It was summertime in Gusty Meadows. Nora had my hand in hers. Her eyes were gold in the sunlight, but her hand was red, stained from the June-bearing wild strawberries we’d been picking off the branches. Their seeds would stick in my teeth like pieces of candy. We smiled at each other with ruby lips.

“I could eat the whole field,” she said. “They’re the sweetest thing I’ve ever had.”

She kissed me, and nothing, not even those perfect strawberries, tasted sweeter than that.

When I was around Nora, I could not think of anything else but her. She created in me a fortification, a curtain wall, and she sat on top of it. Every other thing that tried to get in would bounce off the surface and fall dead at its base.

She led me through the tall grass like a pixie in a dream, and I followed her confident stride. Along the way, we came upon a dehydrated culvert and snuck inside.

“What is this doing here?” she said, between strawberry kisses. “I don’t see a river.”

I didn’t want to answer her. Why would I ruin such a perfect day by speaking of that place? Besides, our mouths were currently occupied, and I was content with that. But she pressed the subject, genuinely curious about the incongruous culvert.

“There’s a power station not far from here,” I said, but I didn’t want to think of that, because her eyes were on me, wide and curious; adventurous. She flirted with the zipper of my pants, her big doe eyes never leaving my face. I swallowed hard and tasted strawberries. “It generated electricity by pumping water out of the ground. This place was built for runoff, to prevent flooding in the field. The plant is decommissioned now.”

I stared down the gullet of the culvert. We stood inside its entrance where the sun could shine, but the tunnel led into strict darkness. I shivered, and then remembered Nora on the wall, and those thoughts fell dead to the floor.

Nora had never been to Gusty Meadows, not many people have. It was a sleepy town. I brought her there on an impulse, which was a trait she brought out in me. I hadn’t visited since my grandparents passed­—no reason to—but Nora somehow reminded me of the place, with its gorgeous fields of pedantic strawberries, and in June the dandelions fell on us like snow.

For the moment we were under cover from their assault, and my groan echoed through the culvert as she unbuckled me and pressed me to the curved wall.

“I want to go,” she said.

“All the way, baby. Let’s do it. Right here and now.”

She laughed into my mouth. “To the generating station, I mean.”

And her lily flowered dress came down and I came up. I breathed her in and it made me drunk, so I fumbled with the buttons of my shirt with unsteady fingers while she tried to distract me with her hands and breasts and lips.

After several blissful minutes we were back out in the dandelion snow, and she was leading me East towards the groundwater hydro station, but its name had forsaken me, and I didn’t care because it wasn’t on my mind anyway, only she was.

Young love is dangerous yet intoxicating. I envy and pity those who never get to experience it. Young love is a rose with thorns, and the stem is as long as a lifetime.

Nora had such exuberance in her character, and it bled onto me, it livened me up, but I could never match her energy, not all of the time, and hardly even some of the time. Girls like that are ephemeral creatures, they hop from stone to stone, never looking back, for if they did they would see only crying eyes.

“We can’t go there,” I said, tugging at her dress.

“Sure we could. And we will.”

“We can’t, Nora, we can’t.” Something in my voice quieted her song. She looked at me stark and serious for the first time all day, and I felt guilty for it.

“And just why not?”

“Something terrible happened there. Decades ago.”

But this only seemed to add to her excitement. She beamed at the prospect of a haunted power station, but I was scared. I demurred and planted my feet, but she tugged me along, and in the end all it took were those tea-cup eyes and a pleading pout to get me moving.

“So are you going to tell me about this terrible thing that happened?” she said as we flattened the field with our feet.

“I think it was in the ‘60s,” I said. “There was a. . . something to do with a boring drill. You see, this whole area is a rich aquifer, that’s why everything is so. . . vigorous. They made bores to pump the water. They were underground lakes, really. One day they dug too deep, I think, and they discovered tunnels below the ground, a conduit system, deep rivers that channeled for miles in every direction.”

“It’s all interesting, love, but fast-forward to the good part.”

“Well, workers started to disappear.”

