Sons of the Zone [Part 1]: The Garden

I happened across something quite peculiar yesterday- although the term ‘peculiar’ is relative here in the complex, being that there are many of such peculiarities hidden within the winding tangle of corridors and abundance of rooms I find myself lost in. I was wandering; searching for loose supplies, vending machines, cafeterias, or apartments from which I could plunder some food or drink, or maybe even the odd packet of cigarettes, should I strike lucky. I found myself in a corridor that I could only describe as being reminiscent of one of those budget chain hotels that one may find oneself in on city visits, far away from home. An unattractive, mottled turquoise and purple floor, cheap wood-lined doors, and domed wall lighting – an inoffensive, clean, and family-friendly facade.

The room I am writing this in now led on from the corridor through a door that is styled in a way that suggests one may be entering into an old castle. The door is arched and made out of sturdy-looking reinforced dark wooden planks, with a grey metal ring handle. The door’s frame appeared, at first, to be made out of large, weathered stones – which upon further inspection are actually made out of some kind of plaster or plastic designed to look like stone. A light brass plaque is affixed to the door that reads “The Gnome Garden”. On a glance down at the floor, there appears to be green lush grass bleeding through underneath the door and mingling with the carpet underfoot – as if the outside is trying to creep its way indoors.

Let me explain how events unfolded. I hesitantly stepped up to the door, inching my head closer so that I may press my ear against it and listen for clues of what may be on the other side – something that I have learnt to be a necessary step before crossing most gated thresholds in the complex. On the other side of the door - tinny sounds from cheap speakers: the sound of a light wind, the chatter of woodland critters, the chirp of insects. My hand reached for the ring handle and I pushed the door open, it felt lighter than it looks. I was greeted by an enormous bright room with a high ceiling, that is full of vibrant colours. A bright green grassy floor; flowers of odd varieties, shapes, and colours that I had never seen before; sturdy, healthy looking trees, mushrooms, and enormous red toadstools. The walls in here have woodland scenery painted along parts of them, whereas other sections of the walls depict scenery of open swathes of natural land and grassy plains that stretch off into the distance. It’s quite easy on the eye – the colourful tapestry of fantasy landscape complete with towering spires and a large stone-walled castle perched atop a fearsome looking mountain.

In the centre of the room, in a clearing among luscious, green-leafed trees stands a statue of a humanoid on a big plinth surrounded by rocks, fallen branches and a collection of bright red, conical shapes spread about in a rough oval around the statue. Sensing no immediate danger, I started to slowly approach the clearing, darting looks behind me at the doorway I entered through, and trying to glimpse any hazard that may be obfuscated by the thick tree trunks at the area’s periphery. As I drew closer, I noticed that the red conical objects were sitting atop pink lumps buried almost entirely in the dirt. My focus shifted to the statue – a tired-looking, grey, stone figure of a young lad. It portrays a boy with an entirely spherical body and head, with rounded limbs, and a pointy hat. On his face – a pair of perfectly round eyes and a simple looking smile composed of just a few thickly carved lines – like the kind you may see on the face of an old comic book character, or in a young child’s simplistic yet charming render of a person.

As I studied the statue I became more aware of its cracks, scuffs, and pits – it looked as if it had been standing here a while, being softly worn by time’s embrace, alone in this room. My eyes were drawn to the boy’s face, there are streaks of pale, washed out stone that run down from narrow but deep cracks that underscore the bottom of his domed eyes. I reached out tentatively to run an index finger along the crack underneath the right eye; the stone was cold. Then I felt something else - movement against my skin. I instinctively wrenched my hand away, close to my chest – a small pearl of moisture had pushed its way out of the crack, and had broken its surface tension against my finger. I watched, curious, as another shiny blob of moisture pushed its way out of the crack, and started to slowly make its way down the cheek of the boy’s face, following a previously trodden path of washed-out stone. I leant forward slowly, closer to the boy’s face; the little shimmering pearl tiring itself and tapering out of existence.

