It begins in a park. In the summer, the parks in East Berlin are all brown dry-out tufts of grass and empty beer bottles. But you must understand, they were a treat: a pinnacle of freedom. The afternoon we meet is a melting occasion of alcoholic discourse and meanderings through a meadow public.
And the cars drive by. The winds skits across the ocean’s skin tickling, whipping. Stormy is the thought. A future dawning. A page turning and with what to look back on. Cars. Driving by. The grass dances, the tree's shakesies are a quakesies. With a tinge of fucking disparity that lingers like the dim lighting. It’s the random corner-sitters. I must look like one, of course. But there it is, that’s so sadistic. Mine eye is a judging one, I suppose. And this is to be it, a limbo. A centered restlessness that stretches on and on. A roadside bakery, the cozy passé of it all. It’s warming. It always smells good. And cheap uppers. What else is there to want. An existence. A life, full and fresh, on the fringe. Acquaintences of passers-by. Close-knit kin. Forever young. A life on your feet. Eating well. Living well. Always sitting on a little money, but never that much.
Others are sitting on a lot of money. They go on trips. They take the charter bus. They have a 401K. Investments. Security. But what’s that? A mortgage. Credit payments. Car payments. They’re living well. Safe. They wear expensive watches, and lug around big SLRS. Enticing. Why it’s a delightful jaunt up the coast. Traipsing through our lives like a safari. A breath of the rich ocean air on PCH. It tastes so good, I imagine, but sometimes I don’t think the juice is worth the squeeze. Youths being youths really. One day I’ll want that sweet elixir. That’s not today though. Because then what? What do you strive for?
I’m taking my time with it here in Berlin. That’s for damned sure. After a spliff, Shahar smiles with a sneaky look and some a that little eye-drop bottle dripped right plop on my finger and I lick it off. We all start laughing and Shahar drips a little on his finger, and Max and the Colorado Kid do the same. Welp, Here we go. And where’s that we’re going, you ask? To the Toufulsberg, the devil’s own hill. Evil laughs. Muahahaha! Devil’s Hill! The depravity! The insanity! Grant holds back off the eye-drops to play chaperone, and Corinna takes us all by the hand and leads the way.
A bit to eat first, some doner off that spinning stick and I feel the tingles beginning to mingle and whisper over my skin. When we’re on the train the safety goggles are on. The sun’s still high, but it’s surely off to one side, and it’s falling fast. But by the time we notice, we’re sliding off the train in fits of acid laughter and quick English and Steve Irwin head cocks from side to side, ready for adventure, and we’re too high to care. Ambling through some little rural German neighborhood on the outskirts, between East and West Berlin, with sweet, little homes and small lawns all in a row, and past that, it’s the forest. We’re ready for it, and we charge in, down a wide pebble path. The forest’s not like the great redwoods in Santa Cruz. They’re all skinny-trunked perennials with skinny branches and brush and padded leaves below. And it seems to suck all the noise out of the world except it’s rustic rustling, because that’s all we hear and our shouts and rolling laughs and speech doesn’t echo or reverberate. It flies out in all directions and gets drowned out in the silent wild around us, and we do too. We’re humping on through, towards the only hill in Berlin, thick with trees, and looming ever nearer. “Whoa, close your eyes.”
So I do, and the darkness explodes behind the lids, and my ears tickle and I shake at all the tiny sounds around. The air’s so sweet on the skin out here, and I almost forget the vision I used to possess because everything else takes over. We’re still walking, but I don’t know towards what anymore. Towards Grant’s voice beckoning us forward, and he’s laughing because we’re all lost in our own heads swaying back and forth across the path, uncontrollably smiling. “Where are we?!” Where, indeed. Some old, magic woods in an ancient fairytale land at the heart of it all. Can’t stop rolling now, rolling, rolling down Alice’s rabbit hole with my eyes closed, not daring to open them. Until I stumble in the dip on the side of the path, that is. My eyesight returns, but it’s not like I’m any more found now than I had been. Everything’s brighter, and the forest looks different than I remember, and as the sense floods back, my skin’s crawling with a raucous yell, “I feel so alive!” The feeling drips from the pores and we spin and dance and jump high to the music in our heads. All the trees stand solemn tall in the sun and watch us by, then forget us in that blink of life’s eye.
