Day 67: Halfway to Day 134

Some mornings you just need a wake up call, it's true.  Did you ever notice that when anyone calls you in the morning they think they woke you up?  No?  It's just me?  People assume I sleep late?

Well, listen up, palsy walsies.  I'm up by 8 every morning, this is when I watch Conan. 

Warriner's English Grammar and Composition is going strong, but I'm pretty sure it's a "workbook" so just reading it won't get the most out of it.  I can have a fictional class and come up with a fictional teacher who is going through it with "the group", (that I am part of).  Then I can have to read my homework assignments in front of class.

PS:  Todays is fun.  I think I'm going to let this goddamn story end, eventually.  Tomorrow I'm wasting my day off reading through the whole damn thing.  I doubt I will be able to finish it though, considering it's so long.  I have advertisements.  Just sayin'

I went out till 2 in the morning so this is hours late.  But I'm still doing more today.  I think I'll "start a new one".

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            Charles and Chief emerged on the other side of the tunnel in a connected rolling ball, the stairs shaking and shedding bits of stone as the arm up above pounded into it.  Dave’s head could be heard faintly howling.  The apartment was a mess, the kitchen cabinets all flung open with a box of oats emptying onto the linoleum, the TV tipped over but still turned on, a hole in the wall that led directly into the carpeted hallway where the enormous flying trident once was.

            Chief swept a pile of plaster off of the couch and had a seat.  Charles rose much more slowly, his ears ringing like a bell.  Pulp was pressed into the wall across from the TV like he was a framed picture, his upper torso compacted with his arms and legs crammed into it.  The sirens whirred out in the bittersweet daylight.  Through the trident shaped hole in the wall Charles could see a trident shaped hole in the wall of the next apartment building; a tunnel created that looked like someone was shining a rectangular transparency beam.

            Chief looked like he wanted to fall asleep, but his nerves were tight and he sat stiff on the couch.  The stairs remained where they had been, not purple but just ordinary, some of their ornamentation eroded off.  The hallway creaked, the monster surely still standing at the top humbled but undefeated.

            The fire department attended to the building a block away first, the old wooden mansion creaking noisily.  Small fires had broken out along the tridents path, electrical fires that sparked into the air like invisible demons. 

            A secret service team descended immediately onto the trident at the end of the block, covering it in a tarp and wrapping that tarp in white cloth, lifting it with attached wires to get underneath.  It was whisked away by black helicopters, suspended in the air like an emergency rescue mission.

            The police captain lamented Charles’s loss at the door with cap held at belly button level, not unlike if his daughter had died.  A forensic specialist sprayed everything with white powder, insisting Charles vacate to the hallway, while a group of interns set up a three dimensional camera.  A trainee and the deputy stood at the bottom of the stair well, the deputy with a knowing look on his face like this was somewhere in the protocol book.

            “Big stairwell.”  The trainee said, squinting indignantly.  The deputy looked at him approvingly.  “Bet it we went up it we would find something important.”

            The moustachoed deputy laughed like he was being tickled pink.  “Ever seen one of these before?”  He asked, forehead scrunched up in appeal.

            “…No”  The shy newby pawed the ground.

            “Could be anything up there, anything at all.  Closest thing we’ve seen to one of these is a secret ladder one time, that one just took you up on the roof.  Guy on the roof threw his old shoes at you, then you took him into custody.”

            A thunderclap sounded from the top of the stairs.  The forensic scientists and interns continued to comb for clues.  A particularly absent minded agent tripped over the old man’s dead body, screaming like an arachnophobic in a spiders nest when he turned to see what it was.

            “ANOTHER BODY!”  He called out in horror.  The captain shook his head, the rest continued their work nonplussed. 

            A SWAT team charged up the stairs, the trainee looking on with palpable intensity.  Charles watched from the hall with Chief, they attempted to warn the Captain who shook them off. 

            Charles was taken in a separate car from chief to Police Headquarters, where they first took a picture of him from the front and then the side.  Charles was happy this was all out of his hands.  Chief was discharged quickly when he said he just wanted to help, and saluted Charles on the way out.