In the distance now we saw it; not a large power plant, just a dead husk, black on a blue sky, and we were coming from the West, from its backyard, so I wouldn’t have been able to see the signs for it, but the name came to me then. Puram Generating Station, or, colloquially known as The Puram. It came to me because of how fitting I found the name after I heard the stories of the water they found in those tunnels. The purest darn water you’ll ever taste is what the workers said; the ones that went down there originally, the ones who inflated a raft in the dark with their headlamps on and rode a mile East—the length of their security tether—and then a mile West, and then a mile North and South. And each direction had a dozen branches.

“Disappeared to where?” she asked me.

“To the tunnels,” I said. “At first, the disappearances were a mystery. There’s life down there, you know. They discovered crustaceans that fed on the sediment. Unlike any animal they’d ever seen. Marine biologists visited the place, but the disappearances started happening soon after, and the tunnels were too dangerous to explore very far. An ecosystem three-hundred feet beneath the ground. Life in the dark. It’s sort of spooky to think about. Well, eventually someone noticed what was happening. They had set up security cameras after the third worker disappeared, because they assumed a culprit within the work-place, and employees were beginning to get nervous. The cameras ended up capturing men approaching the borehole and jumping in. They captured men climbing down the wall ladder. They captured men talking to the open darkness of the hole while gazing down its depths. Of their own accord, thirty men went down there into those caves to die before they closed the place for good. The last of them was the plant commissioner.”

“Did anybody ever go looking for them?”

“Nope, no way,” I said. “I shiver at the idea of their bodies down there, floating forever beneath the ground, being eaten up by those crustaceans. Nora, I don’t think I could go in there.”

We had gotten close. The Puram loomed above us, a hulking monolith with black skin and even blacker innards. It was a monument that represented the exact opposite of why I had brought Nora to Gusty Meadows that day. She had reminded me of the innocent beauty of the untouched fields, of the strawberry plants with their delectable fruit, of the love we found in the culvert. In retrospect, though, I believe that Nora was far more similar to that black carcass of a building, with insides just as dark. Those black tunnels, her veins, with liquid—unpure—coursing through them.

“Surely you don’t believe in a tale as tall as that, do you?” she said through her ruby red lips. I would have let those lips suffocate me, I would have let them hold mine shut forever.

“Sure I do, why wouldn’t I?”

“come on,” she said, and she gave me my wish, a tender kiss to end the argument.

We approached a diseased chain-link fence that was brown and flakey from years of rust buildup. Signs of neglect were scattered throughout the yard beyond. Weeds sprouted through cracks they made in the paved pathways, unfettered and uncaring of their place, they stood amongst the broken ground in a stubborn display. Spray paint vandalised the black stone of the structure like fresh tattoos on a dead body. We walked along the fence line, looking for a way in, and Nora danced the whole time, twisting in my arms and twirling on her toes, with shattered glass reflecting in the sun and catching in her lightbulb eyes like a disco ball or a Fourth of July fireworks show. Everywhere was glass from broken windows, and it made the lawn appear to be on fire.

A dandelion tuft landed in Nora’s auburn hair, jealously dancing with her for a moment before being carried away on the breeze. It was a revelatory moment, for I caught a glimpse of our future then. I, as a tuft, among many, her as a celestial body onto which gravity—or maybe magnetism—forces us to be drawn to, but ultimately we are crushed by its weight.

We came upon a break in the link. A section of fence had been rotted enough for some past presence to have been able to kick a hole in the metal and crawl through. Nora held her hand out expectantly, and when I took it, she politely dipped down and fitted herself through the hole with expert grace. When it was my turn, I clumsily sat on my knees and crawled through with all the grace of a hippopotamus. I was lucky not to have gotten my shirt snagged, or my hands lacerated from the glass shards in the grass. I dusted off my stained knees and took in the view.

The Puram watched us with serrated eyelids, daring us entry. “Come,” it said, “come right on in, come right on in. I have left a glass carpet for to soothe your tired feet, and the handle of my door is cool as ice, for to relieve the state of your bleeding hands, and don’t forget that once you’re inside it is dark as pitch, for to rest your tired eyes.”

