glowing coils

cecil gershwin palmer

[glowingcoils]

cecil’s sweater featured in this thread.

[kesheph-blog]

“Cecil? I can’t hear you, sweetie. Where are you? It’s so dark here.”

The words echo in the empty halls and rooms, leave behind an impression as clear as a shadow. It’s being piped in through the walls; it’s impossible to pinpoint it to any one location. But when he enters the hall again he will find the floor covered in thousands of shards of broken dark glass that crack and crunch beneath his feet.

A flurry of handwritten text appears on various doctor’s prescription pads, easily seen by anyone passing but easily missed by anyone not paying attention to their surroundings.

WHY DIDN’T YOU LEAVE?

TURN AROUND

I DIDN’T LOOK

I’M SORRY

G-D FORGIVE ME

[glowingcoils]

“Mom, I don’t know what to do,” he says more loudly, worry growing. This isn’t a good place for his mother to be. She’s easily frightened and overwhelmed. It doesn’t matter that she’s dead, Cecil still wants her to be safe. Ghosts can feel fear just like anyone else.

He finally decides to leave the room he’s in and go back to where he started, hoping that will be a more obvious place for her to find him. “Don’t worry, okay, I’ll—“

Cecil looks down, swallows. This mess wasn’t here before. This smell—the sharp, woozy smell of alcohol—wasn’t here before. His stomach clenches and he looks away, shutting his third eye. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a coincidence. Hushed and careful, as though trying not to give cause for any further absolutely-totally-impersonal destruction, he picks his way toward the front desk, where he feels some sort of controls to the intercom should be.

When he sits down he sees the notes, and once again very nearly forgets what he was doing. His shoulders sag, he drops the metal bar with a clang that he barely notices, he reaches for as many of the notes as he can grab and pulls them toward himself. He takes one that says I’M SORRY and another that says WHY DIDN’T YOU LEAVE? and holds them in his hands, staring, wondering, trembling.

“I’m sorry, too,” he says, to himself and also not to himself. “I don’t know. I didn’t know where to go.”

[kesheph-blog]

“Mama?”

Inside the freestanding doors is the white, sterile laminate and stainless steel of an emergency room waiting room. There’s no one else inside, no patients, no staff, nothing but the quiet hum of fluorescent lights and empty vending machines. A phone receiver dangles off the hook with a clear dialtone beeping softly; next to it, on the counter, sits a single bottle of dark beer.

“Mommy?”

The voice sounds like it’s coming from over the intercom, which means it sounds like it’s coming from everywhere. There’s obvious fear in that voice, but more than that there’s the trepidation of being six and needing to cross a dark room alone at night. None of the doors are locked, but none of them lead anywhere of particular interest either. Trying to leave out the front door only returns one back into the room they came from. So many of the rooms in here look so identical to each other that it’s hard to tell if other doors have the same effect.

The intercom sparks to life again, but this time it’s not a child’s voice, it’s an adult woman’s.

“Cecil, is that you? Cecil? I can’t find you in here.”

[glowingcoils]

Everything else—the poking around he’d been doing among the nondescript rooms, the ruins outside (wherever ‘outside’ is now), even the stranger he’d run into—seems suddenly irrelevant. The child’s voice, that could have been anyone, so many children sound alike, and although the words and their tone had unnerved him, he’d put it aside. Now though, this, her—he can’t do that to her. She sounds so lost.

“Mom?” he calls, wary and shocked and pathetically hopeful, turning around, then turning around again, head whipping this way and that. His heart is pounding in his throat. “Mother? I’m right here, can you hear me?” He wants to take off looking for her, find her right away, but he doesn’t want to confuse her.

[kesheph-blog]

“I am going to hurt you.”

He’s too close. Their panic spikes. The ground between them dips down about six feet and slams backwards, separating them by about twenty feet. The buildings cluster tightly together and begin to sag inwards, the sides peeling and lifting, revealing an expanse of metal and wood framework on the inside. They seem to pulse, as if breathing, and are sweating salt water. 

On the other side of the gulf between them a pair of sliding glass doors, the kind you’d find at the front entrance to a hospital emergency room, keeps opening and shutting on its own like a guillotine. They are not attached to anything and appear to go nowhere.

