Summer writing project, part four
After a long break, I'm back to working on my story. The next chapter is below the cut. Based one some criticism I received, I also did an edit on the first few chapters. The big change is that from here on out, the character formerly known as Lucy is now called Robin.


People avoided the chalk outline that police had drawn of my corpse like it was a black hole on the sidewalk. No matter how busy or distracted someone seemed, no one stepped within five feet of the faded drawing on the ground. They broke stride as they approached, saw the circle of orange cones and yellow police tape that isolated it from the rest of the world, and then gave it as wide a berth as possible. I guess it makes sense, then, that I drew my fair share of stares when I walked right up to the chalk drawing and knelt down. I ducked under the police line and touched the cracked concrete sidewalk. Some of my dried blood remained on the pavement. A few hours ago, my body had cooled and settled into a state of rigor mortis in that very spot.

The police had already been through, collecting evidence like busy little ants and scurrying anything they could find back to some forensics lab. I wasn’t hoping to find something they had left behind – I just wanted to remember something, anything, about what I had done last night before my trip to the morgue. I scanned away from the pavement and up the brick wall of the Ligea Hotel, the ten-story tall building at 42 Addison Avenue. The structure looked gray and dismal, not quite as tall as the surrounding buildings and with a drab coat of aged paint that lent it an almost sad quality. I traced the outline of each window with my eyes. No broken glass. That meant that, unless I had the courtesy to dive out an open window, I had fallen off the roof. I closed my eyes and imagined the sensation of falling. I wondered if I had had the time to notice the speed my body traveled at before it came to an abrupt halt, knocking tiles loose and embedding myself into the sidewalk below.

I looked at the outline where they had found my body. Regardless of whether you come back or not, dying has got to suck. Still, at least in my case it wasn't permanent. I scooped up a handful of dirt and dust from the broken concrete. I sprinkled the grit over the outline of my head. Then, with my index finger, I traced two circular eyes and a large smile. I stood up to admire my work. The chalk drawing – the yester-me – definitely seemed to be in a better mood.

A few people had stopped to watch me once I had crossed beyond the holy barrier of the police line. One woman hissed at me in disapproval.

“Have some respect for the dead,” she admonished me.

I stepped over the police barrier and headed toward the Ligea. “If you can't laugh at yourself...” I began, but I trailed off. I don't think she would have appreciated my sense of humor.

I walked past the front desk without even nodding at the clerk. An “Out of Order” sign dangled from the elevator doors in the lobby, so I began the long trudge up the stairs. I turned my left palm face up as I walked, glancing at the tattooed eye that marked my silent partner.

“So there was a missing person in this hotel. Who was she?”

MONA STEVENS, responded Robin through the tattoo.

DISAPPEARED TWO WEEKS AGO.

HUSBAND HIRED US TO LOOK FOR HER.

“And you, through whatever freaky magic you’ve got, tracked her here.”

NO, she said, surprising me.

“Then how did we know to look for her here?”

YOU FOUND HER.

I paused at the third floor landing. The steep stairs left me a little winded. “Cool,” I breathed before continuing up. “So it looks like I had some detective skills after all. So I figured out where she was. Then somewhere between the locating her and the actually finding her, I wound up taking a tumble and winding up in the morgue. So what happened? Did I go crazy and jump or did someone push me?”

The tattoo remained a formless black cloud. Then new words traced themselves across my skin.

SOMEONE KILLED YOU, I ASSUME.

“You assume? I thought this whole freaky tattoo thing was so you’d know what was going on?”

DIDN’T SEE YOU ONCE YOU CAME HERE.

“What do you mean, you didn’t see me? Were you on a coffee break or something? Or did you just shut your eyes when some punk tossed me off the roof?”

COULDN’T SEE.

The tattoo paused.

BLINDED, the final words read. Then the words formed back into a crude eye and stared at me plaintively.

“Blinded? As in you were blinded? So I’m really on my own, huh?”

The eye blinked, but Robin didn’t respond.

“Great.”

Seventh floor now. I stopped again and breathed deeply this time. My forehead felt hot as my face flushed. My left palm tingled, and the tattoo formed into some new words.

TIME TO HIT THE GYM, EDDIE.

