Escaping The Veil (EBOOK)

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THE OLD MAN stood on the Spanish tile roof of the balcony of the room beneath his. A mug of strong black coffee warmed his crooked, wrinkled fingers. He sipped and released a content sigh. Exactly the way his wife of nearly seventy years used to make it for him every morning. Shuffling his feet forward a little further until the toes of his canvas sandals hung over the edge, he contemplated jumping into the ravine below. He’d done that before, though. It never made a difference.
The first time, he had slipped. The second and third times, he jumped to see if the outcome would be the same. After that, the thrill was gone because to his immense dissatisfaction the outcome was the same. Each time he’d hoped that maybe he’d fall into a portal and end up on the other side of the ravine. But like anyone else who fell or jumped or was pushed, he always returned to his tiny room within the ever-expanding compound.
The residence was five floors tall and made of separate but connected units with twenty rooms per floor. When a new person arrived and all one hundred, eight-by-eight rooms were full in the existing unit, a new unit appeared, attaching at the end. As far as the old man could tell, every unit was identical, every room identical to every other room.
His was the only exception, as far as he could tell. His ten-by-ten box of a room sat perched on top of the first unit. Why, he wasn’t sure. Perhaps because he had been there the longest, he got the one unique room like some badge of honor? When he first arrived in The Here, the compound was long, but he could see the end. He couldn’t see the end anymore, not even from the roof of the balcony of the room below his. He couldn’t tell how far into the distance the compound stretched. Or how far into the horizon the ravine extended. Or how deep into the earth the ravine dropped.
As the ever-present blanket of clouds overhead lightened from battleship gray to a slightly brighter dolphin gray, the old man wondered what this day would bring. Not that there were actual days in The Here. The change in the color of the clouds happened with no discernable pattern. It seemed more a courtesy to the group to alleviate boredom than an indication of a passage of time. Still, the concept of calendar time was so ingrained in them, they thought of the darker gray clouds existing to indicate night and the lighter gray as being day.
The man sipped his coffee again, stared across the ravine, and gasped. There she was. He couldn’t see her clearly, the fog hovering there obscured everything in The Next, but the man knew her outline. He knew that the gently rounded shape was his Sadie. The bump protruding from the top of the shadowy figure’s head was the messy bun she twisted her long hair into every morning. One tug of the comb holding the bunch in place would release those beautiful salt-n-pepper locks, like lowering a shade over a window. Seeing Sadie, but not being able to get to her, was the definition of torture for him.
“Soon, beloved,” said the old man, ever the optimist. He held his mug out to her in a toast of love he knew she couldn’t see. At least she’d never given any indication that she could see him.
Slowly, as the sky reached full light gray, people emerged from the compound to gather at the edge of the ravine. It couldn’t be more than a hundred yards from one side of the apparently bottomless gorge to the other, but no one would try to cross because they could never agree on a method for how to do so. As many as could fit congregated near the entrance to the bridge outside unit one. That was the obvious way across, but the bridge was as broken and rickety as the old man. Made from tree branches and thick vines, there were gaps in the decking nearly three feet wide in some spots. In other spots, the branches holding the vine handrail in place were broken or non-existent. Since there was nothing to hold on to, the person crossing would need to rely on cat-like balance to get to the next handhold. The old man, among many others, was balance-challenged even on steady ground. He’d never make it past those spots on the swaying, precarious bridge.