The Escalator
a disturbing dream
Released under a Creative Commons Attribution No Derivatives license on the 14th of December, 2009. You may distribute this work commercially and non-commercially, as long as it stays unaltered, due credit is given to the author, and the author is informed of the publication.
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Diseased minds, foul and wretched figures that move and act on the basis of words and numbers, occupied the narrow and dark escalator. They were all blocking the next from moving in either direction. They swayed left and right with no purpose and no intention, as they were hopelessly carried down into the depths by the transport machine.
Who built the escalator? The escalator was only a machine, but a machine with a purpose! And in a time of spiritual depression, they all obeyed the escalator; they pleased it with the remaining willpower they had to live, and go on.
And the escalator swallowed them.
Long ago, the machine had swallowed him. I was there, that bleak morning, when he passed me, and squeezed his tall and thin body into the miserable crowd. There was something in the way that he looked around, in the thin walkway of the machine, that made me so sure, he did not belong to that dreaded landscape.
Yet he made every effort to blend in with the rest. Against his purpose, eyes searching the ground, he pushed into the slimy herd, until they covered him from all sides, with only his head standing out. 'You'd think, he'd know better,' I thought. 'A man of his intelligence surely must have known to avoid the machine; and he surely knew of its danger! Why then, against all his reason, is he losing himself in the machine?'
My curiosity could stand still no longer, and in moving so, it made me move forward. Intuition was telling me not to lose sight of this man. The escalator lowered him deeper below the ground, and his pale face was about to disappear in the darkness. My feet jolted.
I could not care about the wretched creatures any longer; I pushed their slimy figures aside and severely bolted down the walkway - squeezing past everything standing in my way - just to have the man in my sight again. 'Why am I doing this?' I kept asking my mind, as my raw animal instincts lead me straight to my doom. Maybe I was diseased too. Maybe in all the while I had been watching the escalator, I had been drawn to it. Maybe in spending so much time fighting the inevitable, I had lost my purpose too.
I spotted his stern face again. I slowed my pace. Silently catching my breath, I observed him. His posture had changed. It seemed he had scared the creatures around his step, away. He had one arm stretched out, hanging a garment over the railing - his loose jumper stretching across the side of the machine.
All of a sudden, his jumper made a jump; and tearing from his hand, it escaped through the creases and gears, into the belly of the monstrous machine. He watched his sleeve disappear, with peaceful eyes.
The hum of the escalator grew intense. I could smell the oily-stench of its burning engines. To see the escalator stop - it seems - was both his and my wish. Yet the engines kept working persistently, the pitch of their humming rising to violent heights.
The wretched figures started anxiously, as the vibrations grew stronger. I grabbed the side of the escalator, burning my palms on the plastic covering, and holding the machine with all the strength I had, to slow its slipping movement through my aching fingers. I don't think my effort had much to do with it, but at last, the machine started coughing, it's shrieks losing their steady rise, and silencing in periods. My body shook with excitement. Adrenaline had been racing through my arteries. Was the machine really going to stop? 'Did it really work; did we stop the machine?'
Eventually I understood the voices, I heard, rising around me. The crowd did not cheer me; they were in howls of discontent, in agony. An evenly-timed, loud rhythm took over the dying sound of the machine.
'Thud, thud, thud...'
They were leaping! After all we had gone through to stop this madness, and at a moment of great chance to change things, they were desperately attempting to resurrect the old. The adrenaline I had pumping through me, spied on my thoughts, and I rushed at them; pushing them violently and scattering them aside in the narrow walkway of the escalator, as I marched up against them screaming, that they stop this madness!
My efforts were in vain, no matter how far up-and-through I got. Under the rhythmic pressure of a gigantic crowd, the escalator freed its gears, and began to take them down again.
I watched, from the top of the machine, beaten, and an outcast, as the fools sunk to their depths, taking with them the only person who had made a difference; the man who had the knowledge to stop the machine.
And so, the escalator swallowed its creator, too.
...