Gazing Into the Abyss

When you start doubting a dream from inside it, the dream's sensations suddenly become viscerally real — real enough that you can no longer tell whether it is a dream at all. I had believed I was dreaming, but everything around me insisted otherwise. I reached inward, feeling for a gap in the fabric: the air thick with choking grit, the hollow ache of hunger in my stomach, the cut on my arm where Wu Wei's blade had opened the skin, the blood now slowly drying around the wound. I touched it lightly and a sharp jolt of pain shot through me. All of it too real. Just as I abandoned the search for cracks and began to accept this as genuine reality, a crack presented itself on its own.

"Hahhh—" From somewhere in the abyss at our feet came an enormous sigh. Deep as a cavern, not something a human throat could produce. Wu Wei heard it too. We both craned over the edge and peered down into the bottomless dark — and then came the true horror: in the blackness directly below us, two eyes slowly opened. They carried no emotion whatsoever, staring straight up at me.

Before we could react, the rock beneath us gave way. A sickening drop seized my body, and I plunged headfirst into the abyss.

The faster we fell, the closer those two eyes grew, swelling larger and larger until, at last, we each dropped into one of them.

The eyes were full of water. Deep water. We hadn't been crushed by the fall, but hitting the surface felt like a hammer-blow to the skull — my vision went white with pain, the world spun, and when I managed to open my eyes there was nothing but darkness in every direction, the faint sound of bubbles rising. I had completely lost my bearings; I could not even tell up from down. Clothes soaked through, the water's buoyancy gave nothing away. I was going to drown in this eye.

With my lungs nearly empty I searched the darkness for something — anything — and found it: a point of light, faint, impossibly distant, but light. Even the faintest light is enough to find hope in blackness. I drove myself toward it and at last broke the surface. The first breath of air was the finest thing I had ever tasted.

No time to savour it. I hauled myself out of the water and shone the flashlight at the other eye. Wu Wei was still in there. Relief: he surfaced, gasping, and stared at me with wide, shaken eyes. "Are we really inside a dream?"

He was beginning to doubt too. I didn't know how to answer — because I no longer knew the answer myself.

I stripped off my soaked jacket and climbed onto a raised rock to look around.

We were inside a small, enclosed space ringed entirely by rock walls. The raised rock where I stood must have been roughly the centre. Not far away were two water-filled hollows — the "eyes" — their surfaces lit from within, because each held a perfect mirror of the moon. The moon was mounted in the night sky outside and its light entered through a narrow gap in the rock wall, striking both pools at once. It was the moon that had guided me to the surface: that faint point of light.

Now I understood the "eyes." When the moon moved to the right position, its light funnelled through the gap in the rock, hit the water, and reflected back out — and the "eyes" opened. By day, sunlight would flood in through the same opening and the space would be considerably brighter.

Sunlight and water meant plant life. A few metres beyond the two pools, a dense stand of low plants grew from the rock — not green, but a strange purple-black. Crooked stems. Heart-shaped leaves.

That box. The pattern on the lid had looked like a cockroach; the pattern on the sides looked exactly like these plants.

"I know these! Sweet potato vines — they're edible!"

Wu Wei had already bounded over and was stripping leaves into his mouth by the handful. We hadn't eaten since falling in. Watching him devour them, I felt hunger twist sharply in my own gut. I walked over to pick some for myself, but Wu Wei suddenly turned toward me and held out his hand.

"Give me some water."

That was the last thing he ever said to me.

I was about to go to the pool to fetch him water when I saw his jaw lock mid-chew. Then his eyes flooded with blood and his expression twisted into something unrecognisable. He toppled backward and hit the ground hard. His body began to convulse violently, dark purple liquid seeping from the corner of his mouth. The convulsions lasted only seconds. Then he was still.

My mind went blank. It happened too fast; I was still processing it when it was over. I crept to Wu Wei's side and pressed two fingers to his carotid artery.

Nothing. Wu Wei was dead.