The Eleventh Hour

I sit with my toes curled over the edge of the ragged black hole you dug in our floor and stare into the void - into the secret world you found beneath our kitchen - and listen. Crouched. Frozen. Like a rabbit in long grass, too terrified to move or to make a sound.

Lest I betray this hiding place.

The enemy is at our gate. Ruin in their wake. They have overturned what little is left of this shattered kingdom like soil beneath the harrow’s blade.

Their saccharine jingles of promised peace still pour like cold honey from the transducers in the public square and echo in the hollow streets. Lies left over from the outreach campaign of trust that paved the way to our destruction.

Propaganda on repeat.

Warped and out of tune.

It lilts over the desolation with the drifting smoke and gentle fall of ashen rain.

In the distance I hear the thunderclap of the cannonade. There is an answering call of the earth being torn apart and my bones rattle in their sockets. The windows shiver in their sills.

The first tide of screams rises like flames over the rooftops and tenements.

The walls are breached.

The city will fall.

Furtive voices bubble in the hall outside our door. The last of our neighbours wrangle their family and make their escape . In my practiced silence, they sound like a herd of nervous cattles, and I curse them in my heart.

They slip into the lane outside and then into the street. Naked and open now to the eyes of the coming anger, they're quiet and less clumsy. Their footsteps are muffled by the banks of fallen ash. Perhaps they will escape after all.

Perhaps.

But then their child cries

A scream that splinters the agonized silence.

I retract my curse and instantly ache to move. I think of all we have done and planned, but I want to break from cover and beg them to come back.

I want to shout out after them that there’s another way.

But I clench my jaw and bite my tongue and fight to sit still and keep playing rabbit. I huddle deeper into myself, and pull our only possession closer. All that we have left.

A paper box that holds our greatest treasure.

Our daughter.

Silent and sleeping - even as the world ends around her.

Foreign curses ring out in the street outside. I wince at the crack of firearms that follow. A mother screams. Our daughter shifts in her paper cradle.

Our neighbours flee.

The enemy - like a pack of wolves - hunts them down.

Their weapons sizzle and pop.

I think of that screaming child.

But I stay. Unmoved. Waiting for you in the twilight of our home.

And finally, you return. A shape of speed and shadows that bursts out of the darkness in the hole in the floor. My rabbit heart thrashes in its cage, and I nearly scream.

You move too fast, though.

Arms around my body.

Lips on my forehead.

Chest against my tears.

I pull you in, tight. Can't we stay like this, please, for even a moment?

More gunshots ring out.

No.

You push me away and I search your golden eyes.

"They're waiting for us." You whisper.

No time to tarry.

You lift our precious cargo, and my anxious hands hover over her cradle’s paper edges. But of course, you're careful as ever, and she never comes near the broken edges of the tile and stone and steel as you turn around and return beneath the floor. Swallowed again by the darkness.

The cannons seem only two streets over and the sky has turned to blood. Its bathes our shattered kitchen and the broken bones of our home. My heart mourns the memories that could have been. The family that would have grown within these walls. But we are without time for tears over fallen homes and fallen cities.

For countries and their kingdoms.

There will be time to weep later when the sacrifice is far behind us.

You reappear. Eyes shining like embers in an abandoned hearth. You take my body in your hands and lower me into the open ground beside you. We stand in a crimson spotlight from the world above.

Ahead of us is nothing but darkness.

You pick up our daughter once more, and I follow you into the underworld, where the air is brittle and the gloom so close as to be almost felt. Waded through like heavy fog. My steps are blind and slow, but before I can think of it you find my hand.

Lead us on.

Silent feet on cool sand.

You never waver at any turn or pause to note the way.

I always forget how well you see.

Even down here.

As we traipse the forgotten world below, the world above is bathed in angry fire. Its monstrous rage is dulled by the earth and stone between us, but its bellows and roar reach us even here, like a hand pushing on our backs, urging us on.

