The Flood Room

Lyrics

Down again. Always down.
From the upper air where the dust motes dance in shafts of afternoon.
Down where the light is remembered, not seen.

Past the Foyer's polished silence, where greetings hang in the air like ghosts.
I turn my back on the Drawing Room's polite symmetries.
I take the back stairs, the ones worn concave by hurrying feet.
The temperature drops a degree with every step.
The air gets thicker, heavier. It has history.

Down into the stone breath of the house.
The Furnace Corridor offers a wave of dry, metallic heat, a memory of winter.
I pass the Sealed Room, feel its silence pulling like a vacuum, and I do not look.
My destination is older.
The floor here is dirt and flagstone. A smell of ozone, of deep earth, of water where it shouldn't be.
There is no door. Just a stain on the wall, a tide-mark that shimmers.

And the wall gives way. Not a door, a dissolving.
This is the Flood Room.
The water is not stagnant. It is perfectly clear, perfectly cold, and does not move.
A standing wave of time.
This is not the memory of a flood. This is the archive.
The river that was here before the hill.

My feet stop at the water’s edge. It laps the stone without a sound.
One drip, from the ceiling, lands. The only clock in this room.
Each ripple expands for a century and vanishes.
The walls are slick with a green algae that doesn't need the sun.
I look into the water, and the ceiling reflected there is not a ceiling.
It is the night sky. The stars are wrong. They are the constellations of a forgotten pole.

In the center of the room, a child’s dollhouse, a perfect model of this mansion, is submerged to its own first floor.
Its tiny windows stare up, full of water.
I dip my hand. The cold is absolute. I bring the water to my lips.
It tastes of salt and silt, the taste of primordial green.
The taste of the first rain and the final melted ice cap.
The event that never happened, which is why it is always happening.

This is the Flood Room.
The water is not stagnant. It is perfectly clear, perfectly cold, and holds everything.
A standing wave of time.
This is not the memory of a flood. This is the source.
The tide that is coming for us all.

The house remembers the water.
The water does not remember the house at all.