We’re getting deep into it now. Up the hill. Right on up to the top, with no more path beneath us. Just giddy flower children floating through that summer forest in West Berlin. Shahar don’t even got any shoes on, like some wild, loose-clothed monkey with all his weight in this step and that, feeling his way through the shaded brush, and then sun-soaked glens of dried, yellow grass that crunched soft under my sandals. Then back into it all the thicker. The only sound is our footsteps and our heavy breaths and we talk about nothing and laugh at how lost we’ve become only to break the silence. A foot-trail, pressed down overgrowth through the skinny trees. Or maybe just nothing. We just pushed ever upward, and soon our trials greet us with a series of fences rising high into the canopies. Old, lightly-rusting. Menacing. It was four separate lines of fencing each separated by a length long buffer of soft forest ground. An impasse, with nowhere to go except around the perimeter now and find a hole. The whole thing began to look and feel like one of those death-maze traps in a cheesy horror flick. Four acid-tripping yockels, just bumbling through eerie woods in East Europe, looking for some fun adventure at the abandoned CIA listening post. Alertness now was at a fever pitch. Huddled close single file. Jumping at every crack of a branch. Until, ah hah! A hole! If you can call it that. A long cut in the metal fencing pulled open’s more like it. Oh, joy. What fun. And we all slide in. Between two gates now, and there’s a prickly feeling up my spine of a mouse in a some grand experiment, drugged, and trying to find its way to the big cheese.
There’s a door-sized, open frame in the next fence not far off. And then another cut hole, and another and we’re through, against the wall of a big concrete building. Around the corner’s an old, overgrown courtyard, Devil’s Hill. The summit. We look up, and there they are, the two towers topped with huge hexagonal domes. The post is gutted out, and much of it bare metal frame and exposed to the elements, and as we look up at it, there’s people sitting up on the different floors (some living there, squatters by the looks of it), looking back down at us. But it’s a look more hollow and dead-eyed, like they’ve been consumed by this great, skeleton-ed complex we’re now faced with. What else is there to do but gulp down the fear and strong-jaw it on forward. Shahar climbs right up the side, two stories to where it’s open, gripping a vertical I-beam, and Grant follows. Ha. Max and I look at each other like, “Hell no, we ain’t doin’ that,” so we walk around the building with Zack and Corinna until we find an entrance. There’s no electricity (not all too surprising). Just a long dark corridor cut straight to the middle with white, concrete-brick walls all painted over with graffiti. It’s not a tall hall and footsteps echo as opening becomes a little door of light behind us. We take the first set of stairs one flight up and there’s Shahar and Grant and the sun coming in through the framework to the west. Grant’s super excited. And sober so I’m a little more at ease. “Dude, this place is sick.” And now that I think about it, it is. And the higher up the flight of stairs we went, the sicker it got.
[stop]
Stop. Look out at the world stretched around you because, boys, we’re at the top of it now. You too, Corinna. Can’t see anybody else from up this high, just a needle and the city to the east, and off to the west, across that great forest reaching out forever, Apollo’s chariot’s run, run, running away on the horizon, balled in fire, the fiercest, flaming red through the low twilight haze. But he sits there, looking back from the edge of the earth for what seems like another day, not daring to turn his back on the sheer joy and awe of our human existence. And we look him right back, the bliss crawling through our souls, the skin tickling at the warm summer night's breeze these twelve stories up at the edge of Berlin, until he winks a green flash, and he's gone, chasing our friends on the other side of the world as they're just waking up for work or for school. I can't believe they're missing this, and I smile at the chance of my seeing it, the luck of it all in all this randomness.
