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silcrow-story · 3 years

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Salvage III

The Past Peripheral

Dana walks upstairs just as soon as she’s sure June’s left, tries not to catch her eye as she walks by. Her hood’s back up, her tears have dried; she appears as composed as she can.

As she opens the door to her apartment, she becomes acutely aware of how tired she is. She’s been awake for just shy of twenty-four hours; she flips her phone open to check the time, make a mental note of it. 09:03. She’ll need to make it through to sunset, yet.

She can hear Nadia pacing back and forth in her room; the walls aren’t all that thick, and it’s not such an unfamiliar sound. She marks a pang of sympathetic worry in her chest, sets her cup of coffee by the sink, and walks to the far end of the kitchen, turns left at the window, steps into her room.

Once she’s at rest, face-down on her air-mattress, sleeping back spread half-open, she tries to clear her head of all thoughts of the present and future as yet haunt her. She likes to slip into the past when no-one’s looking; if she’s careful and she keeps her hands steady, there’s nothing can hurt her there. She’s had no such luck with the present. Fuck it, she thinks, the cutting-room floor can have the rest, and lets a neatly edited memory wash over her, envelop her like an autumn wind.

Another equinox, and 1500 leagues away; a shallow field awash in mid-afternoon sunshine. It’s not really all that far from civilisation – indeed, it’s within an arm’s reach, if she cared to, but she doesn’t, and for the moment it’s a world apart. Not quite warm, not quite cool; not still nor silent but subtly alive.

It’s a shallow scene, but for now it’s enough to get lost in, as the amphetamines in her blood dissolve into inactive metabolites. Only one or two ghosts here, she thinks, and only shadows to fight. It was a simpler time; she doesn’t even mind that particular cliché. She can’t hear Nadia’s pacing anymore; maybe it’s the two sets of walls, maybe Nadia’s taken a moment to lie down herself, maybe Dana’s simply sufficiently sequestered in reverie. It’s alright like this, she thinks. And it is, for the moment.

She’s casting a sidelong glance at a ghost as a cloud passes over the sun. She’s rarely lonely in these memories, the ones she’s set aside as outposts of retreat. The grass is green but drying as the season starts to turn; it’s dying, and it goes without a fight. And yet, and yet, despite it all, the witch-hazel in seed alights on some soft breeze, borne on by thin white strands that seem all to few to bear the weight of new life. New life was all around, then, even in the face of winter’s coming on; perhaps, then, there is new life now, despite cruel summer that she knows comes hence – it’s a notion that’s easy enough to entertain, from the safety of this scene.

But the present moment intrudes, like a knife between two ribs, and the set falls away and Dana tosses and turns ‘til she’s left alone on the sound-stage, staring up at the popcorn ceiling, and there’s a crack in it as ever. Behind her eyes, and above, and out, there extends some black corridor, the lights therein having burnt out at once in maybe a dozen frames between them. A dozen frames duly lost, disposed of, swept away.

Two hours pass in relative quiet, and relative peace; while she can’t quite fall asleep, Dana can at least rest her eyes, and let the redness fade, and breathe.

In the room across the kitchen, Nadia’s stopped pacing, although her racing thoughts have yet to slow. She’s given June her number, and she’s said she means to get back to her when she’s sorted all this out, and she does. It took her a full minute after June left to realize that she hadn’t even thought to look at what, besides her name and address, might be written in the notebook to which she’s still holding on so tight.

And so she lay out across her bed, and hesitating only slightly, opened it to the first page, and found it entirely blank.

She hadn’t been sure what she expected; it wasn’t that much of a letdown. And now, as she reclines again, she almost wants to keep looking, press on. The longer she lets the thought linger, the more she supposes there must be something in there, after all, that the book mightn’t’ve come to her under such circumstances for nothing, and –

– and so she gives into the temptation, and takes a look at the second page.

Which second page is blank as well, but that’s to be expected. She doesn’t stop before turning to the next one, and the next one, and the next, the pages tumbling one by one, a mid-tempo cascade. A crescendo, tense and off-kilter. A page, and then another.

Christopher doesn’t want to think about death, as he passes the gas station, heading west-southwest, walking as fast as he can manage without really exerting himself. He doesn’t want to think about death, but it’s an inevitability when he’s out walking around this time of day. The song that’s playing isn’t that much help; the singer’s pleading desperately that someone might remember him, hanging on tight to his only hope, and Christopher wishes he couldn’t relate quite so much as he does.

He’s lived in this college town for several years now; it’s been several years since he’s been a student. He doesn’t think all that much about his two brief semesters of study at the university these days; he’s had other things on his mind. Though he’s held his ground, this town, his almost-home, for so significant a fraction of his life, his mind remains cluttered with images – places, voices, memories, some his own and others not. He knows this gas station, and a few others; the convenience stores, most all of them; St. Peter’s Hospital and its blessed, damned emergency room; much of the college campus, the fountain, the sculpture; the stairway up the hill, from 19th Avenue to 20th; the list goes on.

So, too, does Christopher go on, past a grocery store and an apartment complex and the high school and its baseball field, and another apartment block, and finally the traffic light at the intersection where he crosses the parkway to stand kitty-corner from the State Archives. He’s been walking toward the sunset, but now he turns away, and sets off uphill, toward his final destination. He’s got an appointment to make, and he knows it; he exhales sharply, raises his hood, and tries to let his music drown out the passing traffic.

The trees rise tall around him and the soft, slow song surrounds him in a tenebrous indigo haze, the swelling sub-bass a premonition of the twilight impending. The clouds are perforated, now, punctured as to let stray beams of early evening light pierce through and dapple with marbled shadows the ground beneath the boughs through which they pass. Nonetheless, the atmosphere, the signs of imminent rain, all have yet to pass. The singer’s deep in love and fear, and feeling trapped, her voice arcing from a dark half-whisper to an empassioned cry as she pleads for her beloved to see, to bear witness, to notice her if only as an afterthought. Christopher pretends once more that he’s not in her shoes – it’s just a song, it’s just a nice song – and sets his own shoes to the pavement, and presses on; the branches of impassive evergreens above sway on, and shatter all kaleidoscopic his thin shadow.

Hours earlier and just a block or so west-southwest, June’s leaving Nadia’s apartment, trying to gather her thoughts. It’s fairly early yet, all things considered, and there aren’t many people about; in her going back she passes just one figure, furtive in a hoodie, face freckled with the falling rain from whence she’s stepped, which figure stands still briefly before walking by, wordless. June’s too preoccupied to pay her much mind.

She’s only slept an hour or so out of the past twenty-four; she had to rise well before dawn to make on time the spot that Christopher’d prescribed. She knows she needs to get some rest, but she’s still thinking, about Nadia and the notebook and how she’d not once opened it, not once. That’s a bit odd, isn’t it?

It’s still on her mind as she unlocks her own apartment door, blue-grey, cold steel handle, brass key. It’s all but underground, apartment 20, room D; her room’s only window looks out on the rocky embankment and shallow depression in the hillside into which the complex as a whole is wedged. She imagines it’d make most any other tenant a bit uncomfortable; the lack of natural light in the morning, the proximity to the sidewalk and the parkway’s traffic overhead. June doesn’t mind, really. She takes some strange comfort in her room’s position – it’s surrounded, and so in some implict sense protected. Once she’s inside, door locked behind her, overhead light switched on, she surveys her room and all her scattered thoughts at once.

Her room’s only slightly cluttered, but all that’s scattered around gives the impression that there’s more clutter than is actually present. Clothes are strewn across the floor; the desk beneath the window’s covered in stray papers, and the several spiral-ring notebooks from whence they’ve been torn. Her laptop’s still open on her bed; the battery’s running low. It’s become a bit overwhelming, June realises for the third time this week, having so much up in the air. So many diversions, and Nadia, and Christopher, and whatever’s in that notebook only amount to one more. One more cul-de-sac, one more dead end…

Her train of thought careens into oblivion as she notices she’d been wondering about the contents of the notebook for the first time. It wouldn’t have been right to look, she thinks, so why am I regretting it now? It’s really Nadia, if anyone, who needs to know.

June takes off her glasses and closes her laptop and tumbles into her twin bed. She can’t remember the last time she’s had a good night’s sleep, and so she closes her eyes, and wonders briefly if there’s anywhere she ought to be right now. It doesn’t take long for sleep to overtake her; sleep, first, and then dreams.

She doesn’t realise she’s dreaming at first; the feeling is real, even if the setting isn’t. She’s lying down on something, hard metal, brushed steel, bleachers. It’s a soccer pitch, and it’s late at night, but there’s something different about the sky here. It’s vast, and as close to black as blue can get, and there are more stars than usual – so many more that it’s striking first, then more captivating with each passing moment.

As she watches this foreign starfield, June gradually becomes aware of the fact that she’s not alone. There are a few ghosts there with her – perhaps two or three, their faces half-turned away from the camera in shadow. She doesn’t recognise them quite yet, and she doesn’t feel especially obliged to. The stars wheel above her, and she begins to notice the planets among them; first Venus, then Mars. It’s spring, she decides. The air smells like spring. It’s Aries season, and she can tell by the nip in the air that she’s up north. Up north, and west of somewhere; she’s too fascinated by the fractals forming from the depths of the firmament’s parabola above.

She gets to her feet, eventually, and feels dizzy, feels like she’s falling, and that’s when she realises it’s a dream. She doesn’t want to wake just yet, though, so she holds on tight, and stands straight and tall as she can, and stays a while longer.

Nadia’s still in her room, flipping through page after page. She’s not really sure what she’s looking for, at this point. Some indication, perhaps, that the book was hers, or that it wasn’t – surely, it was left where it was for a reason.

Around the twenty-first page she begins to notice marks – not words or letters, just faint pencil-strokes. As she sees the first her breath catches in her throat; the mark itself bears no significance to her, but its presence there does. Someone was here before, she thinks, and shivers at the thought. This wasn’t just something I’d lost and forgotten; somebody gave this to me.

Of course she wonders why, but at this point that question seems far out of reach. What could be the use of wondering why, when it’s not even clear yet just what it is that’s happening. She’s begun to feel altogether out of her depth, and the water-line only rises higher and higher still as the stray pencil strokes begin to articulate themselves into shapes, lines, symbols, and then, at last, numbers. Coordinates, Nadia realises, then, numbly. They’re coordinates. 4*.***, -12*.*** . The datum doesn’t carry any significance to her, on the face of it; she’ll have to look them up later. It’s the implication of their presence that gets to her; the idea that she’s being directed, being by some unseen force guided unto a destination. Just like June was, she thinks, and shivers again, and closes the notebook. Would it be more senseless to go, or not to, she thinks. Is this ‘Christopher’ the one behind it all, or is he being strung along, just like we are? What is there for me to lose? What, if anything, might I stand to gain?

There are far, far to many ambiguities for her comfort. She’s got to work tomorrow, got other things to attend to; she hasn’t, after all, much time to invest in this sort of game. But regardless of what it could mean, regardless of its potential to be a scam, a fiction, a trick, it’s not so easy a thought to let go. Open questions have a way of doing that, of worming their way into a consciousness before their intrusion is even noticed, of quietly yet constantly. A mystery is a vulnerability in the mind’s defenses, a slowly spreading crack in the walls and ceilings, a stray pencil-mark on a white blank page that renders itself with time entirely indelible.

Nadia knows what she has to do, and so, reluctantly setting her notebook aside, she opens her phone – it’s early evening, now, perhaps a quarter to seven – and dials ten digits, holds it to her ear, lets it ring. The rain’s stopped, outside, and there’s a gap in the clouds just broad enough to let through the window, obliquely, the pale glow of some thin sunbeam.

When Dana arrives at the lookout, Topher’s waiting, and she breathes a sigh of relief. It’s a beautiful sunset, over the bay, and it’s in plain view; naturally, he’s staring at his shoes. He hasn’t noticed her yet, or if he has, he’s given no indication, so she ascends the wooden tower to join him, and they stand there in silence for a moment as the red-gold radiation of the sun – not quite below the tree-line – cascades about them.

Eventually, she turns away from the sunset, looks straight at him. “I hope you’ve not been waiting too long,” she says, and she mostly means it.

Christopher takes out his earphones, shakes his head softly. “Nah.”

After another moment, he says, “Do you suppose they’ll make it?”

“Nadia has the coordinates. Nothing for it but to wait,” Dana replies. They’ll come, she thinks. He can’t think we’ve left that much up to chance.

The sun has descended all but entirely into the Pacific by the time June and Nadia pass beneath the arch of rock, walk among the trees, and glance up at the lookout, freeze when they see the figures there, silhouetted in civil twilight.

Hours earlier, June is still lingering in the dreamscape, walking a campus in too many layers of clothing, passing a facade of sheet-glass and aluminum. What’s beyond is all a blur of green and gold, and so she looks closer, turns to face it properly, and allows the blur to articulate itself into something vast and strange.

There rises within that strange greenhouse some titanic plant, a primordial mass of pure life, a vital, verdant relic of another age. The trunk that forms its core is one with the vines that twine about it, and the ruddy blooms that sprout thence, and the roots that seem in their writhing to set the loam in which they’re stuck to shake like something breathing – all these, and more, and stranger parts, are one being. For all the shock of its immense and bizarre form, it evokes in June more respect than revulsion; it is a thing of this Earth, no alien, no stranger. She doesn’t approach, but merely stands, looks on, her upward gaze almost supplicant.

The dream, as dreams so often do, lets the scene seem not as strange as in the waking world it surely might. And so, anaesthetized to the intrinsic anomaly of that great tree’s existence, June lets the time slip by just looking, admiring, inquiring – identifying all its tendrils’ avenues and leaves’ expanses – and at peace.

Then from the metal eaves perhaps five meters overhead there blows a wind, a warm gust from the exhaust-fans, and it rushes to subsume her psychosoma, like a flood. There is a trepidation, a murmur of spring, a stench of mould and compost, and then a fresh, sweet taste, like strawberries and sugar; the world ripples, the ghosts and their faint voices leaving first, and then the greenhouse and its denizen, and then, alas, June, and she is awake.

The call comes but a minute or two later; June’s surprised it didn’t wake her. She picks up, and it’s Nadia; she’d known, somehow, it would be.

Nadia says hello, and says she was looking through the notebook, and asks if she’s free to come over, because there’s something she wants to talk about. June’s only a few doors down, and curious as ever; so, despite the fact she’s only just awoken, she says she’s on her way, and hangs up, and steps outside.

The air is crisp and clear, the clouds shot through with early evening warmth, as June enters the parking lot, and tries to clear her head. The endeavor doesn’t go far, and it only takes her a moment to decide against it; she’d rather have less on her mind going in, she reasons, as she starts up the two flights of stairs to Nadia’s apartment. She’s trying not to wonder what she’s walking into; in this effort, at least, she is successful.

Having reached the blue-grey door, and facing the number 12 in cracked black plastic stuck thereto at eye level, she knocks for the second time that day.

Dana wakes up slowly, despite never really having slept. Her bags are packed, and she’s ready to go, more or less. She flips her phone to check the time – 6 minutes to 7 in the evening. She was making good time before; now, alas, she’s running late. Topher must be there already, at this point, she thinks, and is only just stepping out the door to her room when she’s stopped in mid-stride by a knock at the door.

Before she can decide to dart back inside her room, or to answer the door, Nadia’s stepped out, crossed the kitchen, noticed her standing there. Dana glimpses the notebook she’s got clenched in her right hand – is June here already? I s’pose we won’t be waiting long, then…

And then Nadia’s opened the door, and June is stepping inside. She seems surprised to see Dana standing there, across the kitchen, by the bright blue folding chair and tense, and unsure what to do. Dana’s not quite sure why, but she hopes June doesn’t recognise her from earlier; June cocks her head, adjusts her glasses, tries to decide whether or not she does.

“Oh, hi! You...you must be Nadia’s roommate,” she says, with as much xeniality as she can manage through what’s left of the haze of dreams about her head.

Dana cracks a smile and says she is, and she’s sorry, she was just on her way out and didn’t mean to interrupt; it’s an evident affectation and she knows it, but June and Nadia step aside, and Dana leaves, and sets off to where her associate waits.

Moments later, in her room, Nadia’s sitting cross-legged on her bed, reading off coordinates; June just stands and listens, wide-eyed – no less confused, and no less curious.

“...and so I looked them up, the coordinates,” Nadia says, almost breathless, livelier than June’s yet seen her, “And they’re like, right here. At the lookout in the arboretum. Did – did Christopher or whoever it was mention anything like this?”

“He didn’t say anything about- no. He didn’t say much at all, really, and I hadn’t had the time to ask, and I didn’t look. Didn’t look in the notebook, I mean.”

Nadia hunches over a bit, looks down at the dusty beige carpet, furrows her brow. A moment, still and taut, goes slowly by; June feels awkward, but she simply stands, and waits, and another moment goes by. Then, at last, Nadia raises her head, and looks June dead in the eye, and says exactly what she was hoping to hear.

