With half an eye over the seat-back, I stared in utter befuddlement…
More stone blocks filled the archway, rendering passage impossible! What on earth? I thought. Yet the negating blocks were not of normal stone, as were those of the arch and the courtyard’s walls…
They were of the same cryptic material that comprised the stalactitical crystals of Miss Aheb’s chandelier, and her and Selina’s pendants!
The trolley jerked; metal abraded as the vehicle’s wheels squealed over the ancient rails, and it was then…
Impossible!
Trolley No. 1852 rumbled forward toward the solid wall within the arch and—
Ineptly, I covered my head with my arms, awaiting what… I could never estimate.
The trolley, without so much as a hitch, passed through the wall of outerworldly blocks.
There came a noisome sucking sound, then one of soft grinding; I myself felt as though I were being pulled through a range of sand, yet no physical substance was observed; barely visible mist, however, was observed, akin to the seeming mist I’d thought I noticed in the madam’s chamber. I received the notion that the mist (warm and somehow oily) existed in some direct or indirect relativity to that inexplicable counter-luminescence, for that same trait now—that light which was not light—held dominion over the queer space in which the trolley now ranged.
And a queer space it was, indeed.
I sensed barrenness even before I opened my eyes, and felt inordinate pressure as well as a peculiar absence of air temperature; it was neither hot nor cold, just simply nothing. I thought of vacuities and voids, of inhuman realms and lost worlds. It was then that I actually looked out of the trolley-car’s vestibule…
Should this manuscript ever be found, I suspect that by this point, the reader will have no choice but to dismiss me as one fit for some refuge for the deranged. Translating what I then witnessed into communicable lexicon would overbound the skill of even the most preeminent writer. Sufficient words, you see, simply do not exist. I will endeavor, though, toward a feeble attempt…
I saw a sky hazy with the anti-light, whose source could not be perceived as there was no object of provenance, such as a sun or a moon. Yet beyond the spectral shimmer, the nature of this phenomenon I can only think of as a sky existed in layers, or stratum, the darkest being the most elevated, the lightest being in the closest proximal relation to the land, if indeed it could be called as such. Yet each strata bore colours defying category; instead, they seemed gradient shades of tone, bereft of what we’re taught to be primary and/or secondary colouring which, when amalgamated, result in the visual character of what our eyes perceive. Forgive my convolutedness, and I apologize for any ensuant frustration. Alas, this is the only description my anaemic grey-matter can generate.
Even more spectral, though, than this “sky” was the terrain itself over which the clattering trolley now traversed. The physical realm I now beheld (what I mean is the solid ground) existed not as earth nor desert, not as hillock nor woodland. It was merely flat, barren space, flat to exactitude and extending as far as the eye could register retinal images. I knew then that I must be on another planet, or (recalling the forbidden mythologies of the ancient Ahebites) within some other dimensional plane that existed in contestation with the three aspects of dimensionality we are comfortable with; for the Ahebites, led by the dread witch-priestess Isimah el-Aheb, were worshipers and human physical agents for the drab, featureless beings known as the Pyramidiles who did indeed inhabit a realm that was not planetary and thereby could only be para-dimensional.
This, I knew, was but grim fable; or at least I’d always thought it to be…
How, though, could I deny it now?
More surveillance was necessary for me to make a proper assessment of this phantasmata I was now sitting in the middle of. I required a forward view, which would no doubt expose me to the greatest risk yet. Nevertheless, I took my chance, realising no other subsidiary manoeuvre.
I stood upright at the back of the trolley.
What faced me were the backs of my sister and the aberrant motorman; nothing could be more imperative, I knew, than to prevent them from seeing me. Yet I was the one who needed to see. And see I did…
To my unabating horror.
Past the shoulders of Selina and the thogg there stretched a vista so strange, so unutterably alien, that the very glimpsing of it fleeced the breath from my lungs and instigated a slugging of my heart. It was a horizon of sorts, extending to sheer endlessness, a screaming, demented infinity that transcended all manner of measure. Sounds like wicked wind blended with some human aspect seemed to shriek from all directions; and dust (though dust that glittered) flitted through the ultra-terrestrial haze, filtering a purview of impossibility. The only apparent “natural” objects in view were the two track-rails extending in perfect linearity for incalculable miles ahead. Who could possibly have lain them? I wondered in fascinated terror. And just how long do they extend?
These and myriad more questions overflowed in my struggling and shock-wearied mind. This land and sky of undefected planes, I knew, could not exist via any known laws of nature or relativity, nor could the trolley’s very passage—a vehicle with no perceptible mode of power. But my unblinking eyes bloomed then, when the flat, vacuous void ahead at last relinquished some of its unfathomable homogeneousness, the blistering panorama’s monotony finally breaking to reveal the tiniest eruptions of some facet of feature.
Pyramids! I realised through a headache-inducing squint.
Yes, miles or hundreds of miles distant, their ranks rose as the trolley approached: a morass of pyramid-shaped objects whose angles all existed in perfect uniformity. Some spired higher than others, but beyond that, they were all of the same, and I knew now what they could only be…
The Pyramidiles.
That hideous race of faceless, immobile anti-beings so decadently and blood-thirstily revered by the Ahebites of pre-dynastic Egypt.
It’s true! It’s all true! my palpitating thoughts screamed.
The myth of the Pyramidiles was no myth; so then neither could be their principal servitor on earth, the witch-priestess Isimah el-Aheb, now known as Madam Aheb of the 1852 Club…
And it was into the midst of these appalling parasites of undying turmoil that the trolley ventured. God only knew what would happen once we arrived.
Whether it was hours which lapsed, or days, the prospect was beyond my mental potency to estimate. Neither Selina nor the noxious motorman moved from their forward posts, but eventually, the range of minuscule pyramidic eruptions grew larger as more distance was gained; then, hours or days later… they loomed, and in their looming I stood utterly paralyzed. The smallest of them stood hundreds of feet high, yet the tallest easily spired thousands of feet into the obscure, unilinear stratum above; each Pyramid was indeed a colossus; and being cognizant that each of these things were alive made the observation all the more horrific. That incessant living wind-like screaming rose in pitch as the trolley clattered directly into the thick of the things. I could see them and their mammoth flesh-walls; could see the most horrific trait of alclass="underline" whatever it was that covered their living pyramidal bodies (presumably some foreign laminae that served as skin) was of a wet, sickly white, like that of a bullfrog’s belly, tessellated with an even more sickly green.