On the Corner of West Elm and Bailey

On the Corner of West Elm and Bailey XIII


Quatre covered his face with his hands, brows knit, and nose scrunched.

All of the books and periodicals had been read thrice through. The dull grip of monotony and nothingness that characterized much of his after-life in limbo was creeping up on him, again. It had been some time since Trowa had last paid a visit. He remembered that they had been at odds with each other. The reason why had only just escaped him.

Words penetrated his consciousness now and again, floating up from obscurity like dice in an 8-ball, words like: microchip, lighbulb, movie, starwars, computer, ultra pastureized.

As these words cropped up, he remembered their definitions and their context, more words, no substance.

He felt listless and allowed himself to be coddled by his feline friends that came and went, ever nameless.

The letters on the floorboards caught his eye from time to time and pleased him in a distant way. The feeling was like that of encountering a familliar room which, due to some twist of circumstances, belongs to someone else.

His gaze alighted on \'Trowa,\' and he couldn\'t help the blank smile that crept up his face.

What\'s a Trowa?

There was an abrupt Thump Thump Thump upstairs.

That was something that he recognized.

He waited.

She didn\'t laugh.

When they were alive, Sibatt had a room where he imagined the noise to be coming from. In life, she had been a mostly agreeable girl, not given to sudden passions. In death, she seemed to have on-off days. It was as if her soul could only serve as a vessel to one emotion at a time, one a robust euphoria, and the other, an agitated restlessness.

Quatre pressed his lips into a thin line and closed his eyes.

It was an off day.

++

It wasn\'t a place that he had been before.

The parking lot was empty, the street lamps were on, and the moon was nowhere in sight.

There was a group of people filtering in through a side entrance to the main lobby.

He ran to catch up, feeling a weightlessness that seemed akin to slow motion. Tufts of grass that had been flourishing between the cracks of the sidewalk brushed along the soles of his shoes like wire bristles sending up mists of dew in his passing.

He was two paces behind the last person when he passed through the door into the side entry way, and balked when he found himself completely alone. The door behind him was closed, and he didn\'t even bother to ponder leaving. He knew that he couldn\'t get out.

The service desks were vacant, and the elevator was crumbled into oblivion. All of the wide expanse of red and gold carpet under his shoes had been worn down, so much in some places that the dingy hardwood showed through underneath.

Trowa walked around for a while, often looking outside at the darkness where the lights from a few proximal street lamps formed the only islands of land for miles. The soft yellow light inside of the lobby seemed merely to mask the darkness than to ward it away, and at times Trowa couldn\'t discern was was inside from what was out.

He had reached the wall on the far side where the paper was peeling and pressed his fingers up to a loose edge.

The lights flickered.

--

He was in a different room.

The walls were off-white and tiled, the caulk eaten away here and there leaving fissures just large enough for small insects to make homes in.

There were sounds of women talking, clothes changing, metal clanging, and showers running behind him. He turned around and found himself just barely inside a girl\'s locker room. No one seemed to take any notice of him at first. Oddly, he felt no qualms about being where he was, he was neither aroused nor disgusted.

Many young bodies with many soft curves moved about before him speaking and interacting amongst themselves. He could hardly distinguish one girl from the next. None of them seemed to have faces.

Between the benches, Trowa spotted a fresh face.

It was a pretty little girl whose chin barely cleared the height of the bench she stood behind. Her hair was long and black and ironed straight, like liquid ebony. Her eyes were almond-shaped and wide with long dark lashes and brown irises. Her cheeks were pinkened with a powdery blush, and her lips, of a similar color, were drawn back into an excited smile that revealed all of her perfect white teeth.

When Trowa noticed her, she giggled and ran, weaving effortlessly between benches.

\"Why don\'t you play with her?\" a featureless woman asked.

Trowa nodded and took off after the girl into the women\'s locker-room.

He chased her a while, growing genuinely amused by the ring of her vivacious laughter and the swirl of her hair as she evaded him again and again. He didn\'t notice how the women around them seemed to grow quiet and disappear.

The little girl disappeared behind a row of lockers, and Trowa blindly followed, only to stumble backwards in mild horror and shock.

The little girl laughed as innocent as ever as she raised herself high on her serpentine coils. Her body beyond her smooth alabaster neck took on the form of a massive chalk-white snake.

Surprisingly agile, she dropped back down low and slithered away quicker than an eel and up the wall into a corner of the ceiling eaten away with age and browned about the edges.

--

Trowa opened his eyes and sat-up from a repose that he couldn\'t remember slipping into.

The room had changed again.

He was in a tatami-mat room hardly larger than a walk-in closet and amid the thick folds of a floor pallete that took up nearly all the space of the floor. On either side of him were paneled walls that he knew opened when pushed to the side, rather than inward or outward. Newspaper clippings crowded every available space, pasted down flat over all of the walls and ceiling. Trowa would have made no sense of them, even if he had bothered to read them.

The room, unlike the lobby and the locker room, did not appear to be lit by anything save by the pale blue light of a full-moon that shone through windows that were not there.

Trowa felt menace there and felt for the edge of the door. When he found it, he pushed it to the side and emerged from the small-space, kicking off blankets as he went.

--

The new room was even more eerie.

A raspy breathing permeated the air and raised the hairs on the back of Trowa\'s neck to a point where he felt particularly feline. He looked around. It was a plain, unadorned room, another tatami-mat room.

It was what lay on the ceiling that gave him cautionary pause.

On the ceiling was a square opening to an attic, just large enough to fit a man\'s shoulders through. It protruded from the rest of the ceiling like a pair of wooden lips, and next to these yawning labia was the body of an old man.

Trowa knew that it was an old man by his gut rather than his sight. The figure was engulfed in darkness with only two white wide eyes with beady pupils, that watched, to lend it distinction.

They were trained on Trowa and watched him with such a steadiness as made him wish that he could turn to stone. He could feel the malevolence of the watcher bear down upon him like a heavy cloud and searched for an exit.

There were no doors.

There was only the square opening to the attic.

Slowly, he lowered himself to the ground and sat dully on his legs at a loss for what to do.

He stared at anything that wasn\'t the old man lying on the ceiling, and eventually felt a little better about his circumstances.

Then, thin arms suddenly snaked around his shoulders, and he parted his lips to breathe.

++

Trowa woke suddenly from a troubled sleep.

He did not scream or kick, but in a sudden fit of wakefullness, he sat bolt-upright in the same moment that he opened his eyes and breathed deeply.


...TBC

note(s):
1. sorry, this is LATE. I\'m a bit busy with school, right now. I\'ll get back on track as soon as the load lets up
2. Trowa\'s dream is based upon one of my nightmares. I hope that you found it creepy. (\'cause I did)