Halloween Stories #2
Oct. 30th, 2011 02:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hafoc
An old story of mine. It seems appropriate to the season.
Second Story Man
Sunset comes and I awaken in the telephone exchange which was. This is where I spend most of my time now, in the second story of a storefront in the middle of downtown.
This building went up in 1896. The Merchant and Farmer's Phone Cooperative had it built with a high, broad, three-part window across the front to give the girls, the operators plugging in connections on the big switchboard, good light for their work. Now this dusty window lets in the twilight, at dawn and dusk. The half-light of day's birth and death, the only hints of sunlight I can ever see.
The windows are one reason I chose to stay in this room. Another is that there is still furniture here.
There is a nice roll-top oak desk, and two battered chairs. The chairs aren't much, but I can't understand why they left the desk when they abandoned this place. I guess these old pieces of furniture aren't wanted any more.
I sit at the desk chair, often. Two of the operators' stools still remain, facing the silent, dangling plug wires with their frayed and cracked insulation and the dusty old switchboard. A beat-up, rusted-solid Remington typewriter sits on the corner of a countertop. I think that when they finally closed this place someone was carrying that typewriter away, set it down for a moment, and forgot to ever pick it up again.
I used to drop in here evenings when the girls were working late. Not often, of course, because my presence seems to disturb some people. That must have been forty or even fifty years ago now. There were always girls on duty here all night, although fewer of them as time passed. Toward the end there was only one.
Long ago now the telephone people moved to a windowless pink box of a building that I can barely see from here. When they left somebody boarded up the stairway at the bottom; it was during the day, so I never saw whom. The showcases downstairs were rebuilt straight across the abandoned doorway. I don't suppose the current occupant even knows the stairway is there.
So I can stay here, comfortably, with a window to watch the occasional passersby on the sidewalks below. In the darkness I can watch the motorcars, the birds and the night sky. I can be as comfortable as is possible for someone like me.
I don't go downstairs much. I hardly go outside at all. But when I go down to the dark, locked storefronts at night I am so confused and interested by what I see.
Some stores have what look like photographic cameras on sale, but different from any I ever knew. There are other devices made of materials I don't recognize, performing purposes I can't fathom. Maybe if I could go there during the daylight the clerks or customers would give me some idea what these things do.
The store below me claims to be a military surplus store, but the owner lies. They don't sell muskets or revolvers. There isn't a gun or sword in the whole shop. They have uniforms which aren't proper soldier's uniforms. These uniforms look like something a field hand or convict would wear. They have compasses, some garish but shoddy knives, some clever folding shovels for digging trenches, and a few other odds and ends. I don't know how he stays in business with such a shabby lot of goods.
But maybe he stays because nobody else wants the building. So many of the stores here are empty now. I'd think we were in the middle of another financial panic, a panic that goes on for decades, except that all the people I see walking by wear new clothes, and more often than not they drive amazing motor cars.
The country must be prosperous. It must just be that this town has failed, that some other town nearby sells the people all the goods they need. That's sad. We all had such high hopes for this town when we founded it. We all had great dreams.
Almost all the second stories of the store buildings are abandoned. I can walk the length of the block, slipping from one building to the next, from abandoned storeroom to dusty, empty apartment, to deserted office and so on, never encountering anyone. It makes me more lonely than I have ever been before.
The last ones to leave were a young married couple, students at the teachers' college, I suppose. They were studying something called radio astronomy. They lived in an apartment as far away from here as I can reach, but they moved out two years ago. That apartment is still furnished and is still cleaned once in a while, but nobody has moved into it since.
If anything still has the power to make me angry it is what they did to the building next door to this abandoned telephone exchange. My building. Our building. The one my brother and I built.
