Monument

First posted March 2023.

The white dome has always been here. Rising from the sand like bleached coral, gleaming in sunlight and ethereally glowing in the dark, it stands like a fairytale castle at the edge of the sea. The wind and the waves together, each indistinguishable from the other, fill the air with a constant rushing sound, drowning out all other noise except the gulls and crows who laugh from the beach below as they pick treasures from tangled heaps of kelp.

Martha hardly looks at the dome as she walks past, the same way she hardly looks at it most mornings. It’s a marvellous thing, and she is used to it, so it is no longer marvellous. When she was a child, she remembered running down to the beach and eagerly peering over the horizon, desperate to see the rise of the dome’s enchanting spire with the flag at the top, the statues of the dancing women on pedestals by the entrance, the golden lights in the round windows studded around the base of the dome. It breathed magic like a living thing breathes air, then. Now, it is a building she passes on her morning walk.

“And they still won’t tear it down, eh?”

Nearby, two old men with long white beards sit on a bench, one with his eyes on the dome and the other looking at the collection of police cars and ambulances parked on the side of the street. Martha must have just run past them, but she hasn’t noticed them until now. She wonders how she missed them. A few officers stand between the cars, seemingly doing nothing but looking around, while the ambulance driver sits in the seat, checking their phone.

“‘Course not,” the man looking at the dome replies without changing the direction of his gaze. “‘S been here forever.”

Martha doesn’t slow her walk much, except as nosiness necessitates. The little she knows now is enough, and she continues walking along the seafront.

Things happen near the dome. It’s just one of those things, like summers in England being rainy and traffic slowing around 5 o’clock. Body parts wash up on the shore, pale and waterlogged and fish-bitten. Dogs who have walked past a thousand times will suddenly stop outside the dome, barking with fevered urgency at absolutely nothing. Scattered notes fallen out of songs from long ago ring in the empty early-morning hours. Everyone knows, of course, but one doesn’t talk about these things. It simply isn’t done.

When people do talk of the dome, they talk of nights spent dancing in the glittering ballroom, music so loud it pulsed in their veins, sweet candy rock and gin. They talk of young love and new dresses and stumbling onto the beach with stars spinning over their heads. Martha always wondered how it could have been the same place — this cold, sterile, silent dome once a shimmering palace of pleasure.

The white dome has always been here — except it hasn’t. It was built just over a century ago. The priory ruins just down the coast are older. Even the church next to the metro station is older, and that former train station beats the dome by a year. But one doesn’t talk about these things. When children first look at the plaque bearing the opening date inside by the door, they loudly ask if it’s true and are quickly silenced by frowning adults shaking their heads. Truth never gets in the way of sentiment, and everyone knows the dome has always been here.

* * *

The phone rings, and Martha glares at it without moving from the couch. No one except her parents and work ever call the landline, and it’s too late to be her parents. She lets it ring out, and after a moment of silence, the phone begins ringing again.

She almost gets off the couch this time. Picking up the remote from the coffee table, she mutes the TV and pauses, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees. Nothing in her contract requires her availability outside normal hours. She doesn’t have to answer. The phone keeps ringing.

Finally, the answering machine clicks. “Hi, Martha,” the voice of her supervisor crackles with an undercurrent of static that comes with calling from his car, “I was just having a look at the new reporting spreadsheets you did, and, well, they’re great—”

Except, Martha anticipated.

“—except it looks like you added a column that tracks the total numbers for the year. We have each department go through and take a manual count each April. We just prefer to have that done by a real person rather than a machine, you know? They’re so unreliable. So if you can just take that out, they’ll be perfect. Thank you, speak soon, bye!”

So much for ‘we want you to feel empowered to make changes,’ then. She should’ve known that was a trap. Keeping track throughout the year would save frantic last-minute counts that frequently come up wrong in the chaos, but no company embraces change, no matter how much they advertise the opposite.

Martha realises in her frustration she’s been flipping channels with the TV still muted. She pauses on the news and sinks back against the couch. An item about the body found by the dome that morning scrolls at the bottom of the screen, not even commented on by the hosts. The deceased is not named. Even if they are known, they are never named. To name them would declare the event something worth talking about, which, of course, one does not do.

* * *

It is a silvery-grey day, a solid layer of cloud blocking out the sky and turning the choppy sea matte dark without the sun to sparkle in it, when Martha notices one of the statues outside the dome is missing.

At first, the stark white of the dome against the misty sky holds her attention. Even on this dark morning, there are no lights visible from within, and the round windows sit like black, pupil-less eyes encircling the base of the dome. Normally, she walks right past it without a second glance, but something about it today is aggressively captivating. The dome is almost unbelievably white; she expects it should pick up some dirt, or some sort of weathering, surely. It’s too perfect to be real.

Still staring up at the dome, she hears the high-pitched beeping indicator for crossing the street. No cars are stopped on either side of the street, but she waits for the signal out of habit anyway. Her eyes are still on the dome as she crosses. As she turns the corner, her gaze shifts to take in the full picture, and she notices.

At the top of one pedestal, an oxidised copper statue of a woman is frozen mid-dance, one hand forever on its way to beat the tambourine held aloft in the other. Her scant clothing seems to be made of bearskin, the metal formed into tufts of fur on the garment wrapped around her waist.

At the top of the other, there should be another woman in animal-skin, holding a cymbal in each hand as her light step is immortalised in statue.

She is not there.