Twelve stories up. Up that tight, heartless stairwell, walled in brick. Around and around and around, floor after floor, and it's dizzying and, at moments when the breathing comes hard, I forget where I'm going, where I am. I'm a little hamster on a wheel, but there's delight in the spring of each step. We fly up those steps though, and maybe it's just the acid, but it feels fantastic, and the excitement's ever mounting. But when you're up there, splayed out on the cool concrete floor with your flip-flops kicked off, your best friends with their backs to the brick stairwell spine beside you; all that climbing, all the trains and train stations, all the trials, all the mistakes, all the aches and pains of life's burdens... I don't know when exactly, but I've seemed to lost them. I ditched them in the woods, I think, when my eyes were closed. That void they've left, though, is just brimming with the joy of living now. Each breath of the air is lit with freedom in these moments, and that flame burns that much brighter, and we're goddamn Apollos ourselves, lighting our own way, perched up here without a care, and the world chuggin' away below us.
The siding's all but faded away from the years, the decades of desertion. It used to be fiberglass though. I'm almost certain, because as the wind and the air wraps around that tower, between those metal skeleton struts, and through our hair and our toes and whispering in our ears, there's tattered fabric flapping lazy from what used to be the exterior. Out by the edge. Hanging down from above. And when we tiptoe to touch it, why yes, it's fiberglass all right. Shahar cuts each of us off a piece, scarf-sized, so that we'd never forget, but something tells me we never will. We all tie our pieces around ourselves and dance to the sky darkening. Yeah, maybe wrapping our bodies in old, disintegrating fiberglass isn't the best idea. But we don't care. We're still jumping on acid. Especially me. Out by the edge, I feel it swingin' in my hips and a lickin' of my lips, and Grant's phone's wailing away at full blast so we just barely hear it. My feet keep the beat though, and my whole being sways.
That's when I look down, and holy hell! We're high up! It's something like the feeling of roller-coaster butterflies when you're toes are wiggling over a ledge, and you look down and it's twelve stories straight to the ground. Nothing to hold you back from that feather drop but your old trusty equilibrium and self-wherewithal. I grab one of the support struts in a vice grip because for a split second there I forget it all, and as my mind's eye looks out again it feels like I'm flying and my feet are floating. I'd better sit down. And when I do, I look over to the left and Grant and Corinna are sitting too, leaning back on their two arms with their legs dangling over, and Max and Shahar are standing, wrapped around their own struts farther down the diameter, pissing with a wild laugh and ecstatic cry of release. What a lovely feeling that must be (not quite my cup o' tea though), and I love them for it. I love it all.
[stop]
"To the dome?" To the dome, so we prance on back to the stairwell. But Sharhar's not done yet. Before we mount the stairs Sharhar steps off towards the edge and does some mounting of his own, pulling himself up perpendicular on one of the supports with his feet going out to one side, and his head looking straight down the twelve stories on the other. And my knees go weak at just the sight of it. He's crazy, but he holds it, and when I squat down to squash the butterflies, I see a great wonder in his eyes at the view.
And like that, he's off it and we're up one my flight of stairs. Sounds of living suddenly sound different, and my ears prick with excitement. The steps stop and I find myself standing in a dark globe of hexagons, an enormous cathedral of a place, with size, it seems, fitting for Atlas's shoulders after the shrug, and I wonder to myself as to whether Ayn Rand would take delight in our present follies. Doesn't matter, though. My second foot off the step kicks something in the fading light from a tall, window-sized hole in the side. Oww. The thing skips off across the dirty floor, and each roll of the stone echos a hundred times before fading. And I gasp, and it echos too. "Whaaat is this place?" We look at each other with devilish smiles at the madhouse magic of the place, and Max and Corinna and I high-five Shahar for dripping LSD on our fingers today. Our skins're tingling at crazy bats of sound each flying around, echoed and amplified. It's a rebirth. There's a caution at first, a child-like nervous short-stepping while this Timothy Leary dream-sphere becomes our reality.
