By Howard Gardner
© 2006
There was no particular reason why she should need to get up at seven o’clock, since she had no job to go to, nor any means of getting there, even if she had. She supposed that from a certain point of view, maybe her day-to-day existence in the apartment might constitute some sort of work, if anybody out there was actually deriving benefit from it. She passed through the hallway, stopping briefly to check the blank wall through which she had entered this apartment several days earlier - it remained a simple, blank wall - and continued into the kitchen. There was already some light coming through the translucent plastic window and she didn’t need to switch on the strip light to see what she was doing.
She flicked on the switch of the kettle and poured some cornflakes into a bowl. A calendar on the wall, donated by an unknown pizza delivery firm, displayed, for this month, a photograph of an incredibly greasy-looking mushroom and pepperoni stuffed-crust meal for two and she dutifully crossed off another day. Thirty-six days then, in all, if the calendar was to be trusted, and today was the 19th of August and the twelfth day she’d spent in this particular apartment. The calendar had not been here when she first entered, but she’d carried it with her from the previous apartment in order to maintain a tiny amount of continuity (although she had so far not found any means of contacting the company who supplied it and placing an order).
It certainly didn’t feel like thirty-six days of captivity however, and perhaps the calendar wasn’t to be trusted. The previous apartment had been fitted with proper windows; ones through which she could look out at a cityscape and watch the sun rise and set. It hadn’t seemed like a simulated view. Even though it hadn’t been possible to open the windows or even break the glass, she had at least been satisfied that she was watching real days come and go as she looked out through it. Here, in this new place, she wasn’t at all sure if the days and nights were real. That light shining through the ‘window’ might just be electric – she had suspected for a few days now that the clocks were all speeding up and slowing down together, of their own accord, which was highly disorienting and would make the information in the calendar effectively useless after a while. She had no hard evidence of any of this though, so the crosses in the calendar would have to continue until a better alternative presented itself. There was a further possibility that somebody came in and tampered with the crosses while she slept – perhaps the same person who restocked the food in the cupboards or repaired any breakages - although Kathleen didn’t think any crosses had been added or subtracted without her knowledge. She was more vigilant now anyway, just in case.
Another difficulty in measuring the passage of time could be attributed to somebody’s tampering with her body chemistry; Kathleen was uncertain of when her last period had been, but it was certainly before she’d arrived in this building and begun to cross the days off in felt pen. It seemed reasonable to assume that hormones or other agents were being introduced to her through the food in the refrigerator or perhaps her drinking water. Without any kind of testing kit or knowledge of what she was actually searching for though, there was no way of knowing, so she simply had to accept this, along with everything else that was being done to her here. Once she had thrown a fit of anger and tried to haul the fridge away from the wall, convinced that it was being stocked through a concealed door in the back. She’d not managed to shift it though and had only succeeded in pulling a ligament in her calf which was only now starting to heal.
There were four television stations: Channel 43 - its number, presumably, was intended to mock the large amount of absent programming – which broadcast old reruns of soap operas and game shows, which she vaguely remembered but had never taken much interest in, punctuated by unintelligibly vague news bulletins read by the same man every hour; FuckTV, which was, as its name suggested, a not very subtle porn channel; a documentary channel which only seemed to broadcast between 10AM and 6PM and only showed tedious and dated-looking programmes about plane geometry, sharks and classic aeroplanes; and one other signal that could only just be regarded as a station in its own right. This one consisted mainly of noise and distortion, out of which would occasionally surface incomprehensible diagrams, star charts, medical illustrations and mathematical formulae; abstract shapes, disjointed musical chords and bursts of spoken gibberish, which didn’t appear to be any language she’d heard before. This channel would wander about the airwaves, sometimes crossing frequencies with the others, creating ghostly interruptions and distortions across the other shows.
The television had been left on overnight, burbling away to itself at a low volume, as Kathleen had taken one of the books to bed and drifted off, completely forgetting about it. She found the remote and turned up the volume a little, so that she could hear the news above the crunching of her cereal.
“… are still hunting for the killers of a twenty two-year old local man, who cannot be named, who has not been sighted for the last fortnight. In sport news, local team The Hummingbirds have drawn one-all at soccer with visiting team The Gloves and our representation by the national gymnastics teams has been well-received at the Olympiad. In international affairs, a summit is under way to decide on global carbon dioxide emission targets for the next five years and there is continued violence in a foreign capital after allegations of electoral fraud. And now the weather…”
Kathleen put down the empty bowl, muted the TV once more and began to flick through the handwritten day-to-view journal that lay by the side of the armchair. It was for the year 2002 and she had read through roughly the first half of the year during an afternoon a couple of ‘days’ ago but had then lost interest and moved onto another book. Perhaps she ought to force herself to finish the thing? She had located a handful of handwritten volumes on the shelves, dating back to various periods and, despite the quality of the script and the English being highly variable, she tended to pay more attention to these, in case they had been written by previous occupants of this building, and therefore might provide some insight into her own predicament. As she ran her fingers over the faux leather cover, she noticed a faintly visible coffee ring, where she had previously left a mug on it. That was strange – if she damaged or defaced most objects in the apartment, they would be back to normal the next ‘morning’. Obviously this journal was a one-off then, irreplaceable. Even more reason to read it for clues, then.
The diary was, according to the Personal Details section inside the front cover, the property of a Mr. Joachim Sayers, apparently a New Yorker like herself, although he lived in one of the nicer parts of Brooklyn, whereas she had spent most of her life in Queens. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why she didn’t finish reading the diary before; opening it again now reminded her of the pang of home sickness which it had previously produced. Joachim described a number of familiar sights and places, in particular the crowded subway system with its buskers, greeting politicians and plethora of newspapers. There was nothing so far to indicate how is diary might have ended up here in this room.
July 2, 2002
This entry was one of the longer ones but was fairly typical of what she’d seen in there before. It was possible that Joachim’s interest in new age books and psychic phenomena was significant but she suspected he was really just a bored – and perhaps slightly naïve - single man with too much time on his hands. She made a note to look closely at any books by Charles D. Brent, should she happen to find any here.
The journal entries continued in much the same way through August and September. In early October he made a scribbled note of a security combination for some luggage and this caused Kathleen’s interest to prick up; she had ‘escaped’ from the previous set of rooms by experimentally dialing a number into the apartments’ phone, after hearing it read aloud in a TV commercial. Since then, any number of potential significance had been dialed into the phone and tapped into the keypad of a calculator. This had no effect, though. No hidden doorway appeared and she flopped back down into the chair, feeling demoralised. It was stupid to think the puzzle - if indeed that’s what it was – would have such a similar solution this time around. The phone in this apartment didn’t even have a dial tone when she picked the receiver up, which was quite an obvious hint she must look elsewhere.
