Thick hazy air hung beneath the shaking lights as raindrops shivered and splattered across steaming glass. A curious, hollow stench lashed out like an invisible whip from one row to the next, and not even the gelid breath of the midnight breeze could batter the smell away from him as his sweating fingers now clutched at the briefcase more urgently. From under the sickly pulses of tungsten light, he peeked out from beneath the black fedora that slept atop his gaunt skull, to observe, on the other end of the bus, a man. He was wrapped from head to toe, with a sticky yellow ooze slowly slithering between the cracks of thick, crinkled, fleshy bandages. Beneath the wrapping, two pale, beady, bloodshot eyes were gazing blankly across the space, stinging in the air but refusing to blink. The eyes were beginning to grow cloudy, and as he watched, a fly landed on the man’s retina. There was not so much as a twitch. The man could well have been dead.
Before long, the bus heaved across the final corner and thrust itself into the heart of the city. As it thundered by, cluttered clouds of smog and clots of neon whisked up into a strange spectral entity that coiled its starving hand around the jittering vehicle and pulled it further into its bosom. He shifted in his seat, trying to compose himself, his skin itching beneath the stretching fabrics of his clothes as his muscles grew tense. His pale hands, still clinging to the handle of his briefcase, began to quiver. A faint echo carried its way through the open window. It was inexplicable. It tickled like the softest of sighs, yet somehow carried itself over the spluttering of engines, the sharp screeching of wheels, and the cacophonies of coughing that accompanied him on his journey home, to somehow reach his ears. He turned with a sudden dread to the rear window and gazed out with wide eyes, searching for the source of the sound. It rumbled in his mind, a melancholy shriek. Far out in the blackened night, withering branches swayed, and glowing leaves glittered beneath the bright, penetrating moonlight. He continued to stare out at the tree line, expecting to see something between the wizened trunks that warped themselves within shadows and waned and wavered among the howling wind. He swallowed a great gulp of the humid air, his eyes shifting frantically now, his ears straining, his hands tentatively pulling the briefcase even closer to his chest. Yet, whatever that sound was, it could no longer be heard. There were soon no more trees in sight. Instead, within the frame of every window there now lurked gaping monoliths of metal, erecting themselves proudly before their starry backdrop, jutting like daggers into the skin of the sky, piercing the very stained fog that the bandaged man beside him continued to choke on.
It was now a stop before his own, and he had turned away from the window. He brooded over the sight of his pale fingers that still coiled around the lavish leather handle of his briefcase, noting the many scratches upon them. As he did so, another man, draped in thick black formal attire and possessing an alarmingly pale complexion, huffed out of his seat and lifted a bloated black bin-bag onto his back, the size of which nearly dwarfing the man himself. The man seethed hot bubbly spit between his teeth and staggered slowly across the bus before finally emerging out onto the street and fading away into the fog. It was clear to him now that the stench had not arisen from the bandaged man - who still stared up at the decaying ceiling of the bus as if enraptured into a trance, yet simultaneously writhed about on his back, seemingly struggling to rest inside his own flesh. It had, in fact, originated from whatever that bulging black behemoth was that drooped from the slender shoulders of the other man, who had now completely vanished into a snakelike alleyway, the haunted stench creeping along not far behind. The only smell that remained now was the cluttered, comforting, nostalgic smell of fresh pollution, that tickled his nostrils and left his mouth dry. He was now in the city centre, soon to be home again.
With a final hiss the bus spat him out onto the sidewalk, and he leaned on a lamppost to stretch out his cramped limbs, his hand pressing down on a creased damp leaflet hanging from the rotting wood. A missing-person poster. He could not say that he recognised her. He wrapped himself up in his trench coat and, navigating the tumbling litter that scratched at his worn leather shoes, trudged back home, the glassy gaze of apartment windows glaring at him from above like hungry vultures willing on his demise.
