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bossymarmalade) wrote2004-02-06 08:02 am
you call yourself a chinaman?!?
oh, right! Now I remember. It was for the song "paint it black" in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
ink_stain's Vanessa Carlton challenge, but I got hung up and never could continue. Dammit.
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The lights are off.
He wonders vaguely if his house has a generator or something -- that seems to always be the first order of affairs in movies -- but the thought passes quickly. He lives in a normal house, there's no generator.
It's a good thing he's got candles nearby, vanilla-scented; he lights them all and leaves a cluster on the table, taking one with him. He thinks about the possibility that the electrical system's blown a fuse and is halfway to the fuse box under the stairs before taking a look outside, and it's all dark, clear down the hill.
So. It's a proper blackout, then. He pauses in the kitchen and frowns at the refrigerator, remembering his mother enlisting his help when he was little to unload the freezer's contents into one of those blue-speckled foam coolers, telling him not to open the fridge a lot and let the cold air out. There's a cooler somewhere, in the basement maybe, but he might not have enough frozen stuff to really bother going to get it.
He opens the freezer just to make sure and finds two half-eaten pints of ice cream, a bag of chimichangas, and some chili his mom left him. There's some stupid novelty ice-cube things, too -- pieces of plastic shaped like fruits, with water in them. He thinks Trace bought them, but it could've been Joey. Joey likes giving wild varieties of kitschy house wares when a friend moves into a new place. He's the reason JC has a fondue pot that could feed fifty.
"Well, damn," he says softly to himself. Its sounds weird and startles him, and he realizes it's because apart from the night-chirping of grasshoppers outside, it's the only noise there. The refrigerator is huge and silent and Justin shivers in front of the freezer. The coolers are in the basement. He remembers Tara dragging them down there, laughing and threatening to sue if she tripped and fell.
Looking down there now, his one candle in his hand, he isn't so sure the ice cream is worth saving. But it's something to do, he guesses, since having no power means that pretty much every other avenue of keeping himself busy is out of the question.
He's a cautious halfway down the stairs when he thinks about his guitar, messing around with that for a while. It might be nice with the candlelight. Ambience. A shiver runs across the backs of his arms as he pauses there, darkness all around him and the stairs cold under his bare feet. It's a warm night and he's just wearing a thin t-shirt and jeans, and the basement's always cold. Six feet under, he remembers his mom explaining it once, and he tries to banish the nagging tickle at the back of his neck as he scoots down the rest of the way.
There's summer stuff everywhere that still smells kind of like salt water and sunshine and it should make him feel better, but his toes are curling against the chilly floor and that feeling's getting worse, that feeling that makes him want to turn around real fast and see if he can catch whatever's standing behind him in the dark. "You're being stupid," Justin tells himself out loud, just to hear his voice, and wishes he hadn't when it echoes flatly.
He puts the candle in its silver holder on a box of old clothes and is reaching the cooler down from its shelf when the basement door slams.
The plastic cooler bangs to the floor and his heart jumps again at the sound and he gasps jesus! and pulls back. The candle hasn't gone out, thank god, and he scoops it up and heads up the stairs, and it's an ominous solid black at the top instead of the open doorway like he'd left it. His heart is hammering when he reaches the door and turns the handle. It doesn't budge.
First instinct is to pound on the door and start yelling, and he nearly does it, stretching panicked against the wood, before the thought flashes across his mind. The power's off. The power's off.
His candle sputters and smells like vanilla, and there's somebody in his house.
Suddenly the blackness stretching behind him and down seems engulfing, full of eyes and rustling and whispers. He tries to calm himself down and wishes he hadn't seen the Blair Witch movie. He wishes he'd been like Lance and had run to the bathroom during the last scene, dizzy and throwing up from all the jerky camera movement. But no, he hadn't, his stomach had been fine and he'd seen the final shot of that guy standing in the corner of the basement waiting to be killed, and now he can't think of anything else but himself standing in the corner, bare feet and worn jeans.
Justin flattens himself against the wall leading up to the door; it's comfortingly solid against his back and he thinks rationally about his situation. The monitoring company will probably send somebody out, he reasons, if the power failed and somehow so did the backup power for the alarm system. It's welcomely distracting for a few moments to visualize himself laying the whupass on the company for their shoddy service but it doesn't do the trick for long. There's a sound that starts up coming from beyond the door, a hollow clanging sound, like somebody in the distance beating a crowbar against an empty steel barrel, metal striking metal.
He can't imagine what could be making that noise. His house is mostly wood. The big silvery fridge is the only thing he can think of, and this noise doesn't sound like the refrigerator. It sounds rustier, primitive and industrial. Clang, clang, clang. Over and over, steady pace and getting louder and angrier before falling away again.
