Into The Zone

Author's note: A short piece I wrote for my university creative writing group a while ago, inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky's very weird sci-fi film Stalker - though you don't need to have seen it to read this. This was primarily written as a prose experiment, so reviews are very much appreciated.



Near the very end, long after the world had been engulfed in an ocean of colourlessness, and all was tool, gear and featureless mechanism, there was a place called The Room. The Room stood in the middle of The Zone, the twisting, gaping, filthy, slate-grey husk of an abandoned industrial complex, choked by a forest of untamed weeds and half-drowned in mud-blackened rainwater, the sky above it forever sheeted in icy grey cloud. And The Room, so the whispered fables said, was a place of miracles amidst this bleakness; for whosoever set foot in it, so it was claimed, would be granted their innermost wish.

But only one man knew the way through The Zone, for he had been born within it; a twisted and shrunken man, withered and bent before his time, his body warped and his features repugnant. He was known as The Stalker; and it was not until nigh unto the end of his years, when he had shrivelled almost into nothingness, that he agreed to return to the derelict emptiness of The Zone.

He chose the four men who would follow him into The Zone; the four men who he would lead to The Room, where their inmost desires would be granted to them. They were The Writer, The Politician, The Youth and The Worker.

And they followed him; followed this wasted and hobbling figure as he lead them through the colourless undergrowth of damp, towering weeds, past the charred, geometric shells of desecrated outbuildings, through the mossy black streams of filthy rainwater, through the winding hallways of icy grey walls and frigid dampness. And as they walked, The Stalker told them the tale of the last man who had entered The Room; this man had killed his brother, and entering The Room, he had fallen to his knees and pleaded that his brother be brought back to life. And upon leaving The Room, the man wanted for nothing; riches and power had showered him, fortune had smiled upon his every waking hour. And yet his brother, for all his pleading, remained dead. And thus the man had learned the truth, the intimate truth, of his inmost desires.

And when, finally, they reached the room – a crumbling, skeletal stone gazebo which stood in the centre of a lifeless field surrounded by towering grass and the twisted, tarnished, shapeless lumps that were all that remained of some variety of monstrous machinery – every one of the men knew, at once, that they would not enter it.

For The Writer had realised the futility of it all; the futility of attempting to bring upon the world change through words; words that a bloated, lethargic, despondent mass of humanity, it was now quite clear, were far too indolent to even remember, let alone take to heart. His own innermost wishes, he was now certain, would simply be yet another blind stab at a forlornly hopeless cause.

The Politician had realised that others would come; others like him. Not those driven by the selfish love of money or hunger for power, but by the most hideous sort of altruism; the activists, the revolutionaries, the fascists, the disaffected pseudo-intellectuals, all the self-appointed saviours of mankind, who, in their absolute conviction of their own righteousness, would, with the power of The Room at their disposal, stand tall and proud as they tore the world apart.

The Worker had awoken to the stifling narrowness of the life he had lived; a narrowness which had stunted his understanding of all things, which had blinded him to its own meaninglessness, a narrowness which had shaped his dreams; dreams which, from his blind and naive perspective, had once seemed so substantial, so significant, but which he now saw for their vapidity, their insipidness, their juvenility, their absolute unworthiness.

The Youth had realised the bliss of his own obliviousness; the blessing of his own absolute ignorance about himself. Ignorance which allowed him to gauchely stumble his way through life, meander from one half-formed ideal or hastily adopted philosophical conception to the other, proudly touting and then discarding each one without ever having to endure the labour of making an effort to understand it. The granting of his innermost desires would entail the sort of self-revelation that he simply could not afford.

And thus, one by one, did the men turn about and leave, wandering their way back through the silent chaos of The Zone. And in the sterile, lifeless silence, as the darkness gathered in the sky overhead and the frigid rain began to fall once more, The Stalker stood upon the mossy threshold of The Room, frantically cackling.