“Very funny.”

I bypassed the police line at the tenth floor, pulling the yellow tape off the door to the roof and marching through as though I had some sort of government clearance. It didn’t matter, as the cops had picked the place clean – if there was anything to pick up in the first place. A light rain from last night left the wet marks of a half dozen different shoes on the scene, and none of them seemed to match my shoe prints. The police had descended upon the scene like clue-sniffing vultures, tearing everything apart and sweeping whatever miniscule evidence they could find back to their fortress of solitude. Robin and I were on the outside looking in. Somehow, that felt familiar to me.

“What now?” I asked the tattoo.

FIGURE IT OUT.

YOU USED TO BE GOOD AT THIS.

“Thanks for the help,” I grumbled sarcastically.

I walked toward the middle of the roof. The stone tile underfoot had a gravelly feel. It let out a rasping scraping noise as I dragged a sneakered toe across it. Then I looked skyward. The day had begun gray and dreary with a wind that seemed to want to kill somebody. But now the wind had all but disappeared and the sun poked through the clouds. I took a deep breath in and detected a crispness in the air that hid beneath a thin gray layer of smog.

“I used to be good at this, huh?” I said to nobody.

A sudden burst of energy surged through my body, and I didn’t try to stop it. I went from standing still and examining my surroundings to charging toward the edge of the roof. The tattoo on my hand began aching – not tingling like before, but sending hot waves of pain up my arms as Robin tried her best to stop me. I gained control in the last few seconds, stopping just short of the edge of the roof. A pigeon on a ledge below cooed loudly and flapped away in a panic. I swayed forward, then stopped. Over a hundred feet down, I could still make out the chalk outline where my corpse had been, a smiley face still sketched out on his head.

“Are you sure I didn’t just jump?” I asked Robin.

The tattoo said nothing, but the eye squinted at me.

I closed my eyes, trying to see if I could remember anything – if I could get the same type of flash of something I had gotten when Robin played her record. Nothing. Last night, I had stood on this edge and tumbled off. Had someone pushed me, or…

“No,” I said, still speaking to myself. “I didn’t jump. Why would I? I would have known that I’d be back in a few hours.”

I stepped away from the edge and dropped to all fours. I focused my eyes on each individual black stone of the rooftop. Something had to be out of place. Something…

I shook my head. “Nothing.”

Then, as I stood up, I felt something shift underneath my foot. I took a step forward and looked behind me. One slate tile had loosened during my charge to the ledge. Kneeling down, I wrapped my fingers around the edges and pulled them up. And underneath that, I found my clue.

The Ligea Hotel, for all its desire to remain in the dark ages, had electronic locks on the door – the type that required a key card to open. One such key card lay under the tile. It had the hotel’s logo – “Ligea,” it a shining blue triangle dotting the “i.” I picked it up and turned it over. On the back, just below the black magnetic stripe, someone had written a room number – 252.

“Great,” I muttered. “More stairs.”

I started trudging back toward the stairwell. At least I was going this time.

***

The room smelled vaguely of citrus fruit, which contrasted with the drab gray curtains and the stained white carpet. Someone had been there not too long ago – the one bed had been left unmade, with the sheets pushed to one side and a pillow on the floor. Aside from a bed and a bathroom with some cracked tiles, the hotel room had a microwave sitting on top of a mini-fridge, a squat black television, and a table with two chairs pulled up to it. I took these details in with a fast glance around the room, not paying too much attention to any one spot. Someone else drew my eyes away from the rest of the room. A dark red stain lay on the floor, dried into the carpet and spreading out a foot or so from the table.

“Do you know blood when you see it?” I asked Robin. That tattoo on my hand instantly started shifting in response.

LET ME LOOK.

I lowered my hand to within a few inches of the stain. I felt my palm itch as the eye shifted back and forth, taking in the scene and analyzing the evidence. When I felt the familiar tingle of words being spelled across my hand, I pulled it away and looked at Robin’s instructions.

NOT BLOOD.

PAY ATTENTION.

The eye reformed, and the pupil rolled toward the edge of my palm. I followed the tattoo’s look just beyond the stain, to a spot I had missed. A shard of glass stuck up from the carpet next to the table. A little while away, I saw most of the remains of a broken wineglass. A second one lay on the other side of the table, tucked away in the shadow of the bed.

