Unbecoming by unenlightened

The cellar door opened on stone steps that went down too far. The ceiling sloped down with them, from which hung a few nondescript lights without shades. She glided down them almost as if they were an escalator; and down, and down.

The room clearly extended beyond the boundaries of the house, perhaps even beyond the whole terrace. Where there should have been walls, there were gaps and corners that opened on to other spaces, some quite brightly lit, and others full of shadow.

Here, a pair of candelabra burned steady and un-flickering on a table set with the makings of a simple meal; bread, butter, cheese and some apples, and red wine in a cut-glass decanter. She shook her head in disbelief, and moved on without touching anything into a brightly lit corridor with rooms on either side at intervals with what looked like hospital beds. The corridor darkened, and the rooms became more cell-like. She shivered, and suddenly regretted not having picked up a piece of bread or an apple.

At the end of the corridor, a flight of wide institutional stairs took her down again to a bright hallway where a man of indeterminate age sat behind a desk, above which hung a large sign: Enquiries.

“Can I help you?”, he asked looking up from the screen in front of him.

Her mouth opened and closed several times, as if she was about to speak, but couldn’t quite decide what to say. He waited.

“I’m not sure where I am…” she finally managed, and then in a confused rush, I was at home, and I just went to the cellar because the electric went off, and I was looking for the junction box, and… she trailed off, … and then I was here.

“Ah, I see.” he replied noncommittally, “Is there anyone you can contact - friends, or relatives?”

“My phone…” she gestured vaguely towards the stairs she had just come down.

“Well, if you’re going out, you’d better take a hat.”, he reached under the desk, and produced a straw hat, pleasant enough, and laid it on the desk in front of her. And with that, he abruptly turned and disappeared through a door behind the desk that swung shut behind him with a ‘staff only’ sign on it.

The hat was in her hand as she turned towards the patterned glass doors that looked like a hotel entrance. But outside, instead of the suburban landscape she was expecting, was a dry and dusty wilderness of scrub grasses amongst a litter of reddish stones, and a blast of heat that declared this was not remotely the temperate zone. She turned to go back in, and almost fell over - the glass doors and any sign of a building had vanished and the scrubland continued uninterrupted in all directions.

Confusion and disbelief overwhelmed her, and she collapsed onto the ground and wept, sobbing loudly, blindly pulling the straw hat onto her head as the sun beat down.


By the time they came by, the sun was lower, she was quieter, and looking around blankly, unsure if she was mad, or dead, or what? A very ordinary, somewhat scruffy bunch of children with an older woman, were just padding along in amiable silence. The children stood around the huddled figure in silence while their leader put down her stick and her bundle and settled down next to the crying woman.

“My name is Ailsa, I think you have fallen out of reality. Can you tell me your name?”

The woman looked at her in blank terror for a long moment; “I went to the cellar because the lights had gone, and then there was a hotel and then I was just here and…”. She trailed off in disbelief of her own words. “Agnes”, she whispered. “I think I was called Agnes, I was living in Aberdeen, near the university. What happened, where am I?”
“You’d better come along with us for now, Agnes, there’s not much for you here, is there?” Ailsa stood up again, and reached her hand down to pull Agnes to her feet. Picking up her bundle and stick, and still holding Agnes by the hand she set out again, the children following in silence.

“Where are we going?” Agnes asked in a small voice.

Forwards, my dear,” said Ailsa, “there’s no going back any more.”

Agnes turned her head, and saw a place she did not recognise, of looming trees, and something grey and shadowy moving. She blinked hard and looked fixedly in front of her. She shuddered, and they moved on slowly across the dry plain.

TPresently, there was a hum of distant traffic, and as they started to descend into a valley, a highway came into view over to the left lifting up as if to cross the sluggish river that meandered along the valley floor. But the highway stopped in mid air at the river. As the party came closer, they could see that the traffic was all one way, heading at speed towards the river and then just winking out of existence with a little popping sound.

Agnes stared open-mouthed. She was exhausted and traumatised, and the world she thought she knew, had gone mad. By now she was hungry for sure and very thirsty, and such a long, long way from home. As they reached the riverbank, she sank to her knees, her fingers digging into the soil in a desperate attempt to hold onto the world she knew.

Ailsa looked at her for a long moment, and, putting her hand gently on Agnes’s shoulder, she said “We’ll have to leave you here. It’s a good place.” She paused. “You can rest here, we must go on.”

Agnes could not move, or speak, and watched despairing as the group moved away, walking calmly across the river as if it were solid ice. It occurred to her that she had never heard the children speak, or heard their names, and as they passed from view, she was unsure even how many there had been. Three? Seven? More?

The sun had set, and it was almost dark. Agnes’s fingers had reached into the soil and found some dampness there, and she was no longer quite so thirsty. She leaned forwards over the water to see her reflection in the moonlit river. Her skin was cracked and her hair hung down almost to the surface of the water. “Willow” she thought as she fell into a blessed sleep.

In the morning, or in some morning thereafter, there was the intermittent sound of chainsaws, along the riverbank with a deal of men shouting, but Agnes Willow slept on.

Rab Willow had given his lectures in the morning, and had been ploughing through the seemingly endless admin and emails ever since. By four-thirty he had had enough, and gathering a few papers to look through at home, he abandoned his office and jumped on his bike, heading home.

Leaving the bike in the hallway, he wandered from room to room, wondering where his wife had got to. She was usually home before him, but not today. He called out a couple of times, “Agnes?”, and then shrugged and went to the kitchen to make a cup of tea, but the kettle wasn’t working. Then he noticed the cellar door ajar.

He had at the back of his mind a slight notion that he had never noticed before that they had a cellar at all. But they had been there nearly five years; he dismissed the thought, and pulled the door open, and peered at the steps, that seemed to go an awfully long way down. “She must be down there,” he thought. He started down, and gradually realised he was on an escalator. Below him he could hear the sound of an underground train.