October 25, 2002
The next week was blank. Kathleen flipped through the pages until she found some more scrawled notes, these ones far more scruffy-looking than what had gone before.
November 2, 2002
More blank pages, apart from occasional scribbled notes and doodles of cartoon faces and geometric-looking patterns – Kathleen had no clues as to what Joachim looked like, although she could indistinctly imagine a man sitting in his cramped quarters, filling in time by drawing these enigmatic little designs on the ruled pages.
December 12, 2002
The following couple of pages had been carefully torn out.
December 19, 2002
She flicked through the last remaining pages of the year but found nothing of huge importance; Joachim returned to New York to live with his mother and was apparently still looking for a new job on New Year’s Eve. No more mentions of minotaurs, although she did have to stop and wonder if that was significant in any way to her own predicament, trapped in a Labyrinth of sorts. A few minutes spent searching the shelves of the book cases, and the space behind them, produced no sign of Joachim’s 2003 diary. Kathleen let out a long sigh. All very interesting stuff, but probably a red herring. If there was any clue in that book as to why it was here in this apartment, let alone why she was, then it must be far too cryptic to ever become apparent.
The theme of psychic research was an interesting one and it resonated with other thoughts she’d had since becoming trapped in this place. For the first few days after she’d woken up and found herself in an unfamiliar – and seemingly inescapable - living space, her fears were that she’d been placed there for some bizarre and unfathomable punishment. It was only once the puzzles had become apparent that she realised she must be a participant in somebody’s experiment, although it was still anything but clear what the point of it might be. Human behavioural research was her best guess, though the possibility of parapsychology was always there, lurking at the back of her mind, as was another important question: why her? Her first assumption had been that perhaps she was special. Somebody had observed her everyday life and detected some latent talent that this set-up was designed either to study or bring out and develop. After some time, she’d begun to feel that hypothesis was maybe a bit arrogant and it was instead perhaps it had been the ordinary-ness of her life which made her a candidate. And the possibility that she was selected randomly couldn’t be ruled out either. Maybe there were dozens of places just like this, where a broad cross-section of society were being probed and prodded like lab rats.
She dumped her breakfast bowl and mug into the kitchen sink, headed for the bathroom to run the shower. Pulling the bathroom light cord also had the effect of turning on a small extractor fan in the ceiling. The fan had barely any discernible effect on the air around it and one of the blades have been bent or broken, because it added a rhythmic scraping sound to the usual hum of its operation. Kathleen stood beneath it and faced her reflection in the mirror; a familiar person who had dogged her as far back as she could remember and her only company for the last few weeks. The only constant she could be sure of, although it masked a lingering suspicion that the mirror might actually be a one-way window.
There was no point in trying to hide her body from view, since - if she were under any kind of surveilance - there could be no certainty as to where she was being viewed from. Life had to go on; she had resigned herself to the fact that if someone had gone to all the trouble of designing this environment for the sake of watching her, then that person had the upper hand and there was no sense in creating constant frustration and hardship for herself by trying to outguess its architect. She slipped off her robe, hung it on the door and began running the water. Kathleen was approaching forty but Rob (and John before him) had always told her that she looked good for it. Regular trips to the gym and an intermittent regime of jogging had done her good, although Rob had often suggested that her lack of a long-term office job, like everybody else had, might play a part. Her breasts were not large and she'd considered having an enlargement at one time, although they'd lasted well over the years and she'd eventually come time accept them as they were. Without henna, her locks were slowly returning to their natural, mid-brown colour, but she didn't mind this particularly - she had only begun changing its colour a year earlier, out of little more than bored curiosity. Brown was acceptable.
There were disposable razors in the bathroom, so she spent a few minutes carefully shaving her legs. There seemed little practical point in this, but then time was hardly a scarce commodity and it reminded her of life outside this apartment, so she did it anyway. She stopped the water, dried herself and wiped away a little of the condensation from the mirror, just to check in case her reflection had decided to sneak away undetected. Her image looked back inquisitively, wet hair slicked back, and she realised that she'd performed this exact same ritual every morning for as many mornings as she'd been in here. Almost as if a reflex kicked in to try and break the monotony, her hand dropped to the side of the bath, grasped a glass bottle of bath cream, hurled it at the mirror. The surface bowed noticeably from the blow but did not crack and the bottle rebounded onto the floor and shattered. Shards of glass and pink, gooey, scented cream spread in a gleefully disordered puddle; this sort of thing was becoming something of a habit since she’d been in here and, in some ways, she felt a bit sickened by her own actions, although she reminded herself there were much worse ways in which she might choose to protest if she put her mind to them. Even as a child, she didn’t think she’d really lashed out like this during tantrums but, fuck it, she’d never been in a situation like this before in her life, so she closed her eyes, took a few deep breaths and composed herself. It all felt a little better. Not a lot, and she didn't feel she had achieved anything practical, but it was therapeutic. She donned her robe again and headed to the bedroom to get dressed.
It had occurred to her that perhaps her strange existence here was a sick reality TV show that had grown wildly out of control in concept. Did a media executive with a grotesquely twisted imagination sit behind a desk somewhere, making deals with advertisers and sponsors, arranging prime time spots for millions of unsuspecting members of the public to sit and goggle at her life in here? Did an unseen narrator provide commentary on her frustrated fumblings through each day in here, analysing and perhaps ridiculing her attempts to make sense of each new change they thrust upon her?
She dressed, in a boring but comfortable combination of a T-shirt and army combat pants. The place was comfortably warm and the carpets were clean, so she went barefoot. There were a few pairs of these pants hanging in the wardrobe, of varying designs and shades, and she liked their practicality. Their pockets could be filled with useful objects in case of quickly having to move on through the maze of rooms and there was no telling what she might need in the next one. Typically, she carried a small retractable craft knife, a can opener and a pocket mirror. There was no washing machine but whatever clothes she abandoned on the floor would be cleaned and left pressed and folded on top of the bedroom dresser the next morning. They smelt faintly of old paper.
