The Voice
Damp.
That was what I felt first. The air heavy with water. The stone slick beneath my fingers. The fire crackled behind me, but its heat could not reach this deep into the rock. The cold seeped through my skin and settled in my bones.
I could smell the earth. The red ochre crushed in my palm. The charcoal ground to powder. The animal fat I mixed it with, warm from the fire, cooling fast as I worked.
My hands were stained. They had been stained for days. The colour would not wash out. It had sunk into the cracks of my skin, into the lines of my palms. I did not mind. The colour felt like it belonged there.
The others had gone to sleep. Their breathing rose and fell in the darkness behind me. The sound was familiar. I had heard it every night of my life. But tonight it sounded far away. As if they were in another place entirely.
I turned back to the wall.
Something was there.
I could not see it. But I could feel it. Pressing against the inside of the stone. Pressing to come out. The way a hand presses against the surface of a frozen river, wanting to break through.
I did not know what it was.
I only knew I had to let it out.
My fingers moved. Not my decision. The brush touched stone. The red met the wall. A line appeared. Then another. Not shapes I recognized. Not anything I had seen in the world outside.
The shape took form beneath my hand.
An animal.
I was not making it. It was making itself. I was the hand that moved. The brush that touched. But the image came from somewhere else. From behind the stone. From the cold that pressed against my back.
My arm ached. My fingers cramped. I did not stop.
The bison ran. The horse leapt. The deer turned its head and looked at me with eyes that were not eyes. They were holes in the rock. Holes that went somewhere else. Somewhere I could not follow.
The fire behind me died down. The cave grew darker. But I could still see the images. They glowed. Faintly. From inside. As if the stone itself had become a membrane. Something on the other side shining through.
I stepped back.
My breath came fast. Sweat ran down my chest. The cold air hit my skin and I shivered.
The images stayed.
They did not fade. They did not become just paint on rock. They remained alive. Watching. Waiting.
I looked at my hands. Red. Black. Streaked with colour that would not come off.
I looked at the wall. At the things I had released.
I did not know what to call them. I did not know what to call what had happened to me.
I only knew that I could not go back to the others and sleep. I could not wake in the morning and hunt and eat and joke and be what I had been before.
Something had passed through me.
And it had left me on the other side of something I could not name.
","author_name":"Friedrich Gatzen"}