“Wine.” I straightened up and frowned. “Good. I guess.” I didn’t have to deal with another gruesome detail on top of all my recent morbidity, but some spilled wine didn’t tell me anything, either.

I opened the curtains, letting some brownish-yellow light spill through grimy windows. A few stories down I could see the chalk outline where my body had landed. Across the street, a woman dressed in black fed some pigeons.

Then I hear a knock at the door.

“Who is it?” I turned around, only to find that I had left the door wide open. Nobody stood on the other side.

WHO ARE YOU TALKING TO? asked my tattoo.

I didn’t answer. Instead, I turned back toward the window. No one had cleaned it in weeks. The lair of dust and grime left a dull reflection on it, showing a ghostly image of the inside of the room behind me. If I looked closely, I could almost see my own reflection…

“Here’s to you, and to our last day of summer wine,” she says.

I staggered backwards, my head reeling. Who had just said that? I looked around the room, but I was the only person there.

WHAT’S WRONG?

I looked back at the window. Standing a few feet away, I couldn’t see my reflection. “I…what day is it?”

SEPTEMBER 22ND.

“The first day of fall. So yesterday was the last day of summer.”

SO?

I walked back toward the window and stared hard at my reflection.

The knock on the door returns. But it’s not a knock. Someone’s kicking at the door, trying to break in. The wine glasses fall to the floor. She grabs my arm and pulls herself toward me for protection.

I turned my head to see what the person looked like, but the reflection faded.

IF SOMETHING’S WRONG, GET OUT OF HERE, instructed Robin.

“No…nothing’s wrong. I’m just…” I shook my head, clearing out the half-remembered images. Then I pulled the curtains shut, blocking the reflection in the window from view. “I get it now.”

GET WHAT?

“There are laws. Even for things that don’t make sense, there are laws. You told me not to look in the mirror. It’s not just a mirror thing, is it? I can’t see my reflection.”

THAT’S RIGHT. AND?

“But I can see my past.”

NOT THAT EASY.

“It is.” I stepped into the bathroom and turned on the light. After a couple of flickers, a fluorescent glow spread across the white linoleum.

“I’ve been here,” I said. I pulled aside the plastic shower curtain and stared at the white tile of the wall. A few long strands of strawberry-blonde hair lay stuck to the side of the shower, pasted in place by the remaining moisture of last night.

“I showered here. With her. We drank wine together. The last drops of summer wine. She wasn’t the missing person. I was. And she found me.”

YOU’RE NOT MAKING ANY SENSE.

I dropped my hand to my side, choosing to ignore Robin. My speech grew faster and louder as I kept explaining my theory.

“She might have been a missing person, but I knew her. She hadn’t just disappeared. She had come here knowing that I’d follow her. And I wanted to be alone with her. Really alone – without you watching.” I looked around frantically, trying to find proof of my claim.

A single black glove lay on the bathroom counter, next to the sink. I picked it up and pulled it over my left hand. It fit perfectly. I left it there for a moment, then pulled it off and dropped it on the counter again.

DON’T DO THAT, warned Robin.

“Why? Because you can’t see?”

The eye on my hand shifted from side to side and said nothing.

“You said you didn’t know what happened to me when I went into the hotel. You couldn’t see me because I didn’t want you to see whatever happened. I put this glove on to blind you. And then…and then…”

I closed my eyes, thinking back to what I had seen in the last reflection. Someone had started pounding on the door. And Mona, the Mona who had shared with me her summer wine, was terrified. But I couldn’t remember what had happened next. I had taken my glove off at some point. Somehow, I ended up on the roof, then on the pavement. And Mona, who had clung to me for protection, was gone.

“She’s in trouble, wherever she is. She needs me, and I can’t remember a thing.”

I moved my eyes away from the tattoo and toward the bathroom mirror. I glanced fleetingly at the reflective surface, remembering too well what had happened when I looked into the mirror back at Robin’s office.

“I need to remember. So far, I’ve only figured out one way to do that.”

DON’T, said Robin.

I didn’t listen. Taking a deep breath, I looked into the mirror.