Page 42 of A Dance With Devils
“No real phones?” I ask her.
She pitches to look at me, her hips swaying. “No real at all, Alice. Who wants real?” She sways again then turns to run her fingers over a wall. They tap the surface, quickly drumming out a tune of some sort. “New York is real. Here is … Lost. Or found. Poor Malachi. He’s lost, Alice. Can you find him, help him?”
Her whole frame suddenly stops its fluid movement, eyes sharp and piercing as they look back at me. “Could you hear him? Feel him inside you?” I frown at that and back a step away, slowly putting the old phone I’m holding back down. “So much power. They both have. Don’t know if they deserve it.” She knocks her head with her hand. “Good men, bad men. Broken men. But love. I do – both of them. One more than the other. Do you?”
Mad as a fucking hatter.
I sigh and drop into one of the old chairs, coughing a little at the plume of dust that rises into the air around me. No phones. No way out. A break, Whit said. Time out. Who has time out like this? This is … I don’t know what this is. But it isn’t for me. I need to leave, find some sense and get back to reality beyond these walls.
“I’ve got to go. Find him. Save him,” she suddenly shouts. Her body rushes away from me, the long swathe of her dress following after her. “Down we go.”
Gone.
Thank fuck.
Another sigh drops out of me, gaze searching the room for anything that might be useful until I give up trying and just grab an old coat to drape it over my knees. Maybe I should just try and sleep my way through all this. I could hide here. It doesn’t seem like anyone ever comes through this part of the place. I might get away with it. And if not, at least I’ll have rested before whatever happens next on the agenda of freakery.
I snuggle down, lifting the coat until I’m wrapped into it. Just sleep. Rest for a while. My eyes drift closed at the thought, some semblance of heat and quiet making me calm enough to relax, and I let the silence consume me. Maybe sanity will come back after this. Sanity and a way home.
~
I don’t know what time it is when I wake, but the light seeping into my eyelids causes me to squint and pull the covers tighter. It’s a few minutes later that I realise they aren’t covers at all. Whatever it is is scratchy and barely covers my body. I peel my eyes open slowly and stare out into the space, part not ready to acknowledge the reality around me because I’m still here, aren’t I?
I forgot that for a few seconds.
It’s barely light out there, more lacking darkness like it was when I came into this room. There’s a strange shade in the sky, as if mist and damp has clouded the area and draped it in a veil of film. Mountains, though. So many mountains, all of them snow drenched and striking. And then there’s me. Just me sitting here in this darkened room with no real light and only old, dusty things around me.
A puff of air blows out of my mouth, toes wiggling up under what is actually an old coat. What now? I suppose I should get up, find someone, see if there’s any more sense here this morning instead of whatever madness was lurking last night. I’m not ready, though. Not ready to find other people or see other things that can only be described as odd as fuck. And pills. I don’t know what they did to me, or where I was when I was made to take them. I remember them, though. At least in some reasonable sense of memory. And I can remember him on me – his eyes, his weight, his presence.
My Malachi.
I frown and keep gazing out into the strange outlook, unsure why those words seem to be so strong inside me. They’re like a memory on my skin, in my veins. I can feel them, as if they’re somehow part of me and he’s part of me, too. There’s no sense in that. No reason for it. But that mad woman said things like that. She asked me if I could feel him, hear him inside me. And then she said something about helping him. I don’t know what that meant.
Why would someone like him need help?
Maybe I’m just sleepy and hungry. Confused. And oddly sad, desperately sad. I’m not sure what the hell I am, but normal isn’t it while I’m here. Scattered memories inch through my thoughts, all of them laced with panic or fear, but not of him. He was there with me – running and chasing and … I don’t know. Up, I remember that. Up and flying and … protection.
Up, up, up.
The thought makes me grab at an old newspaper that looks as stuck in time as the rest of this room, perhaps hoping some more time sitting here alone will present logic or a way home. September fourth nineteen thirty six, it reads. Old pen rings circle around passages, all of them highlighting financial information – reports and, from what little I know, possible investments.
Leafing through, I’m eventually led to page seven, and a gasp escapes me. A face stares back at me from under a hat, sombre and stoic as he sits for a photo. Mid-thirties maybe. And too familiar for my liking. Dark eyes, dark lashes. A different era of clothing maybe, but the same cut of jaw and angles that brought me here stare back nonetheless.
The whole image is like a hole I’m falling into, black and swirling on the decaying paper in my hands. I can sense it inside me like I can Malachi, feel the pages sinking into my skin somehow. And then more comes flooding back into my memory, this time filled with passion and lips and hands that gripped me. A tree. A big fucking tree with snow on it’s branches and my back against its trunk.
I let go of the paper sharply, shoving it away, and watch as it comes to rest on the floor, the angle turned so the words jump off the page at me:
Malachi Albert Jones. Oil Magnate.
More words come at me like bullet points:
Hostile takeover.
Dominating presence in the market.
Recession.
Industrialist.