His heart is thumping along with each clang and his mouth feels dry and metallic. Justin takes a deep breath and inches back down into the basement, getting colder with each stair he descends. There's strange ominous things looming on every wall and his feet have never been so frozen. He opens the box of clothes, hoping to find shoes or slippers, but all he finds are a pair of striped blue socks. They're warm when he pulls them on.
The candle is getting lower, the flame dipping erratically, a pool of melted wax and he notices detachedly that he's spilled some of it down his hand, streaking his thumb. There aren't any more candles down here but there's lots of other stuff that would burn. The clanging from upstairs is quieter now and Justin doesn't think about the fact that he hasn't heard any footsteps or voices or anything and takes the opportunity of the lull to set about finding something to light on fire.
An old shirt wrapped around a golf club seems like some pretty good makeshift work. He's tying the last knot when something flickers at the corner of his vision, and he looks up. And he sees a white-clad figure standing just beyond the candle's light.
When he yells and drops the club it knocks the candle over and everything hisses and goes dark, and there's nothing but his own panicked breathing.
He can't turn his back on the spot where the person -- the thing, whatever it was -- had been, so he shuffles anxiously backward with his hands flung out until the back of his ankle scratches against the bottom stair. He manages to scramble up them and the clanging comes back from inside his house -- three more times, clangclangclang and then silent -- and Justin can feel his eyes rolling in terror. The door is still locked.
There's a long scraping noise at the bottom of the stairs and he crowds against the wall until he's practically smashed along the door. His eyes haven't adjusted to the darkness yet and all he can see is inky black and random spots of bright, frightening light when he blinks. The scraping noise is coming against the wall, he can feel it jittering up his spine, and Justin realizes in horror that he's keening, high in his throat. He turns and bangs against the door with his fists, kicking it hard and slamming his shoulder into it, but it's solid and dark and unyielding. He keeps going anyway as the scraping gets closer, hammering and kicking and he distinctly hears one of his toes crack the split second before something pounds on the other side of the door, a loud resounding boom and then again and again and it's not a person, he can tell that much.
Panic is choking him and the door's splintering inward and he scrabbles through the splitting wood, the sting and wetness of his tearing fingernails feeling almost good because it's a tiny distraction from the smothering terror. There's an enormous gash opened in the door, faded black light filtering in and he has a moment to see through the door and think why is it fucking smiling before the thing on the other side reaches through, and then everything goes back to black.
Something smelled like sour cherries, and there was a dripping noise. No, not quite that -- more a little watery, dimpling noise. It ran a shudder across Justin's shoulders and he opened his eyes.
He was lying down and Chris was next to him; in fact he was slumped halfway onto Chris, who didn't seem to notice or care. There was mist all around them and the dimpling noise and Justin stared at Chris's rigid profile and opened his mouth next.
"Don't get scared," Chris said stiffly without looking down and wrapped an ice-cold hand around Justin's trailing wrist. "I won't," Justin rasped, then turned his head away from Chris to see the thing from behind the door sitting across from them.
He couldn't hold back a gasp and bumped against Chris, who was tense all through his body. Justin's heels kicked against the bottom of the boat, he'd realized by now that they were in a boat and he pushed himself upright into the mist that was floating around them. The thing was just as eerie in the foggy half-light, dressed in a simple white shift with shoes made of bandages, wrapped and plaited up its legs. Its face was covered with a calm smiling mask, no seeing or breathing holes, crescents where its eyes should be, and a long black braid of hair behind its head.
"What is it?" he asked Chris, who leaned hurriedly, awkwardly over.
"Fucked if I know," Chris whispered. "It hasn't said anything. I don't know if it even talks."
help me
The sound was sibilant, silvery whispery and they both knew with sick certainty that it was coming from the thing. They caught their breath and stared with wide, wide eyes as it lifted one delicate, black-skinned hand palm-up, flat unnatural black, like it had been stained through with ink.
help me the sound came again and Justin shifted across Chris, who was perfectly frozen still.
"What? Whaddyou mean? Help you how?" Chris ventured. Justin looked distractedly over the side of the boat and saw that it had dozens of little legs along the sides, pale pink spidery legs, and it was those that were making the dimpling sound as they plinked through the water to move them along.
The thing was swinging its head slowly back and forth between them. lost it said. i lost someone i am called michiro
"Michiro," Chris repeated. Chris always repeated things when he didn't know what the hell was going on. He said it made him seem smarter. "I don't -- look, I don't know how we got here, but how can we help you? We don't even know what's going on."