I shook my head to clear it of such crazy thoughts. Nora, remember Nora. Atop the wall, a presence larger than The Puram.

“I really don’t love this, Nora. We don’t know the state of the place, we could hurt ourselves. And it’s dark, we don’t have flashlights.”

“Pretend we’re at the end of the world,” she said. “It’s only us. These are lands unexplored. We come across this. Do you go inside to investigate, or do you stay out here quivering in its shadow?”

“I go back to get help,” I argued.

“It’s only us, love. It’s the end of the world.”

And that was that. She began to move, but before I went after her I stole one last wistful glance to the West, toward the strawberry field and the safety of the culvert.

We came around the side of the structure and followed a weed choked path to a set of industrial double doors. Surprisingly, the wire-mesh glass on the doors were intact. I took the lead for once, pressing my weight against the push bar of the door, which gave way easier than I had expected, causing me to stumble and almost fall blindly into that empty darkness, but I caught the mullion and steadied myself.

“Careful,” Nora said. “You almost got swallowed by the beast.” She smiled, a bouquet of perfect teeth, and ruffled my hair. I did not happen to find the statement amusing. Regardless, I tried to match her air of levity, so I held the door ajar with my foot and bowed steeply, hand outstretched toward the belly of the beast, and performed the words “m’lady.”

Nora pinched the hem of her dress and curtsied before courageously entering The Puram. I followed her in and let the door shut softly behind us.

The first thing I noticed, while my eyes were still adjusting to the dimness of the place, was the smell. It was the acrid odor of stagnant water.

“Pee-yew!” Nora said. “And that’s with the windows open!”

It was dark, but it was still mid-day and much light fell in through the factory windows, although it didn’t spread evenly, it sort of just pooled on the ground in square shafts. Nora stood in one of these shafts looking like a runway model in a spotlight. I stood where I was, not wanting to touch her, because that would spoil the image, but she gestured for me to join her, and I had always been helpless to her needs. So I went and we stood there together in the optic nerve of The Puram, and for the time being I had forgotten the smell, and my fear, and everything else in the world.

Then something fell, deep in the darkness of the facility, and I snapped out of my trance.

The air suddenly felt heavier, the odor of the place more noxious. I couldn’t see ten feet past the shaft of light we stood in, so when I turned in the direction from which I heard the sound, it felt like I was trying to stare into the depths of an ocean. A place so deep that even the strong rays of sunlight could not stretch themselves to reach it.

“Relax, it was probably a mouse, or a rat, or something that got startled by our beauty,” Nora said, still somehow full of alacrity.

“Nora, I—”

“Give me your lighter.”

“What?”

“Your Zippo, you dope-head. Hand it over.”

I reluctantly fished in my pockets for the Zippo and placed it in her outstretched hand. “Nora, please don’t go exploring that sound. I got maybe fifteen minutes of fuel in that thing, and I have zero intention of falling through the fucking floor. Didn’t you hear me? This place bored holes into the ground.”

“End of the world, love,” she said, and winked at me before flicking the spark wheel and walking off into that void, into that terrible, terrible place, and toward that terrible, terrible sound.

I had no choice but to follow. Anxiety had solidified into what felt like a dry marble in my throat and I swallowed it down. My mouth was dry and tangy, no longer tasting of sweet strawberries, but of spoiled wine.

The lighter didn’t do a very good job of penetrating the darkness of the factory, in fact it felt more like all we were accomplishing was highlighting our presence in the place. Hey there! You, in the dark! We’re right here, can’t you see us?

Nora led us on, walking slowly, but confidently. We sidestepped fallen tools, and I-beams, and abandoned industrial vehicles, and eye washing fountains, and splintered pallets, but we never really saw any of these things, we sort of just got an impression of them in the weak orange flicker of the lighter’s flame.

“Stop!” I shouted. We had come across a very low steel barrier. I had noticed our light faintly in its reflective surface. Nora approached it, the barrier only going up to her knees. She extended the lighter beyond the steel railing and revealed two massive tubular legs plunging deep into a dark well. The well itself seemed to have a diameter of about fifty feet. The white steel barrier followed its circumference in a full circle.

