Hey everyone, back from the pits! Did ya miss me? Sorry I haven't updated in a long while, you have no idea the problems I had writing. For...months. Ahem. Well, I got at least this much out of me! Expect to see me updating a lot more in the future!
CHAPTER SEVEN
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White eyelids, blued by veins underneath, open slowly, hazel rings squeezing black down to a point, tiny in light.
Can only live in the darkness.
The first thing Rachel saw was a featureless wall, which she instantly recognized as the side of the bathtub. She was lying on her side - her arm, specifically, but it couldn't have been long because it hadn't fallen asleep yet. And her upper lip seemed warm...
Pat. A droplet of something fell from above, outside her range of vision, and landed on her upper lip. It dribbled slowly; liquid, but definitely thicker than water. It was like snot, actually. And directly under her nostrils...she hadn't noticed the smell before, in the way that one can curiously be oblivious to the most obvious senses until they consciously think about it, but now it hit her like a freight train. It was overpowering, almost sweet but not in any way pleasant. As a matter of fact -
Rachel's hand snapped to the upper lip and then in front of her eyes. Her index finger was smeared with a lumpy red-brown substance. "Fuck!" For lack of any better materials, she wiped her finger and then her upper lip on her sleeve. She stared at the smear on her once-white shirt with a look of disgust. "Symbol of femininity," she murmured darkly, and as she did so another droplet fell onto the sleeve's wrist.
Rachel slowly stood up. It wasn't hard to trace the source of the fluid; the showerhead was dripping, and the filter or whatever it was called - whatever separated the water into the separate streams that constituted a shower - had come loose and allowed the chunky bits to drain out the separation at its bottom. She carefully reached out, nudged the showerhead - and the "filter" fell clean off, bouncing off the bottom of the tub and throwing the crap that had collected in it all over her shoes. What was left of the showerhead continued to dribble the substance, obviously pumping out far more than would come from any real human being...
But then, this whole place seems a little overdone, isn't it?
The bathtub itself was by far the most pristine object in the room, bloody gunk and all. The wallpaper was soiled, if the word soiled could describe it; it had been turned a colour as if it had been soaked with urine repeatedly, dried, and then used to grind out lit cigarettes. It was marked and smeared with a substance that looked a lot like blood, although the pattern of the stains looked less like being splattered and more like a bleeding object had been pressed up against the wall so that it could soak in for a while. The ceiling was inexplicably dark, as if covered in some sort of short, black-brown grass or mold that hung downwards and gave an air of claustrophobia to the room. The ceramic tiles of the floor were cracked, looking like they had been somehow dried out and made unbelievably brittle. They also held the yellowish colour of the walls - though, come to think of it, the yellow tinge may be because of the lights in the room giving off a positively sickly tone...
Rachel stepped out of the bathtub, stepping carefully on the tile floor lest it be slippery, and made her way to the mirror. She had intended to check her reflection for blood in case she had hit her head again, but it was a futile effort; the glass was somehow clouded - giving only a foggy, blurred reflection, as if covered with a layer of Vaseline. This was compounded by the fact that it had a symbol drawn in red on the glass. The liquid had dribbled and run and was unidentifiable as anything other than what was probably a stick figure with a polygonal torso, and maybe another long line attached to the end of the arm - the figure holding something long and thin, if the line wasn't caused by dribbling blood ruining the image.
She really didn't need to check herself anyway - her behavior thus far made that clear. She could walk, think and see. When she had awoken before, in the van...she had not been lucid. She could barely move, like trying to lift leaden limbs on gossamer threads. Even when she did get up she had to support herself on the side of her vehicle or fall over, from dizziness as much as anything else. Her brain cells couldn't connect, the world spun and nothing but the basest thoughts could be made.
Not now. She was fine - certainly not post-concussion, or even a fainting spell. It was as if she had simply taken a refreshing forty winks in the tub. She wasn't even groggy. Her head still hurt, but that was from the car crash, not anything new...
"So I wasn't knocked out," she mumbled. "This time, I just...woke up."
She turned her gaze to the bathroom's door.
It was dark outside the doorway, and Rachel pulled out her flashlight. The bright white light shone out of the end, bleaching the walls. They weren't urine yellow, but they were smeared with more red. This town has a real preoccupation with blood, doesn't it? she thought to herself, dripping out of the shower, leading to the gun...