One thing that had bothered her greatly during her first few days in captivity had been trying to remember exactly what she did prior to ending up in there. However she had been captured, it seemed to have involved some kind of sedative drugging and this made details such as how she’d been transported here and how long it had taken difficult to address. Her last reliable memory from the outside world had been leaving her office on East 45th Street one Thursday evening and heading home via public transport. She had read a newspaper and recalled articles about the city rolling out more funds for hybrid-powered taxis and the following month’s visit to the state by President Hu of China. She got in her front door and found a note from Sally, saying that she’d be home at about eight as she was seeing friends. It seemed to be an authentic note - it was unmistakably Sally’s handwriting – but if she did come home at eight she would have found her mother gone. Robert too normally got home at about that time of the evening as he tended to do a lot of overtime. She just hoped to god that whoever took her had left promptly and that the rest of her family hadn’t come home to be similarly captured and taken somewhere else against their will. Presumably they were going out of their minds with worry in some far off place, calling the police and missing people’s helplines and probably, by now, sitting down for interviews with the FBI. The last thing she thought she recalled was boiling some pasta and making meatballs and sauce. On the other hand, this memory was a great deal more vague and she couldn’t be sure that her mind hadn’t constructed it, perhaps to cover up something more uncomfortable or perhaps simply because she’d already decided to make pasta while she was traveling home and her senses had slowly but surely failed her as some kind of sedative kicked in. Her first memory of this place had been waking up in an unfamiliar bed and spending a couple of hours fearfully searching for a door and pounding her fists on the walls, shouting for help until her throat ached like it had been scrubbed from the inside using wire wool. Nobody had answered. As night had fallen on that first evening, she had attempted to break a window with the legs of a wooden stool but had then fallen suddenly and inexplicably asleep and woken up again in bed with a headache and a burning sensation in her lungs. She didn’t try to fuck with the windows again after that.
After a lunch of canned soup and some fried bread, Kathleen continued to examine books, this time in a somewhat less discriminatory way, as she took every book from a shelf, starting on the left and finishing on the right, then moving on to the shelf above until, she supposed, either she would exhaust all the books in the room or find something which might help facilitate an escape. Of course, she was not reading each one cover to cover – even without any distractions, which might take months or even years and seemed a bit too extreme, given that there was no definite reward promised for doing so. She flicked through the pages, stopping occasionally to look at an unusual illustration or anything else that could have been put there to grab her attention. Once in a while, when she shook some of them, page markers would come tumbling out. Sometimes these were tacky-looking shapes of laminated card, gift shop souvenirs of a hundred different tourist attractions from around the world. Others were merely scraps of paper and used envelopes, sometimes blank, sometimes decorated with shopping list items, children’s daubings and experimental squiggles of ballpoint ink. These, she placed to one side in a pile for closer examination later. Perhaps just one of these might contain a coded reference to something too?
The books continued to come off the shelves and get shoved back. Some were written in Arabic, Russian, Japanese and perhaps a hundred other tongues. The ones not written in English and containing no pictures were the quickest to go through. If somebody had purposefully hidden a clue in there for her anywhere, it was unlikely to be in the text, so as long as no other items fell out from inside the book or had been inserted into the spine, then she could discount those straight away. Others were more challenging; an illustrated encyclopedia of plants, for instance, had to be minutely examined for hidden clues over a period of more than half an hour before it could be returned to the shelf. A kitschy, yellowed old paperback on the solutions to everyday problems was also troublesome, as it was filled with cartoonish line-drawings of the situations described, as well as being filled with pencilled annotations by a person who (in a note inside the front cover) identified himself as Louis M. Cardinale. Its title was Let’s Take Control of Your Destiny and its content was odd, right from the outset; one section was devoted entirely to debunking proverbs.
“Q. When we say that a guy moves ‘fast as lightning’, is this true?
No, not at all. Lightning moves at over 180,000 miles per second, while an instruction from the human brain to a travels at barely more than 125 feet in one second. If a fellow really did move that fast, he would simply fly apart - bust up on the spot and, like Humpty Dumpty, could never be put back together.”
Cardinale’s comments ranged from “useful – remember this!” in response to a section on driving dos and don’ts, to “shameful! I declare this advice silly and hard to follow,” beneath a particular chapter on the importance of communication within a marriage. That book took very nearly an hour and was the most mentally draining.
One book which engaged her curiosity more than most, was a colourful children’s story titled The Long Flight of the Bear, which was the only one she actually recognised from any time in the past – she had read it as a child, as well as reading it aloud to Sally on more than one occasion, some years ago now. For this reason it was upsetting to read now, so she gave it the quickest of examinations for any hidden notes and then shoved it back where she’d found it, spine facing to the wall so that she couldn’t see the title.
During her own childhood - or at least, the early portion of it before her younger brother had been born – comic books had been one of her best loved escapes from everyday living, occupying a space alongside Saturday morning television and ice cream. They’d provided a window into a simpler, colourful, more manageable world, peopled sometimes by television tie-in characters and at other times by magically empowered children and supernatural creatures, whose motives were always far simpler to understand than the meaningless jumble which otherwise surrounded her life. They had been there during the times when her parents had argued and, strangely, the titles she spent her money on during this period often featured children with fantastic abilities or bravery. She preferred them to animated cartoons in certain respects, since by having the option to examine every panel at her own pace, she could sometimes find fascinating details lurking in the backgrounds and appreciate the care and attention that the creators of these worlds often put in. Some were printed on poor quality paper and occasionally the plates at the printers must have been slightly out of alignment, as the coloured areas would stray outside of their outlines, but this was just an endearing quirk of that particular world, which Kathleen grew to accept and like. As there was not always money to keep buying new ones, she would re-read old ones during quiet moments, searching for hidden details and meanings among the printed dots. Was that why she was here now? Did the man in the corner store who’d sold her these tatty magazines all those years ago report her to a clandestine and all-powerful research department who would ear-mark her for later study, in order to exploit these traits? Or did her parents, for that matter? It hardly seemed very likely.
Kathleen then took a break, drank another coffee and watched another shark documentary, mindlessly turning a bookmark with a photograph of Windsor Castle in England over and over in her fingers. What would happen if she gave up and carried on with this searching tomorrow? What if she went back to work one morning and found someone had rearranged the shelves, so that books already examined were jumbled with ones yet to be looked at? This frustrating possibility never left her mind, even though there was no evidence yet of it happening.
“These charming replica figurines are limited to just three thousand numbered editions and stamped for authenticity and signed by the artist. They can be yours today if you call the number on screen now,” said a brightly smiling woman who had perhaps just failed to make it in any other, better broadcasting jobs because of her unusually formed dentistry. “Or, you can visit our website and place an order, as we accept all major credit cards and will ship to you within seven days.”
The figurine held in the woman’s perfectly manicured hands was of a stylised grey squirrel, squatting on its hind legs and holding some kind of nut in its claws, while it gazed up into space with exaggerated, over large eyes. It looked horribly tacky; the kind of ornament that Rob’s mother seemed to collect on every surface of her home. But it made her sit up and pay attention – it looked identical to an ornament in the kitchen! She leapt up from her seat and picked up the phone, fingers fumbling in anxious excitement to punch in the number shown on the TV screen. Nothing. The phone remained just as dead as it had ever been. Kathleen felt her whole body sag with disappointment. Still, maybe the clue was connected to the figurine itself? Turning up the TV volume, so that she’d be able to hear the commercial from any of the rooms, she made her way to the kitchen.