“What say we go check it out?”

#silcrow #silcrow-story #03

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ao3feed-brucewayne · 6 years

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A Fowl Reawakening

read it on the AO3 at http://bit.ly/2VAzrDF

by Silcrow

Sure, being able to do a quadruple backflip is cool, but having actual superpowers would've been better. This is the story of how I find myself seemingly "re-born" into the body of the world's most famous sidekick. Boy, do I regret not reading more comics as a kid now. But hey, at least I'm familiar with the cartoons. Life's all about the silver linings, right? A Robin Self-Insert.

Words: 6806, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Young Justice (Cartoon)

Rating: Teen And Up Audiences

Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Categories: Gen

Characters: Dick Grayson, Robin, Bruce Wayne, Batman, Alfred Pennyworth, Wally West, Kaldur'ahm, M'gann M'orzz, Conner Kent, The team

Additional Tags: Self-Insert, I take over Dick Grayson's body, things get crazy, Kind of meta, I bullshit my way through Young Justice

read it on the AO3 at http://bit.ly/2VAzrDF

#IFTTT #ao3feed #bruce wayne #batman #the dark knight #gotham

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jinruihokankeikaku · 3 years

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oh hey Silcrow #08 is done. It turn'd out pretty alright, I think, and - wwithout sayin too much - it's got an important role in the wwhole story's structure, so. It's a relief to havve finished it, similar to #04.

#silcrow-story #wwritin update

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silcrow-story · 3 years

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A Child's Moon II

06. Going Looking

She’s not sure exactly what time it is when her first customer comes in the door. The guy’s looking rough, and she notices it straightaway – face stiff and scruffy, eyes rimmed round with red, shaggy hair stuck to the side of his face by the rain. It strikes her, just then, that she cannot decide if he’s someone she knows from somewhere, or no. It isn’t the first time this week that she’s felt that, she knows.

It’s uncanny, but she shakes the feeling in seconds, and greets him politely as she can, well-practiced enough to make up for her relative lack of composure. He’s looking past her at the wall, or perhaps the analogue clock hanging over the door to the office behind her, lacking a focus especial. It’s an awkward minute or so ‘til he answers her, with a half-wave and a mutter that might be “Hello.”

He clears his throat, shifts in place, looks at the floor, then looks up and asks her if he could get a packet of the Reds, please.

Nadia smiles, says “Sure,” and realizes she finds his voice hard to place as his face was when first he walked in. It’s just like with June, she thinks, wholly compulsively; she’d really rather not think about that. So she turns to get him his pack of cheap cigarettes, concentrates hard on the sound of the rain. It’s attenuated well, through the brick walls, but it’s enough to anchor her, faint as it is.

She asks him for his ID, though he looks easily five or six years her elder. She normally wouldn’t, and couldn’t care less, but she’s tempted enough to try to catch his name. She’d rather not ask, for a number of reasons – foremost, that he looks like he’d rather not talk. He doesn’t seem drunk, or spun-out – those she’d recognise – but he’s clearly having a rough time of it. In passing, she notes that she’s no longer listening to the rain fall; the world is, for the moment, cropped neatly to two meters square.

He doesn’t raise any objections, though he looks a little surprised that she bothered to ask. He fumbles in his coat pocket a moment – which pocket seems a bit too high on his frame – and pulls out his license, and a world-weary ten-dollar bill. The license is from out-of-state – Nebraska – and he’s 25, so she got that much right. The name’s Christopher Clark.

She makes the connection immediately; the jolt of recognition is, despite her effort to conceal it, plainly visible. She doesn’t, in the moment, bother to consider the real chance that he’s not the Christopher she’s thinking of. Caught up in the unexpected jolt of noradrenalin, her thoughts turn turbulent and racing; it’s all that she can do just to say nothing, and put on a feigned game-face customer-service smile.

As she gives him his change and slides his ID back towards him across the formica, he looks up and makes eye contact for the first time since he walked in the door. He thanks her, still short and half-mumbled, but still more sincere than curt, like he means it or something. Nadia, not really sure what his deal is, bids him a good day as he turns, returns quick as he came to the rain.

When he’s left, she relaxes, or tries to as best she can, closes the register with softly shaking hands. She lets the rain’s patter, persistent as ever, fade into the mix once again. As it does, the world expands from the box it’d been confined to, to resume some semblance of the shape it held not all that long ago.

June’s headed to campus and hurrying hard; having slept much longer than she had intended to, dreamlessly, and woken up with a start to discover that it was already a quarter past seven. She only half-recalled falling asleep; last night had been long, and the night before likewise, and though she supposes she needed it, she’s still annoyed.

She’s got her hood up, and long green coat buttoned; her glasses are flecked nonetheless with the rain. The messenger bag on her left shoulder’s holding her laptop computer, a notebook, a pencil or two. A pang of wounded pride has been harrying her since she left, though she’s not really had the time to consider why. She feels like she’s failed, or fallen short, somehow, of something, but the feeling’s left no indication of what that might be. Writing last night about historiography, she’d let herself get much more bitter than usual; thinking about the world tends to wring that out of her. All hitherto existing society looms like a monolith over her life; she wonders if she wouldn’t be, indeed, better off just trying harder to live, and not look.

Christopher contemplates, as he gets back inside, where it all went wrong. When he and Dana began their endeavor to figure out what was afoot in the area, they weren’t the first. They didn’t know each other, either; they’d just been curious, first, then tipped off – after research and inquiry – to enigmatic events that some said were connected. Some proved to be right, and when they were contacted, alas, by someone whose name he’d rather not remember, they made together the choice to continue the work.

It took them some time to start to get along; aside from their interest in the anomalous, their personalities veered off substantially. Dana, to his view, at least, is a natural; in their conversations, she’d quickly made clear it’d been her ambition for much of her life now to understand all that which obstinately resists comprehension. Not him – he’s much more relaxed, in that sense, but it bothered him when he moved here that things didn’t seem that inclined to allow him to live in a manner conducive to...routine. Not that he’d had the best luck with maintaining one, not at the best of times; things had just taken a turn for the worse here.

It started with noticing leaflets around town, on telephone poles and at lights, or perhaps on a window or wall. Often the usual – a lost pet, help wanted, an advertisement for a service or for a new club. Once, a missing person, whose name he’s forgotten, no one he knew or had seen, then or since. Though he’d looked, always, he’d only done so in passing, rarely if ever to remember long. Then, some small time – though not long – post-arrival, he’d glanced at one and paused mid-stride for a moment. It was just a sheet of A4 paper, white, printed on its front face with a crescent-moon’s shape, and beneath it a single-word query – “Waiting?”

He wasn’t, then – wasn’t waiting, that is – but it struck him as odd that the question was asked without an advertisement, no number to call, and not hanging anywhere most would, well, wait. It was just stapled to an old telephone-pole, in a neighbourhood not all that far from his own, with no bus-shelter or crosswalk in sight. In retrospect, he thinks, I’d’ve been better off moving on, but at the time he was glad that he’d looked. Beneath the symbol and question, in smaller print, there was a date – not printed, but inscribed in red pen. It was current, the date, or otherwise just under four months hence – 7/3/2015. The part that struck him as odd, was the fact that around it were several indeciferable marks– more than just a false-start or two, but a dozen, and shaky as though whomever had added the date had been doing so with no small struggle.

To him, at the time, it was meaningless. Still, nonetheless it’d soon seized his attention enough that he thought about what it could mean as he made his way back. There were plenty of people outside that day; it was brisk, cool-but-not-cold and sunny. He wondered if, perhaps, it had been a note to somebody especial; no notice at all, but a signal for only the person for whom the sign meant anything. He wondered if the date in pen, had been added – by the recipient, upon receipt of the note, to let its author know when. He then wondered where it was he’d been returning to, and where he was, and how he’d gotten there.

None of the buildings behind him seemed at all familiar – which was a troubling thought in itself – but indeed the whole ambient tone of the city had changed in the short time since he’d passed the note. There was no-one around, anymore, and it was proper cold – he noted, with a slight shiver, he could see his breath. The street he was on was a bit narrow, and roughly-paved, while the buildings around him rose only two stories, they seemed somehow tall: brick facades seeming to lean convex overhead, roofs' eaves distended to obfuscate half of the sky.

Christopher stopped walking, then, and decided to think back to when he’d first left the house. He lit a cigarette, and remembered he’d left to pick up some groceries – food for the week, new razorblades, dish soap – and realized he’d wholly forgotten to do that at all. He was here, on the opposite side of town, having all lost in thought become lost, likewise, in space.

It took him an hour to make his way home, and he did, but not without feeling unsettled. The whole way there he couldn’t entirely shake off the feeling that something had shifted beneath him; less like he got lost in a place he was new to, and more like he’d been guided, by design, astray.

Nadia’s shift passes by uneventfully; the rain recedes and swells newly in waves, but never surpassing by much a full shower, nor ceasing completely. She’s been preoccupied, but less so than she thought she’d be; once the initial shock of it faded, she slipped almost all the way back into torpor; become, once more, synchronous with the outside.

She doesn’t need to talk much to her manager, and it’s a slow day; this leaves her free, half the time, just to focus on restocking, straightening shelves, and ruminating upon matters less intense, less present. The day before yesterday, she’d actually considered unpacking, or starting to, anyhow. There was a friend to whom she’d been meaning to lend a novel she’d read and enjoyed before her arrival here; it remained, still, in a box in a stack of like boxes in her room at home. It was a science-fiction, set in the near future, which intertwined meditations on life’s nature with a self-contained tale of mankind’s first contact with beings from far beyond all our telescopes, beings who had things to teach us if only we’d learn first to listen to strangers like them. She’d not got around yet to digging it up, and resolves to, as soon as she’s back with her mind newly clear.

A pang of slight guilt reminds her that she also ought to see what June had sent her this morning, though she’s loathe to get once more caught up in that. Then I’ll have to mention Christopher, ask about Dana, and – her realization’s cut off, because she knows Dana’s got nothing to do with all this. Dana’s presumably home by now, but why, Nadia queries, would she come to mind? She and June had met briefly, before they’d departed, but other than that she can’t place the connection. Sweeping aside, for a moment, the strangeness, she goes back to the counter to check the wall-clock, relieved that the shift’s almost through. It’s just after noon, and whoever’s taking over should be on their way by now.

Light plays on the puddles as a car passes slowly, tire treads clicking against the wet pavement, and before much longer her relief’s arrived. Her co-worker’s not someone she’s spoken to much, but Nadia’s never been the talking type; briefly exchanging greetings as she clocks out is sufficient, and she’s on her way. The door swings open – air, steel, glass, wetter air – and Nadia’s walking back faster than she came, as usual. Afternoons never feel quite refreshing as mornings, the air having warmed and somehow settled down, but the light shower’s pleasant enough as she goes.

The memory proved more vivid than Christopher had planned; it’s afternoon, and he’s still barely in the door. Knowing he needs to sleep, and indeed barely wakeful, now, enough to focus, he undresses, leaning hard against a wall. Hungover, and more to the point destroyed by the absence he feels heavy in his gut, he doesn’t want to – can’t – begin to make the decision as to how he might proceed. From here the way seems lost in fog, and smoke, thick, dirty, choking; alone, everything’s become frightening as it was when first he lost himself, in this damn town with its damn haunted places.

The note on the phonepole with the crescent-moon was the way he met Dana; their choice to look deeper was how he’d lost her. It took two long weeks for the two of them to make contact; a long story he doesn’t want to recall right now. He got lost once or twice more in that time, going looking thenceforth for more notes of its kind around town. He didn’t find any – no crescent moons, and no alleys as strange as the one where he woke up that once – but he found marks in red pen on some more sundry artefacts, and he soon knew what to look for. Five years have passed since then, and he got better, with time, at not losing things, or getting lost; but they both knew the risks,c came to know more with time.

This, he realizes, is only a loss, only a thing he’d have to learn risks from. He’d be better off if he just factored Dana’s new absence into his schemata, the maps that he’d drawn of the real city, and maybe hoped. He can’t help but to give himself that, that one faint hope, though no-one he knows of has come back from that. She’s resourceful, he thinks, and laments the fact that he can’t try to appeal to someone. Can’t tell the police – they’d tried that once before, which went badly – and can’t think of anyone else, Dana not having left an emergency contact among her effects. As he falls asleep, involuntarily, he wonders if there’s more he could have done – or if it was years ago that the whole thing was decided at once. So many invisible lines to trip over, and no time to find them all before they’ve fully exacted their toll. He sleeps, at last, and for much longer than he has in quite a while.

By the time her first class has begun, June has shaken the last of the morning’s malaise from her shoulders. It’s a course on philosophy; they’re reading Camus. She wonders how it would feel if the sun made her kill someone. It doesn’t seem far from the realm of possibility, that; the whole override of the system a mind has of restraint and self-regulation might lapse, and then that something awful might happen. Light hurts, sometimes – sunlight especially – and what hurts can coerce, provoke action. It’s not hard to imagine, is all, she thinks, keeping most all of these thoughts to herself.

It’s the absence of sun, the light rain as she’s leaving, that causes her to start to wonder if something’s wrong. She’d been talking to Nadia last night about – what was it? I remembered every word, only hours ago, she thinks, and veers off to the right, to lean against the concrete wall between the hill and her own body. Last night’s become like a room she left something in – she hasn’t lost any time, but the memory’s somehow corrupted, infused with vague tendrils of incursive, shady unease.

She pulls out her phone to call someone, and realizes that she’s not sure who she ought to call. Nadia’s her first thought, naturally, maybe, but June’s worried she might come off as obsessed – the unanswered texts linger, glow dimly, stuck in the back of her mind. Then she considers her father, who might be already awake, even timezones away. But could I even tell him anything, about this, or at all?

Starting walking again, she passes a cordoned-off lot where constructions been on for forever. Under a tree she attains some reprieve, as the rain’s setting in now, and she’s getting cold. She pulls from her pocket her cell-phone – the battery’s on its last legs, so it seems, but enough – and goes through the record of calls she’s received. Christopher’s not in her contacts, but no one’s called since those two nights ago, so he’s right there. It’s a bad idea, but June’s got no good ones – not now, and alas, this one keeps bouncing back. She sighs, and makes the call.

It rings three times; a truck roars by through half-mist peppered rain, and, center-stage, turns off and down towards the boardwalk and marina. The ringing stops, and June’s not shocked, or even disappointed after all that he’d not picked up. She never caught his last name, and doesn’t know how he received her number. Not that it matters, she thinks, silently, and sighs aloud, walks the shallow uphill to the bus stop. This one’s just sheltered by the trees, and so not much, but plenty still for her to rest awhile, and think of home, so homesick, still quite cold.

Four years, four months, and four hours ago, with summer looming high and heavy overhead, Dana’s awake, and sitting an a folding blue lawn-chair indoors. Back to the only exit, half-content, she’s watching light cumuli wend on a lazy breeze a mazy path, sky washed-out azure, wall, in shade, off-grey. She knows that someone’s coming by – her new collaborator, with whom she’d agreed to meet here, given the pre-med student in the stage-right room’s known absence for the day. She has him slated in her mind as Topher, knowing that he doesn’t go by Chris with anyone. It’s not their first meeting, but it might as well be; it’s their first earnest foray together into the unknown.

When he knocks, it’s no surprise; she leaves her lukewarm coffee on the counter, gets the door. He’s taller than she is, but not by much – it’s evident in the way the doorway frames him standing there. They’ve planned this for days, a rendezvoux that she believes, for reasons she’s not sure of, yet, will be safe for both of them, for now.

She says hello, and invites him to come inside and frowns, suddenly aware her other chair is elsewhere. He pulls a notebook from his pocket, small, black, leather-bound and closed; he’d mentioned, in conversations prior, that he’s kept a hardcopy record of all that he’s seen that’s out of line. It’s not the most reliable technique, but it’s the easiest, and one she’s used herself from time-to-time. Second only to accounting for each passing day and hour mentally, it’s saved her more time than aught else.

She invites her to the bedroom, where she’s not fully moved in; the air-mattress is uninflated, and folded in the far corner, while her backpack, buttoned shut, lies in the center of the carpet in the all-but-empty room. Sun pours down like gasoline over the whole doomed scene – who knew a lovely afternoon could seem so volatile?

“Did you notice anything when you were on your way here?” Dana asks, trying not to say more out loud than is strictly required.

He nods, once, sharp and nervous and then passes her the notebook, opened to the fourth and fifth pages, each page prior dog-eared. She takes it, and looks over all his entries, at the handwriting – which is, at least, for the time being, basically intact.

“A man was walking down the hill at 13thAvenue,” the entry reads, “when I witnessed him vanish, apparently spontaneously. There weren’t any forerunning signs – no lights, no hidden messages – although the sun obscured his face, so it was hard to tell.”

