A Narrow Path

“Sir,” her shrill voice cut through his reverie. “Sir, you have to pay for that sir.” The woman behind the glass was frowning at him and gesturing to the object in his hand. He looked down and realized he was holding a bottle. He turned it over in his hand and read the label.

“Hazelnut” was written on the light brown label in black ink in those old timey kind of letters you see at the fair. He looked up from the bottle at the woman behind the glass. She was gesturing again and her frown had turned in to a glare. “Sir, are you going to pay for that? You either need to pay for that or you need to make room for the paying customers.” Confused, he put the bottle down on the top shelf of the display he was standing next to and made his way for the door.

“How did I get here?” he thought. “Where am I?” He couldn't remember what he'd been doing just before the woman began yelling at him. He tried to think it through, but the first thing he remembered was her voice and the bottle marked “Hazelnut,” and before that, there was nothing.

After leaving the shop he found himself standing on the side of a busy alley. Tall buildings loomed high overhead until they almost seemed to lean in over the narrow stretch of road, and people were coming and going in every direction. He found himself staring up at the buildings, trying to trace the angles of their walls and make sense of their shape when he was suddenly bumped in to from behind. He turned to address the person who had walked in to him, but before he could say anything he was bumped in to again from the other direction. He spun to face the second person as the first hurried past, and that was when he realized that there were people everywhere. The alley was narrow and left little enough room for walking, much less standing and staring at buildings. The press of the crowd was already moving him away from the door to the little shop he'd just left, and rather than try to fight it he settled in with the rest of them and made his way slowly down the side of the road.

While he walked he tried to remember. Anything. Where was he? How did he get there? He reached in to his pockets looking for clues and found a wallet. Without thinking he pulled it out and opened it, only to find that it was filled with small slips of blank paper. It took him a moment to realize what they were, but then it seemed obvious. They were business cards. Small, white, textured cards about half the size of a playing card, but every one of them was blank. He flipped the wallet open to where the ID should have been, but in its place there was just another of the blank business cards. Then it suddenly came to him.

“Who am I? I don't know who I am?” He started to panic then, and might have fallen to the ground in shock if it weren't for the constant press of the crowd. All around him, the bodies of men and women provided a support and structure that was gentle and subtle, yet impossible to withstand. He tried then, as he realized he was being moved along, he tried to move against the current. He turned and pushed and tried to shoulder his way through the throng, but it was no use. He found that if he stood still, he could stand his ground but only in the face of people constantly bumping him and pressing up against him. And every time he lifted one of his feet that pressure would overwhelm him and he'd find himself several feet further down the road. The little shop with the woman behind the glass and the bottle labeled “Hazelnut” was already far away.

He turned then and looked at the direction the crowd was headed in. Ahead of him he saw more of the same. A narrow alley. Buildings that rose up in to the sky on both sides until they almost seemed to touch high above. And people, pressing in on all sides, on there way to some business that was impossible to guess and yet obviously important. He let the crowd push him along, imagining for a moment that if he were to simply lift his feet he could float forever in that sea of flesh. And while he moved down the street he tried once more to understand who and where he was.

It was only then that he realized he couldn't understand the language the people around him were speaking. They seemed normal enough, and all around him he heard the babble of voices. But none of the words made any sense. It was like listening to the radio when it's only loud enough to be heard, but not loud enough to be listened to. Words that seemed to almost make sense came to him at random from everywhere in the crowd. He thought that if he could just catch the rest of that sentence, or get a few feet closer to whoever was speaking, then maybe he could understand. Yet somehow, no matter where he turned or how he strained, there was only the constant hum of conversation, without any of the context or meaning that words conveyed.

He thought back to the woman behind the glass. “I understood her. She spoke my language. And the bottle. I could read it. It clearly said Hazelnut.” But he couldn't remember what else it had said. He couldn't even remember what it was Hazelnut of. Coffee creamer? Ice cream topping? Besides that one word, and the black old timey letters on the light brown label, he couldn't remember a thing about the bottle he'd been holding.

