Louis Donovan (strikethose) wrote in repose, @ 2017-02-19 15:50:00 |
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Entry tags: | *narrative, louis donovan |
narrative: louis: antique store
Who: Louis (Narrative)
What: Louis is undergoing some changes. (Turn and face the strange)
Where: The Antique Store
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: None.
It doesn't happen all at once. In fact, it's barely begun happening, is still happening, and he doesn't know when or where it will stop. He doesn't wake up one morning and feel altogether different, nothing so drastic. His days, after all, follow a rhythm. He wakes up. He makes makes breakfast, eggs and a bit of whole wheat toast and marmalade. He makes coffee, because he's become properly American at breakfast time. He checks messages from family and friends.
He goes downstairs to the shop, checks each room to be sure no one's broken in overnight and run off the movables. He thinks, I should get a security system for the third time that week, but since he's stopped fearing bodily harm, he never remembers. The worst thing that could happen is thieves taking some of the shop's many valuables, and Louis senses that would be more the worse for them. That mirror that leans against the wall near the front of the shop, for instance. It would not be a prize anyone would want to win, if they didn't want to see more of themselves in their reflection than they bargained for.
No, what happens is more like a small movement, a gradual falling away. Usually, his breakfasts are silent because his nights can be noisy, thick with whispering and murmuring from the thing. The deity sticks to the edges of his consciousness, these days. It prowls the perimeter, awaiting an opportunity.
He doesn’t feel tired, as he once did, when the deity’s masters sent it out to sacrifice those they felt were worthy. He never slept then, and the nights were full of horrors. None of that. He goes about his business, and he sees to the shop. He sleeps, most nights, and if his dreams are strange and distant, cold soaking bogs at the edge of the western world, scorching sand and mottled silver in the desert, if he sometimes wakes up with a foreign language on his tongue, these are things he has become resigned to. They don’t follow him into the waking world anymore. He and it have reached détente. The thing is bored and restless, and he always feels a little like he has a hand in another century, but it’s the best they can manage. He gets on with living, because even when you’re carrying a god, paying for food is still a necessity.
Under the surface, however, something starts to change. It happens over days, then a week, then two. The thing gets quieter, speaks less, makes its presence felt more often than usual, as if it wants to prove something. Louis awakens once or twice on long weekend afternoons curled in a scrap of winter sunlight, on the couch or on the floor. He soaks in the heat, feeling langurous and tired, until he is released, like snapping out of a dream. He thinks, That’s a new one, and wonders if he should tell someone, but what would he say? That he’s taking catnaps? No news comes of death from the city. So why? Is he a battery it wants to charge, or is it drawing from the sun to strengthen only itself? If it accepts Pacific Northwest sunlight in February as sufficient, it must be desperate.
He doesn’t feel any less like there is a hollow space in his soul occupied by a god that once called itself dead. It clings to him even more tenaciously, if that's even possible. There are moments, flares, where it reaches its old height again, exerts its dominance for no reason at all.
For instance: he starts speaking fluidly to a customer in Irish while counting out her change on Sunday afternoon (he counts back a sé fiche for her). She pulls her hat down a little further, but says nothing. She doesn't seem fazed at first, and he thinks that must mean he has a stranger reputation than he thought.
She’s a pretty girl, blonde hair bobbed in that pleasing asymmetrical way that is probably the fashion (maybe?), blue-eyed, in a dark wool skirt and the kind of makeup that only looks casual. Another interior decorator from the Capital, come to stock up on authentic antiques to kit out a penthouse or, dread it, a 'man-cave' for some rich bloody master of machismo in the city. She takes her change, their fingers brush, and he feels something, a frisson that makes positively no sense at all.
And she’s felt something as well, because her fingers linger for a moment too long. Her long, pale blue nails scrape the bills from his fingers. He could be wrong, because he’s too surprised to think much about it in the moment, but it feels as if she wants to see if it will happen again, the jump, the spark, the whatever-it-was.
It doesn’t, and she folds the bills half into her wallet. She steps away, her eyes on him for another too-long second, and she turns to go with her purse still hanging open. He might have imagined it all, but now - there - she’s looking back at him over her shoulder as she leaves.
Odd.
There isn’t anyone else in the shop, so he’s free to walk to the door and peer after her, wonderingly. His shadow passes over the mirror leaning in the entryway, and it makes it wink with light. He looks down.
It only lasts a second. The mirror reflects someone else, someone part fire of the sun and something shimmering as water, fluid as mercury. It’s an impression rather than a reflection. This mirror reflects whatever it wants you to see - what you are, what you were, what you might be or might have been. Usually, when he passes it, he sees just his own legs and the room beyond. It rarely sends him a message of any kind.
He doesn’t know what he’s seeing when he looks at it, in that moment. It’s like watching the sun descend into a brilliant sea, slowly extinguishing itself in liquid flame.
And then it’s gone, and the static in his mind, the feeling of electricity at the tips of his fingers, the sensation of fingernails scraping skin, they are gone as well.
What the hell is going on?