There are forgotten places in every city.
They decay quietly, buried beneath newer buildings. Layers of less-forgotten places pile up on top of them, like the striations in some prehistoric canyon. But the colours of this history are not limestone white and clay orange; these are concrete grey, and the rich browns of old wood.
A few of these abandoned places can still be found, by the tenacious and the lost. They wait patiently behind swollen doorways and down ill-used stairs, littered with middens of brittle rat droppings. Some can’t be accessed at all. The eyes of their windows gaze only into dirt and darkness, and once-bright paint trembles to dust as trucks and cars rumble overhead. Modern vibrations quickly hasten the entropy of years.
Some suffocate, when an earthquake cracks the last support shoring up a mouldering mausoleum. Concrete and dirt thunders in, eager to fill the dusty void and mill the antique carpentry to splinters. Others drown, when a water main develops a leak, filling the underground void with water one slow drip at a time. All things inside swell and rot, their sodden fibres becoming a uniform grey slurry at the bottom of a secret urban lake.
But some places survive. Although they are mostly forgotten, the meticulous care with which they were built ensures that they persist. Or perhaps they are loaned an enduring spirit by their purpose, or what they contained.
Once in a while, someone will stumble across one of those places, without having any idea what it is.
This is a story about such a place.
Some cities should never have been built.
The place where I live is a case study. The original tiny settlement, built in a hill-bound harbour, expanded too fast with the influx of population in its infancy. Like many overfed toddlers, it grew into a fat, sprawling adult. The messy metropolis drapes itself over the steep hills, demanding and devouring more inhospitable land every year. Consequently, roads are too narrow, houses the same; their piles and supports exposed and raw from erosion as constant sea-storms batter the soil into salty mud. Having lived here all my life, this seemed perfectly normal until I chanced to visit a land-bound city, all flat and geometric; the streets straighter than arrows, neatly laid out like the grids in a mathematics book.
To outsiders, my city seems needlessly convoluted, with streets stacked above one another, hidden tunnels and scribbly wooden bridges connecting otherwise disparate terraces together. The harbourside central city is even worse. Hundreds of years of accumulated architecture have been colonised by newly-minted towers of glass and steel, like so many modern parasites.
It’s the sort of place where anyone can get lost. Even people who are born here can’t resist the occasional wrong turn, just to see where that weird little road they’ve never been down might lead them. I did that a lot, walking in no particular direction through the twisting, mazy streets just to see where I would end up. And that’s precisely how I managed to stumble upon the curio shop.
I’d seen the entrance many times, but I’d never felt the urge to explore. It was a brick-arched alley, narrow and dingy, with no signage, and no indication that anything interesting lay within. I don’t know why that familiar arch piqued my curiosity on that particular day. But I found myself walking beneath it, navigating the cracked paving stones of an alley that curled between buildings and ended in a flight of graffitied concrete stairs. They lead up and down, both directions littered with faded city garbage.
Down the stairs I found nothing but a cave-in of rubble and scum-covered water. But upwards, the steps opened onto another brick alley, carpeted with grey-green lichens and spongy boluses of moss.
My shoes were sodden when I found the ancient arcade at the very end.
It must have been glorious, once upon a time. A not-quite-Victorian wonder of leadlights and timber, diamond panes of red and yellow glass were interspersed with wrought iron and glazed tiles. But now the tiles were cracked and broken, the clever mosaics smashed beyond recognition. The glass was equal parts whole and shattered, mould-rimed fragments of it crunching beneath my feet.