The entry’s simple, though not time-stamped, nor as clinical in tone as Dana tends to be, for her own confidence. She shakes her head, and tells him that she’s glad he let her know; they both feel bad for a while wondering where he might’ve gone. The mutual contrition is unspoken; they both wish that they might’ve given warning, might have told him not to go. But, not knowing, yet, enough about what causes these they only hope he gets back safely. It’s been done, though not by many, nor more than the once.

It’s her suspicion, privately, that what it is that’s causing these phenomena – the vanishings, the lights – is somehow learning – picking up on the behavior of those in its domain. She knows it sounds far-fetched, perhaps paranoid, even, but given the circumstances, she feels she’s earned some small measure of paranoia. It helps, in some strange way, to reckon she’s got some more information, if only conjectured; her theory’s a handhold upon the sheer rock wall she’s facing, an anchor near shore in the face of the oncoming storm.

#silcrow-story #06

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silcrow-story · 3 years

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A Child's Moon I

05. Mezzanine

Nadia wakes up. She’s in bed, and she’s still tired; this, in itself, is not an uncommon occurrence. She tries to remember what she was dreaming about – it was vivid, and intense, of that much she’s sure – but the individual frames seem to slip through her fingers into the ether as her waking mind resumes its reign.

She remembers the day and evening prior, for the most part; she remembers June, and the notebook, and their excursion to the Arboretum. She remembers her disappointment at having found nothing and no-one there, but more prominent in her recollection than that disappointment is the conversation she’d had with June, and how she’d enjoyed it. It had broken the tension that had hung hitherto in the twilit air; it had been a distraction, some slight but not insignificant release from the anxious malaise that had plagued that long, long day.

She has to get to work, she remembers; she’s glad she woke up early. It’s still dark outside. She’d taken a shower the night before, when she, at last, got home. She wasn’t sure where her roommate was – it didn’t seem like she’d come back last night, though Nadia recalls her leaving around the same time she and June had. The thought doesn’t preoccupy her long, though; she crosses the room in the dark, and doesn’t turn on the overhead light, but instead goes to stare at that great mirror in the dark, for a short while. She does this often, on dark mornings, before turning on the smaller lights above it; by night and even early eventide, the thing seems terrible, but on mornings such as these there is some comfort in its darkened depth.

After some few moments’ meditative gazing, she does flip the light-switch, closing her eyes just long enough to avoid the light’s coming on too suddenly. She splashes her face with water, cool but not really cold, and runs a mental inventory, charts her day’s provisional course.

She’s working a morning shift at the convenience store, which store’s conveniently located no more than three or four blocks southeast of where she’s presently standing. It’s been a while since she moved here, since she got the job, since she settled into the routine and learned the lay of the land. She actually remembers how to pronounce the street names right, now, but she still hasn’t really unpacked. If you were to ask her, she’d probably have trouble giving you a straight answer – not because she’s got anything to hide, but because she doesn’t really know the truth of it herself. Looking at the boxes that line the walls has become as much a part of her lifestyle as the seven-minute commute to the Quik-Stop, or the three short diagonals from her bed to her apartment door. “I never really felt the need to,” she’d say, after a long pause, and she’d mean it, for the most part.

She traverses those three diagonals – carpet, shoes, linoleum – skin, air, metal, air again – and steps out into the morning. Her phone’s buzzing in her pocket, but she doesn’t check it just yet – she’s busy looking out from the top of the stairwell, over the railing and the parking lot and the rooftops of the immediately adjacent block of student housing, to see that it’s civil twilight, and it’s raining again. It was raining yesterday morning, too, she remembers, smiling. She doesn’t mind the rain, sometimes. It doesn’t rain as much as she’d expected it to, before she arrived in the city, but when it does it tends to be comforting, and soft.

The rain in autumn had been less frequent, but more intense for it; now that spring has arrived, it seems the rain’s release has been attenuated. She doesn’t take an umbrella or a rain-coat, but she pauses briefly beneath the eave to pay some heed to her phone’s insistent vibration.

Nadia’s phone’s too bright in the pre-dawn dim; the digital clock reads 06:06. The cool morning air has ameliorated, in some small way, the weariness that lingers about her in the wake of yesterday’s intensity. She notices that she’s got quite a few text messages from June – has she been up all night? she wonders, but she doesn’t hold onto the thought for long, nor does she open the messages. She has to get to work by 0630, and she’s still not entirely up to attempting to process all that’s happened in the past thirty-six hours.

And so she goes, down the stairs and into the rain, letting the little drops alight on her hair and the well-worn black t-shirt in which she woke up. There’s a light breeze blowing from the west; the wind is at her back, and she knows it, and for now, at least, the thought comforts her.

Elsewhere, a curtain stirs, but does not rise. The theater is empty; the house lights unlit, but the footlights radiant, limning the crimson cloth that its tints and shades seem variegated in its stirring. There is a slow, almost subliminal sound, somewhere between a hum and a roar emanating within in the walls, from behind the curtain, from behind the camera. The emanation is half-animal, half-mechanical; the breathing of some great beast, the purr of some great engine, somehow synthesized to form some greater, stranger thing, inchoate but growing.

Then there are the footsteps, gentle and padded, stocking-feet; a familiar figure is stalking the aisles, approaching, though slowly, the stage. They go in shadow, their shape out of focus, and though, were you there, you might recognise them by their shape and manner, you could not make out their face.

In some short time they reach the stage, and with but a step or two they’re on the stage, standing there, not especially tall but thin, and sharp, and angular, their features now limned from below by the footlights’ searing brilliance. Dark and red-rimmed, their eyes dart about so as to surveil the absent audience; the figure is basking in the grandeur of this place and the sound suffusing it.

And then, for the first time, they speak, in a voice that creaks for lack of use, but bears nonetheless an air of confidence, and more than that – authority, and sovereignty. Two words, audible even over the ambient reverberation –

“I’ve arrived.”

– and they don’t echo, but they hang in the air, their presence remembered, somehow, by the theatre’s atmosphere.

It’s here that the image begins to blur, and dim, and break up – a darkness spreading out like rot to, in mere seconds, wholly occlude the scene. That’s all we can see here; the rest is indeterminate. The sound, however, lingers more lately, and even as we depart it persists, persists, and grows.

Some seven hours prior, and somewhere familiar, Christopher staggers downhill, blind-drunk. A backpack’s slung over his shoulder haphazardly; the strap’s far to small for his shoulders, and so is his coat. The streetlight here’s cold and fluorescent, and he doesn’t like it; at this state of consciousness, however, that dislike manifests less as a cogent preference on which he might act, and more as some vague discomfort he’ll leave unaddressed.

He pulls from his pocket a cigarette packet; the lucky’s the only one left. He shakes his head – you could tell, were you there, he’d been crying – and his hair’s a mess, not that long, but shaggy, with not-quite-blond flyaways turned silver-white as they flutter and catch the lamp’s glow.

He’s lighting the smoke, and glancing erratically, over the parking lots peppered with vehicles, the beautiful tree-line, the ugly, half-pristine, half-battered old parkway. He doesn’t look at the campus behind him; he wouldn’t, indeed, were he sober and steady, and as he is now he’d not even consider it. For a moment – a brief one, but a moment still – he’s inebriated enough to half-smile, and look at the sky, as if he might find someone there. He just sees the clouds; the moon is all occluded, and but a dim glow through their total embrace. Not that I’d want to see the stars anyways, he thinks, and lets that thought linger awhile inside him.

Christopher Clark is not half a coward, but nor is he nearly as brave as he’d like to seem – to Dana, wherever she is, or the new recruits, or to his two housemates. His father’s called him brave, and back in school, a couple acquaintances whose names escape him did too. Their words ring so hollow and brittle in his psyche now, as they slip between thoughts of sleep and of hatred, of nausea, love – whatever that is, and of sex, and of self-injury. In the past, Topher’s taken slight, vain pride in having the fewer bad habits, compared to his...colleague, his friend, his...associate. He’s got no pride now, though, though shame’s not there either – both self-referred sentiments total-eclipsed, by sorrow so heavy it starts to feel fearful, a dull heavy psychical ache he’ll sure somatise, should he allow it to linger too long.

The dart’s at its filter, when his gaze darts downward, once more to examine his shoes and their state. There’s a hole in the toe of his right black trainer, its shoelaces missing their aglets and frayed at the ends; they come untied often, and must’ve once more as he walked half-insensate from his house hence. He’s not about to bother to tie them now; he lets the butt burn his fingers and pockets it, shakes his head once more, and falls to the ground.

It’s not a real fall – he’s sobering up fast, he thinks – he just kneels down on purpose, by need; the movement’s compulsory, but not involuntary. He doesn’t start crying again – he’s dehydrated, for one, and past entertaining the prospect of ruminating upon the evening’s events. There’s an American flag hanging limply behind him, at half-mast; for what bitter cause, he could not know or care. A breeze blows, and it smells vernal, germinal and heady but not dank, and though it’s soft, to Christopher it’s harsh as anything, abrasive as the concrete where he kneels, and dimly hopes no-one can see him shudder there, a mirror to the flaccid flag behind him which, spurred by the wind, just twitches like a half-dead wren, or mouse, or like small thing.

He’s just going to wait there a while. That’s his plan, anyhow.

June’s not sleeping either, at present, though she’s not upset. She’s been home for two or three hours, and she’s far more comfortable than she’d expected to, by any stretch, be at this point. The evening went fine, and that notion strikes her as, in its own right, a pleasant surprise, and almost too good to be true. She’s not typically one to employ those stock phrases – too good to be true, and such-like, but here it seems almost obligatory.

Having been, the night prior, thrust into some scavenger hunt, by a man she’d not met, and to whom she’d not spoken before, tonight, to June, seemed some anti-climax; a relief, by and large, but beneath that layer-ablative a volatile, delicate peace. The relief June is feeling, she reasons, can’t possibly be relief proper, per-se, bona-fides, genuine; it feels more akin to the calm that precedes some catastrophe, and feelings don’t lie. Not to me, anyways, she reminds herself, but what a bitter, bleak pessimist’s reason this is.

June Gallagher would prefer not to be, young as she yet is, of the sort who ensconce themselves in superstitions, statistics, or loathe as she is to admit it, the sort of intuited reticence to which she’s all her life been inclined. She tries to fight her tendency to sequestration with a steady stream of actions and reactions – devotion to her studies, to impressing and so proving herself to her mother, or her father’s ghost, or, for a semester or a few months-odd, some professor, or passing crush from class or the café she frequents when she’s got to write. It’s why, she now reflects, half-startled at her train-of-thought’s direction, it’s why I took that call from Christopher, and picked up that little notebook at the dead-drop, and the rest.

She decides she needs something else to occupy her mind, reclining in her bed, mired in thoughts. Every day is a lot to take in; so much new information’s always arrayed in a battery, right outside her front door when she disembarks from the lifeboat her bedroom’s become. Flipping open her laptop, she closes her eyes, for a moment or so. Images from a dream – not a recent one, either – come to her hazy, imperfect, translucent, to dissipate swiftly as they had arrived. When she opens her eyes, the screen’s bright, but she looks at it as it displays a word processor’s page. The text thereon is too blurry for us to make out from here, but it’s a paragraph, stacked on another – the scaffolding surrounding some skyscraper’s unfinished floor. June’s writing a mezzanine, then, one might say, neither setting a capstone nor breaking new ground, but nonetheless furnishing some needful function.

As she returns to the task; hunching over the keyboard, too preoccupied for sleep, she lets herself disappear in the words. An hour goes by that she’s at it, when alas, lack of sleep and stray thoughts win out her commitment to stating the case she decided to make perhaps a week ago, half-arbitrarily. It’s not that it’s not interesting – it’s just not compelling, not compared to what all else’s been on her mind, and that makes all the necessary difference. It’s one thing for one’s attention to be held, to be for some time gently engaged, and another altogether for that attention to be seized and bound. There’s something just so fascinating about last night’s events, to June – the absence of anything plainly significant there at the lookout is self-significating, the anticlimax of its negative space like a hunger for content. She’s rather liable to become tangled in such semantic quandaries as these, and this one’s so concrete and neatly presented that she can’t resist ruminating upon it at length.

It’s a story she wants more than aught else, a narrative into which she might slip, and be secured so from all of life’s headwinds. Though she’s, in the past, thought herself a protagonist, or reckoned at least that she might try to be,in years since she’s lain off all of those aspirations, let alone pretensions alike. Now that she’s left her home to alight in this lifeboat, she’s content or all-but-that to simply search for some speaking part in some greater, significant thing. That, she supposes, when she’s on this train of thought, would be...if not satisfying, then at least steadying. And maybe this time, she thinks, as she has times before, maybe this time I’ve found it.

It’s irrational, maybe, she hears as a judgement, soft and insistent from behind her mind; but it’s...like hope, in its abstruse way, she decides, and dismisses it so out-of-hand. It’ll come back to her soon, as she knows, and as all judgements do given time and neglect; but for now it leaves her alone, lets her eyelids sink, and she subsides into sleep.

Down by the side of a two-lane road somewhere else, a muggy, cloudless July afternoon’s viscous atmosphere’s perforated by flies – several score but not more than a gross, give or take – in their orbits irregular about some thing, some dead thing that lived here until recently. You’d only notice the flies if you looked close, but you would, probably; there’s a smell, neccessarily, hung in the hot air such as would tend to draw eyes to its source. The animal’s broken, likely by a motorist; we didn’t see it hit, but one might well assume. There’s no-one outside, at the moment, that we can see; it’s quiet, pre-rush-hour, and traffic is slow.

There’s a sign for a bus stop, but there’s no bus shelter; just a small wooden bench, painted with vibrant acrylics since faded and cracked, and the soft wood beneath well-worn by the weather down here. The creature’s remains are right there beside it, stage right – were we to move closer, we’d see that it’s an armadillo, or was once at least. There’s green all around, excepting the road, and the washed-out blue sky that envelops the scene, from whence a sick yellow sun assails, unremitting, the Earth.

This area’s plagued by kudzu, and heavily; it’s ubiquitous and unmistakable, if you’re acquainted with its look and bearing. Its vines colonise and envelop the volunteer trees, invade the cement of the median, wrap telephone poles, and threaten to approach the derelict laundromat just past the light. Its reign is untrammeled, and stubborn as heat and humidity, here – and just like that weather, it may seem at first an innocent thing, before its pervasion reveals its insidious breadth. It can’t hurt you, though, at least not directly; you’re not its victim, not of its domain. You and I are just observers, and we won’t linger here long – there isn’t, after all, anyone we know around.

Meanwhile, just past the archival library, Nadia’s walking to pick up her shift; it’s much cooler here, and the air, suffused now with a rising mist, shot through still with a falling rain, feels that much cleaner than that we were breathing before. She’s got time to spare, as was her intention, and as is her habit when leaving for work; she prefers to walk slowly, and enjoy the morning’s cool quiet awhile. Observing the atmosphere wake by degrees – the firmament’s lightening, to show the clouds swiftly flutter, their tints variegate – she contemplates checking her phone one more time. What’s on June’s mind right now? she thinks, unexpectedly. I suppose if I wanted to, I could find out; she’s clearly got something to tell me.

Nadia doesn’t, though – doesn’t find out, or nor pursue the thought further, as she proceeds east-southeast down the sidewalk, which sidewalk runs parallel to a thin street; it’s two lanes of blacktop, right off of the parkway. She can’t quite recall, at the moment, its name, though it’s on the tip of her tongue, and she’s trying. It took long enough for her to convince herself that she was used to the lay of the land; moments like these tend to frustrate her some.

Still, in a couple of minutes she’s there, having made the last turn and walked the last block’s shallow uphill incline; she stands before the Quik-Stop’s two brick stories and looks up, and the camera follows her gaze; first the graffito on the face she’s facing, which has been there for as long as she has – then, the second story, with its shuttered thick-glass windows, about which story’s content she knows next to nothing – and finally, straight overhead, into the rain, to see that civil twilight’s half-desaturated blues have warmed and brightened, burnt by the sun’s approach albeit mediated yet by nimbostrati.

She briefly wonders if the moon’s still out, and if the sun’s full-risen yet, and then stops thinking, and goes to the door. It’s been unlocked at some point; she assumes her manager is in, and steps inside. The air is of course different, drier, stuffier, and laden with a scent familiar but hard to fully name. It’s half the incense, unburnt, lined up in little boxes on the shelf on the far side of the interior – the rest of it some compound of the old building’s ambient mustiness, thin black coffee from the back office, and the shelves’ sundry wares’ assortment.

Nadia sighs as the glass door swings closed slow behind her, and presses her hand to her pocket to check – not for her phone, which is silent for now, at least – but just in case there’s something she forgot. he hasn’t forgotten anything, she knows, but still there’s an absence perceptible there – a negative space which she remains aware of even as she clocks in, prepares to open shop. Letting her body’s memory carry her through the half-hour before the doors open, her mind’s left to wander unhindered for a time.

