Brute force evacuate soul
Car-Crash pushed open one of the myriad of doors built into the walls of the garage, this one a metal fire-escape push-door that squeaked on its hinges and slammed closed in its frame, and led Luke down an office hallway.
It took Luke a moment to realize it was the same office, though maybe another floor, that he had met Filepress in, because while at that time the office had a distinct middle of the night feel, this time soft sunlight bloomed on the frosted glass office windows from slits in the blinds within, and the entire atmosphere was screaming that it was just before dawn on a Thursday morning.
They took a turn and followed another hallway, with almost no doors besides one propped open on a humming half-lit breakroom and another closed door labeled riser room, to a set of double doors that opened on a thin carpeted space, with restrooms and a fire escape on either side and another set of double doors at the far end.
Luke, who had never had to take more than a single door or craft jump to get anywhere in the Other, was on the verge of cracking a joke about the trip, but got caught by his own intellect working through his gut feelings towards a realization.
The office was making him travel just as he would in the Real, preparing his mind to travel to a place that was very similar to it. How similar? He was suddenly, annoyingly, afraid. As much as he had tried to convince himself he hated the Other with a fanatic passion, the idea of leaving it and falling into the Real, with his Spirit alive and conscious, was terrifying. All the talk of pain and torture and getting trapped that he had laughed off just minutes before was now smoldering in his ears.
And despite his best efforts, as if sensing he was close to breaking, his mind decided to pile another red-hot weight on top of him, and he remembered something Rory had told him.
“They make you walk, or drive, or fall, some kind of terrestrial travel, something like you would do on earth, that tells your mind “Hey, we have traveled a distance”, to separate you from everything, and so you have to travel the same distance to come back. That’s how they trap you.”
She had been talking about Demons. Luke had to laugh, as he followed Car Crash through the double doors. No one would go through all this trouble for him. His soul wasn’t worth a damn.
He glanced back over his shoulder, saw the closed doors staring at him with darkened glass, and remembered something else. Something that one of the other faceless Spirits who had been with them on and off that night had said, after Rory’s talk of the Demon trap.
“Yes, but the trick is not to try and go back the same way you came. You’ll never escape them that way. You have to go through.” He had made a motion with his hand, fingers pressed together like a karate chop, of gliding forward, and had hunkered down and followed the movement with his eyes so full of seriousness and determination, that Rory had rolled hers and Luke had smirked into his drink.
But now, the memory made his hair stand on end and his breath flutter in his chest, despite the fact that his real body was safely tucked away on the other side of existence.
The double doors slammed shut and Luke found himself in a wide lobby. A white noise hummed at the edges, possibly traffic or voices or footsteps on other floors, and all around seating areas of various shapes led to doors of every kind. Medical check-ins with hospital double doors. Hotel front desks and darkened dining areas. Call center break rooms. Elevator lobbies. Glass and concrete waiting areas borrowed from some financial office towers. Even apartment complex gyms and college admin desks.
Nowhere, Luke noticed, did the lobby lead to any kind of front exit. It was like a front desk that had been severed from the front of whatever it had been built for and become entombed in the peripheral portions of a hundred other places.
There was a round reception desk at the center, with a woman seated, staring at the desktop as Car-Crash sauntered over to her.
“Mornin’ Lina. Got a new body for the bricks. Let’s put him on Nugget’s job. I think B.P. has a slot—”
“Nugget’s job has already gone hot,” Lina said in a voice that nearly threw Luke back out the doors. It was a smooth voice, like an attorney-politician Luke had seen on TV once, and it bounced off everything harmonically, like the whole space was connected to her vocal cords.
“Shit,” Car-Crash said, his voice a dusty chair-squeak by comparison. “I need something in DFW. What about, uh,”
She looked up for the first time and Luke got caught up in the beam. Her face was perfectly sculpted and made up, like a supermodel playing a CEO in a movie, and her gold-grey eyes blazed like concrete under a midday sun.
“Tenpound is still collecting for street cleaners.”
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Car-Crash drummed his fingers on the counter as if he was thinking, but Luke got the feeling from the rigidity of his mask that he was just getting an eyeful of Lina’s chest.
“Uh, yeah. Sounds good. Who—”
“The street clean squad seniors are Tommy Twelve and Backdraft.” The light in her eyes fluttered as she spoke, as if she was reading something unseen.
“Fucking Tommy will roll him,” Car-Crash scoffed.
“Backdraft it is then,” Lina said wearily. “I’ll send the word out now. Here.” She handed Car-Crash a door key, along with a smile that said “I know exactly what you want. Why don’t you do something to make me give a shit?”
Car-Crash took it with a nod and turned on his heel.
“All right. Have a good one, Lina. Let’s go man.”
“Good Luck,” Lina said to Luke, her eyes offering something like condolences. Luke nodded and hoped her vision wasn’t as penetrating as Filepress’s.