They made a restaurant out of it, and I speak the truth; they serve the food on split log tables my grandparents would have been ashamed of, and they serve drink in Mason jars. And they tore all the guts out of the building. The whole second floor, where my brother and I lived, is gone. The fine cherry woodwork, the oak flooring, the beautiful showcases with faceted panes which looked like jewels, are all gone. The building which was our elegant, glittering Emporium, stocked with goods as fine as any in New York or Paris, is just a shell now, the rough naked bricks exposed for all to see. The interior structure was replaced with a balcony built of rough-sawn boards and old barn timbers, running around three sides of the place, with the lower floor planked with barn boards too. They tore out fine oak floorboards to put down weathered pine!
People eat up there in the balcony looking down on other people eating, and if anyone spits tobacco I have no idea what happens. And there are ferns in flowerpots everywhere. Ferns and barn wood belong on farms. Restaurants should have silver, linen, and waiters who wear ties.
That was a fine building and they've ruined it, blast them. We were proud, Marshall and I, the day we opened it.
We built right next to the ruins of the old opera house, which burned a year after they built it and stood half open to the sky for years. It had buttresses and gargoyles on its outside wall. We built right against that wall, making it a common wall between the two buildings. We never covered over any of the decorations. We built shelves around the buttresses, and we let the gargoyles share our living quarters. I would sometimes smile and put my hat on one of them. You can see the gargoyles up there yet, along with the bricked up window openings of the old opera house.
When they rebuilt the place, finally, they rebuilt it as a motion picture palace. I used to like to go there and see the people, but now that's gone too.
Outside it is quiet. Nobody has gone by for hours. The sky is getting light. Soon the sun will rise and I will sleep again.
For the millionth time I pray to God to release me. And I call to Marshall. I want to tell him I forgive him for what he did. I want him to know that I still love him as the brother he was, that he didn't have to flee the demons in his mind and seek peace in the cold, black millpond that stormy October night. But Marshall doesn't answer, doesn't come. Wherever he is, he isn't here.
I am here. Only I remain, all alone.
But you would think they would have noticed! You would think, when they gutted the building that Marshall and I once owned, they would have noticed the space, two feet wide and six feet high, between one of the buttresses and the old chimney. The brickwork is so crude, yet so terribly strong; strong enough to seal in terror, and pain, and muffled screams, and airless darkness that endures forever.
Second Story Man
Sunset comes and I awaken in the telephone exchange which was. This is where I spend most of my time now, in the second story of a storefront in the middle of downtown.
This building went up in 1896. The Merchant and Farmer's Phone Cooperative had it built with a high, broad, three-part window across the front to give the girls, the operators plugging in connections on the big switchboard, good light for their work. Now this dusty window lets in the twilight, at dawn and dusk. The half-light of day's birth and death, the only hints of sunlight I can ever see.
The windows are one reason I chose to stay in this room. Another is that there is still furniture here.
There is a nice roll-top oak desk, and two battered chairs. The chairs aren't much, but I can't understand why they left the desk when they abandoned this place. I guess these old pieces of furniture aren't wanted any more.
I sit at the desk chair, often. Two of the operators' stools still remain, facing the silent, dangling plug wires with their frayed and cracked insulation and the dusty old switchboard. A beat-up, rusted-solid Remington typewriter sits on the corner of a countertop. I think that when they finally closed this place someone was carrying that typewriter away, set it down for a moment, and forgot to ever pick it up again.
I used to drop in here evenings when the girls were working late. Not often, of course, because my presence seems to disturb some people. That must have been forty or even fifty years ago now. There were always girls on duty here all night, although fewer of them as time passed. Toward the end there was only one.
Long ago now the telephone people moved to a windowless pink box of a building that I can barely see from here. When they left somebody boarded up the stairway at the bottom; it was during the day, so I never saw whom. The showcases downstairs were rebuilt straight across the abandoned doorway. I don't suppose the current occupant even knows the stairway is there.
So I can stay here, comfortably, with a window to watch the occasional passersby on the sidewalks below. In the darkness I can watch the motorcars, the birds and the night sky. I can be as comfortable as is possible for someone like me.
I don't go downstairs much. I hardly go outside at all. But when I go down to the dark, locked storefronts at night I am so confused and interested by what I see.