The squirrel stood just where it had been for the last twelve days. She’d not thought to examine it, as she felt faintly appalled by the way it looked – probably her only interaction with it since she entered this apartment, had been to throw a tea towel over it during the first night. She picked it up now and examined it more closely – nothing on its flat, unfinished base and no signs of any hidden compartments that might open. The edition number 1,263 was imprinted on it, next to a small, shiny sticker with a barcode, but that seemed to be all. In the background, she heard the commercial finish and another one start for an abdominal workout machine. Nothing for it, then: she raised the squirrel above her head and hurled it at the worktop, where it struck the corner and shattered.
Amongst the debris lay a small piece of folded paper, which Kathleen stooped and picked up. Carefully unfolding this, she saw it appeared to be only half of a message. It read: “2047 7992 1285 442,” but there had clearly been more digits beyond the tear. There was a fragment of another digit, which might have been either a five or an eight. Shit, probably not quite a ticket out of here, then. Not yet. Something about the paper and the typeface did look familiar though…
Clutching the note, she dashed back into the room with the books and began to sift through the piles of page markers in the middle of the floor. There was no match in today’s pile, but maybe one of yesterday’s, or one from the day before? She straightened up with a renewed surge of energy when she located a matching scrap of paper. This one was mostly blank but held the numbers “5 6142” over on one torn side. She picked up the phone and tried carefully entering the string of numbers – it seemed ludicrous when the cable was severed, although in a crazy place like this, who was to say it wasn’t equipped to transmit the numbers by radio link to somewhere instead?
She pressed the last key and waited with the handset to her ear. Nothing. No dialing tones, no ringing or engaged sound, not even a click. She waited for a few seconds and placed it down heavily on the floor with a faint tinkle of its impotent bells. Then her eyes fixed on something else. The TV remote! Why not? She pressed the small, rubber keys and, on hitting the last one, heard a familiar rumble that might have been slabs of concrete sliding over one another. She’d only heard it once before but had been dying all this time to hear it again. She raced back into the hallway and stopped in front of the blank area of wall through which she had entered this apartment from the last one; nothing. It made sense really – why would her exit door be in the same place as the point of her entry? For some odd reason this notion had persisted in her mind for all this time. Something here looked a bit different though. She turned around slowly and then spotted an opening in the ceiling which hadn’t been there previously. It was a square hole, about the size of a loft hatch, through which she could climb up into… what? Walking around to try and get a better view of what lay beyond, she could only make out pale, electric light and bare, white walls in the space beyond. The ceiling, though comparatively low, was still too high up for her to comfortably climb through the opening unaided and there were no step ladders in the apartment.
She checked her pockets for the usual objects to carry – for, when the previous door had opened, it had stayed open for only about five minutes before automatically closing again – and then retrieved the calendar too from the kitchen wall. For no reason that made a lot of sense to her, she also grabbed the decrepit old copy of Let’s Take Control of Your Destiny. Something in the title suggested it might be a clue and, even if it turned out to be a red herring, she might find herself stranded somewhere next without anything to read. Perhaps that pocket space could have been better filled with food she wondered, although, if my captors want to starve me to death, I doubt a pathetic collection of candy will do me any long-term favours. The book slipped neatly into a thigh pocket with the can opener, and she buttoned it up. Next, she dragged the armchair from the living room, with some difficulty, and placed it below the hatchway with its back braced against a wall, so that she could climb onto it and wriggle through the opening.
The room beyond was in fact little more than an antechamber, about six feet square, with plain white walls and no doorways, except for a further opening in the ceiling, through which led a series of metal rungs. There was another grinding sound as the hatch slid closed and all but disappeared by her feet; too late to worry if she should have picked up any other knick-knacks from the apartment. Kathleen's optimism began to sink, as her gut feelings told her this was an unlikely exit route from the enclosed spaces of the apartment. She’d spent some time wondering for some time what, if she ever came face to face with her captor or captors, she might say to them; to this date, she'd not managed to come up with a strategy. Scream abuse at them? Attack them? Stand there and simply, somberly ask them why? She supposed it would be impossible to guess in advance, just wait until such an event happens and then mentally stand back to watch her own outpouring of relief and bottled rage.
Her hands moved from rung to rung up ahead of her - she had never been particularly good with heights and didn't look back once as she climbed. The calendar was clenched firmly between her teeth, starting to become a little damp with saliva and the edge flapping against the occasional step like a huge playing card against bicycle spokes. The shaft ahead was dark and she could barely see the ladder come to an end and a new open space yawn before her. She gingerly climbed over the edge and into a narrow, unlit passageway with seemingly featureless walls. She navigated her way down it, feeling the walls on either side with her fingertips and eventually saw a chink of bright light up ahead, accompanied by the grating of another automatic door opening. She stepped through it and, as her eyes readjusted to light, discovered that she was in another apartment. The thick door slid closed once more behind her, sealing itself almost invisibly in the wall with a jarring crash.
This place was also unlike the previous two enclosures in that she had limited contact with other captives. This contact was extremely limited, as it consisted of little more than a few knocks on the wall from a neighboring habitat, but it was nonetheless a hugely reassuring confirmation that other sympathetic human beings exist too. Human beings who might actually be in similar predicaments to her. She was reasonably sure there were two other people in adjacent apartments and that they were kept separate from one another. She suspected, although she wasn't sure, that one was male and the other female.
She supposed it would be possible to speak through the walls here, although it would mean both her and the other person placing their heads next to the wall and raising their voices to be heard clearly; she’d not tried risking this so far, since it seemed like a sure recipe for getting into trouble. Knocking, at first with her knuckles and then with the handle of a small metal jug, seemed to be the safest way and either her overseers hadn’t yet noticed it going on or, more likely, they didn’t consider it harmful enough to administer any kind of punishment just yet. Neither her or the other people (she had to acknowledge that the other people might be an illusion of some sort – possibly sounds generated by electrical devices hidden in the walls, or the work of ‘actors’ placed in adjacent rooms or crawlspaces for just this purpose) knew any codes appropriate to this kind of chatting.
The person she thought was female, on account of a coughing that she faintly heard through the wall at one point, seemed to have tried devising her own code system. One morning Kathleen had noticed a complex stream of knocks emanating from the wall, which seemed to have taken on a kind of planned stop-start structure, compared to the more random sounds which had previously been used. It seemed that perhaps the other person had written down a system of dots and dashes to represent the letters of the alphabet and was now working through them in order, in the hope that Kathleen would also note the sequences down and have her own key for deciphering messages. Unfortunately, by the time she’d noticed that particular stream of communication, realized what was happening and located a pen and paper, she’d already missed a significant amount of information and couldn’t make any sense of what remained. She moved a chair close to that wall and sat in it often, with a pen and notepad ready nearby, in the hope that the recitation of the alphabet might start again from scratch. So far, it had not. Of course, there was no guarantee the message would be in English, even if she could decipher it.