When it finally does, it's a joyous awe and mysticism the likes of which I've encountered neither before nor since. Times in life like this are the things we think over, over and over again in the moment. It's a quick study in hindsight, the blink of an eye, and as I look back farther and farther through the years, through each and every turn of events and misstep that's found me now at the core of this Atlas globe on acid, I can't help but think that I've done good, and there's really nothing, no decision of mine, I can look back on with regret, except maybe just one. And depending on the nostalgia in my heart, I can let that singular regret slide, or else it means everything. In that blink, I can't decide between the two, not yet, but I'll take my time because as my eyes open in this new light of night, there's a mental fortitude bear-hugging my brain. A deep confidence in the things I'm doing with my life, and of what's to come. I'll be okay, I know, because in the end, it seems that everything works out all right, and happiness is that blanket I drag by the hand wherever I go, that I throw over my shoulders when it feels light.
[stop]
The center's raised like a stage over the stairwell, and we jump up and dance and click our heels on the hard wood. And tap our toes, and the acoustics feel like a cave, and the sound goes bounding off the hexagonal walls and galloping around the room. Too fast to follow, and I lose myself in the mechanics for a while, stamping my feet like a mad R.P. McMurphy and throwing rocks and small pieces of two-by-fours. Grant and Max are doing some of the same. Zach and Corinna lie back on the stage with their eyes closed, and Shahar's running around the diameter banging on the domed walls. The only light now is that glow of the night and the stars and the sky coming through the little window hole, and after a time, we tire and all lay down next to Corinna, my own breath echoing in my ear. And then we start "ohm"-ing. "Ohmmmmmmm," and it goes on and on Scottish bagpipes style. Eyes closed. The hypnotizing meditation takes over, and my mind leaps up and my soul flies circles around this snow-globe of deep, guttural, hums from behind closed lips and shakes up the flakes. We all happen to stop on our and start up again while the others carry, and the minutes melt away, and it's all-encompassing. When our lungs finally tire of the strain, we all give up at once, but the chant lingers in the air over our heads, ghostly for a long spell before it escapes, Who knows how long we've been lying there. I sit up in a daze.
We're still high, and we talk dreamily to one another in the silence after the ohm. Our voices still echo, but we're used to it now, normal almost. It's that acid-splashed small talk about how beautiful everything is and life's sweet nothings. There's half a thought to the walk home, the dark forest. The predicament of our flashlight-less-ness. We don't worry on it for too long. "It's cool, we got my camera-phone flash," says Grant. Well, there you go. In the clear, in that case. And as we get up to go, there's footsteps echoing from the stairwell, and this boy our age with a guitar comes strolling up, his friend behind him. He sits on the stage with his legs bent at the knee, hanging off the end of it, and his friend lights three candles. Whoa. Should we stay? What do you think. It's a no brain-er. We lean back in the curve of the dome wall next to this midnight troubadour's friend, and as he begins to play, the place comes alive and it's that beautiful everything. Speechless. This candlelit guitar boy plays song after song to perfection with what sounds like an entire symphony orchestra behind him. But he's all alone up there, and more and more I get the feeling he's some sort of mystic, some ageless forest apparition come to cry in the tower, because as he plays, the music's lifting me up from the chest and my feet feel light. And the orchestra's ringing between my ears.
When we finally start down the stairs, the boy's still playing as the candles melt low, and his friend's looking on in a trance. We just nod good-bye. The stairwell's pitch black. Grant pulls out his phone and we begin flashing our way the twelve stories to the ground. It takes an eternity. And between the flashes there's nothing. We're trapped, the six of us, in this stepped corridor spiraling down in a slow, slow strobe. Scared shit-less. Just one flight, a landing, and a left turn after another. Holding each other close, hand in hand, with a sweat grip. At one of these countless landings, as the flash goes off, we see a tunnel smashed into the wall of it. Corinna and Max and Grant kneel down whilst Sharhar and Zach and I stand by the tunnel's entrance, it's about waist high. Grant shoots off a handful of flashes as we all peer in, and in the corner of my eye there appears to be a figure rising up the next flight of stairs. I think nothing of it until the next second when Grant and Max and Corinna are back on their feet. With Grant's first flash, the figure rising's now towering before us, almost on us, in his dark green, hooded robe and a black mask pulled over the lower half of his face. "Ahh!" "Shit!" "Holy fuck!" We all jump back into the wall, grabbing for each other. And in that second, my heart skipped a beat, I'm certain of it. Grant hits the flash again in the terror of it all, and he's standing on the landing with us. But I peak at his face, and he's just as frightened as we are, and under the guise of Grant's phone light we inspect him, intrigued. Then we all have a good laugh about it, and he high-fives us all as he passes. "Woo." That was gripping. Corinna's still shaking.
