The Narrow Gap by Joel Oliver-Cormier

From out of the silence of the vacant street came the sound of echoes. Not echoes of any discernible happening, only pure waves of shimmering resonance without apparent cause, rippling through the icy air between the rows of darkened shops that flanked the street on both sides. I could tell no more than that they came from somewhere up ahead, somewhere unseen and untouched by the dingy yellow light of the streetlamps. Enchanted by the mystery, I tried to follow them. Only later would I ask myself why I was there that night, at so late an hour and on a street so far out of my usual way.

I found the echoes' source almost by accident.

As I moved furtively along the sidewalk, the sounds only became more confused, more dislocated, coming first from one side then from the other, becoming no clearer, remaining stubbornly untethered from the material world. I began to lose my own sense of where I was. Had I not happened to turn my head at exactly the right moment I would have walked right by the slight gap nestled between two shops, no more than a foot wide. An utterly useless and inexplicable space. Yet I knew this was the source by the way a flickery violet-gold glow seeped ever so slightly from within. An unreal colour, whose frigid warmth seemed the perfect complement to the disembodied echoes. The prickle of curiosity was almost erotic. I pressed close to the brick wall, and with one eye I peered into the crevice.

Instantly the blur of echoes came into focus and identified themselves: the crunch of bones and the sickly thump of boots on soft flesh. So visceral, I instantly felt and understood them in my body, as a strangely pleasurable twist of the gut, even as my mind still wrestled against the evidence of my eye. For what I saw there, within the gap, was a vast, impossible chamber whose dimensions seemed to stretch out far beyond the reach of the filmy light. There were figures there, dark forms of men crowded together around a writhing, apparently living, heap that twitched and quivered as they pummelled it without mercy. “Men,” at least, is the best word I have found for them, though I fear it rather misses the mark. For all the din of their assault, their voices were not among it. Even the victim did not let out so much as a whimper. There was another man, too, standing a little ways back from the others, holding out before him a knife with a long, luminous blade. The source of the light.

What a thing to behold!

I watched, transfixed, as the beating continued unabated, the heap twitching all the while as it continued still to live, though it made no visible effort to resist. How, I wondered, had the victim had any bones left to break, nor any blood to let? When at last the knife-man stepped forward, the light shifted with him, and in a blink the other men withdrew fully into the shadows, leaving him alone with the victim. With an arcane flourish, he then raised the weapon high above his head, making ready to plunge it down, and I could not but let out an ecstatic gasp.

His knife still suspended, he turned his face suddenly towards me, and for a brief moment I caught a glimpse of his eyes, shining cat-like with the same eerie light. I had been spotted! Quickly, I pulled away, pressed my back tight up against the brick wall, as though I might melt into it.

Locked in frozen stillness, I waited for the inevitable knife at my throat. I held my breath as long as I was able, and then for longer still. How strange it now seems that my terror should feel so like desire.

Yet the inevitable did not come for me. Had I somehow scared them off, these men who were surely far more dangerous than I? In the silence I could almost hear the patter of the snow that had just started to fall. After a long while, I hazarded another cautious glance inside, finding nothing there but thick, impenetrable darkness. At last, I breathed. As though released from a trance, I felt returned from my tingling body back to my senses, finding myself alone in an ordinary street, surrounded by ordinary shops that in a few short hours would be bustling.

I did not dare call out to the victim, and he did not call out to me. Whether he was alive or dead, whether I had been an accidental hero, I did not care to find out. Let the police come and sort it out in the morning. I desired nothing but to continue homeward, to leave this unsettling episode behind me, to believe I was witness to nothing that night but a strange dream.

But just as I was about to move on, there came a shuffling from within the narrow space, and a moment later a man, huge and nude, came sidling out of the tiny gap, his body covered all over with deep bruises. Blood, black in the filthy, piss-coloured light of the streetlamps, ran down from his nose and mouth and ears. The victim: a man after all. Before I could say, or even feel, anything, he had me by the arm with a grip like an iron vise. I could only gape at him as he looked me over, an expression on his face I could not parse.

He then locked his eyes hard onto mine, his massive pupils shining, and said, “You have borne witness to a very secret and very sacred rite. Your intervention has thus set things on a very regrettable course, indeed. I promise you, when it comes to fruition, you will be among the first to reap the harvest.”

Without another word, he let go my arm and ran across the street, where he disappeared like his brethren into the shadows, leaving me shivering and bewildered in the silence and the falling snow.

This was many years ago. The following morning, I returned to the now-busy street, and after some searching found the gap between the walls. It was nothing more than a blind, empty space too narrow and useless even to be called an alley, populated only by rats and bits of trash. It was easy then, and for a long time afterward, to dismiss the night’s events as an unusually vivid nightmare, to live my life in the colourless daylight. For a time I forgot it altogether. Yet as the years wear on I sense more and more the signs of what is coming. And with them I feel the tingle of yearning in my chest. They come at times as echoes of distant violence, their source obscured. At others they appear at the very edge of my vision, as a filmy violet-gold light that portends a dark and fruitful harvest.