Under

Floundering. Her flailing hands were floundering. She groped for the surface as the refracted sun disappeared, further from reach every second. The water slipped through her fingers. She grasped for the ascending bubbles, hoping to hold one and ride to the surface. The weight was enormous; her limbs moved frantically, though constantly down. The water clutched her throat and pressed the breath, pressed life from her.

And then it was over. She opened her eyes and she was dry. The choking pressure of water was gone.

In fact, all water was gone.

She was laying on the bottom of a lake. Not a drop of water. No dead fish. The lakebed was dry, though the seaweed and algae still swayed with the current that was no longer there. The pier she had been pushed off was next to her, solid timbers well worn. She sat up and untied the socks full of stones from around her ankles and wrists. She emptied the socks and slid them onto her bare feet, then she stood up and started weaving her way through the dense algae.

She remembered very little about the lake - it blurred into a dream - as if everything had disappeared and all that was left was her being on the bottom of an imaginary lake. Her memory was flitting away, but she held onto a single truth (or she thought it was a truth): in the center of the lake was a single pillar of land, a piece too small to even be called an island.

Climbing out was impossible, but it didn’t matter; she was compelled, supernaturally drawn to the island. Surrounded by seaweed moving to a phantom current, beneath the surface of a phantom lake, most likely a phantom herself, she made the only choice she could: she moved away from the pier and deeper in to the lake.

The lake had begun to slope downward and the seaweed enveloped her like trees. Gradually, almost imperceptibly so, the sun’s light diminished beneath the growing canopy above her. Her eyes continued to adjust to the low light until she could barely see in front her.

As the last of the sunlight disappeared, she groped outward, holding onto the seaweed and algae blooms to aid her forward. Slowly the plant life she touched began to glow brilliant blues and greens. Radiating outward, blue and green light emanated from all the plants. Soon the entire lake was awash with a brilliant shade of electric blue, while smaller, low level plant life glowed bright green. The green stood out in stark contrast from the blue and created a path weaving through the forest of blue.

She was led down the glowing green bread crumbs trail by an unknown hand emerging from the back of her mind. It urged her forward. It was a long, arduous journey through glowing forests devoid of any life or sound. As she traveled on, the forest of seaweed began to thin and so did the landscape of blue. Resting on the horizon - if it could be called that - was a distant gleam of phosphorescent red. It looked to be an impossible distance away, but, as she walked, the red glow grew until it towered upward into an impenetrable fog.

This was the island. In a ring 100 yards around, all of the remaining blue and green glowing algae disappeared: it was a no-man’s-land of nothingness.

The spectral hand in her mind tugged her forward once more; she had no choice. She had to move forward. Her first careful step rewarded her with a stumble face first into deep ditch of mud. She stood, clearing mud from her face, removed the now filthy socks and moved forward, step by step getting closer to giant red island.

The mud, at some points up to her waist, made it difficult to move quickly across the distance, tugging at her shorts and slowing her like quicksand. Around three quarters of the way through, the mud began to lower and she could move at a better pace.

She neared the opposite embankment, her clothes caked in mud and her body weary from sloshing through it. The island’s glowing red filled her vision as she mounted the embankment.

The island, though from this angle it resembled more of a mountain, pulsed with different shades of red, rippling across it’s entirety like the grass on a windy prairie. Though there was no wind, it moved uniformly, surging upward. She replaced her filthy socks and followed the light, climbing the craggy expanse upward. As she crested a cliff onto a plateau, the red light disappeared except for a fine-edged ring around a giant iron portcullis. It was a jarring sign of human creation that reeked of grim energy. Fear lanced through her mind, but the spectral hand beckoned her forward.

She found the door’s clasp and turned it, putting her shoulder against the cool iron. The door wouldn’t budge. The hinges were rusted over and opening the door would require much more strength than she had.

She rammed her shoulder into the door again and again. The more her shoulder throbbed from the shooting pain, the more she screamed in agony. Her bare heels dug into the soft silt, yet the door wouldn’t budge. Frustrated, and in a blind rage, she slammed her closed fists into the rusted iron. Blood speckled her knuckles, but she didn’t feel pain as they were shredded raw. Consternation turned to exasperation and anger became fear. Tears welled in her eyes as her fists turned to feeble slaps. Her slid down the decaying door until she sat on the moist silt, her back to the door.

For a moment she sat still, gathering herself, catching her breath, and wiping her eyes clear of tears. She stood facing the door, eyes closed. She slowed her racing mind, opening it to her spectral guide. Pleading for a solution, she placed her palm on the door. The rust flaked away around her fingers and the door radiated a confusing scalding chill. She winced in pain, but stood resilient; her nerves were afire with pain and her knees buckled, but she did not yield. As quickly as it started, the pain disappeared. The iron door moaned and creaked, then begrudgingly moved inward. She opened her eyes and blinked, clearing the dancing stars caused by closing her eyes so harshly. Like the door, she moved inward.