By the time we get to the bottom, it's all hysterical, if not still a little creepy, and we keep laughing about it just to hear ourselves in the night. And, wouldn't you know, we find a road that cobblestones right up to the towers and heads all the way down the mountain. There's a long switchback, and at the bottom, the road t-bones left and right. "Hmm, which way you think?" The question's almost immediately answered for us by a throaty baritone croak coming from the left and choking on evil. Ah, to the right then. The road continues downward, and now it's walled in on both sides by shuttered storefronts and dried out, cloudy streetlights cover everything in orange amber and long shadows. We can see the bottom of the hill. There, the road's whole width is blocked by a metal gate, and when we get to it, there's no way through except a skinny pedestrian's exit to squeeze through one by one, so we start squeezing. That's when we hear the croak again. That evil. And there's a shovel scrapping on cobblestone coming towards us down the hill. "What the fuck!"
"Get me out of here!" Max is last in line, and the specter with the shovel drawing nearer, still past the streetlights, though, so we can't see him. Max pushes us all through. "Let's go!" And we shoot out into the black forest towards the metro station with the sky rich with stars to guide us, and as our eyes adjust, the forest isn't so dark after all, not like the dome or the stairwell anyways, and it almost seems like twilight. We all sneak a glance back, and at the edge of the orange light up before the shopfronts, the devil's looking down on us from his wretched alcove of the world, with a long shadow and one last croak that splits the night and sets us on our merry way. Sayonara, Devil's Hill. God, I hope the trains are still running.
Twelve stories up. Up that tight, heartless stairwell, walled in brick. Around and around and around, floor after floor, and it's dizzying and, at moments when the breathing comes hard, I forget where I'm going, where I am. I'm a little hamster on a wheel, but there's delight in the spring of each step. We fly up those steps though, and maybe it's just the acid, but it feels fantastic, and the excitement's ever mounting. But when you're up there, splayed out on the cool concrete floor with your flip-flops kicked off, your best friends with their backs to the brick stairwell spine beside you; all that climbing, all the trains and train stations, all the trials, all the mistakes, all the aches and pains of life's burdens... I don't know when exactly, but I've seemed to lost them. I ditched them in the woods, I think, when my eyes were closed. That void they've left, though, is just brimming with the joy of living now. Each breath of the air is lit with freedom in these moments, and that flame burns that much brighter, and we're goddamn Apollos ourselves, lighting our own way, perched up here without a care, and the world chuggin' away below us.
The siding's all but faded away from the years, the decades of desertion. It used to be fiberglass though. I'm almost certain, because as the wind and the air wraps around that tower, between those metal skeleton struts, and through our hair and our toes and whispering in our ears, there's tattered fabric flapping lazy from what used to be the exterior. Out by the edge. Hanging down from above. And when we tiptoe to touch it, why yes, it's fiberglass all right. Shahar cuts each of us off a piece, scarf-sized, so that we'd never forget, but something tells me we never will. We all tie our pieces around ourselves and dance to the sky darkening. Yeah, maybe wrapping our bodies in old, disintegrating fiberglass isn't the best idea. But we don't care. We're still jumping on acid. Especially me. Out by the edge, I feel it swingin' in my hips and a lickin' of my lips, and Grant's phone's wailing away at full blast so we just barely hear it. My feet keep the beat though, and my whole being sways.