"Yeah. At least the gun was bleeding real blood." Rachel continued to mumble, sarcastically. "Whereas everything else is dripping menstrual fluid..."
Desales was gone.
Rachel shone the light about the hotel room, alarm growing, but it was true. Desales had disappeared - she wasn't lying on the bed or dead on the floor or standing at the window - she was just plain gone. She took a step forward, and her foot connected with something. She stepped back quickly and shone her flashlight downward. It took a second for her to realize it was a box.
It took another second for her to realize it was a box of bullets.
She shone her light around, finding there was a second on the floor as well. She knelt, picking one up in her thin fingers and staring at it intently. "What..." she breathed. "Why would..."
They, according to the box's label, were .32 rounds and contained two magazines of eight each. Rachel shot a look to her pistol - even though she wasn't a fan, she had had to do some research on firearms once and remembered this specimen of being .32 caliber itself. Hesitantly, she opened the first box and found exactly what it promised - an evil-looking rectangular magazine, full to the brim of two-cubed bullets. She tried to load it into the black and blue semiautomatic and it slid home with a clack. She loaded a round into the chamber with a un-Hollywoodlike style harsh, hard-edged sound.
Perfect fit. Rachel slowly turned her gaze from the pistol to the door.
The hallway seemed to throb to some titanic, sluggish heartbeat, though there was no sight or sound of such phenomena. It was more like the air itself pulsated. It was dark, but there was enough ambient light to make the white shoe visible as it came down the "floor."
The torchlight spread its embrace across the ceiling, walls and beneath her feet. That behind her, that of the room she was in before, was ordinary drywall; blood-splattered in odd non-Euclidian patterns as it may be, but still drywall. Opposite herself was not even close to normal - an impossibly long strip of dented-looking metal, the original colour of which could only be described as "dull." The original colour however was hard to discern as it showed nothing more than a show of decay and disrepair, almost totally covered with rust as well as unidentifiable filth and general uncleanliness. The entire wall was a single long unit, one piece, and yet somehow looked slipshod anyway; it seemed to emanate an aura of dreariness, as if everything about and surrounding her was of some sloppy unfinished world. She shined the light upward and saw that the ceiling was nothing more than strips of dented, unfinished grating and random groupings of pipes. They seemed to make up the above floor. Rachel turned the flashlight downwards and saw the floor beneath her was more of the same. She dragged her foot an inch; it slid in some unidentifiable and unnoticeable slippery substance. She turned her gaze to the left and saw that the hallway continued; its stretched out far further than it had been before and faded into darkness before the end, her flashlight's beam swallowed up by a blackness that seemed material.
Turning her gaze to the right - to the direction she and Desales had come from, in that desperate blind flight back when the world still made a sort of sense - she had very little to see. It was only a couple of steps to the door they had come through - the door Rachel kicked open with ease - was boarded up. Two dozen planks of wood had been nailed to the door, crisscrossed with no sense of sanity or direction or intelligent thought. Nails that looked more like railway spikes were driven through the ends, securing the boards to the wall and blocking off the portal. Rachel could tell without even trying that she was never going to get through that door, short of finding a chainsaw.
And the boards looked old. They were gray and dry and musty. Weird white strings like cobwebs (but not cobwebs) existed in spots. There were discolorations in the wall where the nails had leached, turning the area around them mottled and yellow. They looked like they had been put up hundreds of years ago, and she couldn't have been out more than a few minutes.
Rachel turned back to her left - she still hadn't changed position from the first step she took out of the door - and shone her flashlight once again down the infinitely long corridor. "Deh-Zallas!" she hissed, making the paradoxical loud whisper. "Offis-zer Deh-Zallas!" Her words were deformed by whisper and strain.
"Please..." she mumbled, to herself now. She craned her head over her shoulder and peered back into the room longingly. It was small and creepy and the shower dripped menstrual fluid, but at least it was safe and quiet and familiar...
She remembered the sound of Desales's scream of pain, the sight of her flying against the wall.
