Henry Firenze wasn't expecting death, but then, death wasn't expecting him either. All of these things run to a schedule, we are told. Henry went out one morning to buy a coffee, and Henry met his end crossing the road.
On Earth, there were the usual recriminatory investigations that accompany tragedies. The ripple impacts of his death, so enormous for his immediate family, grew smaller as his relationship circles with the rest of humanity grew wider, until they faded out entirely. By and large, the world neither knew nor cared about Henry or his death.
This realisation, that the world, in general, doesn't care, may have been one of the triggers for the idea of religion, back when man's brain was new and unexplored. Somebody, somewhere, must have been depressed about the idea of the uncaring Universe. Whether they then made up the comfort of a God or whether God existed and gave him that comfort is debatable. It always was debatable, here on Earth.
For Henry, the debate was settled. He found himself in an afterdeath state, and instantly realised there is indeed more to life than an Earthly existence.
He "awoke", though that isn't the term, to his new reality. A room, not like a prison cell, not unpleasant, but comfortably featureless, as if it didn't wish to impinge upon him, didn't want to give him any ideas.
Henry was confused and puzzled and worried and intrigued to find that all these very human emotions and reactions still existed here, wherever or whatever here was. In fact, he decided, he was still pretty much the same Henry as he had always been, and that gave him some sort of comfort.
He sat for a while on his featureless chair in his featureless room, half shocked, half remembering what had just happened on Earth, and he grieved. His grief was mellowed by the realisation that if he was here after death, then his family would be too in some way, some time, and he would see them again.
At that point, he realised that if this was so, then surely his predeceased parents would be here. Was there no way they could welcome him, be here to greet him? He frowned.
Henry got up, and walked to the closed door. Ideas of what might lie on the other side pierced him, each colourful image dancing its temptation.
He imagined (and was pleased to discover he could still imagine) a garden, or a warm cosy room, where his parents would smile and nod and laugh and exist, and they would all be forever reunited. A moment later he imagined a fiery pit and sharp pointed forks and grotesqueries, and for a few seconds, he thought the bravery required to open the door would be beyond him.
Henry opened the door.
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| There were no signs, no scents, no sounds |
Outside were none of his imaginings. Outside was a corridor, matching its features with his room, which is to say, there were none.
Henry coughed tentatively, trying to disturb whatever may be there by the least amount, either from fear of offence, or just from fear. Silence.
Henry walked from the room into the corridor, and immediately the door through which he had come vanished as it if never was.
The corridor pulled him left or it pulled him right. It didn't care which way he went, it just offered him the chance to go. It was a corridor of potential energy waiting for him to make it kinetic.
As neither direction offered anything over the other, with increasing puzzlement, Henry walked.
The corridor was long enough that its vanishing point was in fact its only feature. Nowhere was there a junction, or a mark on the grey walls. There were no signs, no scents, no sounds. Henry could see and hear and feel nothing but himself and the noise he made with the corridor. He walked on.
After what seemed a long while he began to think that his body would surely soon begin to make its childish demands. Feed me. I need a drink. I'm tired.
His body felt none of these things. It was as if it had moved into eternal stasis. Henry decided he could feel worried about this stasis idea - he chose not to, unsure of where that mental path might lead him.
The path he was on, though, just went on. After what felt like an impossibly long passage of time, Henry stopped. He turned around. In both directions the corridor was identical, as if he was caught between two opposite mirrors.
Henry burst into song. A note, flat, made no difference, except to himself. It was a relief to hear himself, not just his footsteps. The sung note hung and broke the muddy silence.
The corridor dampened the noise, the very opposite of a bathroom. It didn't, thought Henry, seem intentional. It was just a result of its structure.
At that thought, Henry's inner chimp woke his curiosity, and he moved to investigate the wall more closely. It was of one-pieced smoothness, a tube almost. It curved over his head like an underground tunnel, perfect in symmetry. Henry's half-hoping fingers pressed against it, seeking some comfort, some sense, perhaps, of the organic. He got back no such sense.
The temperature was perfectly bland, the feel was perfectly bland, the light was perfectly bland.
Henry sighed, ever more puzzled. At last, he made a decision. He turned around, and walked back the way he had come. There were only two choices, and one had no apparent advantage over the other.
Still the corridor lead Henry onwards, straight as a vector. Did it, and thus Henry, have a destination? Or was this the afterlife, an endless walk with no idea what for or why? Was this hell?
It was, Henry estimated, a day or three after he had started walking that he was edging towards giving up. After all, his body needed nothing, and walking further seemed pointless. He could just sit, sit here, perhaps for eternity. It's fair to say that Henry was becoming depressed.
He made himself walk on.
A few days later, Henry was staring ahead glumly, resigned. His eyes saw nothing but corridor, the penumbra of darkness that defined the limit of his vision ever moving from him, until he became aware that it wasn't. That patch of darkness ahead had moved nearer.
His breath-rhythm picked up. It was a change. Something had changed. That little patch of darkness was a destination. It was a place, and places are where humans want to be, even dead ones. Henry wanted to be where the darkness was, to fire up his somnolent new-thing neurons. He walked faster, ran, stumbled, craved and pushed himself.