For a moment I imagined those legs alive and kicking. I could almost hear the thunderous sound they would make as water chugged up and down inside them like the arteries of a beating heart. Chig-chog, chig-chog, chig-chog, chig-chog. And the steady, electrical buzz of the generator somewhere, the central nervous system, forcing everything to move, to act, to live.

“Hold this,” Nora said, and shoved the Zippo into my hands.

She wandered off into the dark. I saw her for a second and then I saw only the hem of her dress, and then she was completely enveloped by the black, and I was alone. I heard her though, and I knew that she would find her way back to me, because I held the light. I was the beacon. Rummaging. Metallic clank. Feet skating on a dusty floor. I could picture her, despite all of her jauntiness, feeling out with her fingers in the dark, her feet never leaving the ground, but sliding on it so as not to mistakenly step on something sharp, or plummet down a well. She was cautious in my mind’s eye, and I hoped that she really was.

Then she was back, appearing before me like a fairy coalescing into existence. When her face bloomed out of the darkness like a pale full moon rising from a dark horizon, I felt okay again. My previous trepidation was lost, because how could I be afraid in the presence of a goddess? She smiled her perfect smile, glad of herself for what she had done, and I was glad for it too, without knowing yet what it was.

She had a stake in her hand. No, not a stake, a massive shard of wood that she had pried off of a broken pallet.

“Let’s see how deep this baby goes,” she said, and then took the Zippo from my hand and set its flame to the wood. It lit up like a torch, and I had this horrible premonition of both of us trapped inside of a burning factory with no idea where the exit was. All my trepidation came flooding back, but before I could protest her actions, Nora leaned forward and dropped the flaming shard into the pit of the well. Overcome by curiosity, I leaned over beside her and together we watched as the fireball fell like a comet to the depths of the hole. But it never winked out, it just fell out of sight. We waited for a splash, or thud, but none ever came.

“Okay,” Nora said. “That’s pretty damn deep. Remind me not to fall into that.” And then she proceeded to circumvent the boring hole, and I was yet again forced to follow, lest I be left alone and lost in the blinding dark.

We continued along for another minute or so, passing more shadowed carcasses along the way.

And then we started to see nothing at all. All at once, our path was clear, unobstructed, an empty floor. For another full minute we did not come across a single thing, not a fallen screw, not a hardened pile of mouse droppings, not even a speck of dust as far as I could tell. The floor looked swept clean and cleared of equipment.

“Where are the walls?” I said at one point, only realizing then that we seemed to be in some massive open area with no walls or windows.

“I don’t know,” Nora said, and for once I heard the slightest bit of doubt in her voice. “I think we’re well past where we would have heard that—”

Something crashed to the floor with a heavy thud that vibrated through the concrete like an earthquake, making us both jump, me nearly out of my skin. And then a heavy rolling sound, like how a bowling ball sounds as it races down the lane toward the waiting pins, except this bowling ball sounded like it was the size and weight of a freestanding boulder.

“What is that?” I said, on the verge of a panic.

“I don’t know,” Nora replied, and she did sound worried now.

We stood where we were, not wanting to proceed, but also not wanting to retreat. We were frozen in wonder, ears cocked, tracking the motion of that heavy boulder, or whatever it was by its sound. It was ahead of us for sure, ahead of us and to the right, but it was rolling in our direction. The sound was getting closer and closer, its rumble sending vibrations through our feet like how the tracks of a train would feel if stood on during the approach of a heavy freight. But we were safe where we were because it was ahead of us, it would cross ahead of us. Until it didn’t.

I took an unconscious step forward, toward the sound of the rolling boulder, and my foot caught on something. I looked down and saw an outcropping of cement that lined the floor in both directions. It was only a few inches high, but I knew what it represented. We were standing just outside of what used to be another section of the facility.

“Nora, I think I found the wall.”