All of a sudden – a change. The ambient temperature dropped like a stone, the tinny speakers crackled and stuttered, the domed ceiling lights above flickered, and I quickly became aware of a soft pulsing sound that accompanied a deep pit of nausea in my gut. An invasive throb spread throughout my entire body almost as if it was effortlessly keeping on beat with the pulsing sound, and trying to make me dance with its rhythm. I became dizzy; in the confused haze of my mind I realised that the pulsing was coming from the very atmosphere of the room itself, and was permeating my body like it was trying to shake the very atoms I am made of, out of me. The main lights intermittently gave way to blue and red flashes that dimly lit spots of the room as they sporadically turned on and off. The throb and pulse grew more oppressive, making me feel like I was going to vomit; my vision blurred, and my ears were filled with bizarre garbled sounds that I couldn’t quite make out that spilled from the speakers, and the very room around me looked as if it had begun to distort. Patches of the room would become dark when others were light, the shapes of objects warped and distorted like chunks of the space around me were becoming smeared parodies of what had been lying in front of me just moments before. Bursts of fizzing, static noise erupted each time a patch of the room flickered and jumped. A warbling, wobbling sound like flexing sheet metal would pop and synchronise with the fluctuating shapes of the visual distortions; the blue and red flashes of light shone through these tears in reality like stretching, translucent fingers. The indecipherable garbled sounds from the speakers started to grow above the pulsating hums and booms – people; they sounded stressed and panicked. The cheap speakers would cut out and vary in volume and pitch, but I could hear shocked, jumbled screams in there; I could hear worried shouts, and confused questions – nothing that I could comprehend clearly. I wanted to make myself smaller; I closed my eyes and squashed my hands over my ears but I could still feel and hear everything.

A screaming cry in a man’s voice erupted over all else, the other voices quietening, still cutting in and out, but any of their significance was drowned out by the despair I felt in this man’s words. “MOVE! MOVE-” he sounded desperate; his shaking voice hoarse and shallow from screaming, his voice’s pitch increasing as he shouted more. “MY SON- IT’S MY SON-”, the sound of his voice cutting out and then suddenly searing through my ears “MOVE OUT OF THE FUCKING WAY- MOVE”. I felt a rush of freezing cold air fly past me. The sounds of people moving, murmuring, shifting, screaming - all merging into a mess; the noises felt like they were chopping each other to bits and fighting for a place in my ears. I opened my eyes, squinting, my vision swimming – I could see the throbbing and dancing patches that were showing a dark parody of this room had almost fully taken over the bright, vibrant place I had been in, yet they would flicker in and out of existence creating a disorientating, shifting assault of visual noise. There were translucent shapes of a variety of dull colours materialising around me; a smell like hot breath, a warm moist cloy to the air like I was breathing in the atmosphere of a music concert. The taste changed in my mouth to something that was unpleasantly metallic - it overwhelmed my last sense that hadn’t been touched by the room. My stomach lurched and I stumbled, holding an arm out as I fell to the floor, the grass felt wet between my fingers. The pulsing sensation was making it hard for me to stand up; my brain and body had forgotten how to function properly and I felt like I was actually losing my grip on reality. The strange shapes around me were shifting and warping but held a somewhat consistent form, the fuzzy forms of people in a crowd – the blue and red flashing lights would shine and try to penetrate them, filtering through the shifting miasmas that the apparitions created. As my vision phased in and out I dragged my eyes over to where the statue once stood, only to see a different statue in its place, it was more detailed than the statue of the young lad - folds in robed clothing, a hand with digits, but still a pointed hat atop its head. This new statue had fallen, but it was elevated slightly by a crumpled lump on the floor, on top of which it laid. I saw the shape of a person, a man squatting down by the fallen statue. The haunting apparition of the man would freeze and then change instantly - shifting into a pose where he had managed to heave the statue off the floor and seemed to be pushing the statue up with his shoulder – grunts and strained groans could be heard cutting in and out of the speakers sporadically. In the next second his shape would warp and deform and he would suddenly be squatting down with the statue fallen once again. The pulsing became unbearable as my teeth chattered in my skull and I shouted loudly in pain as it felt like someone was trying to excavate my skull from the inside with a jackhammer. The man’s voice screamed through the air one last time, so loud that my ears felt like they were filled with scrambling tiny beasts that were chattering and screeching, and swarming in a great wave trying to reach my eardrums and mash them into a pulp. His voice exploded, letting away the most mournful, gut-wrenching howl that I had ever heard - it sounded like every ounce of emotion in him was ripping and tearing at his vocal chords, hoping that eventually they could break free, escape from his body, and rush at the room with gnarled, clawed hands and feet kicking at and shredding the very fabric of reality around it. A slamming jolt shot through my body as I felt one last immense boom as a final pulse emitted from the centre of the room, near where the screaming man’s form shifted erratically. The pulse had knocked me over one last time as I was trying to recompose myself. As my legs gave way and I fell to the floor, my eyes landed on the lump underneath the statue: a smooth domed shape atop a tangle of longer objects and folds – and then I saw it, a small limp arm bent at a terrible angle, and a twitching hand. Then I must have passed out.