midnight squared

Magdalene hears voices through the cardboard-thin walls of her house’s second story. Her grandmother, Margot, has been dying in the room next door for the last three months, and hasn’t spoken for two of them.

The girl slides out of bed, a little shocked by just how cold the hardwood floor can be on bare feet, cold that flows along her legs and inside her nightgown.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Margot says.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” says the other voice.

The little girl is plastered to the wall, trying to hear what else they’re saying, but they’re not saying anything else. Magdalene hears the creak of floorboards and the squeak of door hinges. Margot and her visitor tromp by, and through the keyhole Magdalene can see her grandmother’s wrinkled hand swing across her field of vision.

She waits just a moment, then ventures to crack the door just a bit. Her grandmother looks normal enough, aside from the walking around, but the visitor is glowing, not like a beacon, but as if the light clings to him, like it’s sewn into the fabric and rubbed onto his skin.

Magdalene steals across the hall though her mother’s open bedroom door. She shakes her, tries to wake her, but has no luck. Hovering over the placid face, the girl is hit with a blast of bear-scented breath. Her mother is comatose and inaccessible.

The front door opens, silence for a second, closes with a thunk.

The little girl flies down the stairs. She grabs her long wool coat from the hook and puts on her yellow rain boots, as they’re the first shoes she sees. Magdalene opens the front door in five-degree increments, spotting the two figures half a block down the street already. She lights across the porch in three steps and over the three steps in one light bound. Grandmother and her guide cross the street with the flashing approval of the walk signal.

The two aren’t jogging, but Magdalene is out of breath from trying to keep up with them. It might be the clouds of frost that she breathes every few seconds, the way a dragon breathes smoke when faced with a dilemma. Neither her grandmother nor her phantom say anything as they walk, not that the girl could hear if they did.

Magdalene thinks the man seems familiar, like someone from one of the black-and-white photographs on her Grandmother’s nightstand. A past lover? A close relative from a hundred years ago? Her secret, real grandfather?

They turn in mid-step without slowing, darting into an alley. Magdalene looks around, noticing for the first time that all the lights in all the buildings are off, and the streetlights are boycotting as well. As far as she can see in either direction, there are no cars, but the lights at the intersections are still colorfully regulating imaginary traffic in rigorous intervals.

Next to a dumpster, the stranger pushes open a green metal door. Grandmother follows the pale man into light as Magdalene looks on from the end of the alley. Magdalene races to get to the door before it closes, but en route she trips on something unseen, landing hard on bits of glass that speckle her right forearm.

A few of them break the skin, the blood not red in this absence of light, just darker than the pale skin it drips and flows from. She walks to the door and tries it, hoping it isn’t locked. It isn’t locked.

She finds herself at the end of a long hallway, with a black and white tiled floor. There’s a plaque next to the door with a two words inscribed into it. It reads:

TREAD LIGHTLY.

Magdalene wonders if it’s a puzzle. She looks at the ceiling and notices grooves cut into black stone, the groves intersecting to make a grid corresponding roughly with the tiles below. She’s alone in this room, and her arm still hurts from the fall. She picks a piece of glass from it and tosses it across the room, almost without thinking.

As soon as the shard hits the black tile, a stone monolith crashes down from the ceiling, and a resounding thud reverberates throughout the hallway, throughout the building, perhaps throughout the whole town. The obsidian block extends up into the ceiling, looking more like a support column than a trap that might’ve killed an unthinking trespasser.

“Maybe the sign means that I shouldn’t step on any black tiles…?”

Magdalene holds her breath, skipping on tiptoes across the room, keeping her eyes fixed on the ceiling, looking for movement. She doesn’t let her feet touch any black tiles, and exhales when she reaches the white tile in front of the other green door.

She opens it, only to find that it’s beyond dark. Her first inclination is to prop something in the door behind her to let a little light in, but the door is locked behind her and she feels along the wall in vain for a light switch.

What if this room is like the other one, rigged with booby trapped floor tiles or something I can’t see? She decides to follow the perimeter of the room, keeping one hand on the wall and using one foot to feel out the floor, in case there are pits to fall into.

After taking sixteen steps to the left, she reaches a corner and follows it for seventy-eight more steps. Seventeen steps to the right and she finds another door, gasping a thankful sigh to find it open.

The next room is square, but no smaller than the others. Magdalene sizes up the brick walls, the iron floor, and the six huge chess pawn-like objects placed in a ring. The air has the taste of pennies and the smells like humidifiers.

There’s another sign by the door, this one a framed piece of quilt with the words ‘Please remove your shoes’ sewn into it. On the floor beneath it is a mat with a pair of sneakers on it. Magdalene walks closer to it and kneels over to inspect the shoes, and she shrieks, piercing the air with the vocalization of her pubescent surprise.

A mouse pokes its head from the left sneaker, and a second later it leaps from the shoe and runs along the wall. It turns and runs between two of the giant pawns, never expecting to be struck by lightning. Magdalene shrieks again, the hairs on her neck and arms raised by the shock of the mouse’s sudden death.

She opts not to remove her thick rubber rain boots.

Immune but skeptical, she crosses the room, never taking her eyes off the buzzing beacons. The mouse corpse is charred, smoking. It smells like the burnt chicken of last night’s supper and her stomach rumbles uncomfortably at this thought. At the other end of this room is another door, but this one is split in the middle and has numbers across the top of it. An elevator.

Magdalene hits the button. Instead of an up arrow, it’s got a ‘greater than’ sign in it ( >). The doors rattle open as if straining and she hesitates before stepping inside. There are only two buttons, 1 and 7. After some deliberation, she hits the 7 and the doors close.

It takes thirty seconds for the doors to open again, but when they do it’s a room divorced from the reality Magdaline is accustomed to. Thirty, maybe forty feet from ceiling to floor, the room encompasses the whole of the seventh floor. She knows this because the walls are huge window panels revealing the now-illuminated town below. The floor is dark blue and reflects the overhead lights. Magdalene scans the long tables that ring the perimeter, each one cluttered with papers and simmering vials and test tubes. She notices hulking mechanical contraptions, chugging and humming with lit dials bearing digital numbers. There’s a man hovering between the machines, not the same man she followed here. Grandmother is nowhere in this room.

This man is tall, with uncombed gray hair and a labcoat extending past his knees. He notices her and approaches, pale eyes and a cropped goatee. His smile is slight but not unpleasant and he looks confused.

Standing in front of her, he extends an arm.

“Um…hello. I’m Professor James Krastin. You know, this is a highly-restricted area. How did you, uh, find this place?”

Mistaken jars. A phantom flickers somewhere outside the room. Magdalene is speechless.
 

(c) j baugher 2006