That's when I look down, and holy hell! We're high up! It's something like the feeling of roller-coaster butterflies when you're toes are wiggling over a ledge, and you look down and it's twelve stories straight to the ground. Nothing to hold you back from that feather drop but your old trusty equilibrium and self-wherewithal. I grab one of the support struts in a vice grip because for a split second there I forget it all, and as my mind's eye looks out again it feels like I'm flying and my feet are floating. I'd better sit down. And when I do, I look over to the left and Grant and Corinna are sitting too, leaning back on their two arms with their legs dangling over, and Max and Shahar are standing, wrapped around their own struts farther down the diameter, pissing with a wild laugh and ecstatic cry of release. What a lovely feeling that must be (not quite my cup o' tea though), and I love them for it. I love it all.
[stop]
"To the dome?" To the dome, so we prance on back to the stairwell. But Sharhar's not done yet. Before we mount the stairs Sharhar steps off towards the edge and does some mounting of his own, pulling himself up perpendicular on one of the supports with his feet going out to one side, and his head looking straight down the twelve stories on the other. And my knees go weak at just the sight of it. He's crazy, but he holds it, and when I squat down to squash the butterflies, I see a great wonder in his eyes at the view.
And like that, he's off it and we're up one my flight of stairs. Sounds of living suddenly sound different, and my ears prick with excitement. The steps stop and I find myself standing in a dark globe of hexagons, an enormous cathedral of a place, with size, it seems, fitting for Atlas's shoulders after the shrug, and I wonder to myself as to whether Ayn Rand would take delight in our present follies. Doesn't matter, though. My second foot off the step kicks something in the fading light from a tall, window-sized hole in the side. Oww. The thing skips off across the dirty floor, and each roll of the stone echos a hundred times before fading. And I gasp, and it echos too. "Whaaat is this place?" We look at each other with devilish smiles at the madhouse magic of the place, and Max and Corinna and I high-five Shahar for dripping LSD on our fingers today. Our skins're tingling at crazy bats of sound each flying around, echoed and amplified. It's a rebirth. There's a caution at first, a child-like nervous short-stepping while this Timothy Leary dream-sphere becomes our reality.
When it finally does, it's a joyous awe and mysticism the likes of which I've encountered neither before nor since. Times in life like this are the things we think over, over and over again in the moment. It's a quick study in hindsight, the blink of an eye, and as I look back farther and farther through the years, through each and every turn of events and misstep that's found me now at the core of this Atlas globe on acid, I can't help but think that I've done good, and there's really nothing, no decision of mine, I can look back on with regret, except maybe just one. And depending on the nostalgia in my heart, I can let that singular regret slide, or else it means everything. In that blink, I can't decide between the two, not yet, but I'll take my time because as my eyes open in this new light of night, there's a mental fortitude bear-hugging my brain. A deep confidence in the things I'm doing with my life, and of what's to come. I'll be okay, I know, because in the end, it seems that everything works out all right, and happiness is that blanket I drag by the hand wherever I go, that I throw over my shoulders when it feels light.
[stop]
The center's raised like a stage over the stairwell, and we jump up and dance and click our heels on the hard wood. And tap our toes, and the acoustics feel like a cave, and the sound goes bounding off the hexagonal walls and galloping around the room. Too fast to follow, and I lose myself in the mechanics for a while, stamping my feet like a mad R.P. McMurphy and throwing rocks and small pieces of two-by-fours. Grant and Max are doing some of the same. Zach and Corinna lie back on the stage with their eyes closed, and Shahar's running around the diameter banging on the domed walls. The only light now is that glow of the night and the stars and the sky coming through the little window hole, and after a time, we tire and all lay down next to Corinna, my own breath echoing in my ear. And then we start "ohm"-ing. "Ohmmmmmmm," and it goes on and on Scottish bagpipes style. Eyes closed. The hypnotizing meditation takes over, and my mind leaps up and my soul flies circles around this snow-globe of deep, guttural, hums from behind closed lips and shakes up the flakes. We all happen to stop on our and start up again while the others carry, and the minutes melt away, and it's all-encompassing. When our lungs finally tire of the strain, we all give up at once, but the chant lingers in the air over our heads, ghostly for a long spell before it escapes, Who knows how long we've been lying there. I sit up in a daze.
