Flash Fiction Fridays: Dormant

Today’s fiction is a birthday present for my friend Elton.

DORMANT

Easing himself through the hole as carefully as possible, Julian clicked on his flashlight. The air in the small cave had a strange odor to it. Considering when it was sealed, he realized he might be smelling the first century BC. He considered this for a moment, the idea that every age has its own scent. Then his elbows were in the fine soft dirt and he was pulling his legs in after him. There was just enough room that he could stand without having to duck. But little enough room that he still felt like he needed to.

Light from the opening behind him aided the flashlight, giving him a vague visual sense of the entire chamber. It was small, about the size of his kitchen back home in Surrey. Other than where it had been sealed off, it appeared to be an entirely natural formation. And every single inch was covered in writing. It wasn’t hieroglyphics or cuneiform, but bore characteristics of both. And characteristics of some writing system he had never seen before. Even though he couldn’t read it, felt incredibly familiar. His initial impression was that it had been written haphazardly, madly on every surface. But on closer inspection, he realized it was in a precise gridlike pattern—it was simply the writing surfaces that curved and flowed in unexpected manners. Natural rock.

There was something on the tip of his mind. Julian had learned to listen to these hunches, to reason with his instincts. It was why he was so good at what he did. He took a step back, as far as he could, and relaxed his eyes, letting them go slightly out of focus. He stopped trying to read any of the cave writing, but rather to visually feel it. It had a sense of flow, it was leading somewhere…there.

On the wall to his right was a bare patch, about a foot square, off-center and halfway up from the floor. Somehow he had missed it upon first glance. He approached slowly, carefully placing his feet and searching for anything else he may have missed on first glance. He reached the wall and relaxed his eyes again. The writing here seemed to pull his sight toward a single symbol, about a foot to the right and above the empty patch. He touched it. The empty patch started to open. He tried to be cautious, to step away until he had a better sense of what was happening, but found himself rooted to the spot. In the blackness behind the opening stone, there was a flash and something blossomed in his mind. Suddenly he could read the entire room. It was a letter, in both senses of the word: a lone unit in a macro alphabet and a missive at the same time. It was a single giant thought, and it pushed everything else from his mind. He had to share this thought with the world. He would.

Nothing would ever be the same.

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