            Charles sat in a cell, hanging his feet off the side of a smelly metal bunk.  Moments later, a swat team pushed the enormous monster through the door frame, it stretching its arms in resistance but the giant handcuffs fixed over its hands preventing much resistance.  It kicked one of the six SWAT guys subduing it, and they came down hard on its ankles and legs with night sticks, bringing the thing down to its knees.  One of the guards stood with his arms open in its face and spat in its little red glowing eyes, all the time Charles hoping they wouldn’t throw it in the same cell with him.

            The salvage was going to be a long one up those stairs, the Captain told a lineup of officers.  We’re going to call in a cleaning crew first, someone get him the yellow pages, then we might think of calling an excavation crew.  Until then the building would have to be under manual surveillance twenty four hours a day.

            “No, he didn’t even put up much of a fight.”  Charles overheard from the cell.  The cop pals sat over a pair of paper plates at a table, munching on turkey sandwiches and bags of Bugles.  The one with the skintight wifebeater talked through his hands. “You know, none of the big guys ever do.  They get so used to being tough they don’t realize our muscles are for real, functional.  He looked like he was at the weight room, but not sparing.  For show, is what I’m saying.”

            The wimpier career fileclerk looked over astonished.  “That wasn’t just a normal guy though, you saw like, its head was a skeleton with flashing red eyes?”

            “They’re all the same in the eyes of the law, man.”  The tough one scoffed through his teeth.

            They were interrogating the big guy with Dave’s head in the next room.  The good cop bad cop routine seemed to be working, Charles heard them giving themselves pep talks in the hallway during intermissions. 

“So, a tough guy, huh?  Think you’re really big?”  Bad-cop said to himself, testing out different enunciations and word patterns.  “Real tough, real big, huh?  You think you can mess with us?  What were you doing up in that castle?  How’d you buy that thing in the first place?”

The door swung open and he rushed in, flashing a smile at Charles.  He could have sworn he saw his tooth shimmer in the setting sun.

They let Charles out to see his court appointed lawyer.  “This is looking very bad, Charles, very bad.  Three dead men in your apartment.”  Charles corrected him by holding up two fingers, but apparently there was a third he didn’t know about.  “Some very bad stuff going on up in that castle, Charles, very bad.” 

He leaned in, testing out the “give it to me straight” face he had worked on diligently in the mirror.  “I think it would be in our best interest to avoid the insanity plea, what with so much concrete evidence and all.”  The man fondled his sticky black moustache with his hairy hands.  Charles ate the four sections of a tuna fish sandwich in haste, not realizing how hungry he had been.

The two way glass for the monsters interrogation room prevented any visibility.  Still, he could swear he heard the thing weeping on the other side. 

“Wanted to kill your boss, right?  You hired THIS thing to kill your boss, didn’t you?  Now I’m putting the pieces together.”  The lawyer in the shabby suit rested for a short moment.  “Ooh boy, I’m not excited to see the newspaper tomorrow morning.”  He let out a whistle between his teeth, shaking his head.

Charles had nothing to tell the man.  He didn’t know how he looked any more difficult than Chief, how they could see him in cahoots with the demonic figure.  Each time he tried to talk his tongue would fall loose and dead like a pile of wet newspapers.  He was surprised they weren’t interrogating him in a similar way, it must have had something to do with his cooperativity.

He rose with Charles and led him to a payphone, instructing him just like in the movies that he had one call to make.  Charles was inexperienced with the rotary dial, but it was elegant in its simplicity.  He put his finger in the circular opening and wound it around a few times, although he was only killing time.  He had no one to call.

“He’s making his call, he’s over there.”  The lawyer pleaded with the officers, with little dignity.  “He’s going to be in here a long time.”

The man with the fish put the fish down on a table somewhere, retrieved a long knife to gut it with and removed the head and eyeballs.  He smiled into the camera as they took another picture, this time looking more approachable and paternal.  Dave’s disembodied head yawned in the far room, Charles stood at the phone booth trying to  recall any phone number to dial.

Pulp’s widow came in to see the man who had done it, not much of a man, a silent figure on a bench with an unassuming smile and halfassed rapport.  He made no effort to defend himself, he was suddenly in the place where he felt protected and important.  Chief would stop by eventually to regret stopping by, taking the five hour trip to the city.  The night fell and the officials all left him alone in the cell. 

Charles twiddled his thumbs and bounced his head off of the dry blue bunk.  He had plenty of time to get his story together.

            And that's the end of that one.  I'll read and revise it as time goes on.  This is yesterday technically so I am going to just start over for today.