Ella Claire Gainsborough {Beauty} (![]() ![]() @ 2010-01-04 22:15:00 |
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Entry tags: | beauty |
Who: Ella and the locked room in R1 (if the locked room were a person)
What: Exploring
Where: 905/R1
When: While Daniel is in the hospital
Warnings: None anticipated
Ella had been in the building less than a week, and in that week she'd managed to get two full chapters written. It wasn't all due to her own prolific tendencies as a writer, no, the credit completely went to Bellum Letale and its menagerie of characters.
There was Valmont, who she knew would seduce a girl (probably quite skillfully) into the abyss and then cruelly leave her hanging; Samuel-not-Sam, who was a logical scientist and not a hero at all; The mummy encased in leather and print from that first day in the lobby - Ella liked to imagine she ate men for dinner; The Landlord, who was the perfect villain, imperfect only in his sheer perfection; The penthouse rake, who was more the tormented sort than Valmont was, a modern Rhett Butler who had not yet found his Scarlett; Her sister, who... No, she didn't want to think about her just yet.
And then there was all this business about the man who lived on the roof. Ella had heard the screams the other night, of course. It was impossible not to hear them. By the time she'd found a robe and rushed down the nine flights of stairs, the lobby had mostly cleared, and she'd only caught the tail end of gossip and speculation. The man, they said, had been carted out screaming after being clawed alive by the man in 601. But the whispers that came after spoke of something more sinister; a recluse, an alcoholic, a rake, a cheater and a scoundrel.
Ella had spent the better part of the next day writing, curled up in the arboretum, penning a short story about a handsome rogue trapped in a tower. Maybe he'd be the romantic antihero in her novel. She hadn't found him yet. She hadn't found the romantic female lead yet either, but it was early and there was time yet. Plenty of time, actually, since her new assignment at work wasn't answering her e-mails.
She wandered from the living room into the guest room, which she'd just finished decorating with pages upon pages of unloved books. The mirror in the corner had tilted, and it caught her eye as she walked toward the desk under the window. She approached it with a tilt of her head, and she straightened it with one hand. As she did, her gaze dropped to a door in the corner wall. It was painted over, and she hadn't noticed it when the movers put the large, standing mirror in place.
She moved the mirror, crouched in front of the door, and she ran her fingers over the wall until she found the indent at the bottom. One hard shove, and the paint cracked, and the door slid up into the space above. She peered in, and she looked up into a vast dark nothing. The space was large enough for her to crawl into, should she wish to, and the floor and accompanying pulley rope told her that this was an old dumbwaiter.
She tested the floor, and she didn't hesitate a moment after that.
She climbed into the dark space, having to crouch and squish herself to fit, and then she tugged on the rope, the squeak, squeak, squeak of the aged pulley sounding loud and threatening in her ear. As she went higher and higher, she wondered where the thing would lead, and as the light of her apartment grew further and further away, she wondered if this had been a very bad idea.
By the time the dumbwaiter went as high as it would, her curiosity was almost overrun by fear. She could tell there was another door in front of her; she could even see the light around the edges on this one, soft, but there.
She pushed the door up.