And then the rumbling ceased. Its course stopped about a dozen yards straight ahead of us. There was a deafening silence, the ground stable as ever, and just when that silence became unbearable, Nora stepped over the outcropping and took a few wary steps forward. Deep beneath our feet came the sound of a meteor hitting a lake. Nora stopped dead in her tracks, and together we heard a gigantic whooshing sound, like a waterfall in reverse, and then the rain came. Somewhere in that darkness, water erupted from the floor as it would from a whale’s blowhole. It came crashing down in all directions, soaking us through, washing the strawberry stains from our lips and hands. There was a startled, feminine cry, and it only registered later that it came from my throat, not Nora’s.

Nora, that brave immortal soul, was smiling within her orange halo, and this is what I saw before the water put out the flame.

“Over here,” said a voice that I’d never heard before.

“Nora?” I said. It was so dark. I turned my head back the way we came, and in all that blackness I saw a speck of light, like a distant star in the throes of entropy. It was the only light available, and it was lightyears away.

“This way,” said that voice, so much like a whisper and so much unlike any voice I knew.

I saw sparks as Nora tried to reignite the flame but nothing caught. It flashed a few more times and that was all.

She was only a few feet ahead of me, but I wouldn’t have been able to see my own hand if it were an inch from my eyes.

“C’mon, down here.”

I heard footsteps receding into the distance. Nora was on the move.

“Nora!” I shouted. “Talk to me. We gotta stay together here. Follow my voice. Please.”

No reply.

“Nora, please. I want to go back. You’re scaring me, Nora, just say something. Why are you walking that way? What do you expect to find over there? It’s not the end of the world, and even if it was I would not be here!” I thought about that distant star and how much longer we had before it winked out. When dusk arrived that would be it. No more dandelion rain or strawberry kisses. Just big black nothing in a haunted generating station. Where everything in a large radius, including the walls, had suddenly disappeared as if sucked into the demanding pull of a tornado. I knew what lay ahead, I just didn’t want to admit it to myself.

Silence again, and I imagined Nora in the dark, standing over the edge of a massive hole in the factory floor, a hole as large as the eye of a whirlpool, and in its guts were tunnels and rivers that ran forever in every direction. An endless place with no escape, except into the hungry bellies of unearthly crustaceans that would happily feed upon our drowned and bloated corpses.

Then a light appeared ahead of me. From this distance it looked as red as the skin of a strawberry, or maybe it was just a trick of the light, or maybe there was some mystical gaseous matter in the air that filtered the glow of the lighter’s flame, but there she was. Perfect, lissome Nora, back to me, standing still and silent in the red flare. She had gotten far ahead, as if guided there, and now she was on the cusp of a mighty drop. There was no barrier around this hole. No ladder to descend. Just open, empty space.

I sprinted toward her, knowing that there was nothing upon which to trip on this licked up plate. She wasn’t moving, but I knew that posture, that trance. I’d warned her of it. She’d called it a tall tale.

She lifted a leg and her dress fluttered as if the hole had exhaled beneath her. She was going to jump. Or. . . walk? She was stepping off a cliff. I was so close at that point, just running through outer space, fast as I could, to reach my destination, unthinking, unafraid, seeing Nora, only Nora. I saw her for what she was again. A deity with so much power. Power over everyone and everything but herself.

I was wrong before. She was not stepping over stones. She was a passenger on a crazy train, and she did look back. She looked back often. And when she sped past a set of crying eyes, her own eyes sparkled, like ponds in the moonlight. She would press her golden ticket to the rear view window and smile. She liked it that way.

She leaned forward, as if in slow motion, her grounded foot coming up at the heel. Her balance was now almost completely over the edge and she teetered for a split second as if reconsidering her motion, and then she tipped all the way forward. I lunged for her, my hand appearing out of the darkness into the fringes of that radial glow and I caught her dress in my palm and yanked her back as hard as I could. She made a loud grunting noise and the lighter fell from her grasp and disappeared into the mouth of the void.