As is often the case in such moments of relative quiet, her thoughts start to turn, within minutes, reflexive – she asks herself why her thoughts’ve been scattered, and her thoughts reply in some scatter-shot phrases – it’s spring now, she thinks, and perhaps it’s the rain, or something to do with the moon and the stars…

She knew someone once who would say that, that last part, and mean it; she doesn’t, entirely, even in thinking it – the language and sentiment are not her own. I’m probably just hung up, still, on yesterday, she course-corrects, checking the register, checking herself. She presses her palms to the laminate countertop, so as to anchor herself, find some grounding – then, seven o’clock, goes to turn on the sign indicating they’re open for business once more. In so doing she notices, through the glass door, that the rain’s falling steady again, but no harder – the clouds having healed in the half-hour past, and the daylight, though brighter, having lost its warmth. With dawn’s passage, the morning’s sprung back to its prior state, grey and ambivalent, and quieter.

The earliest regular customers aren’t in on time, and so Nadia Novak’s de facto alone for a short while, tending to busywork, watching the rain, and hearing its patter speed and slow by turns. It’s oddly somnolent, despite the cool air’s always verging on cold, and the clinical cast over the overhead fluorescent lights.

It’s an empty morning, and it feels unfinished – suspended, temporarily. Hesitant and waiting, like so many of us are, for some structure to emerge from the dim distance.

#silcrow-story

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silcrow-story · 3 years

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A Child's Moon III

07. The Trust from Those You Love

It’s a gloomy day, but it’s not yet raining, at an outlet mall squatting in near isolation among the deciduous old-growth-wreathed hills of the region. The shops aren’t yet open, but there’s a Greyhound line that stops here, connects the small towns to the fewer and farther-spaced cities. It's early in autumn, but late in September; the trees are just turning, and by midday it'll be warmer.

A bus pulls on in, right on time, just like clockwork, and a stranger disembarks, looking quite nervous - as if they're not sure why they came here, or where they are, or what to do. A sky white as bleached bone arcs over the the bleak parking lot and its various greys; as the bus departs some cavalcade of small birds scatter up from their gathering, out across its breadth to stain.

The stranger is pacing; she's waiting for the next bus, and predicting an uncertain future. Looking past glasses at the middle distance, hands in her pockets, she feels a sense of malaise wander into the atmosphere, borne on the breeze. Should I even stay here, she wonders, to catch the next bus, try to get to the show?

It's then that she notices something reflected, glimmering in a darkened windowpane.A little mote of light, no bigger by much than a candle's flame, moving almost volitionally among the glass, and then - in no longer than the moment it takes for our stranger to notice it - multiplying. It divides by phases like a cell, until it's less a glimmer and more a cluster, a luminous brocade - something fascinating. They don't leave the glass, though, as she continues watching - intrigued but not awestruck. It's nothing unnatural; it's just a neat trick of the light.

In the stranger's pocket there's an electric lighter, a cheap flip-phone, and about twenty dollars. She's facing east, and she thinks that's where she wants to go. The silence becomes meditative, and then hypnogogic, and when the bus arrives, a moment or perhaps an hour later, it doesn't look quite right. She gets on anyways, though, and the little glimmers of light are still on her mind as she puts her ticket in the machine, and does a cursory look over her fellow passengers. There wasn't anyone else at the stop, but there're a few folks now onboard already, most all of them looking just short of awake.

As the bus starts moving, the outside world blooms, to a pattern of green and grey, marbled and indistinct. The clouds start to break after mere minutes on the road, and it's cold inside the bus, and the passenger our camera's following notices that among the patches of blue in the sky, she can still see the moon. It's just a first quarter, and almost translucent, against the blue sky that it's set in from here, but she tries to watch it as they go along in a silence that barely contrasts the enveloping sound of the traffic.

A child's moon, she thinks. That's what her mom called it, when it shone bright enough to still be seen even once the sun's up. She was never sure why - never gave it much thought - but the phrase stuck around nonetheless in her memory. Maybe it's a sign of something, she thinks lazily. It's not as bright as the lights on the windowpane had been, nor fascinating - just a passing thought.

Then, something ominous happens, as so often does in the liminal zone that all highways can be. The stranger notices outside the windows the world beyond them come into sharp focus, as though the bus stopped - but it hasn't, not yet. Still, the leaves on the trees are now clear-defined, and there are buildings - what city are we passing through? She thinks, quizzically. The sound of the road is not gone, but it's changing, too - no more grey noise, but now something with tone - a hum, not a hush or a roar, so to speak. Nervously, she looks around - and to her dismay, she can't see anyone there but herself.

Did I fall asleep? She first asks herself, trying to keep calm, and to adjust swiftly to these new sensations. She doesn't remember doing so - sleeping - but reckons it's not at all beyond the realm of possibility. It's a little unsettling, though. The way that the sound all around her grows louder even as the view outside becomes the more still is almost contradictory, almost perverse - it's nothing she's noticed before.

When the bus falls away and she realizes that she's not sitting inside it, but rather alone on a bench by a trail in the woods, she finally decides that she's become properly lost. She hasn't been high, or hallucinating - she knows that feeling too well, and she hasn't lost time, either, judging by what her phone shows. It's harder not to panic now, now that things are absurd - or more flagrantly so than is typical, anyhow. Boughs hang above her so high and coniferous that, from below, they resemble a web, or a net - their wood matrix apparently complete, not easy to leave. She tries to ask the bus driver for help, but he isn't there; she knows this, but just figures it couldn't hurt.

Rising to her feet, she feels just a little lightheaded. The question of who she should call for help crosses her mind as she notes the trail's two directions. Thankfully it's well-trodden and doesn't branch off - the woods here are vaguely familiar, but she's still lost insofar as she doesn't know where she should go. It's rained since before- at least, here it has, as the leaves and loam that line the floor are saturated, and stray drops that lingered in the upper canopy intermittently come down in delayed showers from above.

Unpacking boxes on the floor, Nadia has yet to find the novel she had meant to loan her friend. She's been at it for an hour when she musters up the wherewithal to look at her phone. June's sent her about a dozen messages, and none of it makes much sense, but she tries to sort out what it all means, even so, as she reads.

They're nothing like what she'd discussed with June the night before; that conversation had been simple, sweet, and a welcome distraction from the whole strange business of the notebook. June says that they'd met Christopher and Dana there; that Dana had "vanished mysteriously after some other guy arrived," that there were "white lights, flying around, like something out of a movie," and none of this makes any sense at all.

She's sure how to react, let alone respond; June had seemed, perhaps, neurotic, but this was something else. Has she been put up to this? She thinks. Maybe she's in on all of this, with Christopher. Maybe it's just, like, a prank. Just an extremely misguided attempt to get me shaken up. Or who knows? Maybe June's just crazy. I've seen worse than this, after all.

But something about it all strikes her as odd. Dana's been out a bit longer than usual, she thinks, without wanting or meaning to. But that doesn't mean that she's "vanished" or whatnot. That's ludicrous.

She responds, after several minutes of pacing the first diagonal from her bed to the lightswitch, with a simple "wtf". She figures that that ought to cover it.

Losing things and becoming lost have a few things in common. They're both an unexpected and often sudden absence - in one case, of a physical artefact, and in the other, of information and sentiment - the knowledge and experience of one's own orientation. But nothing's really absent, after all. Just transposed, or transformed, or occluded - perhaps difficult to locate or changed beyond recognition, but still out there somewhere, in some form. Maybe when we get lost, in wandering and wondering, our sense of security and knowledge of our whereabouts is present in some other mind. Maybe when we lose ourselves, we're elsewhere.

"Do you think they're dead?" Christopher asks, about three years ago and seemingly out of the blue, at the time.

Dana says no, she supposes they're just somewhere else, and the two of them let that note hang in the air.It's the middle of summer, and it's a bit hot out; the sunlight is golden and green through the leaves.They're not making eye contact, just standing there - awkwardly, but half-comfortable with it, given the circumstances.

They're down by the water, at a bus stop that looks out over the bay. It's been well over a year now that they've been at the strange work of uncovering signs that emerge from the city, like flotsam washed up on the shore in the wake of a shipwreck. They've seen more disapperances, both of them - once even someone they knew. But they've seen things beyond just that at as well - seen places and events that would not long ago have seemed entirely alien to their minds.

There was one point at which a whole street seemed to mutate, looped back on itself like a Mobius strip.They hadn't realised until the third time around; for each moment they spent walking, the path appeared asymptotically close to arriving...somewhere, or changing direction, but it never happened. They'd had to retrace their steps back to the start, watching carefully the whole time lest the road beneath them reverse course again.In another part of town, the sidewalk's slabs began falling away beneath them like so many steps on an escalator, leading seemingly infinitely downward. The distortion only ceased when they reached the bottom, some several kilometers from where they'd intended to be.

The worst encounters were the strangest, and the least frequent - beings that seemed to be part of the world, not unwitting participants like the citizenry at large, but outgrowths of the atmosphere somehow. People who'd loiter about, half-invisible - but never itinerant, never adrift; always at some kind of appointment, some kind of meeting with no-one. You couldn't talk to them for long. before they'd fade away and leave you standing God-knows-where.

It seems to resist investigation, whatever it is that has taken hold here; it has made it clear that it would prefer not to be known or seen.The signs it leaves aren't deliberate clues; they're just accidental, easy to miss - and people who do see them tend to get lost, get distracted, eventually forget - or worse. The symbols hint at words, but never make their meaning clear - every piece the investigators have uncovered feels like a sentence left hanging before the full stop.

June receives Nadia's text well before she gets home, but doesn't stop to read it until she's indoors, and out of the now-steady rain. She's surprised, when she does, surprised and suddenly desperate - overcome with a feeling of lack of direction.

I didn't write these messages, she thinks. She's just as unsettled as Nadia had been, reading them for the first time. Dana disappeared? We met with Christopher? None of this even happened!

She rubs her temples, frustrated and confused.Briefly, she wishes she hadn't gotten into all of this to begin with - the sentiment doesn't stick for long, though. This is a narrative, and she knows it, knows - or at least hopes - that she's become a part of something bigger. And so she decides not to tap out a message, to send no lame attempt at claiming that she doesn't get it. Instead, she just calls Nadia - doesn't wait to consider it twice, doesn't hesitate - and hopes and prays someone answers this time.

Inside that old theatre now, the house lights are on and the camera's stuck on its side. No one is here behind it but us, and the noise has died out, and the stage overflowing with negative space. Are you thinking about leaving? Do you wonder why you're here? Does it frustrate you that you're stuck watching nothing?

You might or might not answer, if I could only just ask you - but I can't, I'm no participant like that. I can only speculate that you are, perhaps, bored - that, or hesitant, suspicious, or such-like. This is understandable - this place is somewhere to move on from. It's an entry-point of sorts, an orifice, a threshold - you're not supposed to stay here long at all. When spring begins, it tends to hesitate, falter a time or two before it's really on its feet and running like a child at the future, at its death. Those moments of hesitance are crucial, though, whether they're, to you, contemplative or only lazy and half-in, half-out and so forth. The point is spring's not in full-swing yet; the question's "Would you like for it to be?"

When Nadia was dreaming, not too long ago, she ran, through a rain-slick street and in the summertime. She wonders, lying on her floor right now, if she would rather be there now than here - younger, and exhilarated, bolder, rapt and fascinated, in a real storm, not just this grey day. The girl in the dream wasn't her, though, she knows - it's not her memories from whence that idyll has sprung. Dreams in first-person aren't necessarily dreams of oneself - they're just shifts of perspective, paradigms borrowed and images glimpsed through a keyhole or crack in the wall. They're rarely revisited, alas, at least in her experience of such warm, pleasant dreams - it's just the nightmares that stay more than one night, just the stress-dreams that haunt regular, persistently.

Now the phone's buzzing, face down on the floor, and she's reaching for it, the novel she sought since she got home from work right in front of her, finally found.. It's June, and she knows it before she picks up, by the pit in her stomach and the hush of traffic and rain- when she answers, the girl's voice is frantic, and Nadia sighs in confusion, regret, and fatigue.

"Hey! I'm so sorry, I just read those messages - the ones I sent you, I mean - not yours - and - well, I don't know quite how I should say this. I can't remember sending them."

Nadia's now quite acutely aware of her heartbeat and her breath's light rhythm. Preparing herself, mentally, to respond, she decides - just by impulse - to believe her new friend's first claim. Something in her can't believe that June's kidding now, not with the strangeness of all of last night. So she holds the phone tight, and says "Tell me more."

June goes on - "I'm saying I know I sent messages, Nadia, but these aren't the ones that I sent. At least, not as I recall. Before I went to text you back, I'd just thought that I'd share some more thoughts on what you'd said last night, about-"She cuts herself off mid-sentence. About what?

Not waiting long for her continue, and anxious, Nadia asks, "About what?"

"Come to think of it, I can't remember that either," June says, rather more distressed in her realising this."What do you recall of last night?"

"Talking to you," Nadia replies, somewhat hesitantly. "About...what the deal with the notebook might be? About who the fuck this 'Christopher' might be? And...about an essay you were writing. Something about historiography...it's all kind of fuzzy though...hey. What about Dana?"

"Your roommate? I wouldn't know. You don't think she actually-"

"-'vanished amidst a swarm of floating lights'? I mean, no, but..." Nadia almost trails off before continuing, "...but she's not been back since she left last night."

"Oh."

"Yeah."

There's a bit of a pause, then. It's not a believable notion, of course, that Dana had disappeared last night. After all, neither of them actually remember it.The pause goes on at some length, and in the theater I'm picking up the camera, folding the tripod, walking out to the lobby - past the concession stands, to the front door. I'm headed elsewhere; you might come with me. Some will, and some won't, I imagine.

The light's a bit blinding, and hard to adjust to; you might close your eyes for a moment or two. By the time they're open once more, the conversation by telephone between our protagonists will have resumed - and in earnest, begun. They're going looking, now - no more wholly blind to the strangeness that's haunting this place, this, their home.

I want to hope things will turn out okay, in the end - whatever an "ending" might actually be. I want to hope, as so many do, that there's no-one so desperate as to not be saved. I want to hope, and I want to believe; but in truth the decision just hasn't been made.

Dana's not quite midway through her natural life, but nonetheless she's found herself within a dark forest, having altogether lost the path ahead. She wasn't sure how she got here - that's how it goes, in such scenes as these - but she has an inkling; that is to say, she knew the risks. High pines list above her, and there's no-one else in sight; it just rained her, and she can smell it; this is some comfort, however slight.

She recalls, unprompted, two years, six months, and four days ago, a conversation she'd had with a colleague, a woman about her own age. She asked her new recruit if she trusted her, not long post-introductions; the girl said unhesitantly that she did. Dana wonders, now, if she's here somewhere with her. It's a senseless question perhaps - no-one who's gone in this deep has returned to the waking world. She herself won't, and she knows it; the knowledge rests heavy underneath her skull, suffuses the negative space. There's no way out, she thinks, and doesn't panic yet; this lack of panic comes, to her, as a surprise.

There are no lights about; no lookout, arboretum, nor Nadia nor Christopher nor June. That's to be expected, based on experience, anyhow; the landscape can change at the will of whatever - whomever? - has made this corner of the Earth so hungry, so cavitated, so on. Pine cones and pine straw on the ground - a few scattered oak leaves near large as her face - sundry dead branches, snapped from their boughs: these details she notes before she starts to move. They might be important, or so she supposes; in any case, it couldn't hurt to keep them for now in her mind.

Her memory's intact, at least, by now; it's healed, and her technique has helped. She'd be proud of that were she not all preoccupied with the main quandary at hand - that is, that she is lost and well within the belly of the beast she's fought for years, and her old anchors have been cut away - the pills, the telephone, the bag itself, and even that old notebook are all gone. She's all alone, and the sky's big; a child's moon adorns it, the pale jewel upon the brooch which pins the firmament a cloak about the shoulders of the world.

A child's moon, she thinks, in question - where have I heard that phrase before, that it should come to mind?

She thinks about the chair - not the one before the window outside her old bedroom door, but its twin, missing now since she'd been in high school. She gave it to a man whose face she cannot now, despite her level best attempts, call to mind; he never have a name, or if he did, he never gave it her, but she recalls his voice. They'd met in a different city before he had left for good for anywhere but there, and they'd then shared the occasional casual dialogue in sunlit early autumn evenings before sunset grew to early to sustain. Is he somewhere like this, now? She wonders, and hopes not. It's better than death, probably, but it's worse than most all else. Without evidence or contact, with no voice nor crutch nor way, all that's left to whosoever gets lost, and real lost like this, is hopeless hope - the will to improvise.

Scanning the ground for a clue or a miracle, she finds a lighter instead. It's a dull and half-dark shade of red, and she strikes it to find it still works, despite the recent rain. The little flame contrasts orange, sharply, with the desaturation of the wood, the sky, of Dana's own unsteady hand clenched tight. It's only there for some sixty frames, for one long blink of the eyes, but it's there and therefor for a moment, there's a human factor present in this place that seemed so empty prior. Dana decides to trust it, to so keep it in her pocket for safekeeping; then she picks a direction, takes aim for the west, and the sun, more or less, at her back, she moves on.

