A random chapter from my book, 'Linea'

Chapter 8 - Mr Rock Still Needs to go to the Land Behind the Red door

Rock left the once Mr Derrik, feeling lower than when he had gone in to see him. It wasn’t the blood, obviously it was not the blood, or the dirt over his body, or even the giggle that came from his distorted face.
It was the lines.
Slightly dipped, it was true, not perfectly straight. But still, so familiar.
Maybe Linea was right.
Another one. A human one.
Rock’s final sheets were made up of jagged peeks, angry zigzags across the pages and spilling onto the floor.
He would be washed soon, his body and the room sanitised and ready.
But for now Mr Rock had nothing left to distract him, although he considered going back to the reception to talk more with Anya. But on this World you had one wife and one wife only, and he would respect that. They left you otherwise.
So instead he went back to the reception just to return the key and request a different one.
‘The Red Door? Really?’ Her eyes lit up even more. ‘You’ve found another one! Oh you are cleaver, Mr Rock!’ Obviously Anya knew more about Rock than he knew of her. Everyone knew him though, of course.
‘Well, I try.’ He said, smiling broadly at her, unable to hold back from her infectious glee.
‘Here you are, sir!’ She said, taking another key card from the computer and handing it over, making sure that her skin brushed his again.
Was he sure they only allowed one wife?
But he took the key from her and made his way to the left side of the Hall.
Through a door and down a corridor there was another set of stairs leading further down into the Mountain’s vault like innards.
This stairway could go on for ever, or it could take one flight to reach the bottom. It depended on what type of mood the Mountain was in.
Today it was impatient because it only took thirty seconds to reach the bottom. There was only a short walk down a low, stone tunnel left to reach the Red Door. Mr Rock took it as slowly as he could, but not slowly enough.
He reached out and knocked on the door.
Nothing.
He sighed and knocked again.
Nothing.
He knew, after the last twelve times, that this could just keep going.
But then the seldom used door creaked and groaned and finally let him in.
The air in this World was un-breathable. He had to rely totally on his injections to survive. But still his body tried to breath, and the air burnt and stung and bit all the way down to his useless lungs, then even more so on the way back up.
The light was ruby coloured, illuminating from a apple red sky and wine red moon. No sun, just the little, battered moon.
The ground sunk slightly with every step you took, then bounced back up to tease you from behind. It was a spongy, dirty, dark little hole and Mr Rock hated it.
This World was made up of a baron, gaseous surface, with one, solitary piece of unstable land poking up unevenly from the mist that surrounded it. In the middle of this unhinged foothold was the Red Door. You could walk all the way around it; just a lump of painted wood sticking up mocking you with a handle and a frame. But Mr Rock left the door open, always, and through it he could still see the stone tunnel and the stairway in the distance.
He really hated this place.
But what disturbed him more was the dress up game going on even here. To one side of the land, standing perilously close to the edge and an unseen drop through poisonous gasses, was a small office desk, battered and coloured a grainy yellow by the strange wind that flew through this World at unforeseen times trying to knock you off balance and push you to that drop.
The chair behind the desk was unoccupied for the moment, but he knew that if he stood and waited it soon would not be.
Next to the desk was a single filing cabinet. His Mistress seemed to have a thing about filing cabinets.
It was a grey metal with a paper label stuck haphazardly to three of the four drawers.
The bottom one remained unlabeled.
Mr Rock waited, planting himself fully onto the squishy ground, knowing that the wind would come and try to play push the living thing off the cliff again. He had almost lost at the game a couple of times already.
Then a sound cut through him, a sound that made him nauseous. His stomach clenched and his inability to breath did not help.
The thirteenth time he had seen this creature and it had still become no easier.
It was a dirty yellow colour, presumably from the wind, deformed and clumping; a thing that should not move.
It was more plant than anything, and should be growing still and solitary and away from him.
But it had been pulled, stretched, parts removed and reattached with a child’s biology set, scissors and glue.
It quivered as it moved, slowly and painfully, a completely unnatural thing made more so with stringy limbs ending in stumps.
It had been made, from scratch, and it knew it should not exist.
But still it moved, an unhappy creature, a tortured little bundle of matter, so unsure of these objects jutting out from its lump of a body and pulling it, actually moving it, along the floor.
It crept up to the chair and sat, or removed the limb-things from the ground and slumped down.
Mr Rock opened his hand with effort and pulled the Shell Thing from the imprint it had been making in his palm and placed it onto the desk. He took a step back.
The creature had no eyes, or ears, or mouth. But it moved down towards the Shell Thing and moved its lump body around it.
Normally now it wound hold the Thing into of its stumps and use the third to pull its lump over to the filing cabinet and throw the Thing into one of the three labelled drawers.
But this time it left the Shell Thing on the table, and went over to the cabinet alone. It opened the bottom drawer and tried to grab at a sheet of paper Mr Rock could see at the bottom. It tried to grab at it, to hold it between its stumps, but the pathetic creature could not get a grip, and eventually Mr Rock, either through pity or revulsion, went over to the creature and picked up the sheet himself. The creature seemed to sigh, then moved back to the desk and clumsily pushed the Shell Thing back towards Mr Rock.
He looked at the creature and the creature, if it had eyes, looked at him.
Does it want me to kill it? He wondered.
But before his mind could answer him the creature dropped back off the chair and pulled its lump of sinew and bone off the edge of the land.
As it always did.
Mr Rock picked the Shell Thing back up, and felt a vague stickiness on it that made him gag, then pushed it far into his pocket and left the Land behind the Red Door.
Only when he was safely back in the Mountain and up the stairway into the Grand Hall did he look at the sheet.