Greetings Steemit folks! Since I got a very warm reception with my first story "It's Just a Room" I decided it would be motivational for me to start posting my in-progress novel. This story is significantly different from It's Just a Room, but the two tales are intertwined in many respects. I began writing what I'm currently calling "C" (Though this is just a working title) just before I started the NaNoWriMo project for my novella It's Just a Room. My plan for this book is to present it in one hundred chapters, each telling the stories of three people whose lives intersect. By posting this on Steemit, I'm hoping to push myself to keep writing it.
C
Chapter 1
That slinking emaciated thing slithered its way up those creaking stairs; with each step, it seized the wooden boards with its boney claws covered in earth and blood, as if it were trying to wring every last bit of essence out of each plank and beam. Its back was ridden with jagged scales, iridescent if not for their tarnished shell of ash and dirt. The cracking and groaning of its bones produced an ambient soundtrack that matched the proverbial drapes of the desolate stairway. Its jaw snarled opened to reveal a set of crooked teeth, like the teeth you might expect a shark to bear if you ever got up close to one deep in a dark turbulent ocean.
Jack sat, eyes held tightly shut, atop the crumbling chair withered by years—waiting. Waiting, that’s it, he thought to himself, clutching his head securely in his trembling hands. That’s all I have left. And all the while, that dreaded thing climbed ever closer. He had been backed into a corner, and his perturbation had haunted him longer than he could even remember now, and this was it. One final glimpse into the eye of the abyss, his mind turned inside his skull, his locked cage of bone and anxiety. His whole body was convulsing gently now, the way a child might shake if it had been startled by a scary movie a Grimm bed time story. Jack was long past the point of giving up, he had tried to get out, he had glanced around the bleeding chamber, walls so dark and drenched with fear that he could swear he heard them screaming out to him.
His eyes still kept shut like two iron doors as the moaning of that thing’s body—if you could call it a body—snaked a path into his ears. It reached the top of the steps, ending its crippled road of oak and cinder.
“Hello,” came a dry voice, like rocks cracking through a wood chipper. Yet somehow it seemed sophisticated, almost Human. It climbed nearer to him groping the barren wood beneath its clutch, and he held his eyes closed even tighter than before; if he saw the thing, if he looked into its bloody rotten eyes—eyes empty with a millennia of torture—it might just break him down right then and there with one determined leap.
Chapter 2
Jack leapt up in his bed and discovered his burgundy cotton sheets were now soaked with his sweat. He winced at the thought, and then remembered his dream. The window to his right was open, and a warm summer’s breeze would have been blowing in through the black screen; would have been, that is, if there had been any wind at all. Instead, all was still that morning. Through that window came the distant cry of a famished crow.
Maybe the crow was hunting, pecking around the dry earth for any crumbs or perhaps the remains of some berries, trodden upon by whoever had passed by. It didn’t matter where they were from, they’d crawl across the concrete of the sidewalks in complete disregard for the fallen life under them, crushed, used, and now food for this crow. Maybe the crow was scouring a nearby frontage road for some roadkill, a small opossum fallen prey to the wheel of some passerby, on his way home from a long day of work, tired of getting yelled at, and preparing for a nice evening of relaxation with his wife and son of six years. Maybe the poor thing, the opossum that is, was just crossing her way over the dark tar, scurrying as fast as she could to avoid the steel monstrosity steadily approaching, but failing all the same.
Or maybe the crow was just sleuthing out some spiders, crawling about an old wooden fence, who in turn were also searching for food, maybe a small insect of its own to wrap up and consume. And the crow, as hungry as it was, would find its fate in death, eventually. Maybe not this morning, maybe not the next, but it would find that its life would soon come to an end. The crow wasn’t alone either.
Jack pulled his feet over the side of his mattress and dropped himself out of bed, onto the carpet beneath. The fine intertwining threads of the carpet were frayed with age, but felt like home as they curled through the space between his toes; lush, calming, and always the right temperature. Perhaps it’s easy to take something so trivial for granted, something as common as the ground beneath your feet, taken for granted like the berries trampled along the concrete, forgotten, just another simple facet of life.
What was that all about? He thought to himself. His head throbbed and he realized that his back grew cold, drenched in his sleeping fear. Just a nightmare? His neck was sore too, the window wasn’t supposed to be open, but perhaps he left it the night before, or got up during the dark—he was prone to sleep walking—but he usually closed it before bed. Jack lived alone in a cookie cutter three room apartment with dark, but smooth brick walls, a Jewish couple who kept to themselves but had family over every other week or so on one side, and on the other, a solitary elderly man who lived with one quiet Scottie with fur so black and shiny it reminded Jack of the feathers of a raven.
The nightmare startled Jack not for the sole reason that he was afraid, but rather because he rarely, if ever, had nightmares; or at least he never remembered them when he woke up. Next to Jack’s bed, positioned neatly and evenly square exactly two inches from the adjacent wall and bed, rest a tidy end table, constructed almost-perfectly out of a dry unsaturated yew by the Boston-based Corrigan Furniture Co., CFC for short, which went bankrupt in 1987 after the CEO, Gary Carmack was allegedly caught in the midst of his very own prostitution scandal, needless to say the company’s stock started to plummet, employees saw the signs and started quitting, some of them were even offered jobs at another furniture company called FutureFurnish, slowly but surely CFC uttered its last dying breaths as it was dissolved and its assets sold to FutureFurnish, and their owner Raphael Petrucci. The end table in question had been produced as a set of matching living room furniture, but Jack couldn’t afford the entire collection, so he settled for the one he would most likely use—but honestly his choice was made because of the sheer… perfection? of the thing. He has a way with spotting the impurities in life, and made a conscious effort to avoid them at all cost. The end table supported five items: A small brass lamp with two bulbs, one of which burnt out two weeks ago and was promptly replaced; a brown leather bound bible with a gold imprint of a urn and the capital letters “PLACED BY THE GIDEONS” in a speckled and brushed gold; a small black journal placed delicately atop the bible, filled with thoughts; a simple gold trimmed Cross pen, given to him by his mother before she passed away of cancer in 97; and a clean pocket knife, closed, with a steel case that shined in the reflection of the golden summer sun.