In that empty blackness I held onto Nora like a drowning man might hang onto a buoy in an open sea. She had come out of her trance and was breathing exhaustedly into my neck, clinging to me as fiercely as I was to her. We were laying on the cold cement, and by our feet, the hole let out a another gust of air. With it came a smell so foul that I considered holding my breath until I suffocated. It was the smell of fermented dog farts or human waste sitting in a brine of polluted swamp water. It was offensive; a collated mixture of every oppressive scent available kept in a jar for centuries to fester and rot. It was the smell we noticed when we first entered The Puram, but far more acute, far more present.

I let the palm of my hand caress the floor and felt not a single grain of dirt. The ground nearly felt polished.

“The water,” Nora whispered into my neck.

I didn’t want to pull in a breath to speak, so I remained silent, hoping that she would elaborate on her own.

“The water,” she repeated, and then the strangest thing happened. It was the oddest sensation I’d ever experienced, and it took my brain several seconds to understand what was happening, especially in that total darkness where disorientation already prevailed. Together we were sliding towards the mouth of the hole, as if gravity had shifted slightly, causing our weight to now have lateral consequences.

It took my feet to stop scraping along the floor to wake me up from the stupor. Because they were now hanging over the edge of a chasm, and I pulled in a breath, finally, and it wasn’t so bad anymore. The scent had dispersed to the deep corners of the massive chamber. I scrambled to my knees, letting go of Nora, and that gentle pull was still upon me. One knee slid over the edge and I stumbled and clutched desperately at a smooth floor. “Down here, come on,” said a voice, and then Nora was pulling me up and out and she was yelling at someone as she helped me to safety, but I was too focused on surviving to process the words, and we ran away, but each step felt like I was fighting a treadmill while wearing a backpack full of stones.

We ran toward the way we came, or so we thought, but our distant star had collapsed and there was no lighter’s flame to see by, so we just ran blindly, with Nora rambling about how she had opened her mouth when the rain had come, and she had drank the sweetest tasting water, sweeter than strawberries, she said, sweeter than strawberry jam, she said, and a voice in her head that promised her sweeter things, and despite it all she was laughing. She took the lead, suddenly sure of her step, my hand in hers, and she twirled in the darkness, laughing her Nora laugh, a beautiful sound that didn’t belong in this place.

I never forgave her for that twirl. That twirl that said she was more alive now than ever. That twirl that took life and love and me for granted.

The ground crunched below my feet as the rubber soles of my sneakers came down on years of unswept dust. The treadmill let up a bit and my backpack got lighter. Still, we were lost and now that my senses had returned I was horrified at what we’d done. We were running through empty space, knowing that at any moment we could have—

—Falling.

Falling downward, falling like the rain, like a waterfall, like a star, like—

We hit the ground with a squelch. All of my weight came down on my arm and I felt it shatter like all the glass that littered the lawn, and my head came down on a pillow, but it wasn’t a pillow because it was wet and slimy. Nora came down hard beside me and was silent. Dead, perhaps, although I knew then that if she awoke from that fall, she would stand upon her broken legs and dance.

With half my face caked with wet mud, I clenched my teeth hard, but my jaw quivered because all I wanted to do was scream, I wanted to howl. The pain was unlike any pain I’d ever known, and it wanted to come out, it wanted to escape. But I held it in, and my eyes watered and spilled, and my lips came up and down around my teeth like a growling dog, but I gave in eventually. I closed my eyes and lifted my head up and when I opened my mouth there was no scream, but one useless and long sob that got caught in my throat and died when I took in a breath, and then I felt better.

“Nora,” I said, and reached beside myself with my good arm and felt her there, motionless. “Fuck, Nora, fuck, fuck.” But she was breathing. I felt the rise and fall of her chest.