A plane cruised lazily past in the far distance, painting a fluffy white trail in the blue sky over whichever city this was. There was a television in this apartment, with the four stations previously available and two new ones (one displayed nothing but screens of text, written in what looked like Russian and the other showed a looping, ten minute-long presentation in English about a museum of antique surgical instruments) but Kathleen much preferred to stand here and watch the windows instead. She’d really missed the feel of sunlight upon her skin and the reassurance that nobody was interfering with the lengths of the day/night cycle. The city which spread in all directions as far as she could see, however, was a total mystery. She couldn’t lean out to look directly down or observe the outside of the building, but she guessed she was somewhere around twenty storeys up, in a building that was taller than any of its neighbours – the other tower blocks only went up to a fairly uniform twelve floors, despite appearing to have been built at different times and in different styles.
The buildings she could see were all built in either concrete or redbrick and had antiquated, boxy shapes with minimal decoration. The street directly below was something of a mystery, since it was obscured from her view by a jutting ledge beneath the window; Kathleen could make out dark, angular shapes of cars and specks of milling pedestrians in the distance between other buildings, but that was all. The distant, dark rectangles of other windows appeared to have streaky and infrequently cleaned windows, like her own, and although light shone through some after sunset, the occupants of the buildings were almost entirely obscured from sight, so there was little to be learned of the city’s people and their lives. She had, at one point, written pleas for help on bits of paper and stuck them to the glass using sticky pastes from the kitchen, but this seemed to achieve nothing and she soon gave up. She always found the messages removed in the morning.
And the point of holding onto this book had been what, precisely? She’d had little time to read through it in detail and spot little gems of information like that one before the hatch had opened. Thinking back, she supposed her only motivation for taking it with her had been the cartoon illustrations, which perhaps had subliminally reminded her of the comic books she used to read as a child. Throwing it away now seemed a much saner option, except that there were no waste receptacles here. Unless she had the patience to shred the book and flush it down the toilet, although she half expected to wake up the following morning and discover a brand new copy lying on her pillow, just as an extra bonus means of torment. She let it fall to the floor and did her best to try and forget about it.
Another possibility which had occurred to Kathleen during her first few days of imprisonment – that is, once her attempts to recollect the events of her capture had failed – was that maybe she wasn’t held prisoner in a physical sense at all. She couldn’t believe anyone had yet invented virtual reality this believable and immersive, and this seemed a bit too long and too vivid to be a dream, yet it seemed surreal enough to be at times. Perhaps the explanation was nothing more than she just hit her head or inhaled some dangerous chemical and right now she was lying on a hospital ventilator, Rob and Sally watching over with grave expressions, while this whole fantasy played out inside her damaged head. That was an interesting idea, not to mention a promising one, as it implied there was a chance of her waking up and resuming her normal life. Things certainly felt real in this world though and there seemed to be no method of testing the theory, so she’d eventually lost interest in it. It never quite went away, though. She wondered if, perhaps, there was a blank diary for this year lying around somewhere and, if so, ought she write her own journal down, just in case she never made it out, but some future prisoner might benefit from reading it?
Kathleen sipped coffee from her mug as she eyed the crumpled gloves in the corner and braced herself for whatever she might discover in today’s delivery. The box, when opened and tipped out onto the floor, yielded numerous ribs, a femur and a bucket-load of teeth and smaller bones that would require careful sifting and comparison against the wall-chart in order to identify. There was something else in there too, as she scattered the smaller items around with sweeping movements of her hands; something that might have been a curving dragon’s tooth, or a claw or… a horn. She examined the rough, blunt end and, despite not being an expert on bovine anatomy any more than she was on human bodies, she felt pretty certain it was a bull’s and, sometime over the coming days, she could expect to see other component’s of a minotaur head.
The knowledge that she’d cracked the purpose of this latest puzzle so early ought, perhaps, to have fired her enthusiasm but instead she felt an overwhelming despair. It was only through blind chance that she’d found that mythological reference on the previous apartment’s book shelves. After all, to have solved that puzzle with the squirrel didn’t actually call for her to read the books in the end, merely to empty them of foreign objects and pay attention to the commercials. What if she’d not read Joachim’s diary? How many weeks or months of this crap would she have had to endure, playing around with dirty, musty old bones, before figuring out what she was required to make? What if the next place she entered would have an even more opaque riddle for her and, by not looking at or picking up some inconsequential object right now, it would be virtually impossible to solve? Kathleen balled up her fists at the thought that someone was deliberately putting her through all this, slowly increasing the difficulty at each level. Until what?
“Forget that!” Kathleen shouted. “I want to talk! I don’t care now who overhears.”
Silence.
“How long have you been in there? Come on, answer me, I need to know. Is it just you, or are there more in there?”
There cam two more thumps from the other side, a little louder than before but the person producing the sound was clearly still torn between making a verbal response and fear of the possible consequences.
“Do you speak English?”
Nothing. Kathleen crossed to the other wall, the one behind which she thought she’d heard a man’s cough, and hammered on that one with the bone also.
“Who’s behind there? Can you hear me? Are you sorting old bones as well?”
Nothing. Closing her eyes, holding her breath and listening intently, she could her the pounding of her own heart and… something else as well, which hadn’t been there before. A hiss was very faintly audible. She couldn’t pin down precisely where the sound was coming from, until she realized it must be gas, most likely entering the room from more than one place at once.
“Get away from the walls!” She yelled. “Get back! They’re trying to gas us! Don’t let them get you! Get down on the floor and cover your mouth!”
There was still no reply, although she Kathleen didn’t stick around to wait any longer for one. The air was taking on a synthetic, bitter taste and her eyes began to sting. As her knees started to feel weak, she stumbled into a doorframe and dropped the bone. Her eyes now watering madly, she groped around for it on the floor mostly by touch, located it once more and thought she heard the hissing a little louder down at about knee-level. Her slowly numbing fingertips explored the wall and found an unfamiliar, cold, metal object. A spout or nozzle that was spewing gas and occasionally dripping with a cold fluid that burned her skin. She raised the club above her head and hacked blindly at it, feeling the bone splinter when it made contact and hearing the hiss change in pitch as the nozzle began to buckle. She raised the femur again, hoping that this last blow would be sufficient to force it closed, but this time her legs seemed to drift from under her and she landed heavily on her back, seemingly unable to breath. The room span; or was it just the light coming through the windows that was rotating? She was lying at the centre of a whirlpool of blue/purple tinted light and her ears roared with white noise.
Then nothing.
Kathleen rolled over awkwardly on her side. Her head was throbbing and her throat felt very dry – had she been drinking the whiskey from the kitchen? The bed felt hard and she couldn’t get comfortable, until she realized it was actually the floor. Rubbing her sore, gummy eyes, she looked around and began to remember being gassed for doing something bad. The sun had set outside and the apartment was cooling down and a sick, greenish glow filtered through from outside. She began to pick herself up, when there was a crash of something falling over in the workroom next door. A scraping of feet upon the linoleum floor.
