Standing at the edge of darkness, filled with disquiet, restless and cold, how dull and insignificantly small the moon had looked in his eyes that night. His heart ached terribly. No friends, no intimacy—nothing. All of his past came back to mind. All the shame. Had anything good ever happened to him in his entire life? When was the last time he had genuinely smiled? The repressive silence only grew louder, and louder, and louder, until he could bear it no longer. He had to look away.

  The moon of this world was a stark sight in the starless night sky. Dotted with blemishes, the monolith had an ancient solemn weight to it, that made him feel… religious? He didn’t know why. It was strange that he would grasp at such a word.

  Misshapen clouds, not misty, but distinct in their borders did their best to obscure her sight; but her visage, not one to be overshadowed, nevertheless bled through, albeit diffused. God-rays pierced through the clouds which must’ve been miles thick, and it were as if a myriad of silvery glinting eyes were staring at you from countless cliffs of fog.

  Then there were the airships; the same ones he had fleetingly seen in the afternoon. Now, silhouetted by the moon, the mast of these flying frigates had nowhere to hide. Even in the clouds, their looming shadows betrayed that they were there. Their floodlights, harsh and heavy, trained at the lower-city, swerved down in set patterns—miles-spanning arcs and slow gyrations—giving the cityscape an uneasy tension, an atmosphere, of a dystopian police-state, or a nation at a cold war, where the state had to keep a close eye on its citizens for spies, traitors, informants, border-crossers.

  Vertigo came over him to take it all in, and he had to take a step back. He felt himself sway, as though he could fall into the night sky itself. Hands clasped onto the guardrails, he craned his neck out: this time, his eyes trained at the city itself.

  A few hundred meters below, maybe more, burgeoned a city thereon which bore no semblance to the one he had so far forayed. Roof-shingles gleamed in the moonlit night sky; havens of light twinkled like stars in a sea of abyss; only campaniles and belfries of cathedral rose above the jagged-rim; fly-overs, viaducts, industrial pipelines grew out like veins of a dark and lifeless wen; and farther north, was everything industrial. No signs of smog, no pillars of smoke, but by its dark and foreboding outline it looked irrefutably industrial: stripped bare of any embellishments, gutted out of walls or even floors—a failed district of half-built ruins and unfulfilled dreams, casinos and foundries—down there, awaited another city entirely.

  And silence, all, was all he could hear, other than the distant drone of airships and the wind wrapped round his clothes. Westwards, the sheer cliff of battlement walls run on till it met the horizon, where it gently levelled off with the city below.

  Satou mutely followed the guardrails until soon it led him to one of the many bulwark that jutted out over the lower-city.

  There, parked by the side of the road, he came across a car.

  “Is this a cab?” Satou asked, knowing the answer beforehand.

  “Yes, ma’am. But I’m off-duty.”

  “Oh. Is there a hotel, around here, not too costly?”

  The cabdriver gave him directions, but he must’ve misheard. Coming to a dead-end, he had to backtrack, but, wasn’t there a turn here, before? He realized he was thoroughly lost. Standing in an alley or a smaller street, shaded by a buildings and with the blackout ongoing, he could see nothing but the moonlit street far below him. There was a flight of stairs here, he realized; though he could only barely make it out. He headed down the stairs, when something strange happened.

  He heard the cracking of broken glass—followed by a momentary and complete loss of sight.

  I’m tired, he concluded. He pinched his forearm, and felt… pain. No he wasn’t hallucinating. Just tired…

  He continued to go down the dark and narrow hallway, until he soon came across an elevator.

  “A lift, here?”

  Warm and humid air blew up to his face as he stood there, outside it, peering in.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  The lift had no buttons, but instead operated using a lever. He wasn’t sure how to use it, at first, but it was straight-forward enough. He turned the lever towards the label ‘up’, and something hard and heavy fell into place, far beneath him. Heavy cogs grinded against each other behind walls, and then the lift began to lumber upwards, only to start falling, with a jolt.

  A light pang of fear did begin to build up in his chest, but nothing he couldn’t repress. He tried not to panic, and keep calm. The lift was not falling. He was fine. But it as going down. Quickly, he reached for the lever and tried to turn it the other way—up—but it did not budge, no matter how hard he pulled, pushed, on leaned against it. Maybe he could not turn it until the lift came to a stop, which it did not until the meter above the doorway reached G5.

