“There are six hundred and twenty-four stairs altogether. Should take us twenty minutes or so.”
“Now that’s a lot of stairs. Will you be okay in slippers?” enquired Ed, aware that it was going to be a tiring climb.”
“Yes, it’ll be fine.”
The walls of the stairwell were surprisingly smooth and as glisteningly miraculous as those in the main tunnels. Visibility was good and every twenty or so steps there was a tiny recess in the ceiling with a bright piercing light shining down. Each time the pair passed through the beams they cast a ghost-like, eerie shadow, melting back down over the steps with an amorphous freedom, getting longer and longer as Ed quickly fell behind George’s pace.
“Hold on, George,” panted Ed, as he pulled them to a halt after a hundred or so steps.
“No probs.”
“Where do these lights get powered from, George? I can’t see any cables or switches.”
“As far as we can tell, it’s all natural light. It is not electric or gas or anything. If you reach into the holes there’s nothing there, they’re just empty. Very strange, but when you land here after hopping from mammal to reptile to sea creature, anything seems possible.”
“Sea creature? Tell me no, not a fish? How would a fish kill itself? What about a prawn?”
“I don’t know. It’s rare anyway, don’t worry.”
“Mmmm! There’s quite a few things I shouldn’t worry about, eh?” replied Ed ironically as they continued on their way, George slowing slightly to Ed’s pace and allowing him to catch up.
Ed began musing on his next transience, wondering where and what he would end up with. He thought about the strange ‘other world’ running alongside the physical one and began to question George.
“Have there been any other ways that people have made contact with these communities down here?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, if we know that some other physical world is going along parallel to this, isn’t it possible that somehow we can make a connection from here, some sort of contact or message? Maybe that would save me having to make the jump.”
“What, like a telephone hotline back to the living?”
“I don’t know. What about Ouija boards, séances, mediums and all that stuff? I never believed in it but by the same token I never thought I’d end up here.”
“Well as far as I am aware, there has never been any sort of contact made like that, at least not from this portal. We think it was all human hype, a myth. Pseudo contact with the spirits and all that. We have had a few fortune tellers and mediums in the past but they’ve never been able to do anything. They try for a while, sometimes over a prolonged period of time, but they always give up. One of them had the idea that it was the souls trapped around the outer edges of the flow that communicated with the other side, the physical side. They even held some ‘events’ down near the entrance, but all to no avail.”
“That’s interesting. Maybe getting trapped is like being half in and half out, caught between worlds. A distant and faint voice of misery. Maybe that’s Hell itself. I hope that doesn’t happen to me,” replied Ed as they continued up the stairs.
There was a very faint chemical odour and as they got higher Ed could see a series of small cracks in the rock with minimal amounts of what looked like a black fluid leaking out. He stopped on a stair, spent a while to gather his breath again and poked at the substance with the first finger of his right hand.
“What’s this?” he enquired, realising its spongy foam-like texture.
“I don’t know. We’ve only ever found it here on this stairwell. It looks like it’s leaking out but really, it never changes. In all the years I’ve been coming up here, it just remains exactly like that, no more and no less. Very odd, eh!”
“Yeah, very odd, along with everything else. Do we have much further to go?”
“No. We’re nearly there now but come and look at this,” replied George, pointing to something just ahead of him on the wall. As Ed got closer he could see it was a single vine growing from one of the steps and meandering up the curved wall, disappearing into the ceiling. Above it one of the jets of light bathed its entire length, casting evocative shadows across the wall and onto part of the stairs. Ed drew closer still and caught sight of a series of tiny bright blue flowers like tiny buttercups.
“It’s the only one we’ve ever found anywhere in the tunnels. Amazing isn’t it?” stated George.
“Certainly is. Why hasn’t it spread? How long has it been here?”