Life was hard on the stairs leading into the pit. But the screams below were worse, and the light above was frightening, so he made do as best he could. He gathered water to drink when it fell and the light was weaker, and knew better than to creep up the stairs when it faded entirely. It always returned before he could reach the top, chasing him back down as if he had drawn its attention with his shuffling on the stone steps.
The screams below had their own wax and wane. He didn’t know what caused them, as he never went lower than a step he recognized for the long crack in it. Fresh air beckoned from above, but nothing in the darkness lured him.
So what was he to do when, for the first time in all of time as he knew it, he heard steps coming down the stairs?
The darkness might have tried to push him away. To hold him back from fleeing with its own terrible weight and velvety flank. But voices were descending with the footsteps now, clattering from the walls with orange, restless light that might have been them or only been with them, and so he fled down the stairs, down past the cracked step, slipping and feeling his way with bare feet and bare hands against the curve of the wall, cold and endless into the dark…
And stopped. There was no light coming up out of the dark. But there was the sound of bare, careful footsteps, and quiet breath coming up out of the screaming. As he stood trapped by the light descending, the voices that seemed hard and loud enough to chip all the mortar out of his world, something else was coming up to meet them.
