The shopping centre was built in the 1970s. The bridge over the river around 500 years before that. The city is older still. The first of these sits adjacent to the second, built into the elevated riverside. Across the bridge, a street full of shops climbs steadily to a grand square, more shops and more bridges. I already know it well.
I'm around five years old and we're there shopping. It's the weekend, that much is not unusual. We're leaving the shopping centre, and as we head through the glass doors there's a sort of exterior courtyard before we pass under a stone lintel and onto the start of the wide, pedestrianised bridge. But off to the side there's a modern set of steps leading down to the riverside. For reasons I can't remember, I explore down these.
Each flight of steps is right-angled to give the staircase a small architectural footprint. There aren't many of them, around five or six, but it quickly becomes impossible to see the top. At the bottom of the final flight I'm in a concreted area. No one is here. The river runs to my right, the general hubbub of foot-traffic filters down from the bridge above and behind me. There are doors across to my left, offices or somesuch, closed and in darkness as it's the weekend. But behind me is what appears to be an extra part of the staircase, not a natural continuation but acting as an addition, perhaps from an earlier time.
Turning round to look, the stairs I'd just descended now on my left, there's a tiled pathway to a squared-off arch leading to what should, by all rights, be the underneath of the shopping centre. Maybe loading docks or staff car parking or just fire escapes. I don't have too much comprehension of all of these, I'm around five after all, but I know I shouldn't be seeing what I am seeing.
Through the arch, directly ahead of me, is the street on the other side of the bridge. I haven't crossed the bridge. The bridge is over there above me, but the other side of the bridge is also ahead. It's busy, people are shopping, because this is now. My parents are there, walking up the hill. I'm not there, I am here. My father turns around and looks at me, cheerfully extending a hand for me to take.
"Come on, don't dawdle!"
Instinctively I run to catch up, taking his hand as we trek up the hill. Then I remember that I shouldn't be on the hill, I should be at the bottom of the steps by the riverside. I look back for the arch, to see if the tiles, the doors, the river are through there. But they aren't because the arch isn't there either. My father asks what I'm looking at. I don't have the words to adequately explain.
Nothing exciting or cataclysmic happens now. I haven't passed into some alternate timeline where black is white, up is down or we finally got that third series of The Tripods. But I passed through something. I know I'm not in the place I came from. It's not a sense of unreality, just... otherness. I walked through some kind of one-way valve that day, and I haven't been able to find my way back.
In time I explained all this to my parents, naturally they didn't have a clue what I was talking about. I told it to friends who nodded or chuckled politely, but I couldn't quite convey my feeling of being lost in a familiar place, of silently deafening isolation.
I even went back there, although not until I was around twenty. The steps were the same, as was the concrete, the river, the glass doors, even the tiles. So I must have been there once, or how would I have known that? No archway, though. Just a brick wall, part of the structure supporting the staircase above. But then, if I really did step into a parallel reality, why would there be an archway at the foot of this staircase? That was back in my old dimension, the archway that lead here. If the jump held a slight spatial anomaly, it stands to reason that if there's a way back it won't be in the same place. And even if I did find a portal, it could well lead to somewhere else entirely.
I haven't been back to the spot since, and as the years wear on I'm not sure if I want to. After all, how would I explain to my parents where I'd been?
DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
• Short stories © WorldOfBlackout.co.uk, all entries are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Y'know, mostly.
• This is a personal blog. The views and opinions expressed here represent my own thoughts (at the time of writing) and not those of the people, institutions or organisations that I may or may not be related with unless stated explicitly.
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