Hector and I return to the ruins of ‘The Sunburn Experience.’ The ashes have been swept away by the wind, but its charred half-walls still mark the perimeter of the building where Hector spent most of his life. The rabbit seems fine. I thought he would be nervous- that some core instinct would have pegged this place as dangerous. It’s only the human in me. I’m projecting my own concerns on the animal.
I’ve been worried for a while now, ever since I discovered the onion paper pages of ‘Autumn by the Wayside.’ I’ve said before that it seems to grow longer the longer I read it. I’ve said before that it has expanded and splayed against the curling paperback. I found a picture of myself with the book when this all started. It was slimmer, then. A compact little travel guide with thick stock pages. Now I know those pages come apart. There are entries within the entries. Sites within sites. I have been reading the sub-pages and, when I can get to them without tearing, the sub-sub-pages. Now that I know how to look, I can see more text in-between.
I’m no closer to finishing this than when I started.
‘The discerning traveler will note a basement level displayed on the interior maps of ‘The Sunburn Experience,’ the only remaining clue that such a place exists. Other mentions of the basement have been edited out of brochures or taped over on signs: very deliberate attempts at erasing public knowledge of the place entirely. Some would attribute the unedited maps to conspiracy. The likelier explanations are incompetence or apathy or an understanding that, if someone has made it as far as the lobby, they will not be dissuaded by missing information.
Like everything made secret, the basement of ‘The Sunburn Experience’ holds a wonder: a source of daylight in miniature. Like every wonder on the Wayside, it has been wasted on dangerous and lucrative pursuits.’
The trouble with the ruins is that the trapdoor is less immediately clear than it would have been if the building was standing. If the guide is right, the door wasn’t meant to be easy to find to start. We wait for nightfall, hoping that the source of daylight will stream up through cracks in the floor. It does not and I assume, too early, that whatever was down there was lost with the rest of the building.
Hector disappears in the middle of the night, and he doesn’t come back. If it were anywhere else, I would let him be, but because he has a history, here, I shake off sleep and set out to find him. It isn’t hard. He’s nested on the bare floor in the northern corner of the once-lobby. I pick him up, finding his underside unnaturally warm, and there, beneath him, is the latch.
The ground radiates heat.
Beneath the floorboards of ‘The Sunburn Experience’ exists a miniature star. It spins in a room of broken mirrors, segmented by office dividers and shelves of dried-up suntan lotion. I find a pair of those little goggles and squint to keep them in place. Hector is nervous at last- I leave him on the surface for a quick look around but hardly make it more than a couple rungs down before the heat makes my skin tighten. I think of all the dangerous things the human body can do with too much sun and take a last glance. A man’s skeleton, bleached white, rests against the far wall. Several rabbit skeletons litter the floor. I don’t know what happened, here, or when it did, but it’s plenty of reason not to leave fingerprints.
I wipe the rungs of the ladder on my way back up and join Hector at camp, where he’s resettled in the sleeping bag. I peel the onionskin between ‘The Sunburn Experience’ and ‘The Terrestrial Star,’ and read about a quirk in the parking lot- a patch of asphalt that has split and cracked in the shape of man’s face- how it seems to discharge and arrange loose pebbles into neat rows of teeth no matter the number of times they’re pulled away. I split the pages again and read how every thousandth tooth contains a cursed gold filling. I tear the page trying to split it again, but I see more text. It will take finer tools than my fingers to delve deeper without doing damage.
-traveler