A metal tray clattered.
“Who’s there?” She croaked through a dry throat.
The shuffling sounds paused, as if in some kind of response, but no other reaction was forthcoming.
Kathleen lifted herself up onto her elbows but felt so drained the idea of standing seemed impossible. As she straightened her head, it seemed as if the entire room was tilting on a colossal gimbal, creating the beginnings of a nauseous feeling. “Are you a prisoner here too? What are you doing? Show your face!”
The sounds of feet dragging on the floor resumed. They were drawing closer and Kathleen’s hand groped for the femur but couldn’t quite locate it. The door to the workroom opened and a distorted shadow was cast on the wall by the pale strip lighting inside; if it was a person, then there must have been something very wrong with him or her anatomically.
“Don’t come any closer!” Kathleen’s voice was barely more than a hiss now, as she tried to force the dry, fear-constricted membranes in her throat to make sound. “Who are you? Are you from the rooms next to here?”
A reply of sorts came in the form of an ululating, guttural wail. It sounded like a baby trying to scream with a mouthful of marbles and she froze in horror as the thing rounded the corner and lumbered into view across the room. It was no living being but an assemblage of pieces from the workbenches, a scrawny, fragile and inexpertly constructed Frankenstein’s monster without skin or muscle but somehow still moving. It’s head was the skull with three eyeholes and their vacant spaces seemed positively fixed in her direction.
She reached up and clutched at a shelf, holding onto it with all her strength and praying that it was sturdy enough to support her weight, heaving herself upright on legs that still felt like they had no bones of their own. Perhaps my own leg bones are part of that creature, she wondered. Or was I using my own thigh as a club earlier without realising it? The creature shambled closer, making broken, mumbling communications that may have been meaningful to itself but sounded like no language Kathleen had ever heard before. Bracing herself against a wall for support, she tried to escape in the direction of the kitchen door but she felt a leg give way in mid-step and she crashed face-first into the wall. Her nose felt like it had exploded and she tasted blood. There was a rattling of bones from immediately behind her as the monster rearranged itself to bend down; an exhalation of rancid, decaying dead air felt warm against the flesh of her neck, which she tried involuntarily to flinch from but couldn't, then there was nothingness.
Kathleen opened her eyes and at first assumed that this was also a dream, as she clearly wasn’t in the apartment any more. The hissing sound was still present and she noticed for the first time a feeling of cool, odourless air blowing on the side of her face. She was lying on some kind of leather couch in a quiet, brightly lit space and, with some effort, raised her head to look around. The room was small, very much like the antechamber through which she’d passed after solving the puzzle with the TV remote. There were two closed, stainless steel doors leading from the room opposite her and the only other feature on the smooth, almost painfully white walls was some red lettering above the couch.
She rubbed at her eyes, which still watered a little from whatever chemical agent she had been exposed to, and tried to read the paragraph, which was printed - or perhaps made up of dry-transfer lettering but certainly not hand painted – on the wall in official-looking, inch high characters.
“YOU HAVE BEEN MOVED FROM THE TEST AREA BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF YOU DISRUPTING OTHER SUBJECTS AND ALSO BECAUSE OF A PERCEIVED DANGER TO YOURSELF. IF YOU INTEND TO CONTINUE RESISTING THE TESTS, EXIT THROUGH THE DOOR ON YOUR LEFT. EXIT THROUGH THE RIGHT DOOR IF YOU AGREE TO GIVE US YOUR COOPERATION.”
That was it. No sign-off, no matter how vague but, nonetheless, her first ever personal communication from her captors. With a little more effort, she hauled herself upright and swung her legs down off the couch. She now wore what appeared to be a white hospital gown and little else. There was a wad of cotton wool held in place on the inside of her left elbow with an elastoplast. Her throat no longer felt dry.
The room was no more than five paces in any direction and it was unclear how she’d arrived there, since there was no other apparent way in apart from the two blank-faced doors. Still, she thought, at least I’m seeing normal geometry now and not everything’s bent… she suppressed a shudder as memories of the skeletal monster resurfaced in her mind. The air was blowing from a small grille in the wall and after a short while it incessant hissing began to annoy her.
The doors both had a small handle on the left-hand side. The handles contained small, glowing red lights which changed to green when she stood within a few inches of it – presumably this was some kind of electronic lock to ensure that she could only open one door and not both at one time. It could be, she mused, that if I open one of these doors, then the other will lock permanently, making it impossible to peek and check what different options are available. Or, at least, that’s how I’d design such a system. She shook her head, for the benefit of nobody in particular. Have I been institutionalised here for so long, that I’ve started thinking like they do about every obstacle encountered?
She stood a little more confidently now, as strength began to seep back into her limbs and the tingling in her toes began to subside. She still knew nothing of the motives of whoever was running this show. Perhaps if she chose the door on the left, she would walk straight into a deep pit full of spikes? Would the door on the right bring her out into a set of rooms with a more pleasant task to perform, or maybe this room itself is the final test and by showing her obedience she would exit the experiment altogether? On the other hand, the testing might just resume if she picked that door, perhaps with something so god-awful she would wish she’d picked the pit full of spikes option instead. Damn. Maybe there was some further layer of subtle trickery involved that she hadn’t even picked up on.
The bottom line is, she thought finally, I’m playing somebody else’s game, according to rules which have never been made clear to me. And therefore, can I even be playing at all? I can hardly blame myself for the consequences, whichever door I choose.
She stepped forward, opened the door on the right and went through it.
The climb had been a very long and tiring one. Kathleen had first been presented with a metal ladder which led another storey upwards, then a spiral staircase which she felt she had been climbing forever. Not only was this building taller than any of its neighbours that she’d seen; it must positively dwarf them. She had to pause several times to catch her breath and wait for the numbness to leave her thighs. When, at last, the staircase ended with a metal door that opened when pushed, she found herself in what, at first, seemed to be another living room. This one, though it had chintzy wallpaper and garishly designed furniture like those before it, seemed unsettlingly different. It had a faintly caustic smell, as if some plastic had been burned here a long time ago. There were windows here, through which daylight was filtering in, although they were obscured by tattered, discoloured net curtains that looked as if they would crumble at a single touch. The shadows in the corner looked wrong, as well – it was only after looking around for a few moments that she realised why they didn’t seem right. They were not shadows at all, but rectangular and trapezoidal areas that had once been subjected to intense heat. Kneeling down to examine these burnt patches, she realised they were in fact the precise opposites of shadows, describing the areas where an intense, scorching light must once have shone in from outside.
As she cautiously explored the rooms further, she found antiquated, nineteen-fifties-style furniture and fittings and, in all rooms that faced in a particular direction – she had no idea of her cardinal bearings here, especially after having gone round and round for minutes on that spiral staircase – more evidence of a terrible, blisteringly intense light that had once shone in, blistering, warping and blackening everything it had touched.