"You're taking this pretty fucking calmly," Justin finally blurted, grabbing Chris's elbow. "I mean, what the hell--"
"Look," Chris hissed, then took a breath and lowered his voice. "Look, Justin -- I have no idea what the hell is going on. I had to deal with all this weirdass crap alone while you were passed out, okay? Maybe it'll be better if we don't flip our shit all at once." Chris shook his head, doglike, and sighed. "Besides, it's not like you got any brilliant ideas, huh?"
"No," Justin admitted. It made him feel better, though, to know that Chris wasn't exactly taking this all in stride.
you are safe with me Michiro interrupted. i will see to it that you are safe on our journey
She reached into her clothing and brought out a pair of thonged rope sandals, pressing them into Justin's hands. His fingertips, he noticed, were neatly wrapped in bits of white cloth, faint bloodspots on them. He put the slippers on over his socks; they felt strange between his toes and the injured one was throbbing, but he supposed that wasn't of much importance right now.
"Where are we going?" he asked Michiro. He still didn't know if they should trust her -- he thought it was a her -- but she hadn't done anything awful so far, and she was after all the only way they could make sense of what was happening. Michiro swung her mask over to face him; she didn't move so much as flow, liquid and dreamlike.
soon she said, and then, again and heartbreakingly, i lost someone
The sound of it drifted through the fog and wrapped around them, and the tiny splish of the paddling legs went on.
Something enormous and darkly pink loomed up behind the mist and Justin smelled something familiar that made him think of Britney and the way her skin tasted just below her ears. He squinted as the boat sailed closer, mist parting cobwebby and wet, and it revealed itself petal by petal, a rose three times taller than them and blooming big as a manor house. Touched by the dampness of the mist, everything smelled like dew-drowned roses.
"Wow," Justin said. "That's not at all...that's totally...." He forgot the word he wanted to say and it wasn't that funny a joke anyway, but Chris got where he was headed and snorted, rolling his eyes and punching Justin's arm in more of a reflexive move than anything.
Michiro turned her masked face upward and Justin stared at the stretch of throat revealed, black like the rest of her skin. The rose shivered and began to open, petals peeling away to clear them a way in. The legs stopped paddling and went silent, drawing up close to the boat, and they glided in, and Justin thought, symbolic/suggestive but didn't bother to say it. Chris had known what he meant anyway.
The petals closed behind them but the whole place was like a cathedral, high and a faint pink color, light shining in through the places where the petals weren't so thick and they looked glossy and brittle, spun sugar. There were absolute bushels of sugar flowers on Johnny's wedding cake, specially flown in from some fancy wedding-cake lady in New York, and they'd looked just like that, perfect and sweet.
"I'm so hungry," Chris murmured plaintively, his voice all strained because he had his head craned back to look at the ceiling. Justin was suddenly aware of a gnawing in his own belly and imagined biting down into a mouthful of petals, having them melt like cotton candy over his tongue.
The boat bumped gently against a broad floor of polished wood and Michiro stood and flowed out, gesturing encouragingly. come with me she said. meet the ocalette
"The what?" Justin said as Chris went, "Uh, okay," and hopped out of the boat. Justin sat there and stared for a minute at Chris's cheap silver sneakers standing on the dock before he got out too. The boat folded up into a green pod the moment he stepped out; it floated silently next to the wooden floor, looking like an elongated brussels sprout with a frill of pink legs. He supposed it would be safe there and followed Michiro and Chris through a wealth of rosebushes to a small brown cottage, waiting nervously while Michiro tugged on a bell-pull by the door.
When it opened, he managed to control himself. Chris made a little noise and jerked slightly. Michiro bowed and Justin could feel happiness radiating from her.
The ocalette was around his height, but with broader shoulders. A cascade of little feather-like plates began at the centre of its forehead and crested down the back of its skull, down its back; the whole creature was a mother-of-pearl sheen, iridescent blues and pinks as it moved. Its eyes were huge and each contained three blue irises and its mouth was nothing more than a slit across its face. When it embraced Michiro, its fingers curled around her back, tipped with thorny tapping claws.
"Welcome," it said, in a voice like cream poured over jewels, and tiny pink rosebuds spilled from its mouth and moved to circle Justin's left wrist. He watched numbly as the flowers settled against his skin, smooth and light. "Welcome," it said to Chris, and nasturtiums fluttered from its mouth to wind around Chris's arm. By the time the flowers were done adorning Chris, the rosebuds had dissolved away.
They went into the cottage together, Chris's flowers fading gently, and found a room like a fairytale, the home of some good witch or kind godmother. Flowers and simple, pretty furniture, and it was all a bit surreal so Justin was glad when the ocalette urged them to sit at the table. Michiro poured them salty plum tea and they drank cup after cup of it.
Michiro and the ocalette seemed to be communicating in a high-pitched thrum, like hummingbirds' wings, and eventually Justin and Chris got to that point where they were eyeing each other over the teacups, you ask, no you ask, just say something and then Michiro said, i need you to help me and the ocalette smiled.
