and light filtered through a small crack.

He squinted at the sudden illumination. Afterimages, blobs of yellow and orange and red, danced merrily. He continued pulling in the meanwhile, gradually opening more and more of the ceiling. He could fit an arm through, then a shoulder. He twisted, heaved, and flopped to the floor outside the box. He landed with force on something hard, harder than the material which comprised the box, and colder too. Some kind of stone, or something like a stone, cut into tiles and tessellated across the floor. Either the original color was white, and they were discolored with rusty reds and browns; or the original color was rusty red and brown, and they were discolored with white.

The room was large, but this was only in comparison to the box. There were no other rooms in sight or in memory to serve as reference to its dimensions. He found that to be peculiar and meddlesome, though only momentarily. Surely there would be other rooms. He would compare this one to those once they were encountered, and would determine whether this room was large or small then. The center held a raised, semicircular platform or table. Dots of red flickered on and off on its surface, though there was no hint as to their meaning.

The room's walls were rimmed with boxes, blocky and dark, which were held in alcoves. Wires, dark worms of corroded metal, crept across the walls, erupted from holes in the floor, wending to the boxes. A few of the boxes had fallen, their wires shorn, hanging limp and dead, cracks radiating from where the heavy containers had impacted on the tiles, though they remained stubbornly shut. He could find no way to open them, as they were perfectly smooth from the outside. He left them there.

The light came from overhead, a wavering, flickering luminescence radiating through an opening in the ceiling. He could see blue. He felt air moving, rushing through the hole above and circulating about the room. It was dry and carried the same unidentifiable smell as it had in the box, though stronger now.

He heard something now, too, a slurred cacophony, a set cadence endlessly repeating itself. He found its source in the table in the room's center. One of its lights glowed a solid red, rather than blinking on and then off again. A plate of a different metal was affixed next to it. It bore an inscription, but this metal, unlike that of the boxes and the table, had been rusted and ruined, and so the inscription was indecipherable. He scratched fingernails across its surface in the hopes of cleaning some of the filth away, but only succeeded in sloughing off flakes of worn metal and increasing the plate's illegibility. He left it there.

He found a door on the wall in between two of the boxes. It may have once been sturdy and impenetrable, but it was made of the same metal as the plate on the table, and it was weakened. Fingers did not disintegrate it quite as readily as they had the plate. He fashioned crude tools out of the loose and exposed wires, harvesting the thin cylinders of metal and bending them together into a bludgeon and a scraper.

He labored at the door. The hammering was loud. Shards of rusted metal flew, and dust filled the air. In time, the table's droning grew quieter and more distorted, until it stopped.

He fashioned a hole and looked through it. He saw dirt and stone outside, a carpet of black gravel. The wind, at times, was strong enough to send smaller chunks of it whirling and skittering across the ground. He expanded the hole, until it was large enough to crawl through. He did.