It sat like darkness in the middle of the room. No one could tell me how it had gotten there, or how long it’d been, or even who it belonged to. It just was, in this vacant apartment. I’d once asked the Super about it, about how the apartment was vacant and what they were planning to do with it, and he came in, took a look around, said he should probably see about having it disposed of, and then his gaze just kind if…slid off it. He turned around, started talking about something else, and walked out of the room, closing the door behind him and leaving me alone in the room with it.
I talked to Luc about it because he’s the kind of guy you talk to about stuff like it. He’s the kind of guy that pulls out the esoteric knowledge that you didn’t know you needed. He walked in, took one look at it, and all he said was
“I don’t know. It makes me uncomfortable.”
“But it’s gotta be something, right? Sitting alone in a room of the Building? I’ve had the Super in here to look at it, except he can’t really look at it. He takes one glance at it, and then he just—I don’t know—gets distracted or something and wanders off. I’ve never seen him like that before.”
“Maybe it’s because it’s not important, Michael.”
“It’s gotta be. The Super can’t see it. I’ve asked some of the old ones about it, and all they can tell me is that no one goes to the 21st floor, but none of them could tell me why. I asked them if any of them had ever seen a black box sitting on a wooden chair in the middle of a room, and when I did they got distracted.”
“Maybe they were trying to be polite, Michael: feigning disinterest to hint that it wasn’t a line of discussion that they wished to pursue.”
“No. You didn’t see them. It was something in their eyes. It was like…like the Super. It looked like they couldn’t hold it in their head. You’ve got that collection of those weird, mystery articles about the building. Tales of the Building, wasn’t it? Is there anything in there about this?”
“I can assure you without a shadow of a doubt that there is nothing in that particular collection about anything like this.”
“But…don’t you want to know what it’s all about, Luc!? Don’t you want to plow through your books and come up with some explanation about how it’s a Babylonian wotzit?”
“Summerian. If it’s anything, it’s Summerian. But, no. I’m not interested. I’m quite sure I don’t want to have anything to do with it.”
He kind of shivered, turned around, and then left. I stayed there in the empty room, wondering at Luc not being interested in something. Since I’d met him, I’d often come to him to bounce things I’d seen in the Building off him, and he always took them way more seriously than I’d ever intended to discuss them. I’d come to him with the most banal things, and he’d always seem riveted. I’d never seen him disinterested.
* * *
Some nights, I’d get bored, so I’d walk down the stairs to 21. The door would be unlocked, like it always was, and I’d open it and just stand there in the doorway, staring at the way that the moonlight and fluorescent offglow of the city would fall around it from the windows, never actually touching it; never casting any kind of shadow other than the one that always hung around it.
I watched it over and over again for the space of a week. I couldn’t really tear myself away from it. In my empty moments, I would just wander downstairs, open that door, and stare. Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, I’d just wander down there and stare at it. Sometimes in those midnight hours, I’d think I heard whispers in the room, filtering down from the tenants above or up from the ones below. Eventually I realized that they were coming from the thing itself: whispers in no language I’d ever known. I couldn’t turn away, but gradually the same odd creepy vibe that Luc seemed to get off it began to seep in around the edges. I was intrigued about everything that it was, but I become more and more uncomfortable with it with every visit.
All at once, I realized it wasn’t right. That the thing that had so intrigued me about it all of this time was the realization somewhere in the back of my mind that it shouldn’t be there: that it was somehow living in a void or a gap or a tear in what was normal and right. There were a number of things that I’d run across in this building, and they’d seemed odd or unbelievable, but, for some reason, despite all of their oddity they all just fit in the building somehow. They were odd, but they were the kinds of things that couldn’t possibly exist anywhere else. They all had the same timeless quality as the building: the same undeniableness.
But this thing wasn’t meant to be here. Someone or something had put it here, and they’d counted on that way that it was able to wrap the shadows around itself and cause the people like the Super and Old Ones to just forget about it to protect the thing: to keep it here to accomplish whatever it was meant to be doing.
No comments:
Post a Comment