Skepticlusion

There and Back Again

Good God, I'm not sure I know what just happened. I mean, I found out why Mara hasn't been back here, but I'm not sure I believe it.

I posted right before I left work. From work, I drove straight to the bookstore. Got there, barged in like I owned the place. Didn't let the bones rattle me, didn't get lost in the labyrinth of bookcases. I walked right to the counter.

Someone new, some skinny-looking, pock-faced skater punk with a barbed spike through his eyebrow sat behind the counter mashing away on a Gameboy. I thought, fuck it, walked right up to the guy and said, "Mara around?"

"Who?" he said, not looking up, Gameboy cooing at him.

"Mara. She works here. Black hair, green eyes, pale skin, fat black glasses."

He must've pressed pause, because then he looked up. "Dude, I'd know if some chick like that worked here. Know what I mean?"

He didn't act suspicious, which surprised me. In my self-centered world, I'd imagined Oddjob or Elise had told the entire staff about me. Apparently not.

"You're sure?"

"Yeah, man."

"I swear I saw her in here a little over a week ago."

"Man, maybe she was like, shopping or something. We get chicks like that in here all the time."

I pulled out a business card, wrote my cell number on the back. "You see her, you call me, right? She's got the brightest green eyes you've ever seen."

He read the card. "Oh, hey, man, you work for the Observer? That's cool, man. I read it all the time."

"Great. Hey, thanks."

He nodded. I walked off.

Once I got back to the Jeep, which was parked in the same spot it'd been the other evening, I looked around. Across the street sat an red brick, three-story apartment building. It gave me an idea.

Couple hours later, just after sunset, I was on the roof of the apartment building with a pack full of supplies, a laptop, a Canon EOS 10D, a Lil' Ears parabolic mic and a fluffy black Coleman sleeping back. The mic I'd gone back and gotten from work, the rest belonged to me.

Mostly for the next five hours I sat and listened to the shop and tapped into the laptop. When people talked, I transcribed.

I heard the bones before the voices. I snatched up the camera and belly crawled to the edge of the roof, leaving the lens cap on until I saw movement. My watch showed half past midnight. The door opened, the rattle loud in my ears.

Two figured stepped onto the sidewalk, both short, maybe shorter than me. The bowler hat looked familiar.

"...safe to leave her alone?"

"The circle will hold," Oddjob said.

"I'd feel better if that reporter wasn't snooping around." I recognized the voice as belonging to Elise. I zoomed in with the camera, snapped a few pictures. Good that I remembered shut off the annoying artificial shutter sound.

"He's being dealt with."

Elise nodded, then they turned apart and walked in opposite directions. The "dealt with" part scared the shit out of me. The fuck was that supposed to mean?

I waited with the mic trained on the storefront for another 20 minutes, hatching a plan. It was dumb, but I knew she was in there, so it was simple. I was going in. I packed the bag, climbed off the roof, ran the two blocks back to the jeep and stowed my gear. Ten minutes later, I was walking the alley behind the store again, this time keeping to the shadows.

It occurred to me I had no idea how to break into a building as I walked. Turned out, I didn't have to. A narrow window on the second floor gaped open, tattered white curtain spilling out into the dark. A dumpster sat below the window. I climbed up, careful to make as little noise as possible, stopping every few seconds to listen for cars. A hop and a pull-up and I was in, crouching on the white-tiled floor of a worn bathroom.

I crept out into and down the hall until I found the stairs. They lead down into the room in which I'd interviewed Elise. I made sure to walk on the edges near the wall so as to minimize noise. Hey, it'd always worked when I was a kid. The only light in the room came from under the curtain to the front of the store and the green LEDs on the front of the computer. Couldn't see anything.

After floundering about with my arms for a minute or so, I closed my eyes and visualized the room. The desk, the cluttered shelves, the back door. Nothing that lead to a basement. I backed up to the staircase, felt my way along side of it.

Then I remembered I had a cell phone with a nice, bright color display. I fished it out of my pocked and flipped it open, bathing the room in blue light. A narrow archway opened onto another stairwell, this one turning halfway down. My hands, slick from sweat, almost dropped the phone. I juggled it back and forth before catching it again. Some burglar I was.

I looked down the stairs, thought, fuck, I'm going to jail, then started down. At the bottom, the stairwell opened to a broad room, maybe forty feet across. Square concrete pillars jutted up from the floor about every ten feet.

I resisted calling her name as I walked forward, phone held out in front of me like an electronic torch. Every so often, it'd go to "sleep" and I'd have to flip it closed then open again to get the light back on.

As I neared the far side of the room, I heard something move in the dark off to my right. I turned, lifting the phone up like a holy cross, and squinted into the dark.

A person lay huddled almost in the corner, and I knew it was Mara. I could almost feel her waking in the dark, looking my direction. My pulse sped up and I wiped my palms on my black cargo pants. I shuffled closer, stopping when I noticed the chalk circle on the ground.

Mara sat on the floor, knees pulled up to her chest, arms clasped tight around them. She wore nothing. I probably blushed.

The green eyes looked up at me. "I asked you to come get me. You didn't come."

"I did. I couldn't find you. Then some little dude beat me up. I'm here now. We can..."

"You should leave. You're in danger here."

I stepped closer.

"Don't touch the circle," she said, standing in a fluid motion and jumping toward me. I froze. She pantomimed the surface of the circle. "If anyone touches it, they'll know. They'll come. I can't get out." Her eyes glowed.

"Mara, there's nothing there."

"Just because you cannot see does not mean it isn't there. You see the markings on the floor, yes?"

"Well, yeah, but it's just chalk," I said, brushing my foot toward the powder. It felt like I'd kicked a cinder block. A wave of shimmering blue light rose from the ground and echoed in rings around the edges of the circle, back and forth, floor to ceiling.

The green eyes flickered toward the staircase. "They know something is wrong. They'll be coming. You must go."

"I'm not going without you. You asked me to come get you."

"Did you not see the circle?" she said, motioning to where the waves of light had been. I stared at her, all of her, then swallowed.

"I saw the circle. I don't know what it means."

"Are you all so illiterate here?" she muttered, low, under her breath, but loud enough for me to hear. "I'm entrapped. I cannot leave. Were you to cross, you, too, would be trapped. I cannot break the circle."

"Okay, so how do I do it then?"

"You can't, only the one who made the circle can. If I was more powerful... If I had my necklace, I could, but..."

"Where is it?"

The bones rattled, clacking together. I spun toward the staircase, then glanced around the room, looking for someplace to hide.

"Do you have any silver?" she said.

"What?"

"Silver?"

I must've looked shell-shocked, but my mind was counting the number of steps it was taking whoever was upstairs to get from the front of the store to the back room and down the staircase. Then her words sank in and I took off my silver chain link necklace. I started to hand it to her across the square.

"Throw it." I tossed it to her. She caught it, cupped it into her hands and started speaking in a language that sounded like whispered song. I heard footsteps at the top of the stairs, but kept my eyes on her, trying not to oogle. Don't ask me why I was admiring her figure. I can't explain it. I couldn't help it.

My necklace smacked me in the forehead but I caught it before it fell. I looked up.

"You must concentrate on a place. Anywhere but here." She glanced past me, toward the stairs.

"I can't leave you."

"Then come back later, but you have to concentrate now."

The steps grew louder. The person had made the bend in the stairs. I looked up into her glowing green eyes and thought of my apartment and then I was standing in my bedroom. An apparition of her floated in the air, then faded.

And that's it.

How the hell did I get here? That couldn't have just happened, could it? But the Jeep isn't outside. It had to have happened.

Now what the hell do I do?

posted by Skept @ 5:07 AM