He sat down on his bed, sheets still cast haphazardly over the mattress, and he thought. This is precisely what his little black journal was for, and so he carefully lifted it off of the bible, grabbing the gilded pen as well. Flipping the pages until he reached the shimmering red silk book mark, Jack contemplated what happened. Everything, he told himself, can be put to reason. He wrote about the room, its dull grimy appearance, sparing no details. Of course, as one wakes, each frame of what is left of one’s dream slowly starts to strip away. It was important to him to catalog everything. His therapist, and friend, Dr. Malcolm Erickson instructed him to write down everything he could remember about his dreams.
“It’s crucial,” Malcolm told him, “To understand what your subconscious mind is undergoing while you’re asleep. This can only be done if you write each dream down and analyze them after you’ve taken a breath or two, perhaps gone to make a pot of coffee, or gone for a walk.” The Doctor’s office was tidy, trimmed, and well kept, but every time Jack visited him he could pick out new imperfections; small tidbits of wrong. At first of course, Jack pointed each one out to the Doctor, but eventually he gave up, and started internalizing them. Everything from the shades over the dusty windows being crooked, maybe by five degrees or so, to the blatant disregard for the order of his bookshelf. How could the good doctor so carelessly organize his volumes? They weren’t even alphabetical, by title or author, and they certainly weren’t ordered by size, or even color. They seemed random, and Jack couldn’t take it.
“Tell me about this dream, you mentioned something about flowers?” Malcolm asked as he fiddled with a cold black pen in his left hand. A frame of rich earth flashed through Jack’s head.
“Yes,” he replied, unfolding the flap of his dark brown leather messenger bag, a bag which he picked up from an artisan market in Austin, Texas two years prior while he was on a personal vacation, and which he carried with him everywhere, ever since. The man in question, who went by the name Link, was a truly bizarre character. When Jack arrived at the stands, he fancied the bag almost immediately. Jack turned to a large Mexican man who was sitting on an equally large wooden crate.
“Do you know who sells this stuff?” He asked.
“Yeah, that’d be Link, he went out for a smoke. I’ll give him a call,” the man replied. Within thirty seconds, Jack turned and looked down the street to see a small man wearing a long brown overcoat and a top hat that seemed about as big as the man. Turned out Link made the clothes himself, and he was apparently a professional leather worker; what would possess someone to want to be a professional leather worker was beyond Jack.
Jack pulled his little black journal out of the bag’s front pocket and carefully opened it up on his lap, setting the bag down beside him, leaning it up against his soft armchair. “Flowers,” Jack began, “covering the field I was in.”
“You were standing in a field?” Malcolm inquired.
“Not standing, no, but sitting cross-legged,” his eyes scanned the uncreased page as he recalled what few frames he could. “The flowers were all sorts of colors; shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple.”
“The whole rainbow, eh?”
“Yes, precisely, a spectrum of flowers. And they were all arranged in that way from the far left of my sight reaching all the way to the right. I imagine I must have been facing east because the sun was setting behind me. The sky was a soft shale, almost blue, like twilight. I looked up and the sky was painted a dry mauve. I’m not sure why, but I didn’t turn around, and somehow I could still tell it was sunset. The moon was rising just over the horizon, directly in front of me. So I suppose it wasn’t exactly a sunset, but rather a moonrise.”
“A moonrise? That’s a fascinating way to look at it, what do you think that means?” The sun was shining through the slits in the doctor’s crooked shades producing angular slits of illumination across his flat standard-issue-blue carpet and bending up across his mahogany bookshelf. The lights were off, save for a lamp behind the doctor which glowed a faint orange behind a black shade. The drawstring hung down so perfectly, a pendulum suspended by gravity, perfectly parallel with the silver stem. Jack noticed a thin layer of dust covering the base of the lamp.
“I don’t really know what it could mean, I didn’t think about that,” Jack responded.
“Okay,” the doctor said, “Okay that’s not a problem, but try to work on that, make notes in your book after a few hours or so.”
“Sure. So there was this moonrise, and the flowers, but there was also a tree on either side of me. The Northern tree was a dry birch with sparse brown leaves clinging onto the dying branches.”
“So it was autumn?” It certainly wasn’t autumn in reality, it was early May.
“That’s what I thought,” Jack continued, “Until I looked to my right. The Southern tree was a rich oak, thick with bright green leaves. The sunset hit the leaves and they were almost translucent.” Jack looked away from the doctor’s weary face and examined the smooth wooden door, probably just plywood covered in a thin wood texture to make it seem genuine. “But there wasn’t just one oak, there were six. I don’t really know how to explain it, but they all seemed to start around the same area and branch out from each other. It looked almost like one tree, but there was this absence in the center where all the trunks parted, yet all of the branches and leaves seemed to blend together into a solitary canopy.”
Malcolm was cut speechless for a moment, mouth slightly agape, eyes squinting a little as if trying to piece together what this could look like. Finally, he spoke slowly, “I assume you didn’t get a chance to annotate this either? What do you think of it now?”
Jack smirked coyly and gave a faint shake of his head, looking back up at his friend, “I don’t know.”