The Walls of Infinity

She sat in the creaky wicker chair, bathed in the glow of the dim porch light, listening to a melancholy tune wafting out from hidden speakers. Alone, she stared across the desolate landscape spread out before her, twilight had long since given way to the India ink of night.

“Alone.”

It was what she thought she was looking for. On a whim, one sunny day, she drove out of the city as far as a tank of gas would take her. When she saw the QR code for a “unique opportunity” at the gas station, she thought “kismet​!” A month-long house-sitting stint on a remote piece of farmland seemed a perfect escape. While the sun was still high in the sky, the rolling farmland that stretched around the house had seemed picturesque, but now, in the hours after midnight, when the distant town’s lights had long since been extinguished, the dark took on an almost tangible quality, a disconcerting pressure enveloping her. Being a city girl all her life, she was even disturbed by the speckling of stars across the sky on this dark moonless night. They seemed less like great flaming suns light-years away and more like some eerie fiber optic ceiling providing ambiance in a haunted house. To ease the disquiet she felt, she knew she should go inside, turn on some more lights, blast the TV, maybe doom-scroll through a few social media apps and make sure the world was still as she had left it. But her feet remained rooted in front of her chair.

She thought to herself how ironic it was that she had left the city because she was feeling trapped. Trapped by the hustle and bustle, by the congestion in the streets, compressed by the shear mass of humanity and yet, here she was, feeling just as trapped by the dark landscape, the walls of infinity closing in on her from all sides.

Alone and trapped, no matter where she went, it seemed.

A twig snapped, the sound ricocheting through the dark. A sound that seemed so close, she swore she felt the vibrations ripple through the soles of her feet. “Just some wild animal”, her inner voice soothed. Probably something small and innocuous, like a rabbit or a squirrel. Were they even nocturnal, though?

Closing her eyes, she focused on her breath to calm her racing heart. “In, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four.”

“That’s better, isn’t it? More grounded, more calm.”

Too bad her inner voice was an unreliable personality.

Blinded as she was with her closed eyes, though, her ears picked up a faint skittering along the wooden planks behind her. “The squirrel was getting closer.”

She opened her eyes and turned her head to look over her shoulder. But her heart tripped when she realized she couldn’t tell the difference between eyes opened or closed.

She blinked furiously, but the porch remained impenetrably dark.

In an attempt to calm her now galloping heart, she tried to work out what had happened. It couldn’t have been a complete power failure at the house, as she could still hear the haunting piano solo playing over the speakers. “It must be just one fuse in the house, and all the lights were on that one” the inner voice reasoned.

As she sat in the wicker chair, she struggled to remember if she had seen a fuse box in the house, or, failing that, candles or a flashlight.

Standing to search for something to light her way, she put her foot out to take a step, but froze when the music abruptly cut out. “Another fuse, surely.”

Her foot hovering in front of her, unable to take a step, she felt a warm humid breeze on the back of her neck.

“It wasn’t warm or humid today – the breeze had almost felt like someone’s…”

The hairs on her arms prickled as she stopped herself from completing that thought. She slowly turned around to face the source of the breeze. She was alone, she reminded herself.

“Alone.”

So, she reasoned, when she put her hand out in front of her, she SHOULD be putting it out in open air. Slowly, she raised her hand to test her theory. She held her breath as she reached tentatively out in front of her, her body tense, coiled and ready to spring away if she felt anything other than open air.

She paused as she registered the information being sent from her hands, lungs aching from holding in her breath.

“Alone.”

A wave of relief nearly knocked her over, as she realized there was no one standing with her. The bands around her lungs finally released their trapped breath. The weird breeze that had stopped almost as quickly as it had started, must have been some freakish weather phenomenon.

She reached down to find the chair she had been sitting in to make sure of her orientation in the now darkened landscape, but it wasn’t where she had expected it to be. “Strange.”

She replayed the last few moments – she had gotten straight up to look for a fuse box, felt the weird wind, turned one half circle. “Right? Where did the chair go, then?” She crouched and swept her arms side to side and slowly turned in a complete circle, expecting her hand to make contact with the wicker chair with each sweep.

But it was as if the chair had never existed.

The absence of the music made the resulting silence feel oppressive and disorienting. She squinted her eyes, trying to make out the shape of the house. No shapes appeared, however, no matter how hard she tried.

Once again, she could feel a rising tide of panic in her chest. “Think”, she commanded.

She had always figured she would be one of those calm and levelheaded people in a crisis, able to think of solutions to the predicament, but her brain was stuttering over the sensations, failing to put together a plan.

Attempting to self-comfort, she hugged her hips. As her hands brushed a bulge in her pocket, she beamed, heart lighter with relief. The cell phone! Not only could she use its flashlight, but she could also call someone for help. She pulled the cell out of her pocket, tapping the screen to wake it up, but it remained stubbornly black. She held down the power button – maybe it had been turned off. But no power ever came on.

Panic flooded in a rush back in to her chest as she pressed the power button over and over. She KNEW the phone had had full power and service earlier in the day. There was no way it could have died.

Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes, noting again there was no difference in darkness between open eyes and closed eyes. Pressing the heel of hands against her eyes hard enough to see geometric patterns, the inner voice started a mantra: “this is just a dream, wake up. This is just a dream, wake up.”

She opened her eyes and looked up, but what had been a star-studded night sky only minutes ago had become a black void that had absorbed everything else surrounding her. She knew it had to be a dream – when things disappear, things like stars and chairs and houses, you know you’re in a dream. When reality changes shape around you, you know it isn’t reality at all.

Closing her eyes again, the chanting continued, “this is a dream, wake up. This is a dream, WAKE UP!” She repeated it over and over, waiting for it to have its magical effect.

She felt a slight warmth on her hand, and she dared to open her eyes, hoping to see that reality – the solidity and presence of the world around her – had been restored. But still she remained engulfed in the suffocating blackness. The warmth on her hand was nothing but another figment of her imagination, a manifestation of fear.

Her heart began to beat in uncontrolled fits, her breath turned choppy, her head felt light and oddly disconnected from her body. She could feel tears streaming down her face as she screamed out her mantra “this is just a dream, damn it, wake up!”

Even her own voice stopped making noise, her throat paralyzed by the same mysterious force that had robbed her eyes of sight and ears of sound. Her mouth continued working, trying to force out the mantra, as if there were a magical number of repetitions that would extricate her from this nightmare.

The tear trails stung her cheeks.

She could taste salt on her lips as she continued her mantra.

Over and over, the inner voice chanted “this is a dream, wake up. This is a dream, wake up.”

She could feel her heart slowing and taking up a steady beat, her breath evened, and the crashing waves of panic abated.

Soon the darkness took over everything.

“Alone.”