[glowingcoils]

It’s a good thing the man’s in a crouch when the ground moves; as it is, he falls the short distance to the filthy pavement, jolted onto his hands and knees by the rapid backward motion. With an admittedly foolhardy curiosity, he gazes down into the rent-open earth. A lot of bodies would fit in there, he thinks. A lot.

The smell of salt and damp and the sound of groaning metal make him look up. Things are changing. Or, well, things are always changing, but it doesn’t usually happen so quickly like this, like an interactive time-lapse photograph. He wonders if the wave of change is coming for him, too—if his skin and muscle will flake off and away into the air like the rusting iron flesh of the city. He wonders if he will die here, in this place with no name, far from the home and the people he loves. He’s not even sure how he got here (though that in itself is not entirely unusual).

The place probably wants something, needs something. Places usually do.

He feels he needs to get back to the person he’s found. Despite their frank threat, they’ve been the only other sentient thing he’s stumbled upon here. It’s hard for a person to ignore that. Unfortunately, the freshly gaping maw in the ground takes away the option of return—he can’t even walk around it, everything on either side is torn up into jagged wrecks of concrete taller and more impassable than they should be. He’s not willing to risk falling into the pit, either. Something about it isn’t right.

So he turns around, toward the insistent slamming that’s begun behind him. The door stands on its own, moves on its own—seems, in fact, to be less a door and more two panels of metal and glass isolated in the dark, narrow street, attacking each other over and over. The message here is clear, he thinks, and he appreciates that kind of thing. Never one to turn his nose up at helpful directions, he picks up the bar again, takes a moment to gauge his timing as though he’s about to enter a double-dutch jumprope, and then darts forward, slipping smoothly through the entrance.

[kesheph-blog]

The street changes very subtly at first; a kind of gathering darkness curling up in corners and around the sides of buildings. It gets denser the further in one goes, and quieter, too. The ambient city noises - distant sirens, car horns honking, people shouting and arguing - fade away piece by piece, like pulling off layers of dead skin, until the street is cushioned by velvety silence. But not total silence. Not far ahead, and getting closer judging by the fact that it keeps growing louder, is the gentle teeth-aching sound of water being poured into an empty glass. And heavy breathing.

The buildings crowd closer together; alleyways shrink until they’re impassable by human bodies, and then nearly disappear altogether. The buildings grow in height until they seem to touch each other, leaning in from their own weight and crowding around the street below, which narrows eventually to a thin gap wide enough for a single person to walk through. Moon, stars, ambient light from the city, they’ve all vanished from the sky, as if someone traced the outline of it and cut it out in Photoshop, leaving a blank white canvas. You can turn wherever you’d like but all roads lead to the same muddled corner where the same hunched figure is curled tightly against a brick wall, muttering to themself. Their head snaps up.

“Don’t!” Their dirty fingernails dig further into the skin of their arm. Their eyes are so wide they’re all white, the same colour as their unwashed hair. Their feet are bare and dirty. They look like they ran out into the street in the middle of the night without getting dressed. “Please. I’m scared.”

[glowingcoils]

The person looking down at them is somewhat obscured in the strange, low light. For a moment he stands still, hesitating, one hand unconsciously drawn up toward his chest—but then he makes his decision and lowers himself slowly, very slowly, into a crouch beside the frightened stranger.

“It’s alright,” he says, putting down the metal bar he’d been carrying and holding his hands up in a show of harmlessness. Though he seems to just be recovering his breath, his voice is striking—a resonant, rich baritone—and he deploys it as a medic would some soothing ointment. “I’m not going to hurt you. ...At least, not if you don’t hurt me. I think that’s fair, right?”

Closer up, more of his features are apparent.  His long hair hangs in two dark, glossy braids on either side of his face. He’s wearing a rainbow sweater featuring a heap of wide-eyed black cats, the sleeves rolled halfway up to reveal brown skin covered in tattoos. His clothes are spattered in something dark. Perhaps, though, the most notable detail is the third eye in the center of his forehead, open and unblinking, its gaze uncomfortably deep.