He turned to follow Car-Crash and stumbled in his step. The Lobby had shifted, somehow, as he was staring at Lina, and the various waiting rooms seemed different than they had been just moments ago, re-ordered, and he couldn’t find the double doors and brown carpet break room Car-Crash had led him through when they came in.
Car-Crash also seemed a bit disoriented. He stopped suddenly and spun on his heel a few times, even glanced back at Lina as if considering asking her, then finally stopped and looked at the key.
“Oh, shit. Here we go,” he said mostly to himself and pointed at a linoleum and white paint region of the surrounding circle, which Luke identified as they got closer as an apartment complex laundry room, complete with masking tape and sharpie ‘out-of-order’ labels on the machines and loose articles of children’s clothing on the ground. The room screamed ‘middle of the night’ which Luke found hard to believe, until Car-Crash shoved the door open, and Luke found himself walking down a strip of concrete lot fractured and pot-holed in every way imaginable, shimmering like a crushed slab of black glass under glaring white lights and a steady, misty drizzle.
The cold sensation of night rain on his skin was about the last thing he had expected to find on the other side of that door, and he looked around for signs of the unreality of it all, like looking for the zipper on a chuck-e-cheese suit, but found only a perfectly natural apartment complex back alley.
A Brick wall mouthed with glowing broken blinds and protruding rust-grilled window units, a tall splintered and stained wood fence, and the muffled echoes of their own footsteps. The most out of place thing he could find was Car-Crash himself, and even he seemed trimmed to fit, his broken tempered glass mask now looking more like a very well sculpted piece of cosplay than a morphed memory.
Car-Crash stopped at a door seemingly at random, put the key in, and turned the bolt. He stepped back without taking the key out and waved towards the door.
“Ok welcome home. Get the fuck in.”
Luke stared at the door, then looked back at Car-Crash, who seemed to be waiting on something.
“Uh, ok. What—”
“You will notice that I’m not attempting to explain any of this to you,” Car-Crash said with an acidic irritation. “That’s because it’s a waste of time. Just go through the god damned door and the box will do the rest.”
“The box?”
But Car-Crash was already walking back down the alley, and in just a few steps he disappeared into the darkness beyond the cone of white light and glowing misty rain.
Luke turned the nob and pushed the door inward, and something about the sound of the door made him stop dead still.
He recognized it. It was the same sound it had made a thousand times. It was the door to his apartment.
No. It wasn’t. He remembered his apartment, on the third floor of a three-story five-year-old complex, everything smooth, new concrete and orange stucco. Not even any rust on the gate hinges yet. Looking out over unused shrubland down to a two-lane road in one direction, and the most baren stretch of interstate between two metro centers in the other.
But that door was distant, hazy, fading. This door was right here in his hand. The feeling was ensnaring, like sensing the edge of waking in a dream. He couldn’t help but move towards it. He had to remember who he really was.
He stepped inside and the apartment came back to him. It was like that other apartment, in a way. The clutter and furniture were nearly identical, and even the smells were the same, but once again, this one was near and close and real, while the other was becoming more distant with every heartbeat.
Though he hadn’t noticed it at the time, time inside the apartment was warped, pinched at the ends. Far away and higher up, with the benefit of distance, another Luke could see the warp, like a cough drop between two twists, and the way time squeezed him over half an hour in a heartbeat, formed the seconds directly into memory, and pushed him towards the bed.
He skipped the shower. Skipped the beer, even. He was so god damned tired. A double shift, surely. He stripped down to his underwear and barely got under the sheets.
As he lay, staring at the ceiling, the world pressed out at the seams, growing moment by moment, as he inflated it with each breath.
The sensation of being stuck on a precipice of recollection reached a crescendo, and he floated up off the bed.
“Oh fuck, I’m dreaming.”
He rarely ever realized he was dreaming before he woke up, but he must have fallen asleep so fast his mind didn’t have a chance to trick him.
Up, up, into the darkness of the ceiling. The shadows of the popcorn texturing melted and broke and he floated into a white noise void.
“What was I gonna do tomorrow?”
But the question was deeper than that. He didn’t even know who he had been today. He had to wake up. He had to remember who he was and what he was going to do and what day it was. And he had to do it quick. He might be late for work. He might have forgotten something important. He might even have someone waiting on him. He needed to, absolutely had to wake up.
It flared out above him. A bright light. Like a little warm sun. A pin prick in the darkness letting in some of the summer heat on the other side. There. That was his real life. Not fantastic. Not wonderful. Not even pleasant. But real, solid, steady, indestructible, secure. Like a uniform concrete slab. He was tired of floating around on clouds, dancing in nebulae, swimming in imagination. It spoke to him, told him about yesterday’s traffic, gas prices, news stories, even strange text messages from unknown numbers. It told him of the real world, and it promised to take him there.
He reached out his hand for the light, and this time, he caught it.