I felt around, trying to get a sense of where we were. The ground was wet and slimy, the walls were made of mud. There was no ceiling, just vast open space leading back to The Puram. I let my fingers sink into the wall hoping against odds that there was something on the other side, but when I felt a thing squirm between my fingers and I pulled my hand away fast. Something else squirmed in my hair, and this time I did manage a scream, and by reflex, I swatted at it with my broken arm, causing my scream to amplify. I thought of crustaceans in the dark, waiting for us to die, or maybe they were starving and wouldn’t wait at all. But no, this wasn’t that place. We hadn’t fallen three-hundred feet, and we weren’t drowning in a black river. Worms, that was all. Still, I was repulsed. The worms seemed to be everywhere, fat and bloated, and my mind conjured up some Lovecraftian mother worm somewhere close by, sightless and starved.

“Nora.” I gave her a little shake. “Nora.” I nudged her with my elbow. “Nora!” I pulled at her hair. “Nora!” I struck her across the face.

Immediately, I was appalled by my rage. In my mind I saw a dart fly past my eyes in slow motion. It reminded me of a rocket ship racing to the moon. This moon was unpocketed, a poster on a wall, and the dart was aimed true. It landed right between the eyes of an unblemished moon, the round, smiling face of a pin-up girl, and when I turned my head to see who had thrown it, I saw myself. This version of me had thrown it with a broken arm, and his eyes were spilling wet pain, and his mouth was working like a rabid dog. There were worms in his hair.

I looked up with the intention of gauging the distance, and determining how difficult, if possible, it would be to scale the earthy walls with a broken arm. In that vast darkness above me I saw something more disturbing than any Lovecraftian monster. There were two sets of eyes peering down at us. They glowed a vibrant gold, and when they blinked I was reminded of fireflies winking out and re-igniting in the perfect darkness of a rural night along the outskirts of Gusty Meadows, where my grandparents lived. Copper filled my mouth, a taste I couldn’t swallow away, and I decided then that it was time to move.

Nora was out cold, so with much effort I took her lithe form in my arm and lifted her onto my back. I was careful of her broken legs, but I figured that if the pain woke her up we’d be better off. She was not a heavy girl, but in her current state, the dead weight was over encumbering. Still, I managed to move, slowly at first, but then I found a rhythm and was able to crawl fifty feet before I needed to put her down and rest.

We were in a tunnel, it seemed. The wall curved around my head in a neat arc and worms spilled silently from the ceiling, landing in our hair and on our laps like alien raindrops. I was glad for the darkness, because although the feeling of them was nightmarish, I couldn’t imagine what seeing them would be like.

“Where are you going?” said a small voice, the voice of a child, but it had a certain melody to it, like the speaker was on the cusp of a song. My head slowly turned toward the sound, an unwanted motion, and yet I couldn’t ignore it. Back the way we’d come were a pair of glowing eyes, sad eyes with dilated pupils, and no whites, just gold gold gold.

A worm landed on my head and I yelped, causing the wearer of those eyes to withdraw a little bit. That was all fine. The last thing I wanted was for it to approach. Nora stirred, and I pressed down on her broken legs with the palm of my good hand. It was the right thing to do, because she sat up straight as if on a piston and screamed with brand new agony. The eyes withdrew further.

“Nora,” I said, but her screams were unmatched, so I put a hand over her mouth until she finally broke down into sobs.

“Nora, listen to me,” I said over her weeping. “Your legs are broken.” A worm must have landed in her hair, because for a second her sobbing broke into a repulsed squeal, a very girlish sound, and her body twisted and shook. More weeping. “Nora, are you listening to me?”

“Okay,” she said between moans. And then, “Where are we?”

“I don’t know,” I said, honestly. “The bowels of The Puram, probably. It stinks like shit down here. Nora, we fell in our haste, and you broke your legs. You probably have a pretty severe concussion too. My fucking arm is snapped. But none of that matters, because something is following us.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something is fucking here. Look.”

I turned my head and went completely numb. Those eyes were right next to me, and in their glow I could make out some semblance of a face. It looked like my own. It was an inaccurate depiction of me and it spoke again in that musical rhythm. “Where are you going?”