A harsh wind stirs the boughs' matrix organic overhead, and for a moment if you squinted you might see the upper trees as threads upon a loom, strings on an instrument, or grass, or seaweed, or any number of less steady things; they twine, and they bend, and the camera gets lost in them - or nearly, but for a strategic retreat. We're leaving for now, leaving this place alone, but I've some suspicion we'll come back around. Everything does, in its time.

#silcrow-story

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silcrow-story · 3 years

Text

Salvage I

Winter’s End

Like an outstretched hand, a branch, trembling, cuts across the sky. The sky is lightening, by degrees; it is not yet civil twilight. A few meters away a streetlight shines on -weary, warm and incandescent. The branch is not yet budding, nor is it dead. It’s only waiting. Three figures step into the frame, hooded, small, and vaguely furtive, soldiers in the retreat. None of them look up at the branch as it reaches yet – none of them pause, though their gait is uneven, their pace slow. There’s only a little snow left on the ground, now – grey and grimy, shot through with the remnants of last autumn’s fallen leaves. It will begin to melt again, come sunrise, and should the clouds break it may sink away entirely. The figures turn the corner of a brick facade, its windows closed and lightless, and exit the frame, slipping into the waiting wings until even the soft crunch of their footfalls is consumed by the bone-grey silence that surrounds this place.

After a long moment, Nadia takes a few steps forward, past the streetlight, past the radius of its glow,, towards that corner and the alley beyond. In turning – mid-stride – she is interrupted by a sound. Someone’s approaching, and instinctively, she reverses course, turns again to face the footfalls and their source, glances up…. There is a flicker of recognition, then – it’s someone she knows, and then there is a flicker of the streetlight as it dies. The scene falls away, then, as a breaking wave, saturating sand and then subsiding.

Elsewhere, someone breaks a mirror, grazes their hand, draws blood, but doesn’t flinch – just shakes her head softly. Elsewhere still, a man in a coat far too small for his frame lights a cigarette, sighs, looks up at a streetlight as in anticipation of sunset it slowly begins to incandesce, like it was stirring from a deep sleep. Like it was dreaming. Nadia wakes up too suddenly for her comfort; the relative warmth and darkness descend like nausea, and she reaches for the window-frame in rising, her outstretched hand cutting across the sky in silhouette, and trembling.

It hasn’t been that long since winter began, Nadia thinks. It’s already over now, strictly speaking. It is a technical spring. The seasons have been turning so quickly that the planet has struggled to keep up. Or something like that.

Ir’s not all that hot, or that dark, really, but it takes Nadia several minutes to come to that realization. Her reflection isn’t really visible in the window anymore, for all the light pouring through, attenuated by the cloudcover, plentiful nonetheless. She’s wearing last night’s clothes, and makeup, and sense of having forgotten or misplaced something; for a moment, she contemplates looking for it – searching the carpet, perhaps, or the boxes stacked against the wall. Instead she closes her eyes for one more long moment, a few more shallow heart-beats, and tries not to think about blood, or mirrors. And just this once, it works.

There’s a knock at the door, which is unusual enough in its own right to pose a distraction. There can’t be that many people about at this hour, and Nadia certainly wasn’t expecting anyone. She walks from the corner of her room to the door at the far side, almost one straight diagonal; she doesn’t even notice the mirror, doesn’t even notice yet that she didn’t notice. That realisation would surely come soon enough, but for now Nadia is entirely preoccupied. The door to her room closes behind her, but doesn’t slam. The two meters of linoleum between her and the door to the apartment, too, pass unnoticed. She turns the handle – air, skin, metal – and it’s unlocked – air, again – and she pulls it open faster than she means to, and there’s someone waiting outside in the hall. It might even be someone she recognises.

A few hours earlier, it’s raining, and Nadia is asleep, and the rain is thin and steady, swept but not quite driven by the night breeze. Lights are on in a few of the windows in the brick building across the street, most a washed-out yellow, one a blur of red and blue approaching violet asymptotically, and the sidewalk and the bus shelter and the stairway railings are slick. There’s no snow on the ground, no-one out walking, the sounds of traffic itermittant and muted, but present, crucially, a reminder of life’s relentless procession even in the face of winter’s last rain and nighttime’s last stretch of full dark. Perhaps a quarter of a kilometer north-northeast of the camera there’s a man beneath a streetlight, which streetlight is fluorescing, spraying wavelengths colder than the air, colder even than morning sun through nimbostratus clouds, and the light is steady but the man isn’t. He’s shaking in his skin and squirming in a jacket that’s too tight at the shoulders, too thin to keep him warm, and he can’t seem to strike his lighter. If you were to walk up and ask him, he’d say he wasn’t tired, but he’d look it, and he wouldn’t look you in the eye. He wouldn’t mind your asking, though. He might even smile at the glistening sidewalk or mention that the moon’s waxing crescent. Not that it matters; the clouds that blanket the city tonight won’t break for some time yet.

The young woman in the doorway appears composed, albeit dazed; Nadia doesn’t recognise her after all. It took her a moment, though; perhaps she’s seen her face in passing, even if they’ve never met. In a moment she’ll say she’s June, and she has a question, if Nadia doesn’t mind; in that moment, Nadia looks past her at the blue-grey wall opposite the door she’s standing in, and then looks three meters or so to her right to note that it’s not raining, but it was raining not too long ago, and then – privately – hopes that it might start raining gain soon.

In a voice that’s very nearly breathless, June says, “I’m June; I have a question, if you don’t mind?” – her tone rising only slightly at the end there, as though she hasn’t finished the question – and then pauses expectantly, having finished the question.

Nadia’s not sure if she minds, yet, and has only just concluded that she doesn’t know June after all, and so it takes her the better part of a moment to reply “Hi – I don’t – I don’t mind. What’s up?”

It’s not quite midnight, and not quite spring; the lights of all the bayside buildings are sparkling like stars that have been by some cosmic lever yet unknown to physics been drawn apocalyptically close to Earth. The marina is functionally vacant as June marches the length of boardwalk between the street and the cement stair to a small stretch of sand, which verges into rock and pebble and seaweed as it approaches the water. As June approaches the water, she shivers slightly – comfortable in her coat, not so in the near dark. She’s determined, though, to come down here and be down here, although she can’t think about why that is for too long, so she doesn’t. The tide is high, the moon is bright – a sliver, only, but a bright one – and June sits in the sand and waits, and watches.

The waves, shallow but swift, lap at the stones. A car speeds by above, the whir of its tires entirely subsumed beneath the murmur of water and leaves in a second or two. June shivers again, considering leaving, considering why she bothered to come at all. It was, on the face of it, rather a bad idea, she thinks, her glances between the area upon which she’s focused and her peripheral vision taking on a slightly nystagmiform quality as the minutes flutter by. Maybe it was a bad idea; if you were to raise the question, she’d deny it, though. “If you knew, you’d understand,” she’d say.

June stands up, slowly, carefully, sneakers pressed into wet sand, and a stray moonbeam glimmers on the surface of a receding wave, and the wave recedes fully, and reveals the rocks and something left among them. It’d be hard to miss, really.

That wasn’t so bad, really, June thinks, walking faster now. She won’t realise for a few hours yet just how tired she is, but as she’s walking home, she’ll realise that the clouds have passed over the moon, and left the sky a muted matte of faintly marbled greys, and that more likely than not there’s rain on its way.

Christopher’s taken off his coat and collapsed in bed, dizzy, on the verge of tears. He was born twenty-three years, eleven months, twenty-nine days, and twenty-two hours ago, give or take, in a hospital not too far from where he’s lying right now. He is tired, and he’s entirely willing to admit that much, now, to anyone who’d listen. There’s an analogue clock propped up on the nightstand, and there’s no-one else home, and he can’t stand to hear it ticking, so he cranks up the song that’s playing on the MP3 player that he’s had for eleven years, eleven months, twenty-nine days, and eleven hours, give or take, miraculously working even now. He lets it blare out across the starless expanse that springs from his forehead and closes his eyes real tight as the singer says he’s tired, too, says he should be leaving, and then repeats himself for emphasis; before long, Christopher’s singing along despite himself. It’s a crescendo, restrained harmonies gradually subsumed by raucous brass and a marching beat, and he lets it repeat, and repeat, and repeat, as if for emphasis, its waveform swelling and subsiding like the Pacific.

Leaving’s easier said than done, though; this is a fact with which Christopher is intimately acquainted. It’s been a little while since he’s left anywhere, really. The way he sees it, places tend to leave him first – or at least, that’s what he’d say, if you were to ask him. Nobody’s ever asked him, but he knows that’s what he’d say. He wouldn’t say the rest, though, though he’d be thinking it – that maybe that’s why leaving is so hard after all, is that it’s all too easy to be left, all too easy to let the ground slip from beneath your feet like so much sand, all too easy to neglect what solid footing you’ve got ‘til it’s gone completely. That maybe that’s why he can’t leave, can’t let himself leave, can’t let himself let go. That maybe once you know what it feels llike to be a castaway, you never really forget it, and you cling to any available surface ‘til something makes you let it go, maybe. But he wouldn’t say that part.

“I think I found something of yours. I wasn’t sure, so I wanted to…”

June trails off, fumbling in her coat pocket.

Blinking once, then twice, Nadia takes a moment to actually look at her. Her face was vaguely familiar at first, but the longer Nadia looks, the less certain she becomes that she’s ever seen the person standing in front of her. Her coat is long and black, and seems to be missing a few buttons; her t-shirt is torn at the hem. It’s her expression that stands out more than anything, though – It’s hard to place, Nadia thought – nervous, maybe? No, more like...worried. Hesitant, certainly, and disoriented – perhaps even frightened...

Nadia blinks again and June is holding something now – a notebook, small, bound in scuffed black leather. It’s not hers – she’s never seen it before, let alone lost it– and she’s about to say something, when June’s voice cuts through the silence.

“Nadia Novak, apartment 12C, right? I live here too, and I thought you might want it back…”

She’s holding it open, now, as if to double-check, but Nadia can already see what’s written inside, inscribed on the inner cover in a vaguely familiar hand. Her own name, her own address, right down to the room number. She can’t remember writing it, though. It’s only a vaguely familiar artefact, the girl who brought it only a vaguely familiar face…

A stiff breeze stirs drops of water from the eaves above the hall, and a light rain picks up once more. In the cold light of morning, it’s almost ghostly; more than a mist, less than a downpour. More than a dream, less than a memory.

Across the street, someone’s waiting at the bus shelter. They exhale sharply as the rain picks up, their face tilted away, not quite discernible. A briefcase rests on their lap, shifting slightly as they bounce their knee impatiently. No one can see them, right now, except for the occasional passing car, and the drivers don’t seem to care to look. It’s early, yet. They check their watch expectantly as the wind picks up again; The smell of rain has wholly permeated the air; they think it’s somehow unseasonable, although they’re not sure why, exactly. The seasons here are different.

Overhead, there is an updraft, and it stirs the leaves on the trees, and the cherry-blossoms only beginning to open. The birds’ dawn-chorus is in full swing, even so many hours past dawn. There’s something haunting about the sound of it all – the birds, the rain, the breeze, the itermittant rushes of traffic – so much at once, and yet so permeated with negative space. This morning is quiet despite itself.

It gets harder to keep it together on mornings like these. A broken mirror, and a bloodied hand, and a cacophony of little voices just outside the window. I don’t need to be here, Dana thinks, and she doesn’t, but she doesn’t leave. It’ll be a while yet before she leaves.

She didn’t always live here. She’s been attached to places before, to other places she shouldn’t really be. She remembers well enough the night she left the last one, how she drove with a thermos of coffee until the innumerable stars diminished, became numerable, drew oppressively close before fading out with the streetlights. She wasn’t sure why she’d left at the time, though it became clear with that morning’s soft sunrise and harsh wind and all the mornings after, each one abraded by the winds it brought with; then, alas, the thoughts and feelings were as rough and well-defined as sandstone.

Dana’s no longer especially fond of people who remind her of herself, no longer quite so generous with her idle conversation as once she was. There was a man once, who lived not far from her old place; she never knew if he had a house or no, never knew if he’d lived after he left. Or if he left, for that matter. There was a last time she saw him, and that’s all she remembers.

There’s blood in the sink; she’s looking herself dead in the eyes. It’s a good thing she doesn’t believe in luck. So many broken things….,she thinks, and then, failing to finish the thought, lies across the air-mattress in the corner and looks up at the popcorn ceiling and focuses on the throbbing in her hand. It’s not really pain, anymore, she thinks – a second attempt, a finished thought. There’s a crack spreading from the corner where two walls and the ceiling meet, spreading southwest, imperceptibly slowly. The ceiling’s not broken, not quite; the decay is only incipient, the damage’s yet to come into its own.

It’ll come around, in time.

Christopher isn’t hungover when he wakes up, nor is he heartbroken. It’s a good morning, all things considered, and two minutes later, when he opens his eyes and rises halfway to turn to face the clock on the nightstand, it’s a halfway decent afternoon.

There’s a song blaring on the MP3 player; there are small green buds on the branches of a tree that hang just above the window’s frame. The rain has abated, and the clouds have yet to break. There’s a draft, and the sound of padded footsteps in the hall outside; someone’s come home in the few hours Christopher slept, it seems. It doesn’t really matter who, not at the moment. Christopher rises to his feet, staggering, vision flooded with familiar colors. A car speeds past outside, headed up towards the freeway, and the day begins in earnest.

The song tapers off, and Christopher is suddenly entirely overwhelmed by the sound of his heartbeat. There’s a note stuck to the inside of his bedroom door – “Today’s the day!!!” – his own handwriting.

God only knows what that could mean.

Christopher peels off the note, folds it in four, and stuffs it into the left breast pocket of the flannel shirt draped over his shoulders in a not un-capelike fashion. He’s not sure when he’ll need it later, but you just never know, he thinks. He’s probably right about that.

The clock reads 12:05 by the time he’s decided that he’s not quite ready to step outside, not quite ready to face whichever roommate’s at work in the kitchen at the moment. He draws the blinds on the window, on the bone-grey clouds and the first budding branches of spring, and falls heavily back into bed, over the sheets. It’s almost dark in here, despite the late hour, and almost warm, despite the early spring. Were he to step outside – first out of his room, then out of the hall – he might see the rainbow, lightly limning an otherwise listless early afternoon. But then again, he might not. It was only there for a minute or two, before it faded; and indeed, in this whole town, there was only one person who saw it long enough to take a photograph.

It isn’t a great photograph, but Dana’s happy with it, and it’s hers to keep, stashed in her cell-phone’s hard drive, timestamped 11:58:15. It’s good enough, she thinks, and it’s always nice to catch a rainbow. The clouds hardly broke long enough for a sunbeam to catch the light like that. It might be a good omen, if she were the sort of person who believed in omens. She isn’t, though, not anymore.

She steps back inside to catch her breath.

It’s a few minutes later when she realises that she’s waiting for something; there’re threads of anticipation that’ve begun to braid themselves into anxiety in her gut. She’s waiting for something important, and the feeling’s been drawn taut in the hours since she woke.

And so she flips her phone open, and she punches in ten digits, and she lets it ring, and waits.

It’s four in the afternoon above a rain-slick road, and thunder rolls long and heavy in the distance. Lightning flutters from cloud to cloud, too often to keep count. Late summer rain has brought its brunt entire to bear; Nadia’s not sure how long ago it is, but she must be a child again. The whole set’s composed of old memories, blurred at the edges, beginning to lose their structure.

She’s running, now, and she’s not sure why; the thunder is closer, the storm is directly overhead. Humidity’s let the heat shimmer over the blacktop, blacktop rough and warm and overflowing with the torrential downpour of late August. There’s a spark within her, as she runs lighter than the air and wholly adrift. The world is flowing around her, turbulent, babbling, breathless.

Magnolias blossoms flare out among the Spanish moss as it adorns the branches of their trees, which trees rise green and hazy as towers mossy in ruin, relics of another time. There is a light on in the house among the trees, and there is someone calling her name, and then the scene is collapsing like so much paper-board and twine. In mere moments all that’s left is that young girl, hair tangled in the rain, and then nothing.

Nadia wakes with that notebook that might never have been hers clutched in her right hand; she can’t remember if she’d been holding it as she fell asleep. It isn’t summer anymore, but spring has begun, and as she listens and awakens slowly, she hears at some great length what might be thunder.

Perhaps twenty hours prior, Nadia is reaching out to take that notebook, inscribed with her name and address, unsure whether, even, to be confused. “I don’t- I’m not sure it’s mine,” she says as she takes it nonetheless.

June’s not sure what to make of that, but as she lets go of that notebook she’d found the night before, all wrapped in wax paper down among the wrack and rocks of the bay, she realises she was almost expecting that – hoping for that, even.

“It’s your name in the front, isn’t it,” she asks, lamely, knowing it’s the wrong question, knowing there’s no meaningful answer.

