1813: Untitled, Chapter 5

[Back to the start.]

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“So.”

“So.”

Now the pair of them were here, neither of them were quite sure what to say. They both already knew the pertinent details, having shared them via chat message prior to meeting up. But, given the eerie similarities between their experiences — and the aspects in which they were complete opposites, too — they had both agreed that meeting up to discuss things in person would probably be more productive.

So far it hadn’t been, largely because despite the strange happenings, it felt like just a regular, normal day. People were going about their business in the coffee shop; conversation was occasionally drowned out by the enormous coffee machine and its overenthusiastic milk frother; no-one gave Magnus and Dora a second glance. To any passers-by, they would have looked just like two people sitting together, sharing some time with one another, though the more voyeuristic might have mistaken them for a couple, given the amount of time they were spending looking directly at one another.

Eventually, Magnus spoke after swallowing a mouthful of cappuccino.

“There’s more,” he said. “More than what I told you before, that is.”

“Oh?” said Dora, interested. There was more to her experience than what she had shared, too, but she was curious to hear what Magnus said first, so she didn’t bring it up.

“Yes,” he said. “It feels… kind of silly to be talking about it, though. I mean…” — here he lowered his voice a little — “…magic. Or whatever it is. Energy. Life force. I don’t know. She explained it all, but it went over my head a bit.”

“She?” asked Dora, one eyebrow raised quizzically.

“Yes,” Magnus said again. “She. After that initial… dream, or whatever it was, I started noticing strange things happening. And eventually, everything seemed to sort of… black out. Though not like it being dark; more like… I don’t know. The world felt kind of… wrong. I knew where I was, but things didn’t look right. And there she was.”

He paused. He wasn’t quite sure how to describe the shadowy figure, since she was such an ill-defined presence. But he could tell that she was a woman, or at least a female presence, since he wasn’t quite sure if being incorporeal allowed one to continue being called a “woman” or “man”.

Dora had heard enough already. She felt comfortable about speaking up now.

“Did she happen to say something about our world, and how it was made?” she asked. She was surprised how confident she sounded asking such a peculiar question. “Did she happen to mention anything about the light…”

“…and the dark?” Magnus concluded for her. “Yes, as a matter of fact.” He frowned. “Wait, how do you know that? Did you…”

“Yes,” said Dora with a gentle smile. “The same thing happened to me. After a few days of strange happenings — in my case, really weird stuff like the little ‘un falling over and scraping both her knees, then there being absolutely no sight of any injury moments later — something similar happened to me. There was… someone. I couldn’t quite see them, not clearly, anyway, but there they were. Some sort of presence. A guy… or the ghost of a guy, or something. Hard to explain, really.”

“Hmm,” said Magnus. The two of them were quiet for a moment, and took the opportunity to have another sip of drink, neither taking their eyes from the other.

“Anyway,” said Magnus after a moment. “There was some sort of fantasyland bullshit about the balance between light and dark, and how things looked like being thrown out of balance if things carried on the way they were, and…”

“I’ll just stop you there,” said Dora with a gentle laugh. “I don’t think it’s ‘bullshit’, not if we’ve both seen weird stuff like this going on. Unless we’re both very, very ill indeed and having some sort of shared hallucination. Then that really would be bullshit; the sort of clichéd crap that’s straight out of a cheap novel you’d pick up at the airport.”

Magnus smiled. It felt good. He felt like he hadn’t done it genuinely for a while, but despite the strange — and slightly frightening — situation in which he found himself, it felt good, particularly to have something private that he and Dora could share together. He wondered if she felt the same way.

As a matter of fact, she did; life had been boring lately and, while she hadn’t quite had something as grandiose as whatever this was in mind, she was grateful for a little injection of excitement.

“What I don’t get,” said Magnus after another sip of coffee, “is how things are being thrown out of whack. I mean, have you noticed anything weird about the world lately?”

“You mean despite… everything that we’ve just talked about?” she said with a laugh. “No, I guess not. But perhaps we weren’t in a position to notice. Perhaps whatever is happening to us is something to do with it.”

“Mm,” said Magnus, his eyes finally looking away from Dora. She realised that she had been tense all the while he had been staring at her, and suddenly relaxed somewhat. “Maybe.”

“I wonder,” said Dora. “All this light and dark business. I mean, obviously I’m light and you’re dark, whatever that means. Are we going to end up fighting?”

“That’s how these things tend to go,” said Magnus, “at least in clichéd crap that’s straight out of a cheap novel you’d pick up at the airport.” He chuckled at his own allusion.