In what appeared to be a dining room, she stopped in her tracks and gasped with surprise, confronted by the occupants of the house. They sat around the table, perfectly still, regarding her through lusterless, unblinking eyes. She’d longed for other human company for so long and was so shocked and startled by the appearance of this typical nuclear family sitting down to eat a meal, that it was a few seconds before she realised they were all fibreglass mannequins. She cautiously circled the table and saw that their plates contained heat-damaged wax fruit and vegetables and that the backs of the dummies’ heads were cracked and misshapen, where exposure to the harsh rays of heat had caused their hollow shells to sag inwards. There was a mother, father and two children – a boy and a girl, perhaps aged between eight and twelve. The girl’s left hand had become detached and lay by her feet but her painted expression still smiled innocently. They were indeed a nuclear family – Kathleen remembered now where she had seen a similar tableau before, in a film of tests carried out in New Mexico, decades ago, to measure the effect of a hydrogen bomb on civilian houses. The sight sickened her so much that she had to turn and run from the room. It reminded her of the life she’d been plucked from, so long ago, it now seemed. As if her whole former life had been nothing more than a long prelude to all these rooms and these tests. Who could say? Maybe all stages of what she’d previously thought of as ‘normal’ life was a test, carefully designed and orchestrated by some malevolent god, prodding and poking human beings like a child might pull wings off flies, and this was just a stage she’d not previously heard of? What even was normal, anyway? Something made a loud buzz in an adjoining room, causing her to jump in fright, but she recognised the sound as the motor starting up inside a rickety old fridge.
There was something else different about this ghastly travesty of a home – she had already walked past it once and failed to notice, but did a double take on her way back from the dining room. This was indeed a house, with a front door! She gingerly turned the handle and pulled, expecting it to be some kind of trick. The door did not budge at first but it loosened with a further hard yank; it had not opened in years and the paint had melted, welding it to the inside of the frame. With one final pull, the door opened and she stood blinking in the light of day. Except, how could she be? Where was this, somebody’s bizarre idea of a rooftop garden?
As her eyes adjusted to the glare, she realised it was not daylight at all. The open space in which she now found herself was in fact a floor of the skyscraper with all the partitions removed, except for half a dozen support columns scattered around at intervals. What she’d assumed was the sun, was in fact a brilliant tungsten bulb up in a corner of the bare concrete ceiling, about fifteen feet above her. There were no windows through which to admit the real thing and the ‘landscape’ surrounding the little wooden house was littered with rubble and scrubby vegetation. She suppressed a shudder, thinking again about the dummies in the house. What if this whole place was irradiated? She shrugged to nobody in particular. What could she do about it if it were? Absolutely nothing, so she put that worry to the back of her mind.
What had burnt the house and its ‘occupants’? There was no obvious answer to this, unless it had been the result of some other test conducted here, probably a very long time ago. There were sprinkler nozzles set at random points around the ceiling and a few crude irrigation ditches dug in the dirt towards the outer walls of the cavernous space. Around to these grew denser concentrations of plant life which, on closer inspection, included fruit-bearing bushes, all apparently growing under the steady glare of the artificial lamp and without any sign of human intervention within the last few years. A ceramic plant pot lay broken in one place – that seemed strange. It had been weeks since she’d last seen anything not broken by her own two hands. Did this mean that no-one came up here to interfere with such things? She saw olives, figs and citrus fruits amongst the brambles and weeds and she picked a small orange to gnaw on as she ambled in a big circle around the perimeter of the space, in search of whatever other little marvels the place might offer, listening to the faint echo of her footsteps off the walls.
She found a deckchair on the far side of the house and sat in it for a while, chewing on some figs and feeling the artificial light warming her skin, as she gazed dreamily up at the concrete sky, criss-crossed with pipes and cables which looked down on her like jet vapour trails above her own Garden of Eden. It was a lazy day and she could stay here for as long as she wished, as the sun would never sink any lower.
Living space
The digits on the clock changed from 6:59 to 7:00 and a jarring series of atonal electronic burblings and raspings issued from its tinny little speaker. The clock radio had a small, recessed thumb-wheel which could be rotated to tune to any desired station – except, for some reason, it didn’t work. Neither did the volume control. Kathleen had thrown the clock across the room three times and smashed it to make it silent but it reappeared intact every morning without fail and with exactly the same built-in faults. This morning she had already been lying awake before it sounded and simply didn’t have the energy to argue with it, so she rose from her bed, put on a dressing gown and headed off instead to make some coffee instead.
With coffee and breakfast in hand, she flopped down on the armchair in the living room. It was the least tastefully decorated of the rooms, with cornflower blue paint covering almost every surface not already claimed by peeling, chintzy wallpaper or a synthetic fibre carpet with geometric patterns woven in brown and orange. Her parents' old place had once been similarly carpeted and she remembered wiling away boredom in her early years, tracing the patterns around with her fingertips, imagining them to be curving streets of a fantastic make-believe city layout. It was fortunate, then, that the walls were mostly obscured by towering bookcases, loaded with a bewildering variety of books, ranging from crumbling old leather-bound volumes that could be well over a century old, to modern-looking paperbacks and spiral-bound booklets that looked as if they’d been knocked up on photocopiers in small print runs, perhaps as part of somebody’s university coursework. It was with these that Kathleen mainly kept herself busy during the hours of ‘day’, since the battered old television on a stand in the corner of the room showed only things that seemed designed to disorient her and she’d mostly given up watching it.
Tuesday
I don’t fucking believe it. My car got broken into for a second time on Sunday night. There’s meant to be safe, off-road parking in the lot behind the building but Mr. Holland knocked on my door this morning and told me I had a window out. The stereo’s gone again – you know, I wouldn’t even be surprised if it was the same people who took it last time. No one I spoke to saw it happen or even heard anything. It makes me feel so damn helpless when there’s nothing to go on, no other place to park most nights. I’m even thinking like maybe I ought to leave the doors unlocked from now on. At least that way they can take stuff without me having to make insurance claims for the fucking windows. I dunno. It’s a sick world.
July 23, 2002
Tuesday
I got up a lot later than I planned and tried to concentrate some more on solving the remote viewing exercises from Charles D. Brent’s book with the symbol cards . Still nothing – the frustration’s getting too much. I needed a break, so I left and went to see Leonard. We sat in the park for a couple of hours and he told me to give up on the whole remote viewing thing. He said he knows people who’ve driven themselves to breakdowns, trying to master it and it’s really not a skill that anybody can learn. Out of those who have got it right, some of them went crazy because they saw “things they didn’t want to”; all kinds of odd shit in the world that most of us would rather ignore. I tried not to get annoyed and told him I was working more now towards getting a better shift at the bakery and not having so much time for reading anyway. We went for a beer and then I got set for work.