Martha blinks, realising she has stopped in front of the dome. Somewhere in the distance, a single gull cries, echoing in the empty sky. The cold wind wraps around her shoulders and carries with it no sound but the waves, crashing and hissing in measured turn. None of the familiar faces of other morning walkers are around, as far as the eye can see. No cars pass on the street she just crossed.

She blinks again, and when her eyes open, there are lights in the windows. Laughter and clinking glasses form a harmony with the lively dance music playing inside. The smells of sugar and beer mix with the salt in the air. Warmth creeps out into the chill morning, reaching from the slowly opening door to caress Martha’s face.

The door creaks as it swings toward her. Martha leans forward, but does not take a step. Night falls like a blanket, softly drifting down on the early morning breeze. Darkness blurs the rest of the world, narrowing her vision like the zoom at the end of a cartoon, down to a little circle that contains only the dome.

White and gold, the dome and its lights — like a gilded sugar confection that could only exist in a child’s dream. For a moment, Martha wonders if it was ever real, or if she had simply imagined it day after day, conjuring it into existence through unconscious belief.

But the iron door handle in her hand is real, and the echo of her shoes on the marble floor inside is real, and the lights, the golden lights dripping from the chandelier that hangs from the top of the dome must be real. Every story she’s ever heard is real, and all of them are here before her: the dancers, the music, the drinks, the laughter. She feels the brush of taffeta and silk as women with meticulously curled hair push past her on their way up and down the stairs. She smells sweets so strongly it reminds her of amusement parks filling the air with canned artificial scents, and hears a delighted roar rise from somewhere inside as the band strikes up another fast-paced dance.

The sound of the door closing behind her is lost in the frenzy. Staring up at the chandelier, she moves to the centre of the room, jostled by crowds that never seem to thin. The lights flicker every now and then, barely perceptible unless you’re watching them — the sort of thing you’d chalk up to an electrical blip of some sort, if you thought of it at all.

The back of her neck aches from looking up, and she lowers her head. She blinks at the small rooms circling the ground floor, waiting for the ghosts of the chandelier lights to clear from her vision. The throng of young couples in dancing shoes, children with candy floss as big as their heads, and students too young for the drinks they’re holding parts for a moment, and in the shadows, Martha sees a pile of neatly-stacked skulls against a counter in one of the ground floor rooms.

She blinks again, squinting at it. The after-images of the chandelier lights fade, and the hallucination is gone.

Shattering glass draws her attention from a floor above. Shrill laughter follows, interrupted by more glass.

Martha makes her way up the sweeping staircase that winds around the dome. As she arrives on the first floor landing, the music slides off-key and speeds up slightly. Glass shatters again, and she looks over at the source. A woman holds a broken bottle at a man’s neck as he shouts words Martha can’t make out. Raised voices sound hoarse and desperate as they battle with the orchestra’s frenzied waltz. Two larger men slink out of the shadows and approach the woman from behind, unnoticed in the din. Wordless shrieks pierce the air as they pull her away, back into the dark corner from which they came. The dropped bottle shatters on the floor, and her intended victim straightens his tie.

Gunshots ring through the dome and Martha lifts her eyes toward the next floor. She continues up the staircase, stepping over the bodies prone on the stairs. She wants to stop, but her feet keep moving. One of the bodies lifts its bleeding head, trying to catch her eye as they gurgle and wheeze. Gripping the handrail, she tries to stop and ask them what happened. Her jaw locks, and her hand burns as it slides haltingly along the metal, dragged behind her as she walks inexorably onwards.

Trees grow from the second floor landing: baobabs and rubber trees, palms and cypresses. Away from the landing, onto the floor itself, the trees grow thick and clustered, rising high past where the ceiling should be. The music from below plays faster still, but muffled more than it should be — as if from another building rather than simply another floor. A flash of light from within the forest catches Martha’s eye, and she steps between the mismatched trees towards it, leaving the gilded marble of the dome behind.

Daisies and clover grow in small, soft patches from the floor between the trees. Sparse groves give way to dense woods. Martha takes her shoes off, tossing them aside, and scrunches her toes in the cold grass. The air on her face smells of pine and rain and freshly-cut grass — and a faint hint of smoke.

The source of the latter quickly becomes apparent as she moves further into the forest. Dancing orange light ahead of her alternates with flitting shadows on the bark of the trees, and hissed whispers and shrill, sharp laughs fly high with the embers into the air.

Terror and wonder churn in Martha’s stomach. She cannot take another step, and she cannot stop herself from moving toward it. The crackling fire snaps and pops. Snarls and growls come from above, behind, and ahead of her. This place is not for her, does not want her, and yet, somehow, she feels she is home.

As she nears the clearing between the trees, she holds her breath. Somewhere in the distance, the waves rush onto the shore, and the wind carries a seagull’s call. Leaning between the trees, trying to get a clear look at the figures dancing around the fire, she hesitates for the briefest second as she remembers the dome, the way it has always looked to her from the outside. The image flashes into her mind like a glimpse of another world, the memory bright like lightning in the darkness of the forest.

There is a crunch — a crack — Martha tells herself it was the fire, but the sound is too bodied, too thick. Wet flesh tears from bone with a sickening squelch. Screams of delight are set like a song to a drumbeat that might be her own heart, pounding in her ears. Her eyes are drying out, but she keeps them open as she slowly peers around the last tree between her and whoever is there in the clearing.

A rough metal hand clamps over her mouth.

* * *

The news item scrolls at the bottom of the screen and eyes skim over the words without comprehending them. The deceased is not named.