The dark patch grew nearer, measurable, reachable.
Henry arrived. The darkness grew around him, until he could see nothing. His hands in front of him, he adored this new state of blindness, this new reliance on underused senses. He walked forward, tentatively, slowly, then with increasing confidence. He celebrated the difference.
At last he was running forward, utterly blind, into the darkness.
And then the sound of his footsteps, the low thudding heartbeat of his feet, changed too. A slight softening of the sound. A sonic evolution from clay to bell. The floor was changing.
Henry reached down and used his new sight, his fingertips, to feel the floor. It had definitely changed. It was more metallic. And soon, his groping hands gave him what he had craved. The floor was no longer smooth. It had a patterned roughness, and pattern meant intelligence and design, and pattern meant Henry had found something, something incredible.
His delight was intense, a state now so unknown to him it was as if he had never experienced it before. Its old novelty ran over him with wash of cold, and a clarity came to his thought. This was not enough. There must be more.
Henry stood up and a new Henry walked on into the darkness.
This time, it wasn't long before his sensitive eyes picked up a few welcoming photons. Ahead lay light. After leaving the light and running into darkness with the excitement of a child, this new light, this potential, this possibility, almost made Henry explode with excitement. He ran again, and quickly this time, quickly.
The light welcomed him. He thought it was a religious experience, heading into the light and for a while he found it funny that God would be so unsubtle, so obvious, so well, God. He ran into the light.
The corridor lay in front of him, as it had before, just the same. Endless. Nothing was ahead except more corridor. The floor had returned to its uninteresting featureless state.
Henry's tragi-comedy filled him, filled him so much his emotions topsy-turvied until he was sobbing like a baby, crouched on the floor. There was no other sound, nothing apart from his sobbing.
It felt like some hours before he stopped, and looked and thought, and worried again. At last, Henry got up and headed on. What else was there to do?
A long while passed, and Henry once again saw darkness ahead. This time, he didn't care. He knew what he would find. He felt he had explored all this place, if it was a place, seen all that this place could offer.
He walked on, once again with feet encouraging time to pass, as if without them time would not move. He entered the familiar wonderful horrid darkness.
It was a surprise then, when the darkness presented him with an obstacle. He had had his hands ahead of him, an instinctive danger warding, when they made contact. Henry's heart almost stopped, though he realised that his heart was never going to stop. His hands had met a wall.
A moment's investigation. Henry had reached a corner. This place had corners and he was briefly filled again with the joy of it.
Then, not allowing himself the extreme of emotions he had recently gone through, he played it down. A corner. It would lead to another corridor. It would go on forever.
Henry walked forward, a new direction that felt exactly like the old one. It took no time at all for Henry to slip back into his walk, into forward movement that achieved nothing and whose only benefit was that was its opposite was nothing.
The darkness ahead once more gave itself up to light. The light that pulled and tempted and promised. A hollow promise, Henry felt, a nothing dressed as a something.
Henry walked from darkness into light.
Ahead was a door.
It wasn't possible for Henry to analyse this, in his state of mind. His body, newly unencumbered with physical human failing or wants moved forward to the door. He opened it, half-expecting by now that it would be the door to the room where he started.
The door opened onto a landing. From the landing lead two staircases, one that went up and one that went down. There no lights or sounds to guide him.
Henry went to the meeting point of the stairs, and he looked down and up. Below, he could just see that the staircase was short, turned, and lead to another landing. It looked pretty much like the one he was on now. He looked up, and in the same way, the turn of the short stair seemed to lead to another identical landing.
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| Each had a sign that said "Floor seven" |
He was beyond thinking, but some half remembered religiosity in him made him choose the upwards stairs. As he did so, he noticed, by the doorway, a sign. It had words printed on it. It said "Floor Seven".
Henry was overcome, again and at last. A place that showed it HAD a place, it was a meant thing, it had some sort of purpose. A purpose that he could figure out, that he could work on. Something to DO.
Henry almost ran up the short staircase, arrived at the next landing. The landing offered another staircase up. It offered a door. Next to the door was a sign.
The sign said, simply, "Floor Seven". The door next to it lead to a corridor.
Jow went up another stair, another dozen, another hundred. He went down a thousand.
Each landing was identical, and each had a sign that said "Floor seven", and a door, and each door lead to corridor.
It was on perhaps the fiftieth year of wandering that Henry paused in his impossible endless march up the stairs, or perhaps it was down. He hardly knew.
Then, far above, so very far above, he heard a voice.
Henry sat down and began to cry. Then he sat and waited.
The voice was louder now. The owner of it was coming down the stairs.
Henry thought about getting up about running towards it.
He thought about all the nuances of interacting with the voice's owner, with the questions and delays.
He thought about sharing their experiences, the puzzles. He thought about the answers.
The voice was nearer, just a few landings up. The words were unintelligible, but the changes in tone and pitch were clear. It was self answering voice, a mono-dialogue.
Henry stood. Without, in the end, much thought, he went to the door of the landing he was on, opened it, and went through, closing it silently behind him.
Muted by the door, the voice grew as loud as it ever would, passed by the landing, and faded as its owner went on downwards, down the stairs.
Henry turned. The corridor lead into the far distance.
He began to walk.