His apartment was sparse, almost empty, with imposing grey walls scribbled with cracks and no decoration save for the moaning metal pipes which slithered their way like vines across the apartment, echoing faint clangs that visited the room like whispers from a different world. A single sofa, crimson-red and wounded, sat in the middle of the room, facing towards an oversized television which now churned out the static that provided the only source of light, the monochrome pixels illuminating no less colour than was ever otherwise present. He hunched over the briefcase and for a moment resembled an overgrown foetus curled up inside some barren industrial womb. He grunted and strained, and finally, the briefcase opened, a mighty creak vibrating through it and up through his fingertips. Inside he only saw blackness. He pummeled his fist inward, reluctantly but with purpose, almost as one would when dissecting a corpse. Inside, the briefcase felt far more spacious, like an entire dimension flowing past his knuckles, contained inside a single box, growing hotter and denser. Eventually, his fingers groped a small red USB stick that felt smooth and cold like the cool stiffness of a severed appendage.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Checking his wristwatch, he quickly inserted the USB into the television and paced back to his seat, phone in hand. He then leaned forward in anticipation; eyes fixed on the screen. The maze of static morphed and mutated before dissolving into voluptuous panoramas of skyscrapers, sunlight dancing sensuously off their rigid structures like waves of glitter, the strange metal protrusions glistening in a twilight haze as soft electronic beats fluttered out from the speakers. The camera swooped and swiveled around these great chiseled towers excitedly as the pinkish light caressed their glossy glass, and they let out a silent metallic purr, kissing the clouds as they did it. Soon the camera hurried inside one of these ominous beauties, losing itself within its steel arteries and being dazzled by great neon organs that swung about the urban caverns like ripe fruit daring to be plucked. In each passing shot, the image faded in and out like a heavy breath, sighing from light to dark, and back again, each proceeding shot closer than the last, as if the image was going to penetrate the very atoms of its subject.
As this display continued, his phone shuddered to life, and, remaining silent, he lifted it to his ear as it whispered cryptic murmurs that slowly reverberated through his skull. The voice was muffled, unintelligible, with a distorted, deep pitch. As he still scanned over the flickering screen with twitching eyes, he replied quietly.
“…It is done.”
One final murmur ruffled through in acknowledgement, and the line proceeded to crackle in a final macabre giggle, before dying. He held the cold object beside his head for a while longer before he let his arm go limp and his eyes droop down from what was now static once more.
Soon after, he perched himself like a lanky ghost beside the window which now creaked gently against a gelid wind; one eye tracking the blotches of neon light that flickered among the dark crevices of the city below him like dancing nymphs playing in the dark; another eye on his own pale, solemn reflection. He saw his own stale blue eyes, his gaunt face looking back at himself, yet he could hardly recognise his own gaze. With a grimace, he sighed, and as the cool exhaled air visibly slathered the reflection of his face, he realised that the room around him had suddenly turned dreadfully cold. With another heavy sigh, he sulked away from the window and limped flaccidly to his bedroom.
In his bed, he wrapped himself up tightly, as if to mimic the bandaged man whose glazed-over eyes still glimmered in his memory. In many ways, he missed the company of the bus. Even if they were a sickly paralysed starfish flopped on their back and crying puss, they were still a fellow traveler inside that shaking metal capsule that rocked and rumbled its way through their world, both within the city, and yet, providing a sensation that he was always somehow without. Sometimes he would gaze out those icy windows and watch the hurried stride of an ambiguous stranger tangled up in winter clothes, fighting off the spits of rain and harsh lashings of wind as they navigated pavement to pavement. As their hands would clasp onto the door-handle of which they would turn and push, he would sometimes imagine the hand instead clasping his own. He imagined the warm, fuzzy feeling of two hands intertwined. But often, when he did so, a strange sensation emerged, and it was indeed of a hand, but a gaunt, pale, skeletal hand, sat squat like a spider beside his own, or scuttling across the minute hairs that perked up on his slender arm. Just as with the peculiar temperature of his apartment air, he had not the energy to address these sensations nor his recollection of them, and merely drifted off to sleep. The faint reflections of the straining lights from outside his window danced beneath his door and trickled atop his eyes as they dilated and closed.
Where there once was a blotchy static darkness within his vision there was now a great emergence of kinetic colour; splashes of bright emerald green lit up by great swooning bursts of amber sunlight; a harmony of leaves shimmering and singing, accompanied by an ethereal hum of insects and the soft shaking of undergrowth. She was crouching down, tending to a silky white rose, which beamed in the tender daylight and swayed softly as she patted the roots beside it. He stood watching her, leaning on one leg, a twitching hand in his pocket, with a smile creeping up his tanning skin, and when she turned to him his eyes lit up with a loving passion, and she quickly turned away once more to hide her gentle grin, displaying it only to the flowers. He approached her slowly, lifting his hand to stroke the soft arch of her neck, to feel the flowing river of blood that pulsated through her slender veins as she immersed herself into her garden. He felt her heartbeat, heard it even, as it merged with his own to build a drumming cacophony of bumping organs. The busy buzzing of insects was now unexplainably absent. His fingers made contact but where flesh was there was now trickling water. His hands were dirty, muddied, being cleansed by an icy stream. She was gone. There was no smiling gaze to stare back at him. His eyes only met his own. They were distorted and cloudy, reflected back at him in the cold muddying water like deep blackened pearls uncovered by the splashing stream. When his waking eyes opened to greet his hollow apartment, those watery reflected pearls still glared back at him in the puddle of his mind.