Heartbeat

I wrote this story at the very end of 2015, and it feels like it wants to be set free now. One of the members of the writing group I was part of back then said it was my tour de force. Another member said that she found it quite disturbing (understandable, if you are claustrophobic). Personally, I think it is one of the best things I have written, and it contains a few of my favourite things.

Peak, watercolours and gouache on gesso prepared paper (2017)

Heartbeat

All I am is darkness, coldness, silence. I know that I have been here a long time, though I have forgotten what time is. In the dark, time ceases, or stretches out to infinity. It is and is not. 

When they led me in I was little more than a girl, yet I knew the world of sunshine well enough. I played out in the light, with other children, my hair golden, my skin turned brown. And I knew the moon, the way it changed and moved, its pale inconstant face. Perhaps I still feel the moon, here in the dark, though all I can see is its hidden aspect, lost in a black sky.

When they brought me here, into the heart of the mountain, I still knew light, colour, and I still knew time. Yet alone in the dark, time seemed to slow and confuse me with its passing, its lack of passing. I was unused to unseeing, to no change from night back to day back to night, and though colours played inside my mind, teasing with visions of what I had known, they soon faded and ceased. 

It was only when the two priestesses and the priest came to bring me food and water that I was able to understand that time was indeed still moving forward. Once a day they would come. Or was it once a week? No matter. They always brought a small pot of strong bone broth, stone cold, with soft root vegetables in it, and a lunate slice of melon, the rind rough as a boulder’s side. The priest carried a lamp to light the way along the passageways and through the caves. The two women carried the food and water, and took away the empty pots and bowls they had left me before. 

I remember when they first brought me in, I saw the inside of the mountain lamplit, and the rock walls were speckled with shining flecks of mica, the stars of the underworld; and when we reached the cavern, the very heart, my heart leapt. Such a vast space, glimmering with trails of dank water, filled with the architecture of the earth, those mineral columns everywhere, bulging and flowing. Though the lamp did not shine far, this is what I saw. 

It was the very last thing I saw.

When they left me there in the dark, their footsteps dying into the distance, I was afraid to make a sound, for even my own breath seemed to echo and vibrate around me, making the mountain speak. So I sat still as stone and peered into the blackness. Though after some time my eyes stopped ‘looking’, for there was nothing to see, and I became accustomed to the lack of light, the lack of sight. I became the darkness, merging with it. It filled me up, as the empty cavern was filled with it, and I dwelt within its fertile possibility. That is why when the priest came with the lamp I had to shut my eyes. For though the six-sided lantern was shaded on three sides, those sides held towards me so no light would touch me directly, and the flame was low and dimmed, it was still too bright. Through my eyelids I saw red, the only colour I truly remember. 

I liked red. It reminded me of the red cloak they had draped around my small shoulders on the day of my journey inwards. We all wear red cloaks. The colour of the heart, the colour of blood.

To begin with, when they brought food, I would slurp at the bone broth, the sounds I made bouncing around in the dark, and then bite into the melon, letting the sweet juice run down my chin, like the water that dribbled down the sides of the cavern. I hungrily awaited the coming of the priestesses and the priest, to see the lovely red behind my eyelids, to eat and know the passing of time. But as my body cooled, adjusting to the inner earth’s temperature, I craved food less. I stopped thinking of what was outside. I stopped desiring colour. In the dark void of the cavern my eyes stopped seeing, my mind stopped thinking. Thought became black. Non-thought. I sat still and silent, and though my eyes were no longer of use, I found that my ears opened and heard more and more. Small sounds on the very edge of hearing became louder, distinct. The movement of distant water echoed shrilly as it fell upon rocks, or sighed along subterranean rivers. Stalactites went slowly drip drip drip as they reached down to their steadily growing offspring. A slight whisper: the mountain breathed. Though soon enough, all those disparate sounds became one and the same with silence itself. One with the encompassing darkness.

I hardly noticed when the priestesses stopped coming and the light of the priest’s lamp did not reappear, for I no longer needed the food of the outside world. My body had turned cold as iron. My breathing was drawn out—time-consuming, consuming time—and my heart beat less and less. All I thought was darkness, stone, immovable weight. I became part of the mountain.

I was the dark. I was rock and mineral, cold hardness, heavy solidity. The warm blood moving through my veins chilled and slowed, moving more like veins of quartz in granite. Moving not at all. The whole of my understanding of the swift rush of human time left me, and I entered into geological time, knowing aeons, time stretched out large as planets and compressed small as an atom, buried underground. There was only Now.

Then one day I heard it. I say day, though there was no such thing, there being no sun, and only eternity, the long black thread of time curled in upon itself. It may have lasted a second or a decade, a minute or a millennium. It makes no difference. I heard what I had come for—the heartbeat of the mountain—beating only once, perhaps twice in a century. If that. It was a sound like a low boom, a deep rumble; though more of a feeling than a sound; more of a knowing than a feeling. It rolled through me, shook my core, and I think my face may have cracked with a smile. Though I can’t be sure. I hadn’t moved for so long.

An age passed, held in the reverberation of that majestic heartbeat. Then I saw red–orange–yellow–white, and harsh sounds tapped and clinked around me. They had returned. I could see them with my ears. Two surefooted young women, and one old priest, nervous in the dark, holding the lantern carefully, the wick burning low, though still wickedly bright to my unseeing eyes. They were so loud, so quick in their human movements. They reeked of flesh and blood, sweat and strange odours, as of food, sweet perfume, sharp smoke. I could not object to their presence, their  unwelcome light, the memories rising unbidden from the scents they exuded. I had no words. 

The two young priestesses gathered my long, long hair, that had grown around my inert body like delicate tendrils of crystallised minerals, and they lifted me, so fast, so alarmingly, though with a gentleness that was soft, not of rock. They carried me out, out along the winding tunnels, away from my mountain womb, away from myself. Salty tears ran from my scorched eyes.

Before we emerged from the mountain, someone tied a soft cloth over my eyes, placed a hood over my head, then they carried me out into the blazing daylight. I could not see it, but I felt it all around me. The priests held a canopy of rich red cloth above my head, shielding me from the sun and the heat, blood-coloured tassels and ribbons swaying. Despite that shelter I still felt white hot, starting to melt, to soften, my blood beginning to move again, my veins aching with the effort of it, the tender and painful humanness of a beating heart. 

I was placed high on a splendid dais, my red cloak grey and white with the dust of the mountain, my pale, translucent skin masked by layers of grime. There was the expectant hush of a large crowd—hundreds, thousands of eyes upon me—and I felt something at my feet, an almost imperceptible tug on my cloak. 

I remembered what I had seen as a girl, on the day that I entered the heart, and I had stood before the silent people, my head newly shaved, my young body covered in the red cloak that was too large for me, trailing on the dry ground. I saw the woman emerge, carried from the dark cave entrance, blindfolded, so ancient and stone-like. She was placed on the platform beside me by the two strong priestesses who bore her, and I reached out and touched the hem of her cloak, accepting sacred dust onto my fingertips. I put my fingers in my mouth, tasting the inside of the mountain, tasting the darkness that was myself. 

‘Does the mountain live?’ I asked the woman.

There was a long pause, long as a mountain’s breath, and then a gravelly, croaking voice said haltingly, slow as stone, ‘The … mountain … lives.’ 

A great cheer of rejoicing went up through the crowd around me, filling my ears with thunder, as they began their long-awaited celebrations. 

Then the priestesses took me hand in hand, while the priest lit the lantern, and they led me into the heart of the mountain.

Beneath the Mountain, watercolours and gouache on gesso prepared paper (2020)