Chapter Two – Gramophone
The apartment was plain and dingy. The only way to tell that it had been lived in at all was that some of the paint stains looked fairly fresh. May was careful to put the chain on when she shut the door. This apartment obviously had nothing worth taking, but thieves didn't seem to care about such trivialities as picking their targets any more.
And one thing Rapture had taught everyone of her inhabitants was just how easily a life held tenderly against one's chest could be ripped away. A heart on one's sleeve torn off and left too bleed. A skull cracked, a throat cut, a body charred beyond all recognition by fire and lightening, flung about by men who looked like demons and thought themselves gods.
She sat in her only chair, hands folded in her lap. The canvases stacked haphazardly in the corner were a little green around the edges, the paint was beginning to run, too. But it had been a while since anything as base and quaint as a painting come be sold in this city. To think that one of her little sketches had caught Ryan's eye an eternity ago. Her ticket to Rapture...
She wished she'd burnt it, torn it up, become a shopkeeper just like Daddy, just been a little less accomplished at her art. Anything that meant she wouldn't be here, in these dirty clothes in this dirty flat, waiting to find out how she'd die.
She touched her fingertips to her face. Plain, dull and forgettable, but still recognisably hers, if a little worn. The woman two doors down had spent every cent she could get (May didn't like to think on how she got them) on Adam. Smoother skin, fuller lips. She'd looked stunning. And then the money ran out and she didn't look stunning for very long after that. Evicted, she'd still wandered the halls every other day or so, broke in and stole whatever she could from the occupants.
She thought about the last time she'd seen Gracie Stevens, and pushed her hands into her skull, as if the memories could be forced out if she could only push hard enough.
May wished now that she hadn't called the police, but what else could she do?
And she'd known that the bathysphere station would be hopeless, but what else could she do?
…
Nothing moved in the grimy apartment, but it was not silent. The steady drip-drip of something leaking somewhere. What sounded like begging from the hall outside. A scratching in the walls that in any other city might have been rats.
From one of the adjacent rooms, the creaky strains of a gramophone leaked through the cheap plaster.
A thin sobbing that echoed strangely in this dusty space.
After awhile the door was unchained, opened once and shut. The burglars who broke in two days later would be surprised that it wasn't locked, and disappointed by the lack of hidden treasures.
After they left, the door did not open again.
End