The Fallen World

The Moon City - Part 5

     He was about to step through when he noticed that the red flag in the window had vanished and, looking back, he saw that the other door, the door he'd come in by, now had a red flag in its window. Going back to it, he found that it was now locked solidly shut, the wheel refusing to budge by as much as a single inch. “Yes, I know,” he muttered to himself. “When the red flag’s up, the door will only open when the other door’s shut. I just wish I knew why, that’s all.”

     As he heard his own voice in his ears, though, he froze as a new puzzle struck him. His voice was all wrong, unclear and distorted. Not sounding at all the way it should. And instead of the sound coming to his ears from outside, through the air, it seemed to be coming from inside his own head, as if it were travelling from his vocal chords to his eardrums directly via the bones of his skull instead of the more normal route. He puzzled over this for a few moments, talking and listening to the way it sounded, before shaking his head in perplexity and dismissing the problem as irrelevant.

     He stepped through the door and found himself in the huge cavern which, he now saw, was at least two hundred yards from the wall on his left to the one on his right, with rounded corners. The ceiling was twenty yards above his head, arched and buttressed to spread the weight of the rock above onto the walls and brilliantly lit with globes of glowing marble. Off to his right, though, he could see a huge crack in the ceiling. It was several yards wide at its widest point, rising up through hundreds of feet of solid moonrock until, way up at the top, he could see the faint light of stars shining down through it. At least he assumed they were stars, since they weren’t twinkling. Great piles of rubble lay beneath the crack, which extended all the way to the wall on his right, down the wall to the floor and, he was willing to bet, back along the floor towards him. Wow, thought the young soldier in amazement. There must have been an earthquake or something. I wonder if that’s why this place was abandoned?

     The cavern was filled with grass, shrubs and trees. It must have once been a park or something, but as he wandered around curiously he saw that everything was completely dead, the grass crunching under his feet like newly fallen snow. He touched the low hanging branch of a tree and it broke off in his hand, and when he squeezed it it crumbled to powder. “Weird,” he muttered to himself, and the sound of his voice in his head made him suddenly realise something even weirder. There was no sound in the cavern. It was totally silent. The grass crunching under his feet did so without making any sound, and the brittle twigs and branches he broke in his hand did so silently. What was more, when he kicked a pile of fallen leaves, they didn’t flutter back to the ground as leaves normally do but flew through the air and fell as though they were made of lead. “Weird,” he said again. “Tom’s going to love this place!”

     He continued walking, looking back every so often to make sure he didn’t lose sight of the door he’d come in through. Once, while he was looking back, he tripped over something, and when he looked down he gasped in horror to see that it was a human body. Badly mummified, its mouth open in a silent scream and its hands, held near its face, twisted into hooklike claws. It was clear to the astonished soldier that this man, whoever it had been, had died in agony.

     It was a gruesome sight but Matthew had seen worse and so he only stared curiously, wondering what had happened to him and whether it was anything he needed to worry about. Shortly after he came across another, an old man, and nearby was an empty pram, tipped over on its side but still containing a faded pink blanket as if the baby had been hurriedly snatched out by a frantic mother. Trapped under a tree that seemed to have been blown over in a storm (a storm in an underground cave? thought Matthew in bewilderment) was a small corpse dressed in the clothes of a young girl, held in the arms of an older male corpse, probably the father, as if offering comfort in the last moments of their lives.