We're still high, and we talk dreamily to one another in the silence after the ohm. Our voices still echo, but we're used to it now, normal almost. It's that acid-splashed small talk about how beautiful everything is and life's sweet nothings. There's half a thought to the walk home, the dark forest. The predicament of our flashlight-less-ness. We don't worry on it for too long. "It's cool, we got my camera-phone flash," says Grant. Well, there you go. In the clear, in that case. And as we get up to go, there's footsteps echoing from the stairwell, and this boy our age with a guitar comes strolling up, his friend behind him. He sits on the stage with his legs bent at the knee, hanging off the end of it, and his friend lights three candles. Whoa. Should we stay? What do you think. It's a no brain-er. We lean back in the curve of the dome wall next to this midnight troubadour's friend, and as he begins to play, the place comes alive and it's that beautiful everything. Speechless. This candlelit guitar boy plays song after song to perfection with what sounds like an entire symphony orchestra behind him. But he's all alone up there, and more and more I get the feeling he's some sort of mystic, some ageless forest apparition come to cry in the tower, because as he plays, the music's lifting me up from the chest and my feet feel light. And the orchestra's ringing between my ears.
When we finally start down the stairs, the boy's still playing as the candles melt low, and his friend's looking on in a trance. We just nod good-bye. The stairwell's pitch black. Grant pulls out his phone and we begin flashing our way the twelve stories to the ground. It takes an eternity. And between the flashes there's nothing. We're trapped, the six of us, in this stepped corridor spiraling down in a slow, slow strobe. Scared shit-less. Just one flight, a landing, and a left turn after another. Holding each other close, hand in hand, with a sweat grip. At one of these countless landings, as the flash goes off, we see a tunnel smashed into the wall of it. Corinna and Max and Grant kneel down whilst Sharhar and Zach and I stand by the tunnel's entrance, it's about waist high. Grant shoots off a handful of flashes as we all peer in, and in the corner of my eye there appears to be a figure rising up the next flight of stairs. I think nothing of it until the next second when Grant and Max and Corinna are back on their feet. With Grant's first flash, the figure rising's now towering before us, almost on us, in his dark green, hooded robe and a black mask pulled over the lower half of his face. "Ahh!" "Shit!" "Holy fuck!" We all jump back into the wall, grabbing for each other. And in that second, my heart skipped a beat, I'm certain of it. Grant hits the flash again in the terror of it all, and he's standing on the landing with us. But I peak at his face, and he's just as frightened as we are, and under the guise of Grant's phone light we inspect him, intrigued. Then we all have a good laugh about it, and he high-fives us all as he passes. "Woo." That was gripping. Corinna's still shaking.
By the time we get to the bottom, it's all hysterical, if not still a little creepy, and we keep laughing about it just to hear ourselves in the night. And, wouldn't you know, we find a road that cobblestones right up to the towers and heads all the way down the mountain. There's a long switchback, and at the bottom, the road t-bones left and right. "Hmm, which way you think?" The question's almost immediately answered for us by a throaty baritone croak coming from the left and choking on evil. Ah, to the right then. The road continues downward, and now it's walled in on both sides by shuttered storefronts and dried out, cloudy streetlights cover everything in orange amber and long shadows. We can see the bottom of the hill. There, the road's whole width is blocked by a metal gate, and when we get to it, there's no way through except a skinny pedestrian's exit to squeeze through one by one, so we start squeezing. That's when we hear the croak again. That evil. And there's a shovel scrapping on cobblestone coming towards us down the hill. "What the fuck!"
"Get me out of here!" Max is last in line, and the specter with the shovel drawing nearer, still past the streetlights, though, so we can't see him. Max pushes us all through. "Let's go!" And we shoot out into the black forest towards the metro station with the sky rich with stars to guide us, and as our eyes adjust, the forest isn't so dark after all, not like the dome or the stairwell anyways, and it almost seems like twilight. We all sneak a glance back, and at the edge of the orange light up before the shopfronts, the devil's looking down on us from his wretched alcove of the world, with a long shadow and one last croak that splits the night and sets us on our merry way. Sayonara, Devil's Hill. God, I hope the trains are still running.
