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The door slammed open and the unfortunate foreigner stumbled out, breathing frantically, trying to ignore the ravenous growl coming from behind him. His eyes darted around the small courtyard, looking desperately for anywhere to go. Mournful statues, bare trees, paths of broken cobblestone, and several closed metal gates leading out to the city.
He ran for the nearest gate and pushed as hard as he could. It didn’t budge. “No, no no no, come on, please,” he begged, shaking the bars. The growl behind him grew louder. He whipped his head back and forth, looking for a switch or button or any mechanism to open it, and found nothing.
He turned to try for another exit, but it was too late. The beast burst through the doors of the clinic, reared up on its hind legs, and lunged forward, slamming him against the bars.
He shrieked, trying to push the creature off. It was much too strong. The arms were like taut wire, ribbons of sinew. He tried to breathe in, to scream again, but his lungs were crushed tight, and all he could manage was a strangled rasp.
He felt weaker and weaker, the excruciating pain became duller and duller. He could feel his body fighting desperately, could feel the intensity of the cold bars on his back as the beast pressed harder and harder, but his mind was beginning to detach, like an unmoored boat floating gently away from the harbor. It felt like going to sleep. It’ll all be over soon , his head said to him soothingly, the sickness and the fear. Just close your eyes. And the man did.
There, on the inside of his eyelids, were the strange swirling lights that had always been there. Fitting to die under stars from childhood. They would fade, and there would be nothing but blackness. He waited.
They did not fade. In fact, they strangely became sharper, clearer, like a genuine image of the night sky.
He cocked his head to the side. They shifted with him.
He turned his head around. The stars followed again, glimmering in every direction. Well, perhaps this is what happens when one dies , he thought. Maybe they were stars all along, and only in death is it dark enough to see them clearly.
He looked down. His body was still there, fully corporeal. His clothes were tattered and ripped from the cruelty of that horrid beast, and there were red stains slowly growing on his torso, but there was no pain. He felt up to his neck...there was rent flesh there. Perhaps the beast bit me . I hope whatever foul magic created it isn't contagious, he thought automatically. He was used to thinking of his health automatically.
He smiled, and hit his head lightly. I suppose that if I’m dead I need not worry about my health. It was a comforting thought.
The stars continued twinkling all around, and he thought back to his youth, sitting indeterminable stretches at the window, looking out at the other children playing in the fields. How he’d longed to join them. How his parents had forbidden him, tried to explain that he had a condition that he must learn to manage . And how every night he would wait for the manor to go silent before sneaking into those fields, cavorting with spirits, making deals with the nocturnal animals.
He would lie in the grass and stare up at the night sky. It was the only time he felt he truly existed. He’d often wished the night would last forever.
It seems I got my wish, he thought. To be finally without pain, staring up into the speckled darkness, a black and peaceful sky forever.
He furrowed his brow and squinted. No, that’s not true , he thought, looking deep into the blackness. There was a dim color between the points of light, hardly even detectable but certainly there. Perhaps a dark blue or violet?
Something moved in his vision. He darted his head to look at it, but there was nothing there. A patch of the same color. He started to feel unnerved.
He tried to look out of the corner of his eye. The patch was still for a moment, then began to shift and slide like oil on water. The unnerving feeling became stronger.
He blinked, and suddenly his eyes registered movement in all directions. Everywhere he wasn’t looking, that almost imperceptible color was moving chaotically, forming eddies and bubbles, currents between the stars. He shook his head vigorously, but the movement did not stop. He began to feel a dull pain in his head as it tried in vain to keep track of everything at once.
Stay calm, he told himself sternly. There is no need to panic. He began methodically going through his exercises, the tricks for when his youth had been the hardest. Tense and relax the muscles. Count to ten. He was becoming aware of a strange and indistinct hum, and the pain was becoming sharper. The hum was a steady tone, a quiet continuous shriek, like screams coming from a deep well. The color was not blue or violet, but a colorless stain, like his steadily blotting shirt.
The pain in his head was overwhelming. He put his head in his hands. If this is death , he managed to think, I would rather be in that creature’s jaws!
Everything began to spin, leaving tracks dug across the cosmos like claw marks. He screamed as long and loud as he could, and the pain in his head grew and grew and grew. He took a shuddering breath, and realized in horror that there was no air here, and had never been, and the pain in his head suddenly popped like a pustule, or unfolded like a lotus, or turned like a flower facing the sun, and he realized the pain had not been pain but an idea, an overwhelming and total idea.
The stars!
The realization dripped down the interior of his body, dragging itself along his bones, swimming in his flesh, nesting deep in his wounds.
The stars! The stars!
The swirling was now so fast, it became a curtain of vivid light surrounding him, drowning him in this living ocean. His shuddering hands felt its body but no recognizable sensation came back. He tried to shut his eyes, but he couldn’t. His eyes were already shut. The eyes he saw this with were deeper. They couldn’t be shut. They would always be open.
The stars! The stars!
“The stars!” He gasped and opened his eyes. The horrid whirlpool had stopped. The blotches of color were now fully formed and still all around him.
The man blinked. The formless color cleared and sharpened. He saw barrels, carts, stone, coffins, a fountain, a sky.
He was back in the courtyard. The beast was still there, snarling and pacing helplessly, now somehow on the other side of the gate.
...what? How...how did it get over there? He wondered. Did it jump over?
He looked around. A lever stuck from the ground to his right, probably the mechanism that would have saved him his ordeal. How did I miss that? He was still beside the clinic, that was for sure, but everything was different: there were ornate graves here, two solemn rows. He looked through the bars, and behind the frustrated beast was the door to the clinic.
I...I must have passed through the gate somehow, he thought. Maybe I slipped through the bars?
No, something strange had happened. He remembered being seized by claws, and fading as though falling asleep, and then...the stars? He had said something about the stars. It had seemed important at the time. What had it been?
Regardless, it seemed he was out of danger for the moment at least. He took a deep, shuddering breath and clambered to his feet. The pain was back, fresh and aching. He would need medical attention, and soon.
Well, perhaps someone else is still inside. The shadows grew longer as he set off looking for another entrance.