The island was, in essence, empty. It was a cylinder climbing upwards as far as she could see with precarious steps jutting out from the walls spiraling upward. In the center of the cylinder, reined in by the stairs on the outside was a tube of something. It looked fluid, but it seemed to be just a trick of the eye. The cylinder was defined with a clear edge, like a massive fish tank devoid of life. It was massive, climbing as high as the infinitesimal stairs and wide enough that the center of the cylinder was shrouded in darkness.

The wall of fluid appeared impassible, so she hugged the wall tightly and climbed the crumbling stairway. Like the rest of the lake, the water that should’ve submerged it all was gone, yet these steps were slick as if a stream ran down them.

Her legs burned with exhaustion. The rough stone cut through her socks and lashed her heels; the walls scratched her hands. As she spiraled upward, her movement became clumsier; her feet, slick with blood, slipped more until she landed on her knees more than her feet. She began to crawl. The steps continued upward, spiraling forever, the same impenetrable haze enveloping the stairs she had climbed and those she had yet to.

Despair began to slip from the back of her mind to the forefront. And, finally, when a foot or knee failed to catch on a step and she slid down ten feet, she stopped moving, wincing from pain and breathing heavily. Rolling onto her back, she laid there and closed her eyes. She needed rest.

She opened her eyes. It was hard to tell how long she had laid there, how long she had been fitfully reaching outward for sleep, for some way to get out of whatever was happening to her. Time hadn’t passed in a meaningful way since she sat up on the bottom of the lake. She recounted her trip from the lakebed to where she is now, remembering it all in profound detail and now, for the first time, it all started to not make sense.

The lack of water. The flowing of the seaweed trees. The glowing pathways. The mud moat. The iron door. It all haunted her now. The infinite staircase. For hours, days - or minutes - she had been walking through a land that made no logical sense. She had traveled the length of the real lake, hundreds of times over. The stairs she climbed towered far and beyond the depth of the lake. It simply didn’t make any sense.

For the first time, it dawned on here that none of this was real. It couldn’t be. The haze of distance around her began to disappear; the top of the stairs dissolved into existence and the first steps she had climbed hours before appeared. Each were closer than they ought to be - only half a rotation around the glass column in either direction.

She realized in a single moment that she had been a slave to her own imagined world; she had been the architect of her own Sisyphean task: rolling the boulder up the hill, only to see it slide forever. But now she knew. Her blinders were off. She knew the dream’s conceit and could see through it now.

Slowly, pain echoing through every piece of flesh, she rolled onto her hands and began to climb again. The end was now in sight and, finally, each skyward step rewarded her with the end coming one step closer.

She reached the top stair and paused, tempering her feeling of accomplishment. There was no door. There was no exit. The stairs simply ended with a lethal drop off directly above the first steps of the staircase. She sat on the top stair, confused, then angry.

The nagging tugging of the spectral hand pulled her up, fighting the blistering anger she could no longer quell. Standing, her eyes burst open and she saw the same chamber with the same cylindrical, clear column in the center. Frustrated, she kicked outward to connect with the cylinder, but instead she kicked a pile of stones into it.

Water.

The cylinder was a tank. It was a 100 foot tall cylinder filled with water. She watched the stones sink quickly to the bottom, tracing their downward spiral until they landed on a massive iron door. The exit was there, she knew it. She also knew she could never descend fast enough to reach the door and in time to open it.

She needed to sink quickly and she had only one option. Sliding off her socks, four in total, she began to fill them with the pebbles and rocks sharing the top stair with her. With them heavily weighed down, she wrapped them around her ankles and wrists to make sure she sank fast enough.

For a short moment she questioned her idea, but the tugging hand in her mind didn’t let her contemplate her decision too long. Then she plunged into the water, sinking quickly.

Even with the extra weight, it took her a long time to descend. Each second that passed, a vital bubble of air escaped from her pursed lips. As her feet hit the door, her lungs were already screaming for oxygen. As she rotated downward to tug at the door’s clasp, her vision was already turning black around the edges. As she tugged at the clasp, water was already mercilessly pushing on her closed mouth. And as the door refused to move, a single burst of bubbles erupted at the surface of the cylinder. Then the water stood still.

She awoke gasping for air, her hands searching upward to find the surface. Except she wasn’t underwater. She was on a pier on the banks of a gorgeous, sunlit lake.

And then she was floundering.