Nora answered our guest with a scream. It took several worried steps backward and then reached out with an impossibly long arm, quick as a whip, and covered her mouth with its dirty hand, a hand that vaguely looked like mine. In the soft glow of those headlamp eyes, I was able to faintly see Nora’s own, terrified eyes widen in fear and disgust, and I suddenly hated the thing that was here with us. I hated it for turning those beautiful doe eyes into flying saucers, for inflicting unhappiness in their deepness, for removing all the good things they typically promised. Its hand moved with bullet speed, latching onto her hair now, and it yanked her toward itself. “Come back here,” it said, and began to drag Nora by her hair, back towards the way we’d come. Her screams were indescribable, but I was reminded of a trip to the zoo I took with my parents when I was little. There was a baby gorilla sitting peacefully on the ground and making goofy faces at the onlookers. An adorable sight, pure creature innocence. Suddenly, two massive alpha-types put on a show for us by gruesomely murdering the baby gorilla. By the time the zookeepers arrived with their dart guns and stun batons, the baby gorilla was torn into five pieces. But the screams it made, that’s what Nora’s sort of sounded like.

Like before, I put fear in my back pocket and moved without thought towards the thing that was trying to claim Nora, the unclaimable. Worms fell around me and I swatted at them as I walked, hunched down for the ceiling was low, and when I caught up to the abductor, I grabbed its ugly arm and wrestled with it.

“Let her go!” I shouted, and I saw that it did. I was holding a severed limb. The thing had shed its arm like an old husk, or like a shell maybe, and in an instant a new arm grew where the old one once was, and it lashed out and struck her across the face. It moved to repeat the strike,, but I put myself between them once more, and once again I was holding a severed limb.

The dance was over when I saw the second pair of glowing eyes appear behind us, and just like that, the thing attacking Nora scurried away from us to meet its companion.

“We’re going,” I said and I picked Nora up, ignoring the fresh stab of pain in my arm, and ignoring Nora’s agonized protests.

I crawled once more through the bowels of The Puram, a digested piece of meat looking for the exit, and although my terror was as abject and absolute as the darkness around us, I carried on, and although my pain was as brutish and mean as those gorillas at the zoo, I carried on, and although my certainty in escaping this horrid place was as volatile and unstable as the flicker of a lighter’s flame, I carried on. I carried on when I turned my head and witnessed fireflies in the darkness behind me. I carried on when they finally caught up to us and the one that looked like me offered me its arm. I carried on when the one that looked like Nora offered us its legs. I carried on when they asked where we were going or when they begged us to come back. I carried on when the worms fell so heavily that it seemed they might fill up the tunnel and drown us in their bulk. I carried on when I spied with my little eye something that was night. A lode star. I carried on.

I breathed in deep and let the clean, sweet air of midnight June fill my lungs. It was laced with strawberries. I laid Nora down on the concrete floor of the culvert, and there she was finally silent. She looked at me with eyes like tea cups filled to the brim, and I fell deeply and willingly into them. All of what happened meant nothing now, because I was safe and secure in those eyes. They took me in and fastened me with pillows. “I think from now on I’ll take your advice,” she said and laughed. Her laugh was orchestral, and nuanced, and contagious, and lovely. I loved her. And I hated her.

But she never did take my advice. She’s been to The Puram many times since, only in different forms, other depictions. In fact, every stop on her crazy train is The Puram. She searches for it and seeks its water. She dresses herself in the disposed exoskeletons of blind crustaceans and they are rigid and sharp things, so that when you touch her you might draw blood. Blood that tastes to her like strawberries, I bet.

I never spoke to many people about what happened there that day. Who would believe such a tall tale? Nora, on the other hand, well I think she tells everybody. But she tells it wrong. She tells about the sequence of events, of the adventure we embarked upon, and the horrors we endured. She always leaves out the most important parts. She forgets to tell about the universe in her eyes. She forgets to tell about the angel that existed briefly as she stood in the halo of light that poured in through the factory windows. She forgets to mention how, although she blames the water for luring her towards the hole, she would have went there anyway. She forgets to mention that there was a moment when it seemed as if the thing with the glowing eyes had stolen something crucial inside of her, something that any other person, myself included, would not be able to repossess. And yet not a few hours later she was back on her train with all of her belongings secured. She forgets to mention that.