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Ink Slinger
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Maryland
Gender: Male
Posts: 3,107
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The Stairway (1,292 words)
By the look of the mold patterns and cracked corners, he guessed the building was built sometime in the fifties. He scrutinized one of the splodges; it was dark and symmetrical, much like the Rorschach blotches he knew so well. One from the day before stuck in his memory, the one he thought was an angel of death. This one might have been a flower or a sickle, but probably nothing any more morbid than the sickle.
In a few seconds it was gone, because he was walking rather quickly and refusing to be distracted by anything that caught his eye. Two doors farther, he counted. He stopped at the end door and glimpsed the sign: Office 266, Jasper C. Malcolm, Attorney at Law.
He sighed and gathered the papers he would soon be authorizing. Death is bureaucracy, he thought, but not for very long. Lingering on memories is always worse when they are fresh and pungent, like wet paint. That’s it: wet paint. Soon it will dry and leave a glistening white veneer, but until then he must be careful not to scar the tacky finish.
He knocked on the metal door. I wonder if they ever bring bodies in here, he thought, as his knock echoed down the hall and back again. The usual return greeting was not forthcoming. He knocked again.
“Mr. Malcolm?”
He opened the door a small space and peered inside. One incandescent bulb glared at the ceiling, and the light it threw down revealed a long, winding stairwell – not the leathern office he had seen before.
With confusion, the man stepped back out and looked at the door again. He read the same words, signifying that this was indeed the correct door.
The stairwell was eerie. I entered on the ground floor, so it must lead to the basement, he pondered. Maybe Jasper’s office moved down there, and the numbers were placed here to direct people to the new one. But he was almost positive this door was the same door that led to Jasper’s office before, regardless of markings. Still, he tucked his wife’s documents under his arm and started down the stairs.
They were made of cheap metal, the kind that shivers when you step on it and makes that awful noise, like a gong. He thought the rusted steel was an odd sight in a Pittsburgh building.
The man counted six steps, then a landing. Six more, then a landing. After three flights, he reached the next floor. He was baffled firstly by the notion that each floor opened in a different direction, because of the odd number of flights; and secondly by the absence of any visible door to access the floors. The stairs continued downward, and the only evidence that he had reached a lower level was the marking on the wall: Level - 1. Level one? He questioned. I was just on level one.
He started down the next flight of stairs. After two more turns – eighteen steps – he saw the same markings again: Level - 2. And then he realized, That’s not a dash, it’s a negative. I’m on floor negative two. He ran his hand along the wall, but no portal revealed itself. The wall was metal, seamless, and it didn’t sound hollow when he hit it with his fist. He continued.
Eighteen, he counted. Then Level - 3. He looked over the railing to see how many more floors there were, but the light barely reached the level he was at, much less a floor or two beneath him. He jogged down the next steps and saw Level - 4. It was no different.
This is ridiculous, he thought, and debated returning to ground level. He remembered what the receptionist had said, the strange one with the different colored eyes. She said, “Almost everyone is gone today, but I believe Mr. Malcolm is in his office. Let me call him.” She did, and he answered. “Mr. Malcolm says to come right down. He’ll be waiting.” Come right down? The man could not reconcile why Jasper would need him to come down anywhere if it were not the staircase he was treading.
The bulb’s illumination had long turned to dusk, then sunset, and now he was left to carry on through the night. He pulled a penlight out of his shirt pocket and descended once more. The bright LED cast an uncanny blue glow on the cement landings, and he suddenly didn’t feel safe. One sheet fell from his hand, and he reached to pick it up. On the front, shaded black and white, was a picture of Mary, under which was written, Mary Cunningham, 32 – Deceased December 26, 2010.
The man picked it up with fury, crumpled it, and replaced it in his folder. He ran down the next stairs, taking the last three in one jump. Level - 7. He slammed his fist on the empty wall and kept on running in spite of his warm, burst knuckles. At this speed, his penlight did no good. He cast it down the stairwell and watched the blue light descend rapidly, never stopping. Never stopping. Like a memory. Like paint that doesn’t dry. Like an endless staircase.
He ran after the pen, knowing there was no use stopping until he heard its metallic clatter on the cement floor. He heard nothing, but maybe that was caused by the blood pounding in his ear, his sharp wheezing, or his numb brain fueled by adrenaline. Level - 21.
Down here the air was cold. January hadn’t been kind to Pennsylvania, and the twelfth seemed an unusually bitter day. The comfort of climate control must have left at about negative fourteen.
By now he was flying. He could still see a faintness where the pen was falling. He knew there would be no end. Unless something changed he would never stop. Now he was determined, and when the man was determined he wouldn’t back down, even in the bowels of the earth in which he ran. The darkness was finally too severe to tell what floor he was at, and he really didn’t care.
The folder he carried seemed to become heavier with every floor. At first he thought it was his imagination, but now his arms burned from carrying a twenty-five pound weight of paper. Twenty-six. He readjusted the weight and didn’t stop for a breath. At this point he was jumping down each flight: six, twelve, eighteen, six, twelve, eighteen. His thumps were loud and staccato, causing his mind to lapse into a rhythm.
NO! He couldn’t let things become routine. No, no, no! With effort, he stopped and clenched his jaw. The rhythm stopped. Life slowed. He wasn’t sure what level he was on now, but he had a hunch it didn’t really matter. Only one thing mattered; only one thing would be able to end his downward journey. With determination and no little amount of remorse, he resolved to stop. Just stop.
So he took one last look at Mary, his love, and cast the folder over the cold, hard railing. It writhed through the air before it passed beyond his vision, and he noticed how much brighter it glowed than the penlight had, this one yellow and warm. Several seconds later he heard the expected brattle of something hitting the floor, and he was certain of what it was.
Slowly he walked down eighteen more steps and picked up the penlight, which rested there at the bottom. The folder was gone, and he felt like a man again, like a freshly-peeled scab: tingling but ready to heal. One incandescent bulb shone on the ceiling, so he pocketed the light and entered the door marked Level 1.
Last edited by Achilles : 05-08-2008 at 02:27 PM.
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