  At G5, somewhere deep underground, a collapsible gate barred his way out.

  Nothing stirred outside. The air stood still. Dust hung in the amber light from the lift; and beyond, was pitch-black.

  He tried to turn the lever now. It moved, but nothing happened. Did it break?

  “Halloa!” Satou tried to call for help. “Halloa!” But—nothing. Now he was afraid.

  There was a telephone handset, right next to him, with rotary dials and it seemed his only hope. He reached for it and dialed in all the numbers he could think of: 110, 100, 911, 988, but, again—nothing. Only static.

  “What the hell…”

  He was stuck here. And for how long?! Till morning, when somebody came and rescued him?

  Again, he tried to turn the lever to other way—up—to no avail. Yes, it was broken. He tried to pry the gate with his bare hands, knowing full well how vain it was, when, to his surprise, found that he might just be able to push it wide enough to shimmy through. He tried it, first, by shoving his shoulder under the heavy iron-link chains, and, found… He did it!

  Painfully, he managed to get out!

  He reached his hand back in to get his satchel; then, rubbing his shoulders, looked both ways—passageways with walls reminiscent of a bunker, that seemed to go on and on and on, branching out here and there, and he decided to go right.

  He couldn’t see anything—even his hands when he brought it up to his face—but he must’ve surfaced at some point, because the night sky emerged above him, partly obscured by the eaves of a dark and looming building. The wall he had stood on earlier towered above, behind, bathed white in moonlight. Only now did it truly sink in just how far he had strayed. He had vaguely known that the lift had brought him downwards. But this…

  The district, or city, or wherever he was in, was not the fashionable streets he had wandered lost in throughout the day. An urbane air pervaded the gloomy wen; and even the air he breathed in somehow stifled his lungs. Lower Ednin—as he decided to call it—was not dirty, squalid; clothesline did not hang overhead; sewage did not openly flow; nor was there a smell, or flies, or discarded papers littering the streets like tumbleweeds; but a wear-and-use was there, present in the air, which unmistakably separated it from the city above, besides the lack of monumentalism and grandeur, as being ‘lived in’.

  The streets moreover winded, swerved, curved, and never led him to a dead end—which would’ve been ideal, since that way he could backtrack, instead of laying his hopes ahead; but they never did. The streets went on and on, and only led him nowhere but deeper in. The widest alleyways were often indistinguishable from the narrowest street, while most byways served as porches for homes and entranceways into dark tenements. Vehicles, though rare, were there.

  As for the buildings: he wasn’t sure what to make of them. Was this what people called Art Deco? They had a flair to them, despite looking awfully mundane; and it was impossible to point out why they made you feel so. Six to seven storeys tall, emergency staircases scaffolded down their side, coated in black, almost all somewhere or the other oxidized by rain and neglect to a copper red. On the rooftops, propped on iron-stilts, or hanging by the side of the buildings, lit garish signs and billboards promised services, products, and prospects that sounded too good to be true.

  “Marybell,” Satou read, on one of the billboards. Selling the dream, he thought.

  Even a fantasy world, it seemed, was not entirely immune from the allure of kitsch and glamor.

  Gasjet streetlamps shone him the way forth, but struggled to reach far. Their mellow reddish glow gave the already maze-like borough an eerie gothic ambience, under whose influence the infrequent manholes and cracked cobblestone street haphazardly patched with broken blocks took on a new appearance: that of mystery. Some of the lights flickered, dying. Others outright did not work. And in such places, only the moon, if she could reach you, shone you the way forth. That, and the lights that came down from homes: lights by which children were being bathed, late meals cooked, books read.

  To the shadowy figures who still prowled the night out so late, Satou asked them, “Is there a hotel nearby?” he himself half-hidden in the dark so no one would see his face. Mutely, these strangers would point him onward, towards his journey’s end. “At the Old Crossroads,” they told him, that it wasn’t hard to find; but miss he almost did.

  Dead in the middle of a three-way juncture shaped like a ‘Y’, there it stood: an unassuming weathered brick-faced corner-building six storeys tall; its double doors were held half-open by a foldable-ladder; and the signage bearing its name ‘Edson Hotel’, lay slanted on its side, left there by the entrance for the paint to dry. This was where he would stay for the night.