Some stores have what look like photographic cameras on sale, but different from any I ever knew. There are other devices made of materials I don't recognize, performing purposes I can't fathom. Maybe if I could go there during the daylight the clerks or customers would give me some idea what these things do.
The store below me claims to be a military surplus store, but the owner lies. They don't sell muskets or revolvers. There isn't a gun or sword in the whole shop. They have uniforms which aren't proper soldier's uniforms. These uniforms look like something a field hand or convict would wear. They have compasses, some garish but shoddy knives, some clever folding shovels for digging trenches, and a few other odds and ends. I don't know how he stays in business with such a shabby lot of goods.
But maybe he stays because nobody else wants the building. So many of the stores here are empty now. I'd think we were in the middle of another financial panic, a panic that goes on for decades, except that all the people I see walking by wear new clothes, and more often than not they drive amazing motor cars.
The country must be prosperous. It must just be that this town has failed, that some other town nearby sells the people all the goods they need. That's sad. We all had such high hopes for this town when we founded it. We all had great dreams.
Almost all the second stories of the store buildings are abandoned. I can walk the length of the block, slipping from one building to the next, from abandoned storeroom to dusty, empty apartment, to deserted office and so on, never encountering anyone. It makes me more lonely than I have ever been before.
The last ones to leave were a young married couple, students at the teachers' college, I suppose. They were studying something called radio astronomy. They lived in an apartment as far away from here as I can reach, but they moved out two years ago. That apartment is still furnished and is still cleaned once in a while, but nobody has moved into it since.
If anything still has the power to make me angry it is what they did to the building next door to this abandoned telephone exchange. My building. Our building. The one my brother and I built.
They made a restaurant out of it, and I speak the truth; they serve the food on split log tables my grandparents would have been ashamed of, and they serve drink in Mason jars. And they tore all the guts out of the building. The whole second floor, where my brother and I lived, is gone. The fine cherry woodwork, the oak flooring, the beautiful showcases with faceted panes which looked like jewels, are all gone. The building which was our elegant, glittering Emporium, stocked with goods as fine as any in New York or Paris, is just a shell now, the rough naked bricks exposed for all to see. The interior structure was replaced with a balcony built of rough-sawn boards and old barn timbers, running around three sides of the place, with the lower floor planked with barn boards too. They tore out fine oak floorboards to put down weathered pine!
People eat up there in the balcony looking down on other people eating, and if anyone spits tobacco I have no idea what happens. And there are ferns in flowerpots everywhere. Ferns and barn wood belong on farms. Restaurants should have silver, linen, and waiters who wear ties.
That was a fine building and they've ruined it, blast them. We were proud, Marshall and I, the day we opened it.
We built right next to the ruins of the old opera house, which burned a year after they built it and stood half open to the sky for years. It had buttresses and gargoyles on its outside wall. We built right against that wall, making it a common wall between the two buildings. We never covered over any of the decorations. We built shelves around the buttresses, and we let the gargoyles share our living quarters. I would sometimes smile and put my hat on one of them. You can see the gargoyles up there yet, along with the bricked up window openings of the old opera house.
When they rebuilt the place, finally, they rebuilt it as a motion picture palace. I used to like to go there and see the people, but now that's gone too.
Outside it is quiet. Nobody has gone by for hours. The sky is getting light. Soon the sun will rise and I will sleep again.
For the millionth time I pray to God to release me. And I call to Marshall. I want to tell him I forgive him for what he did. I want him to know that I still love him as the brother he was, that he didn't have to flee the demons in his mind and seek peace in the cold, black millpond that stormy October night. But Marshall doesn't answer, doesn't come. Wherever he is, he isn't here.
I am here. Only I remain, all alone.
But you would think they would have noticed! You would think, when they gutted the building that Marshall and I once owned, they would have noticed the space, two feet wide and six feet high, between one of the buttresses and the old chimney. The brickwork is so crude, yet so terribly strong; strong enough to seal in terror, and pain, and muffled screams, and airless darkness that endures forever.