“D’you mind if I keep it?” Nadia asks. It must be hers, after all. Some forgotten thing...it wouldn’t be the first, nor the strangest, to be lost; nor would it be the first nor the strangest to come back around.

June’s smiling slightly now, and Nadia notices the shift; from fear to excitement, from anticipation to relief. It is my name in the front, after all, she thinks, and she’s not really waiting for a reply anymore as, almost instinctively, she clutches the notebook closer.

“Of course,” June says. “I mean, it’s yours.”

“June,” Nadia says, suddenly less certain, “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this before.”

And all about, still, the first soft rain of spring is falling.

#original fiction #silcrow story #silcrow

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silcrow-story · 2 years

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A Child's Moon IV

08. Oracle! Vocative

In a volatile state of mind, fighting the future, a solitaire sits atop a parking-garage citadel. Watching strangers on the street go about their business hurried, they seem far more frenetic from up relatively high. There's nothing among them to watch for, especially; nothing to wait for, just data and noise, cascading past almost regularly.

We're overhead, looking down at an angle; we can't see anyone's faces from here. We can see the maps, spread out on the cement barrier between the roof and the freefall, as well as the red pen and camera-phone. The observer is silent, and they seem fixated on their work, whatever that might be.

A man by a fountain at the park across the street is counting change; a student outside the tobacconist's shop drops a book from a small stack. A hurried businesswoman checks her watch and speedwalks faster, stops for the light at a busy intersection, looking frustrated. The procession of lives and their passing tangents goes untrammeled, here, for now, under the sun; almost no-one's aware of what lurks here and could, given a shift in circumstance, rear its head and be a real disruption.

The one - besides us - who's been watching all this takes some notes, marks some points on a map. You're probably wondering why we've come out here, hoping this all wraps around at some point. Maybe it will; the watcher packs up their things, darts back into the garage's dank security, there in shadow to appreciate the cool a minute before moving onto their next point of interest.

Christopher answers the call - knows, already, who it's almost certain to be. He's not used to Dana's flip-phone, and the quality of the voices transmitted is different. It feels wrong, using it, but the alternative is not answering. The alternative is continuing to put off the inevitable, needful work of bringing Nadia and June back on board.

"This is Christopher," he says. "I can explain." I have to explain, he thinks. I'll have to finish the introduction after all.

"Where the fuck is Dana," says the voice on the other end of the line, "and why do you have her phone?"

"Like I said, I can explain. You probably don't remember much of last night. These areas tend to have that effect on people. Dana's a colleague of mine, and she's gone missing. I don't know where she is, but we might be...we might be able to find her." The last part is almost a lie. Almost, but he's not going to admit it yet. Nothing and no one stays lost forever, he tells himself, and waits for the tinny response to come through.

"So you knew her." says Nadia - or, Christopher assumes as much, anyways. He can't tell their voices apart yet, but June wouldn't have Dana's number. "How do I know you're not lying? How do I know you're not the reason she's missing? What really happened last night!?"

This reaction, he supposes, is to be expected - though he couldn't have known that they'd be ambushed then. The arboretum was usually safe. It's somewhere he and Dana met before. "Look, I can show you the way... this all works. As I understand it, at least. It's like Dana told you last night - we've been investigating. We meant to show you, show you what was going on here, before-" He chokes up a little. "Before she got lost."

Getting lost. It's what they'd taken to calling it, because that's what it had felt like when they'd come close to it. One minute, they'd felt certain they knew where they were; next, they didn't. They'd each come back, once; they'd seen others come back, once, and tried to warn them. Most of the time, the ones they warned didn't believe them, and everyone who got lost a second time stayed lost. Whatever, wherever, whoever was orchestrating all of this learned, and learned quickly, and wouldn't let anyone to cross its path stay free for long.

"Do you still have the notebook?" He asks, hoping the line might lead somewhere productive.

"Yes, but - but you still haven't explained much of anything. You're saying Dana's really missing? That you'd worked together? Why should we believe you?"

"So June's still there?"

"That doesn't matter," Nadia says, and June says, "I'm still here. I'm listening."

"So you have the notebook. I know it's mostly empty, but - but you should give it another look. It might jog your memory. We hope - I hope it will."

Dana knew that this might happen - indeed, expected it. That fact does little to make the whole situation feel less desperate, to hold at bay anxiety's encroaching. A fusillade of questions that she'd hitherto evaded come back around to strike her as she walks. She'd answered, in a pragmatic (and, naturally, provisional) way, the biggest question - "Why?" - by saying to herself that she just really had to know. More than that, she knows, she had to feel, to feel this lost again - but that she couldn't consciously admit to.

It's not too cold in the dim wood, but she still hugs herself; her jacket, that's her armor, feels so little now. She strikes the lighter again for some comfort, wonders if anyone else is around here. Or, more to the point, if anyone real is around - she shudders to think what simulacra lurk here past the event horizon of the realm in which she's lost. Trying not to think about where they come from, or what they really are, she trudges on, pretending there's a path she's meant to follow. Her eyes are open - she's alert, but bound to tire soon.

There are things growing here - in fact, nothing really seems dead, at least not in a bone-dry way. Even the leaves and the twigs on the ground are in decay actively, coated with lichens and molds and occasional mushrooms. The spots of colour are few and far between, though; the air's far too soft for it to be dull, per se, but it is grey, and the atmosphere foggy. The lighter was the one spot of truly bright colour; she strikes it again, and admires the flame, as so often she does when there's some flame at hand. It's not much, but it's something. Something someone lost, once, she thinks, and keeps walking.

Then all at once there is a rustling in the leaves, but there's no wind. They simply stir up, as by volition, and swim in the air, rustle against one another symphonically. It's a sound with a lightness belying its potency, a surface current hiding greater movements deeper underneath. When a place so impossibly haunted as this one's disrupted, if only for a moment, its whole being notices. Ripples emerge, radiate, then subside. Dana feels these few ripples, as there moment's there, and she wonders if she's the rock that fell in.

When the trees start to move with their upper boughs, she stops - pauses to watch the display. They fall, but fall slowly - as if through high water, as if against some steady current unseen. The roots pull out slowly, and soil erupts with them like a time-lapse of erosion on dunes. They're headed, all, one way - toward a sharp nexus, some point in the distance. It would seem a shocking sight to see their falling and their rising - to one who'd not beheld such sights some times before. But Dana isn't shocked, she's only watching. This is what she came for, after all, whether or not she's the cause; if anything, the causal loop just makes the scene mean all the more.

She almost wishes she'd something to hold on to, fearful, though slightly, that she too might soon fall away. But she doesn't, and she doesn't, and as the depths of the wood become their edge, a horizon of sorts becomes evident. The point to which all of the trees' peaks are drawn lengthens, to become the line of perspective around which the landscape entire re-orients.

Dana lets her eyes, a censor's, surveil the blooming sky for faults. It's like time's stopped, or slowed a moment - but it hasn't, not this time. There's a faint air of anticipation as she watches the fishbowl unfold before her, eastward. The tree trunks form a sort of vortex - roots hang groundless in mid-air, and boughs entangle as they crash together, all to meet. This is real, she tells herself. This is what's really been happening. We just weren't looking close enough.

Nadia's got the phone in one hand, the notebook in the other, sitting on her bed confused - unsteady. As she turns the pages, she remembers, somehow.

It's a haunting feeling, that sudden rush of awareness. Unlike normal recollection, it doesn't have an obvious psychical cue; the notebook is the trigger, but there's no epiphany to unlock what was hitherto withheld; it's as though the door wasn't locked but merely hidden, noticed only now. She remembers the lights, and the lookout, and Dana - the real conversation, unfinished, then, there. She remembers the fifth figure who had arrived in so ominous a fashion - but does not, of course, recall their face.

Christopher's still on the line, and she wants to respond, but she's not quite sure how - or indeed, how to accept that any of this is real. But it is - that much she knows, now. The memories that have rushed back to her like a flood are as real as anything she can recall - the cracking of the twigs beneath her feet, the damp post-rain air, the color of the sky above as twilight dimmed by turns.

And so she says, "What just happened?"

And Christopher says, as though it were a matter of fact, "The notebook's a mnemonic device. That is to say, it's beyond the influence of whatever's causing...all of this. The disappearances, the spatial distortions, the mysterious messages."

Nadia's a bit overwhelmed by this; June is simply listening intently, a rapt, almost excited look in her eyes. She's standing still as Nadia stands up, and paces back and forth - the same carpet-diagonal as ever. The phone's speaker's turned up, and but for that the room is quiet - but for the pacing, the room's still. All the tumult of the past two days is trapped herein; there's a crack in the ceiling. But then again, there's always been a crack in the ceiling.

"So...so you weren't just fucking with us. This wasn't a prank, or...or a scheme, you weren't...you weren't trying to hurt us, or..."

"No." Christopher half-knows it's hard to cope with, remembers when he was first told by his old absent friend and former colleague that his experience wasn't some transient psychiatric glitch, that there was something truly strange afoot here. But he only half-knows, of course, because he'd wanted to believe Dana, and they - they've no reason to believe him. Dana would've seemed more trustworthy, he thinks, and he's probably right; unfortunately, she's indisposed, and I...I'm what we've got.

"So - wait. Why did you contact June in the first place? Why does the notebook have my name in it, and my address? Why did she have to pick it up? Even if you aren't lying about last night...you must know this still doesn't make sense," she says, trying to make it make sense. It remains steadfastly noncompliant.

"Like I said, the notebook's a mnemonic. It's got your name for...for the same reason we initially reached out to you, and June. You've both been lost, once, before. We were...trying to stop it from happening again."

"Lost? I mean...I don't recall having mysteriously vanished lately," she says, realising even as she says it that that might not be true. That at this point, there might be no way of knowing.

"You vanished where you left the notebook," Christopher says, "And not too long ago. A matter of days. The notebook reappeared shortly thereafter - Dana figured out when it would arrive, and I sent June to check it out and bring it to you. We figured it would've been too risky to advise you to go there - not to mention the fact you might not have believed that you'd lost it, or been there at all. These are precautions we've learned to be necessary. You're not the first two we...warned." He very nearly says recruited, but thinks the better of it, and stops there, realizing how quickly, how hurriedly he'd been speaking. He had never been especially good at introductions.

Dana's trying to keep pressing east, to little avail, and less by each hour spent at it. The trees don't quite act just like trees around here - they've taken to active obstruction of passage, steering her as might some labyrinth's walls. The space seems remarkably open, despite this - the trunks' impossible tangle only emerges, it seems, by necessity, letting her go so long as she goes the right way.

Eventually she stops - lets the wood right itself - sink to the forest floor, lean in the leaves. She's warm with exertion, but swears it's gone colder, like the protean shape of this space has sapped its entropy. She's not quite exhausted, but feels she needs a new plan - this avenue of exploration seems to only have incensed the restless land.

Letting a hand fall down among the dead and dying things, she breathes, and tries to remember. The foliage then shifts softly beneath her; just as the trees did, some few hours prior. They cede to envelop her hand, first, to the wrist - and then with a start she notes her whole forearm's sinking beneath them, not into loam but into something stranger, and more fluid. She tries to rise to her feet, but finds the ground is pulling at her, drawing her in, and under, and out like a rip-tide. In mere moments she's subsumed completely, and the leaves coalesce above her head as though nothing'd disturbed their rest at all.

In the dark below the forest floor, Dana Delaney finds, to her great relief, that she can yet breathe. It's dark, verging on black, and all deliquescent, despite her still-steady breath feeling to her more like a liquid than any thin air in which she's now suspended. It's dim, and it's hazy, but not quite oppressive - indeed, the space seems vast now, and far from claustrophobic. Still, she's quite sure that she'd rather not be here; there seems to be very little to see, few signs to interpret, no trace of a trail one might follow. Turning to look down, she sees something she hadn't expected to, and she remembers.

She was seventeen, and had a driver's license for the first time, and a high school career that was as steady as it was banal. She'd been on her way home when she noticed something was different - something was wrong. Her acquaintance wasn't there at the park as usual, and he was always there. He had become one of the few constants with which she was entirely comfortable.

When she got to the park later, he still wasn't there, but she rested alone for a while in her blue folding chair, sipping her thermos of coffee and pondering all of the future's uncertainties. The future, unlike the present, had seemed open wide, indefinite - welcoming, comforting, somehow, if dark.

She never saw the man again, but that night, she drove out to the highway, straight ahead, and going nowhere. As she crossed the bridge that crossed the city limits, the stars were all innumerable, the firmament's expanse without end - full of desperate, twitching, dying hope. She drove until she felt she couldn't keep up with her thoughts, the way they shot across her mind intensifying with each passing vehicle and each descending star. She knew that most or many of them are, in fact, long-dead; but that fact didn't faze her as she fantasized their world-ending descent.

And now, again, she's wreathed in near-black, and again driving uncertain into territory beyond which she hasn't knowledge or assurance - only curiosity, and beneath that some faint, weak hope, which hope like her short shallow breath yet shudders, twitches. She floats there, suspended just under leaves and rot, and contemplates her next move forward, now. This is what she went and got lost for; this is the design which she arrayed. It's now just on her to advance, unhindered by doubts and anxieties. We watch from underneath, that looking down she might yet see some camera, cosmic in the yawning aether there. Her face is still, and stern, and deliberate as ever; even without an audience she knows of she's performing what she feels she ought to be - a stoic, that she isn't, and a woman with a plan. I'm that, at least, she thinks, repeatedly - I had a plan before, and I've one now. That in itself should serve to pull me through.

June still isn't feeling a flood of last night's real events return to her all at once; she's anxious now. Nadia's still on the phone with this Christopher - saying, in a markedly sudden shift - she believes him, remembers it all, after all. June has the texts she supposedly sent, this morning, to Nadia - detailing it. She's gleaned back that much, anyways, of herself. Still, there's so much that's troubling her - why their memories left to begin with, where Dana has gone, and how the notebook washed up in wax paper, just before dawn those two mornings ago.

She doesn't raise questions yet, eager as she is to do so; rather, she focuses on listening, posing contrast to Nadia's frenetic pace, and to Christopher's tone. He sounds distressed, truly, June thinks. I suppose I can't blame him.

Her lack of overt engagement belies a growing excitement within her - indeed, her curiosity's grown into a compulsive fascination. This, here, is a narrative - and almost a caricature of one, at that, its events so mysterious they seem larger than life. Hoping that she can be more than a bit part, that hope fueled by - among other things - her proximity to the notebook, and the fact - relevant or no - that she was the one to retrieve it, was therefore causal and essential to the sequence's whole going down. She's not really making an effort to hide what she's feeling - no, it's more like this is the way she that she typically reacts to pleasant surprise. There's guilt there, though muted - or perhaps, instead, shame - this, at her knowing that someone's gone missing, and feeling no worry or consternation nonetheless. It's not that she doesn't care about Dana - Dana, a functional stranger, despite their allegedly having met; it's just that she doesn't quite care enough for that angst to win out the quickening, the stirring, that this strange affair seems to bring on. The guilt is still there, at not caring enough, though - sat, stationed upon the seemingly evergreen pile of notions and sentiments she's not yet mustered the wherewithal to try to, in depth, address.

Then, Nadia's handing her the notebook, as if to try reawaken her lost memories. This won't work, June thinks, hurriedly, not knowing why, as the faint sound of Christopher's breathing, compressed, crackles through cell-phone speakers to awkwardly occupy air. Then, he speaks, and she notices.

"June...you're listening, right? I - we - we had to warn you, too. Just like Nadia, just like me, and Dana, and everyone to whom we've reached out so far - you've been lost once before. I think you remember. You were down by the water, by the rail, right?"

June's mind's eye fogs over, then - becomes half-lidded as she remembers, and she does remember. It had been a strange experience, to be sure, but she'd written it off - it sounds like most people do, she thinks, and feels an irrational sting of disappointment in herself. I was no different...I thought I had just been tired, just been seeing things. I wasn't an exception, wasn't like Christopher, or his colleague, or colleagues....

But it doesn't take too long for her to shake the thought, and avoid reminiscing in too much detail. So she just says, with real and irrepressible confidence, "Yes. Yes, I remember. But I...I'm here now. And I won't let it happen again, to me, or - or to Nadia. I want to understand. If there's something here to figure out, some mystery to uncover...I want to be here for it."

The declaration cuts through the breathing on the other end of the line, through Nadia's muted footfalls, and through the buzzing of the light overhead. Christopher, elsewhere, holds Dana's old cell-phone away from his face; Nadia halts in her pacing, and looks at June, quizzical, almost impressed; and the warm yellow overhead light in the room flickers out, and leaves them in a cool facsimile twilight. The blue glow of mid-afternoon through rainclouds is all that illuminates them now, and at that, through the gaps in the blinds.

