Dopecentury XXI --- Sewer
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: “the monotony rarely becomes tedious.”) My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these “Dopecentury” entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
The sound of running water. Except I can tell by the smell that it’s not water. Water is wholesome and life-sustaining. This stuff might run like water, but it is the opposite of wholesome, toxic, poisonous, infectious. Ingesting it would likely be fatal. Even touching it is dangerous. But that’s unavoidable because it is everywhere in here, in the dark.
My fingers find the wall. Old brick, wet and slick with slime. Almost involuntarily, I smell my fingers. That’s a mistake.
I move a foot forward, and the toe of my shoe finds empty space. I slide my foot around in a curve and it meets back up with the level stone I am standing on. I move gingerly in that direction. Apparently, I am standing on some kind of ledge that runs along next to a deeper area. By the sound of it, the toxic-smelling not-water is running in there.
I keep one hand against the slick wall, trying not to think about what I am touching, particularly when my fingers drag across something soft and bulging stuck to the brick. This happens with disturbing frequency.
I move forward. After a short way, I perceive the faintest light ahead. In the darkness so complete, in an environment so inhospitable, that faintest of light washed me with an astonishing amount of reassurance.
As I approached, the light revealed itself to be a thin beam, shining down from a small hole far above. Under the beam, my hands found the slippery rungs of a thin steel ladder. I climbed up.
And up and up. Through a narrow tunnel where the wet bricks scaped against my shoulders leaving my shirt wet.
At the top of the ladder, the tiny spot of light seemed impossibly bright. I could not look into it. But I understood that it was the hole into which a prybar could be inserted to lift the heavy iron lid above me. Here was hope. I could escape right now, if I could lift this lid.
I pushed up against the lid with my hands. It did not budge. I repositioned my body further up the ladder, and leveraged my wet shoulders against the cast iron of the lid. But I did not have the strength to lift it. Or possibly it was sealed so tightly into its seat that there was no way to move it without mechanical force.
I held my hand under the thin spot of light, imagining the safe world of the city, in the daylight just above my head, but completely inaccessible to me. It was difficult to face climbing back down the ladder to the darkness. But it was necessary.
At the foot of the ladder I turned and proceeded in the direction I had been going. I could hear water moving ahead, louder than in the well running next to my current path.
My hand sliding along the wall suddenly fell into empty air. I stopped and, using both hands, felt along the wall. A corner. Sliding my foot along in front of me I felt the end of the ledge I’ve been walking on. An intersection. And from the volume of the not-water ahead of me, it seems like I have reached an intersection with a major artery.
I feel around with my feet. The ledge does not continue around the corner, which makes me briefly ponder how they service this main artery. Regardless, it leaves me with little choice: I have to either step into the rushing not-water, or go back the way I came.
I look back and see the dim glow of the light. Unfortunately it seemed much more likely that following a main artery would lead to a way out, while retracing back up a smaller tunnel would lead only to still smaller tunnels.
But who even knew how deep this main artery was? Potentially I could have to swim across. That prospect almost made me wretch. I would have to test it. I crouched down, and placing my hands against the wall for stability, lowered a foot into the not-water. It was cold, and moving fast, but it was not a strong current. This turned out to be because it only came up to just below my knee. So it was shallow enough to walk across, if it didn’t get deeper in the middle.
I lowered my other foot into the water. Putting my hands out in front of me in the darkness, I started slowly sliding my feet forward. I could feel soft floating detritus swirling against and around my legs. I did not want to picture what it was. The smell was overwhelming, piercing through my senses even though I must at this point be somewhat adapted to the smell — that could only indicate that the smell was even far worse than I perceived it.
I reached the other side, and realized that I would have to walk down the main artery. It made the most sense to go with the flow, so I turned that way, and again keeping one hand against the wall I proceeded down the tunnel, the sound of the rushing not-water echoing for what seemed like an interminable distance.
Every once in a while another tiny pin-prick of light made its way down from above, and I pieced together from the shadow above me that there was a catwalk suspended from the ceiling — that was how they serviced this main tunnel. Unfortunately I could not reach it. Instead I slogged on for miles through that foul stench.
In places, I crossed other intersections like the one I had come out of initially. More often, my hand slipped into the darkness of a smaller pipe that fed this main artery. These pipeways were too small for me to get into without crawling, which I was not about to do. Often I would hear the squeaking of rats only a short way down these pipes.
I realized as I passed more of these pipeways that there always seemed to be more of the foul not-water running from them. Each had more flow than the last. The main tunnel water was increasing in height too, now above my knees. Was this simply because I was coming to a denser part of the city?
Soon I realized that the reason there was increasing water was because it was raining up there on the street level. This was dangerous, because the level could rise rapidly, without warning. As if warning could help me anyway.
Storm runoff was now sluicing down the walls. I passed some of the pipes where stormwater was blasting from the pipe in a torrent. The water in the main artery was rising more quickly. Now above my thigh. Now to my waist.
I tried jumping up to grab the catwalk. I could just barely get the tips of my fingers onto it, but I didn’t have the strength to pull myself up. When I dropped back into the sludge below, my feet slipped out from under me.
And now I was being rushed downstream, my head getting sucked under on occasion. I cannot tell you how foul that sludge tasted. Something I never wanted to taste, or ever taste again, but will never forget. I had the thought that even if I survived and escaped this torrent, I would probably succumb to some awful infection later anyway.
The water was too deep and moving too fast now for me to regain my footing. But it was not so deep that I did not bash my knees and arms against the floor and sides of the tunnel repeatedly.
The darkness consumed me and digested me, sucked me down and held me there in the wet stinking blackness. It felt like I was swept along for miles farther. Now I suspect I will be swept along forever, through this stench and blackness until the end of time.