But then you slow.

You stop.

I coil around you to try and see your face in this impossible dark.

Then I hear it.

Over the roar of blood in my ears.

Over the roar of the fire above.

Echoes.

Voices.

The Enemy.

"We're too late," I whisper when what I want to do is scream.

The voices grow louder, and their light races ahead of them, thinly so, but even now where all was pitch, I see the shape of your face. Your brow furrowed over your molten eyes, and the sleeping form of our daughter cradled in your arms.

We remain frozen.

And then you move.

Only one arm now bears our baby while you flourish the other. A light crackles at your fingertips. It sputters and flickers as though with life and hangs in the air above our heads. A halo that illuminates us in a pool of golden light.

You grab my wrist and bolt, dragging me with you.

We tear through the underworld, with the monsters on our heels.

The living light keeps pace with ours. Whirring overhead.

One turn after another.

And another.

Again, and again.

We're too fast and overshoot it - the door.

Ancient and worn and marked crudely with the symbol of our saviours. You double back and hammer its cold-iron surface.

Nothing.

And then a luminous voice answers from beyond.

"Errod’s feet are shod with coal."

The countersign. Secret passage words. Lines from a poem from the days of Yore.

“And Tembeth cleaves the harrow.” you shout, no longer cautious of how much sound we make.

The door swings open and your ethereal lantern pales away in the flood of light from beyond.

A silhouette looms over our huddled bodies.

A woman.

Or womanish creature. Our deliverance.

More specifically, that of our daughter, who is alert now. Awoken by the violent run and staring at us with those eyes.

You hand her, paper box and all, over the threshold, and once again my hands hover and flutter as she changes hands.

"Her name is Rebecca." I choke, as she is taken from me forever, into the arms of another.

I watch her. So perfect, so small, so unaware. She blinks up at the womanish creature, without fear. And I feel time being wrenched away from us. Stolen as if it were something tangible.

All I want is to hold her.

Tell her that she is so incredibly beautiful, and loved, and safe now. I want to tell her everything that we have done to secure a future for her.

To give her passage and refuge.

To give her life.

And there is this pain in my heart, this terrible fear, that she will not even remember us.

She is so very young.

And my bones splinter under the weight of the thought that one day she will think of who we were, and throw questions into the wind of why we aren’t there with her.

Did we abandon her?

Did we not want her?

Did we not love her?

And there will be no voice to answer her back.

There has been no time for tears. No silent space safe enough to let them flow. But here, on this threshold with death behind us and oblivion ahead, they flow freer than they ever have.

They’re fiery streams that pour over my cheeks and curl around my jaw, and cold as they slither over the terrified pulse in my neck and away into the folds of my dress, into the bosom of my heart where I once could hold my darling daughter.

You pull at me, eyes on the corridor behind us. But I cannot move. Is there no other way?

And then I feel it.

I tear at the folds of my cloaked neck until my hands fall upon it.

Curved in the shape of an ancient symbol - like an arrowhead - or that of a spear.

Within it a picture of you and me.

A lock-heart.

Wet now, from tears, and glowing like molten gold, it’s all I have left to connect us to her. The only memory of us I can hope to pass on.

I peer into the face of the womanish creature. Her two arms cradle our treasure, and another two extend to take the lock-heart. Her unearthly fingers take mine in her grasp, wrap around the heirloom, and hold me. She returns my gaze with animal eyes that search the corners of my anxious heart.

You're tearing at me now. Your grip like the falling tide. And I hear the cries of the enemy and follow your golden gaze into the tunnel behind us.

I have held us here too long.

I have no time for words to thank this creature, or to say goodbye to our precious child. All I can do is fall upon her one last time and kiss her perfect face and whisper a silent promise that she will hear only in a memory of a dream.

And then I let go.

I yield to your pull, and she is gone.

The door that has divided our family closes, and we run.

Eyes swimming and blind.

Into the darkness