Friday
I collected the last of my clean laundry, packed the case and caught the first train on my way to Connecticut. Hrnshi’s Sanctuary is right by the coast but I’ll have to hitch the last of my way as its no place near a station or major highway. There’s not supposed to be any cell phone reception and it’s meant to be nested between the sites of two abandoned mining towns – so truly out in the Styx. I’m traveling relatively light in fact, since I’ll be required to wear the Sanctuary’s own robes on all formal occasions and they don’t give a lot of storage space for other possessions – they’re not encouraged. My mentor will be Doctor Everett, who I’ve not met or spoken to so far. I’m anxious.
October 27, 2002
Sunday
I’m more comfortable than I was when I first arrived here. There are about a dozen other new initiates and it’s mostly just these that I’ve spoken to since turning up. The people who run this place are strict and they expect us to be in the right places at the right times – they’re putting us through a battery of medical tests, wiring us up to EEG machines, examining our heads with sight charts, memory exercises and all kinds of weird shit. Room’s small but no worse than my place in NYC. Haven’t been allowed to call home yet.
Monday
It’s a pretty amazing place, once you actually clear their orientation lectures. Dr Everett’s tutoring me and two other initiates in telekinesis. He wants us to focus our minds on stone shapes, mostly. I haven’t passed any of the exercises yet and am not sleeping well. Spoke to mom yesterday, asked her to put my car up for sale.
November 4, 2002
Wednesday
There’s some guy here from India who can make stone beads move around inside a pot, just by looking at them. I’m not shitting you, it’s true. I’ve watched them for ages, even held the pot in my own hands while those little beads are bouncing and going round and round. This is the strangest shit I’ve ever seen.
Thursday
They tell some stories here that I’m not sure if I can believe. There was a lecture with slides of old Greek myths and a man telling us that some creatures were, at least partly, based on things that were real. Like the Minotaur that lived in the huge maze. They think that monsters half man and half bull (or mutated people who look like they’re half bull) really have been found in some parts of the world and kept quiet by governments. There were photos of old skeletons that have supposedly been dug up, although I wonder if perhaps they were really put together from some old human and animal bones. They told us there might be some of these creatures still alive and walking around today, but probably kept locked up in special secret institutions, because if they ever -
Thursday
Dr Everett sat me down in his office yesterday afternoon and told me things just weren’t progressing as his manager had hoped. He said there’s a certain amount of time they can allocate per candidate but then there’s just so many to look at and testing can’t go on indefinitely without producing the right numbers of ‘statistical anomalies’. He said they can keep me on a bit longer and try to work deeper into my abilities, but only if I can subsidize my stay there with more money. Which I can’t afford to do. Merry Xmas, Jo. Looks like I have to ship out again – that is, if my folks are even in a position where they can take me back.
Day four in the new apartment. This one was somewhat like the first one in appearance, as it had windows and a view of the same city from above that she had grown accustomed to seeing in the first few days after her capture. There was whiskey here too, should she want it – a bottle of Jack Daniels stood in one of the kitchen cupboards and was refilled every morning although, so far, she’d only sipped small quantities of the stuff, with ice cubes from the freezer. That no alcohol had been provided before might be a reward for her completion of the previous tasks, but it also might be a trap, intended to tempt her away from her task and into some unknown punishment further down the line.
Q. “Does the glamour girl make a good wife?” Began another paragraph in her book from the previous apartment. Only this book, the clothes she wore and the calendar were the only ‘meaningful’ links to previous areas in the complex (the clothes she’d found in this new apartment were far less practical, mostly floral print dresses).
No, unless she reforms. The well known Miskatonic U. study of marriage summed up the 'happy wife' as being just the 'good, old-fashioned girl.' She likes Bible study and uplift activities, belongs to not more than two clubs, loves children, has a wonderful sense of humour, has not too many close acquaintances but very warm ones, dislikes radicals and bossy people, believes home and marriage are the 'womans sphere'. Boys, remember this.
Back to the workroom. The work here was different from what she’d had previously and she had been a little squeamish of it at first but soon grew used to it. Every morning a new cardboard box full of bones would appear in the corner of the room, which was spacious and light, with a linoleum floor, strip lighting and white tiled walls. The bones were mostly very old and dusty but she was provided pairs of thick rubber gloves to wear whilst handling them; the object of the task was simple to see this time, as a large, exploded diagram of a human skeleton hung on one wall and a couple of stainless steel benches provided space to try and put together these jumbled, three dimensional jigsaw puzzles. The bones which arrived were mixtures, seemingly at random, of human and animal remains and their musty smell now saturated most of her clothing, although by now she noticed the smell only in the parts of the apartment where it was absent. On the second day here, she had found an intact, adult human cranium with three eye holes, the extra orbit being about an inch above the others, right in the centre of the forehead, although, besides this alarming abnormality, nothing noticeably abnormal had arrived. She thought back to the diary she’d read in the previous apartment and wondered if perhaps she was expected to build the skeleton of a minotaur from all these odds and ends? It was one possibility. So far, she had three possible skeletons on the go (including the triclops), although none of these were anywhere near completion; presumably, once one or more of these were finished, the next door would open or at least some clue to opening it would become apparent. No bull’s skulls had yet turned up in the boxes.
Brandishing the femur like a primeval club, she marched into the next room, the one with the internal walls where the knocking had been heard. She pushed aside the chair that she’d left by it and thumped loudly on the plasterwork with the bone. She waited a few seconds, then rapped some more, leaving behind a web of hairline cracks. After a few moments, some knocks came from the other side, sounding somewhat timid in comparison. They began with five consecutive knocks, then resumed spelling out the complex dot-dash sequences.
Time reverted to its confused state, spilling like liquid, pooling and occasionally trickling through Kathleen’s mental topography at any speed that best suited it. She dreamt of waking up on the floor of the kitchen in another new apartment, which was modeled after her own home in Queens. She was alone though, as her family had left her blurry and unreadable notes on scraps of paper pinned to the cork board. Moving from one room to another was impossible, because all the doors were opening and slamming themselves at a rate of two or three times a second, creating a deafening and never ending symphony of booms and crashes, which surely ought to have destroyed the frames and hinges if this was genuinely her (former?) home. She gazed through the rapidly moving blur of wood which barred her passage into the hallway and then turned to look at the yard through the kitchen window. The sun rose and set at a rate of about one day every second, which creating an unnerving strobe-like effect on the stationary lawnmower, the fence and other familiar sights. The whole garden was playing host to an insane and repetitive dance festival of fast-moving shadows, yet the sun mysteriously became a source of steady, unwavering illumination when it shone into the house through the glass. She heard the sound of hissing gas, nudging her from the edge of her awareness. Time stopped its passage for a bit to gurgle around an obstruction and then continued its flow, opening up once more into its more familiar day-to-day stream.