“Maybe I should have paid for it after all.” he thought. But then he remembered his empty wallet with it's blank business cards. “What is happening to me? Is this a dream?” He pinched himself to see if he'd wake up, and felt pain blossom on his arm where his fingers twisted the flesh. In moments a bruise began to form on the skin. He tried once more to remember who he was. And then he felt the crowd change direction.

He looked up again and noticed that they were reaching the end of the alley. Where before he could have sword it continued on forever, it now suddenly ended in another of the tall buildings. This one had dark glass hung in all the windows and one of those electric signs over the door that he couldn't quite read. It seemed like every time he looked it was between words, with just the last letters of one scrolling away as the first letters of another scrolled on. He tried to stare at it, waiting for words to cross it whole and give him any impression of what was happening, but for some reason he couldn't seem to focus. His eyes kept wandering away and fixing on other aspects of the building, the stucco facade, the gargoyles over several of the windows, and the tall crenelations high above where it kissed the sky. The more he looked at it, the more it looked like the pictures of castles he'd seen as a boy, but every time he turned to look at the sign once again it was as incomprehensible as before.

He realized he remembered looking at pictures of castles. As a young boy. He tried to focus on the memory, to draw some kind of clue from it, but it was only a sensation. More of a relation to what he was experiencing than a true memory. He didn't seem to have any true memories at all from before the shop.

The crowd pressed him closer and closer to the castle in front of him, and as he reached the drawbridge that had been lowered over the wide moat that surrounded it he suddenly began to feel very afraid. As he got nearer the feeling grew, until it became a kind of terror that made his blood pound in his head and sweat break out over his body. He turned into the crowd once more and tried to press against the current of people. His progress slowed, but he continued to move towards the dark gaping maw of the open gate and the passage beneath the walls and the murder holes above. His terror turned to panic and he began to cry out as he pressed against the tide of people, trying with all his strength to push them aside, pulling at their clothes to move them from his path. But it was no use. They didn't seem to mind or notice, and every person he pulled away was followed by a thousand more. Step by step, he was pressed ever closer to the dark foreboding fortress at his back.

He turned and faced it once more. Above he could see men walking the battlements, and somewhere he heard screams. He looked at the people around him once more, but they had turned into monsters. Hideous and disfigured, their faces and bodies melted and ran before his very eyes, forming nightmarish shapes and then dissolving into a chaotic mess before reforming once more in ways that tormented him on some deep, fundamental level.

“Why?” he cried out. “What is happening to me? Why am I here?” He was almost across the bridge now, and as he looked up he realized that the people on the battlements had stopped walking. Every one of them was standing now, staring down at him. They didn't even seem to be breathing anymore, as though they were all poised, waiting for the next thing to happen. He lowered his eyes to the darkness at the end of the drawbridge and watched as it slowly drew closer. Ahead of him people were passing beyond the end of the wooden bridge beneath his feet and in to that darkness, but somehow it was impossible for him to see beyond it. His panic grew until it was all he knew. He no longer saw the horrible faces of the demons that surrounded him, or heard the babble of their voices. All he experienced now was the gripping absolute terror of what was to come. The unknowable horror that awaited him beyond that dark gate. The press of the crowd around him pushed him closer, ever closer to the darkness that swallowed every one of the people before him without ever growing full. As he inched towards it he braced himself for what was to come. The darkness was almost upon him now, and as the first black rays touched his clothes he felt a cold chill spread through his body.

And then he was through. The darkness was gone. The fear was gone. In it's place, there was a white light, blinding and everywhere. A feeling of warmth. And voices from every direction, but now he could make sense of their words. He understood the song now. The terror that had gripped him only moments ago seemed strange and foreign with his new understanding, and he knew that he could travel in any direction he wanted to go from here. There were no limitations now. Limitations belonged to the man he was before. The man who didn't know who or what he was, or why he was there, or where he was going. Those questions didn't matter anymore, that man was gone, and the limitations those questions placed on him were gone as well. He knew what to do and without hesitation, he stepped in the right direction and out of the light.

He looked down at the bottle in his hand. “Hazelnut,” it read, in blue letters on a white label. A woman was standing behind a counter looking at him. “Will you be purchasing those sir?” she asked. Confused, he shook his head and put the bottle down on the counter in front of him. “No thank you,” he said. He paused for a moment, and then turned and walked out the door.