Rachel whimpered, closed the door and began to creep down the hallway. Her foot raised and was lowered - it did not fall but was delicately placed upon the floor with the tenderness and caution of a baby being placed in a crib. It was by this soundless pace that Rachel advanced, flashlight beam held to shine into the endless nothingness. When the writer passed by a door she would test its knob, attempt to open it, but the knob only rattled loosely and, once, came off in her hand - the door impossible to open and to enter.
The hallway still continued, but Rachel could go no further. The floor itself had simply given out, the grating and pipes suddenly and inexplicably stopping at a straight and very deliberate-looking line, a perfectly square gap. The floor picked up again ahead, but it was a distance between the two equal to the width of the hall; it was far too great a distance for Rachel to jump. A look over the edge of the gap showed simply blackness which her flashlight could not dispel. She didn't know what would happen if she fell. She didn't want to find out.
But there was one point of interest. An elevator was set into the wall, just past where the floor ended. The doors were a shining, stainless steel, as were the walls to their left and right where the call buttons were located. The corners of the metal - so pristine and unsoiled in this environment, bizarre and out of place - touched the corners of the gap without the slightest error. It was obviously, so obviously deliberately arranged.
But by whom?
Rachel's gaze dropped from her feet, to the elevator doors. She couldn't jump the gap, not to the opposite floor. But the crack between the elevator doors were only halfway - maybe, maybe...
Maybe. Rachel licked her lips. She reached, leaning over with one hand bracing herself against the wall, and managed to use the tire iron to push one of the buttons. The elevator doors opened smoothly, blind to the world of decay about them. Rachel checked the distance between the doors and the edge of the floor again, and a third time.
Maybe. Coin toss. Her mind, her writer's mind - the intricate and beautiful thoughts that flashed back and forth a million times a second across her brain, that can take a sight, a smell, a feeling, a thought and put it into a hundred thousand million billion different combinations of words - her writer's mind went now, independently of herself and begging her to see what was going on in front of her. Heads or tails. Fifty-fifty. Heads, you win. Tails, you die.
She started to back up, tentative slow steps as she kept her eyes locked on the elevator doors.
Coin toss. No control. No control. Can't see. 50 chance to fail.
She bent her knees.
50 chance to lose everything with no control. One out of two to die.
She ran forward, if you can call the two steps running before she hit the edge.
Maybe.
She leapt, arms grasping for a hold before she even left the floor. She was flying, hurtling...
Heads, you win.
Falling...
Tails...
And the thirty-six-year old whose exercise consisted of never going outside and whose diet included whatever cheap, zero-calorie item happened to be in the fridge when she got hungry once or twice a day fell too far and only caught the lip of the elevator floor, hanging out over nothingness, with her ribs. She scrabbled for a hold and swung out into space.
...you die.
Rachel's arms and breasts were over the edge of the elevator floor, but everything below danged. Her legs kicked uselessly for a hold that didn't exist and her momentum swung her. Her knees should have smashed into the wall below the elevator but there was none, only inky blackness in an utter void under the Lion Heights first floor. Rachel's arms were crossed, trying to support her weight, and then snapped out to stretch themselves along the elevator floor and try to find something to grip - anything that would allow her to pull herself into safety instead of falling into a bottomless pit.
There wasn't anything on the featureless, carpeted elevator car floor. Her sleeved arms managed to find purchase but little more. Stable for God knows how few moments, Rachel tried to pull herself up by her elbows and shoulders, but failed. She just didn't have the upper body strength to for that - few people do. One hand slammed against the edge of the doorway and tired to push her inside, but she was at an awkward angle. It was like trying to pull one's self up by their fingertips. Her right leg kicked again, higher now; she swayed and nearly lost her balance before her toe caught on the elevator's lip, allowing her to push herself into the elevator by her leg. The feel of her thighs straightening, like pulling metal strings, was heavenly.
Rachel crawled the rest of the way into the elevator, gulping down mouthfuls of air as her eyes bulged. She turned herself over onto her back and simply laid on the floor, sucking musty oxygen in and out as she stared up at the ceiling, cold seat in her armpits.
But it was only a couple of seconds before she sat up; the adrenaline not yet worn off as she crawled on hands and knees to the rows of buttons. A bloody thumbprint was prominently displayed on the button for floor 4. Rachel breathed deeply in, then out before overlaying the print with her own thumb.
The elevator hummed and began its ascent; one level of hell for another.