The camera then zooms in, from where it's positioned, above the vast mirror over the small sink, to focus on June's strikingly focused face. Her glasses, no longer occluded with reflected light, let her eyes shine through - magnified, irises dark but full-saturated, stillness anticipatory hewn into her expression. Maybe the lightbulb's burnt out, or maybe the power's gone out temporarily, or maybe there's something more to it - but for now, at least, June's attitude radiates into her two new acquaintances, lets on them alight a light hope that's, to one, too familiar, and to the other, too new.

#silcrow #silcrow story #original fiction #web fiction #serial fiction #silcrow 08

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silcrow-story · 3 years

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Salvage IV

04. Vanishing Act

The four of them stand there, atop that high wooden turret, all ensconced in still tall trees and twilight. None of them know what to say; none of them have perfect information, though some may have more information than others. It feels darker than it really is, somehow, with each of them surrounded as they are in their respective penumbras of doubt, and worry, and all the other seeds of fear.

The city lights glow just below the horizon; the bayside homes and the marina and the sundry post-industrial array of commercially-zoned buildings. The camera could follow them, could fly out over the treetops, to see the buildings and their brick facades, the street-lights and the pavement with its potholes, and the gradually thinning traffic among them, pedestrian and automotive…the camera could go on and see it all, but it doesn’t; it stays here in the lookout, just overhead, cocked at a slight Dutch angle for effect, and it waits.

Christopher came here because it was asked of him; that’s what it was in the last case. There might’ve been greater concerns, from the point-of-view of some hypothetical disinterested third party, but he made the choice to walk the trail through the woods this evening because Dana asked him to. He did make the choice, though; he considered the alternatives, looked around for any last way out. He might’ve bought a ticket on a bus out of town – re-created himself, perhaps, in some city smaller and so many leagues away. I wouldn’t be a coward for it, if I did, he thought, once, earlier, and the fact that that was true didn’t stop the shame from rising to surround him, in countless little tongues of flame. I wouldn’t be a coward for it, and it wouldn’t be the first time, and none of that would mean a damn thing to my conscience, he thought, and that was the end of it.

He wasn’t in love with her, with Dana, is what he told himself, at times aloud, when he was drinking or exhausted or both. He was just...attached, is all. This amounted, for all intents and purposes, to exactly the same thing. They’d been working at this together for years, now – almost exactly five years, though he’s lost the count of days. Dana would know, he thinks. There’s not a doubt in his mind that she’s kept count all this time; he respects her for that. She’s good with these things.

Christopher then begins to wonder, without meaning to, what exactly would become of their new associates. Nadia and June, he thinks, and feels a pang of sympathy for the two of them. They didn’t ask for this; no-one in their right mind would. He entertains, briefly, the notion that they might end up like Dana and himself, entangled, mutually tethered, as much rules of the game as players in it. He somehow doubts it, but it’s not outside the realm of possibility.

Christopher came here because it was asked of him by his close associate, the incomparable Dana Delaney. He’s here now, committed to this path, and he’s going to see it through. For once in my life, I’m going to follow through, he thinks, and he begins to feel something not unlike determination. It takes maybe a dozen frames for him to realise, chuckling under his breath, that it’s not so foreign a feeling at all. Attachment, Topher, says the small pencil-sketch of Dana tucked away behind his eyes, in a voice he knows by heart. You and your fucking attachment.

Dana Delaney’s dead tired; doubt dances down from command control to peripheral nerves. She came for a reason, like everyone here, but more to the point, she’s the only one came with a plan. She knows this. She knows a fair bit more than most, and she’s, in that, confident; in all other matters, she settles for acting the part.

The first thing Dana knows is that Nadia and June aren’t ready for what’s about to happen. They were led here by design; their presence is necessary, but they’re not participants, not at this stage. Topher so often behaves as though this were a game, and she knows that’s how he likes to think of it. Games, by definition, have rules and have structure; they have things to which to hold fast.

The difference between us two, she thinks, is that he still tries hard to hold on. Still thinks it possible to. She doesn’t – think it possible to hold on, rely on the rules, stay in the game. As far as she’s concerned, she’s been flotsam for five years, four weeks, five days, and counting, now.

Now, Topher’s got his head bowed low as ever, staring at his shoes; his earphones blast some sad song Dana’s heard a hundred times. He’s nothing if not true to form; she’d never say it out loud, but she takes some comfort in that. On such turbulent evenings as these, there’s always a chance that all the patterns that held hitherto will break. Dana’s not at peace with this, not hardly; she’s just learned how to live without.

“Live”is a stretch, she thinks to herself, when she’s in her most cynical, three-days-awake state of mind. She’s never quite been suicidal, and she’s said so much to everyone who’s asked, always redacting the fact that at her lowest, she’s so apathetic that the difference is minute. It gets easier with time and practice, excising all such inconvenient details. Dana’s an experienced editor, so in her head, she repeats that she’s ready for this.

She isn’t, really; she knows no-one could be. But she’s had six hours sleep, give or take, and forty milligrams of dextroamphetamine, and as she looks out past Topher to the darkened wood beyond, she reckons she’s as ready now as she might ever be.

The whole way here, June followed perhaps a pace or two behind Nadia. In part this is just because Nadia’s taller; June’s kind of speedwalking to maintain their pace. Really, though, she feels like she ought to be following, even being as she is the one who led Nadia into this. I was only a proxy in that, after all, she concludes. It’s Nadia’s notebook that gave us this location.

She came because she was asked to, in a sense. In point of fact she was only invited, she knows; but she felt, somehow, when Nadia asked, it was because she needed her there. Maybe that’s a self-important notion, but she’s learned to trust her gut. Nadia wants her there, by her side, as they stand on the lookout and face those who wait for them there.

There’s something ponderous about tonight; the evening’s twilight’s as heavy as the morning’s own was light. The air’s still blissfully clear, at the moment, of humidity, pollen, and contaminants; the smoke that haunts this city so often has been merciful today. No, there’s no apocalyptic haze, but still – there’s something up, she thinks. Perhaps their purpose here has lent some ballast to the atmosphere; whatever the case, June feels under pressure up here.

She looks at the ceiling so as not to look at the floor, and remembers in one swift sharp moment her dream from the afternoon prior. It was a strange one, even by her standards; the part she remembers, at any rate, was quite intense. That strange being she saw in an oneiric greenhouse seems almost plausible, here at the arboretum’s pinnacle, swaddled in leaves. Foliage, living and dead, is ubiquitous; on the trail that they took here, roots old and gnarled reared up on occasion. In so breaching the surface, indeed, they looked almost awake.

June’s not dreaming anymore, though, loathe as she might be to believe it. As from the beginning, when she got the call from Christopher, all her excitement’s been tempered with fear, and her curiosity with some stray skeptical thoughts. Still, it’s the former sentiments won out it seems, as she snaps out of her reverie, sees that she’s here. She’s facing two people, a man and a woman, maybe a few years older than her. It doesn’t take more than a quick look to recognize Dana, which recognition sets all June’s loose questions to tumble chaotic; they’re cluttering her mind anew.

She wonders if the man is Christopher; it seems too obvious, almost, though at this point she’ll take any spot of clarity, blunt, cheap or vacuous as it may be. She looks to her right at the girl that she just met today – Nadia Novak, the notebook’s proprietor, the one who led her here. It’s a comfortable narrative, so she holds on to it, and wishes that it wasn’t quite so dark.

What in God’s name am I doing here? Nadia thinks, her eyes adjusting to the post-sunset conditions.

It was her idea, she’d have to admit, if you asked her – and she would, although she’s not completely confident in that. True, she’s the one who suggested that June come, that they make an investigation of this. If June hadn’t caught her off-guard by agreeing, she mightn’t have come, after all. It’s a mystery, almost, but then again, not quite – the more she contemplates it, the more it seems like nothing’s there. A phone call, a notebook – one with her name on it, coordinates, and...nothing else. Nadia’d not really stopped to consider at any great length what the real question was, besides those broad-strokes whats and whys.

It’s a moot point, at least for the moment,she reasons as she looks around. It’s quiet out here, with few insects chirping, no rain for the moment, and traffic too distant to hear – the only other sound’s what’s coming from the earphones the guy opposite her is wearing; it’s thin, soft, and noisy, but she almost thinks she knows the tune.

Now June’s looking at her, she realizes, and looks back; it seems the polite thing to do. She doesn’t really get what June is looking for. Her expression seems...expectant, she thinks, frowning slightly, but she’s gotta know I haven’t got any more of a clue than she does? If anything, I know less.

She doesn’t know what her own roommate’s doing here – some fresh confusion – nor does she recognize the man who’s beside her, half-standing, half-leaning, and seemingly lost in thought. There’s nothing familiar to her here but the last red-orange glimmers of sunset, and the pattern of the lights down by the bay. All else is obscure and overwhelming, at the moment, and she finds she’s no idea what to say.

It’s the second time today that’s happened, Nadia Novak thinks. I guess I’d better try to improvise.

And so, as though stepping out on some unsteady bough, she looks at Dana, smiles, and says hi.

Christopher stands up straight, turns his music off, and looks up for the first time since the sunset. It seems like Dana’s taken the lead, and he’s alright with this; she was always the better of the two of them at introductions.

“Nadia,” Dana says, “Glad you could make it out tonight.”

“Dana,” Nadia says, “How did you know I would be here?”

“I sent you the notebook,” she replies. She makes the line sound earnest as she delivers it, even though it’s a total non-answer.

“That- that doesn’t tell me anything.”

Nadia’s growing quite frustrated. Who wouldn’t be? Christopher thinks, shaking his head.

“Just give me a minute to explain. You know me – I’m Dana Delaney. You’ve lived with me since you moved to this city. My associate here – Christopher – is the one who called June, instructed her to retrieve the notebook, and deliver it to you. Presumably, you came here to investigate the coordinates penciled into that notebook, somewhere between the seventy-eighth and eighty-fourth pages. Christopher and I have been planning to meet you here, because there’s something we need you to see. I apologise for the roundabout means of communication; it should soon become clear it was necessary for us to take such measures.”

It’s still not much of an answer; Christopher knows that Dana knows this. Most of it is obvious, redundant even, but that’s the point. The introduction has to start off slowly. The circumstances are sufficiently confusing, sufficiently overwhelming in their own right to pile on too much background information at once.

Nadia pauses, looks unsure of herself. There’s a part of her that’s indignant; almost everything she’s just been told, she already knows. All Dana’s done is recount the day’s events. And what’s all this about the ‘seventy-eighth’ and ‘eighty-fourth’ pages? Something they need me to see? “It should soon become clear…”

Nothing seems to be getting any clearer.

Dana doesn’t wait for a reply, and continues her introduction.

“You came here because you were curious, right? So are we. There’s something happening here, in this town, something...unsettling. We think it’s been happening for a long time, and we’ve been trying to get to the bottom of it. What you’re about to see is...a case in point.”

In another place, and another time, Nadia’s heading home, or somewhere like it. There’s snow on the ground, it’s grimy and half-grey, and she’s got a long walk uphill. Someone she knows is trailing behind her; they’d met only minutes ago, beneath the now-darkened streetlight, and they’re on their way back together.

As they pass the corner drugstore, Nadia stops to observe it. Like so much here, it feels quaint, just slightly dated – not antique, but maybe a decade or three out of pace with the world at large. There’s a lot she doesn’t like here, but she doesn’t mind the buildings – brick facades and lower ceilings, smaller windows and warm lights all make the atmosphere feel that much more human.

Still, it’s colder than she’s used to, and it gets to her sometimes; it’s better than high heat, but not by much. Her breath hangs pale around her as she’s walking, and her throat and lungs and sinuses feel more present than ever.

The trees up here are tall, and pretty, though they’ve gone bare now; real seasons have been such a novelty. The sunsets are getting later now, but November’s were so early – it became hard to contend with the new paucity of day. Still, she has contended, and she’s found new ways of doing so; the only way to learn, she knows, is getting this worn down.

It’s hard to keep a straight face, for the pain or for absurdity, and all the nonstop psychodrama that surrounds her home. It’s not really a home, she knows; it’s just the place she’s staying while she studies here, but she still calls it one. It’s better than the alternative that is admitting you’re away from someplace you belong far more than you think you ever might here.

It’s frightening to think that there’s something just beyond the unfocused fringes of your field-of-view. Like the mist that rises with the morning’s warmth, and the reflections that grow broader in a window-pane with the oncoming dark, all that’s incomplete-but-not-unrecognized is a real ghost. You can look and it will flicker, flutter, dim by turns then go away from you, perhaps for good. Walk to the end of an unfinished bridge, and cloak yourself there in the feeling that arises; discomfort borne of an anticipation for what you know’s not coming, or at least not coming soon.

June was waiting for a call from someone else, that night, when she got the call from Christopher instead. The thought’s tucked away in the back of her mind right now, safely sequestered for clarity’s sake. She’s trying, repeatedly, to remind herself to stay present, to fulfill the expectations that she’s set out for herself. It’s no easy task, but she thinks that she’ll manage alright if she only keeps trying.

Then there is some stirring among the boughs surrounding them; a stiff breeze, a harsh wind, a bracing chill. It’s as though something, or some several, has begun to move in the underbrush and then rise through leaves and needles slowly, to hover just above the four congregants there on the viewing deck. They can’t see anything yet; there is something that is not ready to be seen.

Nadia’s got one foot ahead of the other; she’s guarded, not sure what comes next. She looks at Dana, and notices she’s shaking slightly. She’s nervous too, Nadia realises, and the thought concerns her. Is she just as out of her depth as I? What have I been brought here to see?

Christopher still hasn’t said a word. He’s thinking; he knows that’s a cop-out. Dana’s handled the introduction alright, he thinks. Alright as she ever could, in any case.

Dana’s feeling the amphetamines now; awake, almost anxious, all-too-aware of the incipient movement among the arbor. She’s preparing, bracing herself, now; she’s the only one here who really knows what it means. David thinks he does, she considers bitterly, but he doesn’t. This is something I have to do for myself.

Dana is also the first one to notice the figure walking up the path, under the bent boughs, the stony overpass, walking gingerly across the well-trodden earth. They’re moving very quietly; they’re good at this, and their pace is steady, their face, duly, hooded. They don’t need a flashlight to see where they’re going; they’ve been this way before.

They don’t live on this side of town; they had to take the bus, and they stayed on while it ran its route’s entire length a time or two. Even Dana doesn’t really know why they did this, though she noticed them at the bus stop, briefly, as she was on her way back to her apartment that morning. Maybe it’s some attempt at operational security, she thinks, though she can’t imagine it makes all that much of a difference. She cocks her head, and then nods slightly, in David’s direction, so as to draw his attention.

She catches Nadia’s attention, and June’s, too, and soon they’re all aware of the figure approaching them, which figure stops before the structure upon which they all stand, and comes to a stop, looks up, and stays there. There descends then a feeling of dread, falling like a fog upon the four of them, a discomfort somewhere between fear and shame, uncertainty and remorse. It is a grim feeling, bleak as some dry, cold, unseasonable day in summertime, and heavy as the weight of all things past. Whether it came with the figure, or the figure came borne upon this dread’s weight, cannot be known; not now, at least.

The murmuration all about them heightens with each moment’s passing; no longer is it but a subtle stir. No, it’s a dull roar now, akin to distant thunder, though the morning’s rain has long departed, and there is no storm in sight. It comes not from the sky, nor from the earth below, but somehow it emanates inward, from the enfolding shroud of trees – out from their trunks toward some epicenter, and closing in.

And then there are the lights, descending slowly, just larger than fireflies, bright but not blinding, in radiant array, and many. They sink as through water or some medium thicker, their passage deliberate and altogether unaided by gravity. Nadia and June can only look on in awe and bewilderment; even Christopher is somewhat overcome, though it’s nothing he’s not seen before. Dana stands up straight, gives the figure below a meaningful look, and then turns and holds her head high, and turns to gaze out over the bay.

It takes Christopher too long to realize what is happening, and so it is too late, he realizes, to try to intervene. The lights, innumerable, now, as stars, are reflected in June’s glasses, in the lingering raindrops on the branches and evergreen needles, halt in their sinking and begin to turn inward, and to coalesce about their epicenter. They are surrounding Dana, to spiral around her limbs, to illuminate her wholly, taking her into their fluttering, flickering mass as if to consume her.

She’s not surprised, June realises, dimly, through the nimbus of fear and confusion swirling around her. She must have known this was coming. Whatever this is. She turns to Nadia, who’s watching, wholly fascinated by the display.

“We should get out of here,” she says, hurriedly, and her own voice sounds strange, almost distended. It’s enough, nonetheless, to jerk Nadia from her reverie, and so, wordlessly, Nadia agrees, and wordlessly, they leave – descending the tower swiftly, though not quite running. Christopher notices, and almost turns, almost makes a move, but he’s more deeply enraptured than they had been, and so he lets them go.

They don’t see him sink to his knees as they start down the path from whence they came; don’t see him struggle vainly against the despair that’s coming on. The figure that had just arrived seems to have left; they do notice this, but don’t remark upon it, keeping a brisk pace as they exit the frame to the left.

