Short Story: Fugue

[railenthe]

 

 

 

A short story. (c) 2008 Railenthe.

 

Stats: Words: 1,668     |     Rating: T     |     Warnings for: general creepiness, and the experimental factor of using the second person.

 

 

 

You were fine at the start of your day. Sure, you had a little bit of a headache, but you put that off to the changing of the seasons. It always happens like that: the seasons change up, and you get either a head cold or severe allergies. The head cold is the most common for you; you seem to be outgrowing your allergies one by one, as your learned the day before yesterday after eating a peanut butter cookie didn’t send you to the hospital in a shiny new ambulance.

 So it is with this headache that you start your day at work on Wednesday.

 It isn’t glamourous work—you are a housekeeper in a hole-in-the-wall hotel in the neighborhood, nothing more and nothing less. But, it is honest work, and it is work that means that you can afford to both continue your degree and eat at the same time, instead of choosing one or the other. Remembering this fact, you sidle up to your supervisor’s desk and get the list of rooms that has been assigned to you. Your cart full of linen is already full, so you just drag it to your first three rooms and get to work.

 It is in the second room that you finish that you realize that something is wrong. The headache that you complained of earlier in the day has intensified into a demon of a sinus headache, one so strong that it makes you a little dizzy when you move around. Just the season, you think, as you step out of the room and mark it off as “clean” before moving on to the next. You wheel over to the third room and stop as someone bolts in front of you and dashes through a doorway. “Damn it,” you mutter as you wonder why you didn’t see the kid before. You look down the corner to make sure that no one else is coming.

 That corner is just a wall.

 Either the kid just went through that wall, or you are seeing things.

You don’t like the sound of either of those ideas; so you shake it off and go back to work on your third room. In this room, you start seeing more shadowy things like that: people walking in where they have no business (and in the end no substance, either), then back out again, through unopened doors, through walls—one petite woman walks through the mirror, you realize before your mind can tell you that simply makes no sense; little glowing bits of blackness that float in front of your eyes like midges on a hot summer day outside. They are about as persistent as midges, too. They flutter around your face as if you were sugar-coated. You wave your hand in front of your eyes, trying to clear your vision of these little distractions; if you can get them out of your way faster you can concentrate on your work. Just for good measure, once you have the linens totally swapped out you spray the entire room down with an industrial pesticide. The guests here shouldn’t complain; the patrons in this room were complaining of ants, anyway. You fog the room like a bomber spraying mustard gas and get out just as quickly

 You see a few more of them on your exit from the room. Some are coming out of rooms, some are going into them.   Most of them seem to be ignoring the doors…or walls…in the case of the little girl who emerged from room 207, the floors.

“…I’m not seeing this.”

 Maybe it’s the fumes from the spray, but you’ve started to get a bit dizzy. You never have liked this spray, and you mention that to your supervisor. She tells you to sit down for a while and rest up, then go back to your work. You’re the only one ahead of schedule, anyway, and so you won’t lose much time by taking a little break. With that advice, you go to the vending machine and get yourself a Coke. While you sit and sip on the fizzy goodness, you notice that the little black-light bugs have stopped bothering you. What hasn’t let up: the occasional phantom that you see drifting through a closed door, down a non-existent hallway. These things would be easy to ignore were it not for the increase in the pressure from your headache. It feels now like there is a small balloon inside of your head, slowly being inflated into surely unhealthy proportions. Thankfully, you are still able to breathe, but the pulsing that it creates in your vision is something unholy.

 The room lurches for a moment, and you grasp the wall, straining to remain upright. The motion of the room knocks the breath out of you, and you cough once. You’ve been seeing those all day, those black spots, so you ignore them again. Time for the fourth room.