"Um," Justin said, then scowled because since he'd stepped up it meant he'd have to deal with this. Chris smugly leaned back and sipped his tea as Justin said, "but how? I mean, what can we do? I'm guessing you wanna find this person you lost, but I don't know how much help we can be, I mean, Chris and me." He felt lame and wished he'd said yes when Chris had bugged him to watch Spirited Away last month. The ocalette poured them more tea and put down a dish that seemed to be filled with small Styrofoam flying saucers. Chris picked one up and Justin watched out of the sides of his eyes as Chris fiddled with it and the ocalette said, "You must help Michiro find her lover." It curled its claws gently over Michiro's shoulder, and she rose soundlessly and flowed away to the other side of the room. Justin and Chris leaned in closer.
"Michiro lost her lover years ago," the ocalette said. The irises in its eyes melded and separated again. "They were separated. They were to come together again at the end of time, but her lover has grown restless and is seeking her." The ocalette sighed, and little cherry blossoms spiraled down from its lipless mouth to scatter the tabletop. Chris pressed one with his finger and it melted soft and sad.
"We…she wants us to help find him, right? So he can stop looking?" The ocalette nodded at Justin before continuing.
"He is searching for her in places forbidden," the ocalette explained. "Places in your world. He is searching for her where love has been lost."
Justin was quiet, thinking of blonde hair and a slow Louisiana accent. Chris carefully composed his face and folded his hands on the table. "Why us, though?" Justin asked. "I mean, we're not exactly -- we don't -- we're just ordinary guys."
"No." The ocalette looked from one to the other, and the strange pearly feather-scales shook and chipped against each other like china. "In circumstances like this, ordinary people are never chosen. Nobody who is chosen for an important task is uninteresting and unredeemed, unflawed…unperfect." Crhis gave a startled seal-bark of laughter and the ocalette shook, sounding like windchimes, violets drifting from its mouth. The purple flowers wafted onto Chris's hands and he stared at them, eyes cloudy, and something in the flat desolation of his gaze suddenly looked very familiar.
"Holy shit," Justin said in a harsh whisper. "You and…shit, Chris. Shit. I didn't know."
Chris twisted his hands together in a flurry, the violets flying up and then back down. "Yeah," he said sharply. "Yeah, well…not anymore. Doesn't matter."
Justin patted Chris's hand and the violets dissolved into their skins, nothing but mist and fragrance.
"Chris," Justin said later, when it was dark and they were lying on strange beds that felt almost like shaving foam, if shaving foam fluffed up huge and green and firm. " D'you believe what the, uh -- the ocalette said about this kind of stuff not happening to ordinary people? Because, I dunno, we're pretty ordinary --"
"No, we're not." Chris sighed and shifted, and smelled like cedar chips and grass. "I know it's a good sound byte to say that we are, but we're completely totally not."
"Well, I think we are. I think I am. I'm, I mean -- I'm a pretty ordinary guy, just in extraordinary circumstances."
Chris snorted and flung out an arm to whap Justin's shoulder. "You're a moron. None of us are normal people anymore, dude. We haven't been for a long, long time." He turned over, and Justin stared at the curve of Chris's back moving under his shirt. "We wouldn't even know how to fuckin' begin."
"We've worked hard," Justin said, almost to himself. "We deserve everything we got." Chris didn't say anything, and it didn't take long for Justin to fall asleep.
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and that's it. I'm sure I had some sort of plan when I started writing, but it's long and it would take forever to set up and I ended up just hating the whole thing. So, really -- my abandoned WsIP stay abandoned for good reason. *g*
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Hee! You sound so sweet and determined. I'm glad you liked it, nontheless. And I hope you had a tip-top birthday, honey! *snug*
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Great job.
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And dude. Who doesn't have a post-Blair Witch horror of basements now? geesh.
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This day is going to kill me. I will not survive.
What kind of comment can one leave for these incredible orphan stories that won't be finished? I don't want to guilt-trip, I don't want to push, so I just go *whimper*.
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And what the hell is an ocalette?
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Uh....I made it up. I was gonna make up everything pretty much, which is probably the reason I stopped writing it. *g* But I'm glad the opening was frightening! Because I was fucking terrified writing it, chickenshit that I am. *g*
And of course it would end in timbertrick! Who you think I is?!?
creeptastic.
And the second half is lovely, as well as spooky. Even I, giant chicken girl, like Asian ghost stories.
Re: creeptastic.
That is a *huge* compliment! I scare pretty damn easily, so it's often hard for me to gauge if I've actually made something frightening or not. I'm glad to hear I succeeded. *g* Thank you so much for the feedback!