In only moments, Christopher is left alone with us, knelt, half-doubled over, on the dry, well-worn wood of that small turret at the heart of the arboretum. Reaching, lamely, for Dana’s backpack, he realises he wasn’t prepared; he’d known the risks, of course, but he could not have known that it was this evening they would all be brought to bear, could not have known his own inability to bear their brunt. He is alone with us, and he is helpless; the lights have departed now, and he cannot bring himself to care, or wonder wherefore or whence they came. All he knows is that it’s dark, and a damn cold night, and Dana’s gone elsewhere.

#silcrow story #04

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silcrow-story · 2 years

Text

Living Things I

09. Germinal

Two days and three hours ago, Dana cuts her left hand on a shard of a mirror she broke, in a small accident. She doesn't bandage the cut - that, it wasn't quite deep enough to warrant - she just washes it, and lets the blood filter in filaments through the sink's stream. It's easy enough to ignore, for right now, what with all else occupies the action and attention of the day. A rainbow, two new recruits, Topher's dear vagaries, and the incipient moves in the riskiest line she's attempted, since first she fell into this life.

She'd hit the ground running, after her first - and then, only - close encounter with the vast mouth of the strange beast poised, alas, to devour this town. She doesn't like to remember that part - has all-but-excised it, indeed - but the follow-up's something of a fonder note. Someone contacted her, not long after, like a sponsor for some society seeking her membership. An older woman, and fidgety, and - by outward appearances, anyhow - at her nerves' end - but someone who knew how it felt, to be lost, and endeavoured to help her out, show her the ropes.

She'd gotten the hang of it quickly, and when the inevitable occurred, she was prepared - to mourn, privately, to contain her reaction, to, alas, carry on the needful work. She carried it all so well, then - medicated, stricken with nostalgia and the empty space where, now, two acquaintances once were, she staggered sometimes - but she never slipped up, never walked away. It was her oath inherited that led her to design an incident in which she'd, by intention, jump right in, and with the knowledge she mightn't come back, nor understand what's on the other side the more.

She did it for the sake of all that tied her to the memories, the people - living, dead, and lost - who made the good parts good. It wasn't a self-sacrifice, to her, nor any suicide - it was, instead, the next step in a sequence preordained. She's not a big believer in fate, luck, or the significance of dreams - and as the mirror broke, and as now she washes the blood away, she feels some small relief at that. No, to Dana, this predestiny is not divine, or supernatural - it's more a promise, to the world and its uncertainties, that by her will she'll follow the course that she sees ahead and wreak upon its havoc some leyline of terra firma, of stability. It might sound supernatural, were she to say all that to you - but she wouldn't, if you asked her now, or even asked before. She'd tell you in its stead something that wasn't quite a lie - she'd say she likes to have a plan, and mean it.

Two days, three hours, and just a few minutes later, June and Nadia stand in a darkened apartment. The lightbulb's gone out, perhaps on account of a power surge, and it momentarily alerts them to the whole of their area - not just the phone, and the floor, and each other, but the air and the window, the door and the mirror. The room has asserted its presence, demanded a place in the conversation which, for this short moment, dangles deflated, a flag at half-mast, a fascination from which the subject's been swiftly and involuntarily cut.

After what feels like a minute of silence, but probably isn't so long, Christopher says hello, his tone rising slightly on the second syllable in query, just to make sure they're still there.

They're still there, and June says so, and Nadia says "Wait, I - I think the power's gone out."

"But you're okay?" He asks, perhaps too intensely, perhaps so much so as to merit regret, and then "I mean, nothing else strange is going on?"

"Yeah, I mean - let me just check. Let me call you back."

Nadia hangs up June's phone, and glances around, trying to figure out what to do next. June looks...not offended, but somewhere thereabouts - perhaps agitated, or confused, or taken aback. You'd probably pick up on it if you were here, but Nadia doesn't - she just hurriedly hands the phone back to June, and darts out the door to the kitchen, letting it slide shut behind her.

The light's still on in the kitchen; it must just be the bulb that's burnt out. With a sigh of relief, Nadia opens the door again, still, understandably, unsure as to how to proceed. She's got a headache, from eye-strain or perhaps simple overstimulation and stress, and she squeezes her eyes tightly shut, rubs her temples, so as to keep it at bay. It doesn't do much, but in moments, when her head's just slightly clearer, she turns to June and she asks, "Hey, what was that you were saying just now? That you'd..."

"Oh. That," June replies, hesitantly. "I just meant...I just meant that I want to understand. And I don't want anyone else to get hurt, or whatever it is that's happening to people, and I still don't quite remember any of this, but..."

"Hey. I get it. We just met yesterday. There's a lot going on. But...look, at least we have some information now, right? Yesterday, we were completely clueless. I think maybe - even if we're in over our heads, it's still better to have a sense of just what it is we've stumbled into. And if Christopher's telling the truth -"

"If he's telling the truth. You say you remember everything that happened last night. But...why can't I remember? Hell, I can't even remember the texts I sent you, and that was this morning!"

"I mean, you don't have to believe him. Dana's been gone less than twenty-four hours - for all we know, she's just spending the night out of town. Honestly, I'm pretty sure I remember her having been away longer. You could...you could walk away, if you wanted. I wouldn't blame you."

"No."

"No?"

"Yeah, no. I'm the one who started all of this - I'm the one who answered the phone. I'm the one Christopher called, and if he...if they're for real, then we're both in some kind of danger, right? The same kind of danger as..." June trails off, leaving the dim air to carry a latent energy not unlike the ambient charge which precedes cloud-to-ground lightning.

"We should call him back."

"You're probably right, but...I don't know. He might've tipped us off to this, by however many convoluted means, but...he's still part of this mystery. We're still the ones that are going to solve it." June pauses, nearly breathless. "Right?"

Dana's lying face-down, relative to the dark wood; relative to us, she's face-up, suspended in space. It's not quite tranquil here, nor is it yet outright frightening - there's no panic, chill, nor mortal terror in her mind as she rests there, tired, worn out, coming down. The indefinite expanse of this tenebrous region has an air about it of...imminence, of lurking unknown truths and dense potential energy.

There's a cut on Dana's left hand, and for the first time since she broke that mirror and cut it - two days and nearly four hours ago, now - it's beginning to bother her. She raises - or lowers - her left hand to look, and the cut's not really red or swollen, but it seems somehow just slightly more severe than she'd initially thought it to be. Perhaps deeper, perhaps wider, or perhaps a millimeter or three longer - it runs from the mound at her thumb's base up, to curve and angle out across her softer palm.

She's got several scars on her hands, which you mightn't really see were it not for the closeness of the camera, and perhaps also the attention with which she's now looking for them. There's one across the knuckle on her left hand's middle finger, and another, thicker, at a slight incline down her right thumb's base. Her nails are long, uneven - even ragged, one or two, but her hands aren't calloused rough, nor stained - not seeming at all worn so much as wounded and then healed. The scars, and the fresh cut both seem as incidental and erratic outliers, deviations from the mean of naive, vulnerable softness.

The cut has now begun to itch, and to pose a distraction - threatening to confound Dana's current study of that distant point we can't yet see, beneath her - or above her. The loss of any absolute reference for direction but herself is less alarming than she'd at first worried it was going to be; indeed, armed with the knowledge that she was already, in the wood above, irremediably lost gave her some solace as - for reasons arbitrary and beyond our means to guess at - the world, the ground, the floor pulled her beneath, and left her there.

In some effort to distract herself from the insistent, mild pain, she hazards swimming deeper; this is, in fact, less "swimming" and more "letting herself fall". The space around her doesn't become darker, colder, or change anything like water might as a diver descends - indeed, if there is any current here, it's stilled for now, and allows her some smooth passage further in. From where the camera's placed, we still can't see just what it is she's falling towards, but she seems more intrigued than concerned, more fascinated than confused. For all its inkiness, the aether here is not opaque, nor cloudy, nor much less clear than thin air. It's just its liquescent feeling, and the fact it fades to black rather than azure, that distinguishes its depth from the infinitely deep expanse of sky.

Eventually, it becomes clear the feeling's overwhelming - frustrated, Dana scratches at the dry gash in her hand. It's bloodless, now, she notes, and the edges have gone pale - but if her eyes aren't now deceiving her (and here, they well could be) it's as if the cut's still growing, having spread now up her palm to such an extent that it couldn't possibly be a mistake. Is this...some side effect of where I am? She thinks, and hazily. I have to keep going, but...I'm not. I'm not. I'm not...

Her mind seems to have hit a solid wall, and now she's sure that something's taken hold here, that the typical rules of fair play in navigating this landscape at this depth no longer exist. It's troubling, but she counts it a blessing, if small, that she's conscious enough to be troubled. If she could just think past the pain in her hand, she might yet be able to...go. To advance. To look deeper. To follow the source of her fascination all along its meander and down to its roots, to its core.

She's still lost in thought when it becomes evident that her left hand's begun bleeding again. The blood looks black in the minimal light, seeping out as though the gash had only just been inflicted. The itching sensation is still there, overwhelming, preoccupying, now - it's as if something was lodged inside, a splinter or some mote of grit embedded, hatefully abrading her. Looking down, she sees the blood flare out as if through water, staining space around her, twining like a living, moving thing.

Blood in healing wounds coagulates, and clots up; so too does this fresh blood coalesce, but it becomes more solid yet than any scab or caul. It's like a seed has taken root, and thence the blood is sprouting - not bleeding, then, but growing from her capillaries. The stems of blood take on more definition, as they grow, spiraling and twining up amongst each other - but not separating from their source, remaining ever anchored to their sconce and source in Dana's open palm.

It's only now that fear begins to seize her; only now that her body is jeopardized, now that the knife is pressed up to her throat. She tries, first, to swim back up, towards the floor, and the leaves and the dark wood which would now be welcome. It's to no avail, though, as she realises she's sunken far beyond sight of the surface through which she fell - in all directions now, there's merely this roiling cistern devoid of light but for what lies below. After one vain attempt to reverse course and surface, she thinks that perhaps pressing onward's the better bet - onward toward that bright object which we can't yet see.

The camera still can't turn to face it - it might be blinding, might damage the film. Warm a light as it might be in person, from here - at this distance - it takes on a dangerous heat, as might irradiate any onlooker such as yourself. Dana's blood has gone heliotrophic, seeking out the source of light and warmth - twining like a vine towards the vanishing point there.

Unsure of any other viable course of action, she seizes the stem in her opposite hand, feels its surface, thin and wet and living, and it feels painful and raw as a healing burn. Not like blood already spilled, insensate and abstracted from its source, it feels instead as loose flesh still attached, still wired with nerves, still capable of feeling her loose grip upon its length. It's growing, yet, as well, though still so thin and twining as to seem more like a green seedling, and new, vulnerable as any newborn thing.

Briefly she considers pulling it away, attempting to just sever this new growth from in her veins, but she refrains - holds back awhile still, as fascinated as she's unsettled and disgusted by its emergence. More vegetal than it is animal, it lacks pulse, sinew, and bone; it grows, and multiplies, but always with its constitution purely blood, sans intervening tissues. The growth fast enough to see and track, now, but slow and steady still - it precludes focus on anything else, on Dana's part. She watches, in awe and gut-horror, her own limb become part of the space she occupies - become newly beholden to this realm's strange, alien laws. In defiance of logic and science, the tendril yet stretches on - hungry for radiance, thirsty for whatever lingers below and beyond.

Christopher lights up, leans up against a wall, stares into negative space. He's looking for nothing, but hoping, now, for the best - he's going to wait, for the moment. He figures they'll call.

He's still got Dana's backpack with him; he'd opened it only to answer her phone, and he's still put off looking through it. This is in part because it doesn't feel right to look through her possessions, not when there's still the faint hope that she might return, and in part because he's not sure he could bear to see whatever scattered remnants of her are left therein.

He can hear the pill-bottles rattle as he pulls the bag from his shoulder, and sighs. He's sure she's well-supplied; it's her way of getting by, her way of coping. It's not like he can judge her, he knows - everyone has their vices, and Christopher himself is no exception. He doesn't judge her, but he worries, sometimes - when she's been up for days and frets at every shadow, every slight sound from beyond her field-of-view. It's not hard for him to tell, when that's the case - though she'll not say it out loud, it shows in her movements, her speech, and her bearing. All he can do then is try to be of comfort, which he can rarely manage; she'll sleep eventually, and he'll keep a sort of watch until he, too, swiftly succumbs to weariness - unaided by the speed, his wakefulness puts up less of a fight.

Pulling out an amber bottle, nigh-empty, and holding it to the blue afternoon half-light, he sees the two remaining cross-tops in, and fantasizes. His mind wanders back to their early endeavours, to stake out the safe spots amidst all the chaos here - the Arboretum was one, but a recent discovery; the earlier ones were largely indoors. Some sort of shelter seemed necessary - the darker the room, the safer it tended to be. Inside their respective homes, with the blinds drawn - rain wholly excluded, sun mediated by ablative plastic and cloth - they'd never felt threatened, and spotted no signs that the lay of the land might there shift. The hazard had something to do with the atmosphere - always there was a wind, or a glimmer, or a sudden downpour to indicate imminent incidences of phenomena - vanishings, spatial distortions, and so forth.

They'd soon learned that this didn't mean civilised artefacts and architecture were safe; the presence around here would often wield words, walls, and streets to its ends, so long as they'd some contact yet with the environment. In this sense, the Arboretum had seemed exceptional - surrounded by the air and wind and sun, the turret there at the glade's core was, by their months of observation, somehow altogether free of untoward influence, sturdy as rock in the face of the protean sea as surrounded it.

Or so it had seemed, Topher thinks, bitterly, and tosses the pills in the bag. He was right - he couldn't stomach it, and wonders no more as to what else there might be inside. Extinguishing his cigarette on a wall, he paces impatiently along the length - several meters, no more - of the driveway. His housemate's car's home, he notes, as he turns back around - there might, then, be someone indoors, someone to whom he'd just rather not speak at the moment.

It isn't for any personal quarrel that Topher's evaded those with whom he lives - it's just he's increasingly struggled to connect to anyone whose life's not so wrapped up in investigation as his. Indeed, there were times when he'd seen Dana for his only friend - he's not sure, now, if that's the case anymore. She was more than a colleague, but never a lover; an occasional confidante, by mutual needs, but never a buddy - no, nothing so warm. Their relationship being, as it was, defined so dramatically by their co-conspiracy, Christopher found it quite hard to compare to any other connection of his. He's wondered at times if she felt the same way, or at least turned the same question over in mind once or twice - it seems likely enough to him, which he finds a comforting thought.

There's a sound just past the door to confirm his suspicions; he sighs, once again. Stepping inside, discarding his cigarette butt in the bin, he makes a valiant effort to fix fast his focus on his shoes, and the holes in their toes, and the socks that peek through - on anything but the eye-level center-stage, whereabouts he might find others. With a half-muttered, half-spoken "Hello?" he makes, reluctantly, his presence known to who else might be there; when there's no reply, then, worth noting, he heads for his room. It's dark, there, and in a welcoming way - the afternoon's deepened to an early evening, the blue rain-light dimmed down once more to an ambient grey.

A seedling grows in two directions; outward, at the sun, and in towards the damp, dark depths of earth. In each direction, it seeks sustenance; it reaches for the things it needs with hungry fervor coded in at its inception. Seedlings are, in that sense, like ideas - ideas, which so soon as they're conceived begin to burrow in the mind from whence they've sprung, and outward, demanding communication. A notion needs be spoken, and also dwelt upon, just as a young new plant needs sun and nutritive products of its predecessors' decay. Every wood grows from seedlings, as does each scheme of thought grow from germinal notions - seemingly random moments of conception

There's something in Dana's arm, now, and it's burrowing - taking root under the skin, breaching capillaries to enter the bloodstream proper. It looks like her blood, but it isn't her blood - of that she's been convinced entirely, watching it spread. It's red, and it's dark, and it feels like a part of her - to her touch, to nerve-endings, perhaps, but not to her mind. To her mind, there's something malignant, aggressive, about its mere presence in her open hand. She's not sure what provoked it to grow - she's seen nothing quite like it before; this is a source of anxiety to equal the pain and the itch as accompany it.

This anxiety is dominant, and totalising - it doesn't pause to let thought through. Like an obsession, she ruminates on it, grimacing at the pain, but never closing her eyes. Her exhaustion is wholly subsumed in the pain; thoughts of sleep are as absent as thoughts of escape. All that matters now is what's pressed through the breach in the skin in her hand, to reach out for the light - the light that gleams green-gold, down at this abyss's nadir. All that matters is warmth - radiance - it demands, wreathing her forearm in purpura, anguish and chill. So she keeps reaching for it - arm stretched involuntarily, palm open, splayed, begging its aid. Dimly, she thinks the light might indeed help her, might indeed be what she needs, or she wants. Brightly, the light persists, sparkling like a dying star.

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