 

*_*_*

 

You’re not doing nearly as well as you would like now. The spinning has gotten worse. And you don’t remember falling asleep; so you’re understandably disturbed when you wake up on the ground, holding the rag you were using to clean the floor. How long have I been down here? you muse as you get to your feet. You look again, making sure that you have in fact cleaned up the mess in the room before you back out of the bathroom on your hands and knees to avoid falling on your head (again? You’re not sure whether or not you fell on your head in the first place, but why take chances). As you stand, back on the carpet, the room sways and tilts once more, and the only way that you can get out of it is if you hang on to the wall again.

 Barely, you make it out of the room, neglecting to vacuum the floor because you can’t decide which handle is really there and which is the figment of your imagination. Trying to get to your cart is an exercise in impossibility; you grip and grope for it, but it seems no closer.

 And the pressure! It has built in your head until it feels like your head is about to explode; the little black things running in and out of your line of vision have doubled, redoubled in number, and you stop in the hallway right there, looking at the corridor helplessly as it stretches on and on. It’s grown impossibly long, twisting like something demonic. An M. C. Escher painting, you think as you stumble to the ground heavily. You don’t remember getting so tired so fast, but suddenly “down” feels like the best place to be. So you slump to the floor for a while, and enjoy the bit of rest it provides. You feel like you’re dying…dying, and no one even cares that you’re there.

 

*_*_*

 

You don’t get to rest for long. You wake up in the same place where you collapsed. Apparently no one found you after you went unconscious. You aren’t surprised. No one in this place seems to have time to do much of anything, when it is sold out. Even so, you wonder what could be so busy that no one has even walked through the hall and seen you. You pick up your rags and go to clean another room, working slowly to make sure that you don’t start seeing those funny little lights again. This room seems to be in much better shape than the last one that you cleaned. It’s a good thing, too, because the parts that are messed up don’t seem to be reacting well to your elbow grease. There is a speck on a mirror that has been bothering you since you got into the room; as often as you spray and buff the speck, it doesn’t fade away. At one point, you actually lifted the mirror off the wall and walked on the spot using your rag, trying to stamp the spot out of the glass with your shoe. When it doesn’t work, you put the mirror back on its nail on the wall, noting the discolored portion of wall where the mirror had been hanging. You exit the room, annoyed at the sub-par cleaner that you’ve been using and prepare to search for something stronger.

 As you step out, you notice a slew of people standing around in the hallway, all looking at something on the ground. You don’t recognize any of them. A few of the people are obviously paramedics, or EMTs, or something of the sort. You can’t help but wonder what is so interesting. As you approach the throng of bodies, you see one that surprises you—your own.

 “How long have they been out?” An EMT, checking your pulse. Your hand goes to your own neck, as your eyes fixate on your still form.

 “Not sure. Is—”

 “We can help. Lucky someone found ‘em,” is all the EMT says as your limp body is loaded onto a stretcher. You zip over, shouting, “What are you doing?!”

 No one can hear you as you protest, as you watch your body being wheeled to the elevator on the stretcher. You’re pulled to your own side as you are moved forward, as if by a cord tied around your waist. You cannot resist the movement.

 You hear the officials saying things, about BP, fibrillation, and other medical words that you know nothing about except that nothing that you hear is good. Is this death? you wonder as the spots start up again. You’re connected to a machine that, if you were conscious, would undoubtedly be painful. An exhaustion passes over you, and you slump over your body.

 

*_*_*

 

You wake again, this time, seeing nothing but white. You realize that you are looking at a hospital’s ceiling. You also realize that you are back inside of your body—alive. You can’t move anything. Too many straps and tubes.

 “Are you awake?”

 The voice comes filtered somehow, and you realize that you are in some sort of boxed-in room. A quarantine. “Yes,” you attempt. “What is going on?”

 Your question doesn’t get answered. “That information is classified. You’re here because there was no other safe place.”

 “Where is everyone else?” You were always one to press the issue.

 “Dead.” The answer is clinical. “We’re examining you until we can cure you and dispose of the building.”

 “But I’ll live?” you ask.

 “Yes.”

 You sleep. That is all that you needed to hear.