“I’m serious!” said Dora, pouting slightly. “I don’t want to end up having to do anything weird or nasty to you. Not like that,” she corrected herself quickly before Magnus could slip in a quick innuendo. “I mean… kind of seems like we’re opposites, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, I guess,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean we have to go against one another. Opposites attract and all that.”

 

*       *       *       *       *

It was getting dark — and several coffees later — by the time the pair of them went their separate ways. Concluding that they couldn’t do much else with their respective strange phenomena until something else odd happened to one or both of them, conversation had turned to all things trivial: what had been on television the previous evening, how much both of them hated Magnus’ ex — though Magnus always felt guilty any time he bad-mouthed her, even despite the depression and rage she frequently provoked in him — and the silly things little Alice had done. The socialisation had done them both some good, and they both left the coffee shop with smiles on their faces.

Dora had offered Magnus a lift back to his flat, but he had refused; he’d decided that he wanted some time alone with his thoughts. He often found that if he walked and thought, he could contemplate things more effectively than if he was just shut in his flat all alone, surrounded by memories in physical form.

Of course, there were a lot fewer of these left lying around now that she had been back and collected her things. The flat had felt disturbingly empty after she had been and gone, so Magnus had taken the time to rearrange the furniture as much as possible so it felt like he was in a different place. It had proven mostly effective, but the bedroom which, thanks to its built-in wardrobe, was harder to rearrange, still held potent memories. He found himself sleeping on the sofa rather than the cold bedroom a lot more these days, frequently drifting off to the low drone of inoffensive, mind-numbing late night digital TV.

His footsteps echoed as he paced along the street. He felt like he was walking with purpose, though he was in no hurry to get home; there was very little for him there. After a moment he slowed, then stopped. He wasn’t sure why, initially, then he felt an overwhelming surge of curiosity.

There was an alleyway that he walked past every time he went from his flat to the centre of town and back again, and he had always wondered what was down there. He doubted it was anything interesting, so he had never just wandered in to take a look, but for some reason, now he found himself once again walking with a strong sense of purpose, this time towards the alleyway.

It was a narrow passage between two buildings, and in the fading light there wasn’t a lot to see, since neither building had many windows on this side. There was the odd frosted glass window that Magnus assumed was a bathroom or similar, and occasionally these cast a small pool of light into the otherwise darkened alleyway, but for the most part the passage was unlit.

It was a dead end, though it opened into what appeared to be a small courtyard rather than simply terminating in a wall. The courtyard had a few dumpsters in it and smelled awful. Both buildings seemingly had back doors here, presumably to allow the occupants to take out their rubbish and throw them in the dumpsters. But there was something else; something lying on the floor.

“Holy fuck,” said Magnus as he approached the lump on the ground. It was a person, and they didn’t appear to be in a good way. He knelt before the figure and established that it was a woman, probably in her mid-twenties — about his age — clad simply in a T-shirt and jeans. She was lying face-down on the ground, and the area around her head was slick with still-wet blood. It was obviously too late for her, and Magnus started to feel panicked, both about being caught with her, and about whether or not whoever — if anyone — had done this to her was still around.

Then he felt it. He couldn’t describe the sensation, but it was there. He looked in the direction he felt it was coming from; up and to his left. There was what appeared to be a fire escape on the side of the building, but it abruptly terminated two floors up from the ground and there was seemingly no ladder allowing anyone to get up — or, for that matter, down.

A primal feeling in his brain told him that he really needed to get up there right now, but the rational part of his mind — which, he felt, was rapidly losing influence in this situation — said that there was absolutely no way that he could possibly–

Before he knew it, he felt the strange sensation of energy surging through his hands. They took on the curiously odd appearance they had done any time the strange events had happened recently, but this time there was something more; it felt like energy was focusing in them, and the more it did so, the more mottled and marked they became, until eventually they looked like an old man’s hands; gnarled and covered with varicose veins. A high-pitched whining sound assaulted his ears, and his head began to ache, as if it was about to explode. Was this the power that the shadowy figure had talked about? And if so, how on Earth was he supposed to control it?

Unsure of anything else to do, he clenched his fists and pointed them both at the fire escape high above him. Tendrils as black as night erupted from the back of his hands and laced themselves around the bars of the fire escape’s guard rail, and before he could register his intense surprise at what he had apparently just done, he felt himself being yanked violently into the air, his heart in his mouth as if he was riding a theme park attraction. Almost before he knew it, he was standing on the platform of the fire escape, some two storeys off the ground.

And that primal feeling was still there; he needed to continue on upwards, to chase down whoever had done this, and to punish them.

His rational mind finally gave up trying and just slipped away quietly, and the primal urge took over as he raced up the steps to the rooftop.