Day 60: Escape from my Parents House

              Don't blame the parents at all, blame myself, on and on and on.  Trying to take responsibility for things and whatnot.  Agoraphobia/other fears have gotten into my system but if I self-diagnose I'm going to start acting like I have problems I don't have, so...   Cognitive dissonance theory!  My story here needs to hurry up and go somewhere I only have about a third of it left to write.  Woke up early and reading more psychology stuff.  This blog shows up when you google my name, finally.  So, let's continue to be as honest as possible in order to reach that apex of creativity that I keep hearing about.
             The rules in a lot of these business-types-of-books always boil down to "strengths, not weaknesses", and the only thing I'm good at is making an ass out of myself as the loveable scoundrel character.  Well, I do this writing thing and I play the bongos and read spoken word poetry.  I'm good at the guitar, like pretty awesome good, and I'm ok at this persistence thing.  So why am I writing?  Because I don't want to quit anything.  And it's sort of giving me an identity so far, as much as I'd love to have that magic moment where I just move out and everything clicks together and I meet people that I like.  I'm still pretty temperamental and impatient, let's work on that one huh?  Anyway, here's my dumbass story that keeps on going and going.  Next months novel will have actual characters in it, I swear.
           PS:  I know this is all self indulgent BS and I'm trying to only talk about things I think people might care about, (but I'm failing).  While on the topic of being self indulgent, I have an ex girlfriend that's a model now.  She wasn't a model when I dated her, but she doesn't look any different.  Beauty "truly is in the eye of the beholder".
           PPS:  My story is pretty bad, but it could be a LOT worse.  Atleast it's sort of funny sometimes.  Of course, it's always accidental when it is.  My fourth or fifth novel should be a lot less useless.

            He tallied the items in his inventory, emptying his pockets after walking up to the third flight of stairs.  He could hear the creature thrashing, its haunches scraping against the enclosed stairwell, it’s bellowing sounding to him more sad than hurt.  It was a clever ruse for a monstrous creature to pull, he thought, there was no way that thing was so winded.  It’s probably not even real, the inkling came to him in the back of his mind.  It was like a curtain had been pulled over his eyes.

            “Come back down, come back down to me.”  A womans voice called from down the stairwell.  He knew he couldn’t go back, but it was pathetic.  Now it didn’t even sound like his ex-wife, even if the thing somehow knew what she sounded like, it should have known she never showed her injured pride to him.  She had lacked all emotion after the drawn out divorce proceedings, he hadn’t wanted to be divorced, marriage was something he had earned.  And now this creature was doing a poor imitation, it was laughable.  Earned was a harsh way to think of it, maybe he deserved it, he definitely put the hard work in.

            Chief proceeded up the stairs with newfound vigor.  These monsters weren’t something Charles could easily deal with because Charles had never dealt with monsters before.  It would be easy to save this kid, he thought.  Of course, his victory was accomplished because the monster had become stuck in a doorway that it couldn’t fit through, but whoever was pulling the strings must have known that.  His antagonists just didn’t have much of an idea what Chief was capable of, they were testing him.  It’s best not to give anything away, maybe I should pretend to have a gun, he thought.

            As he hurriedly climbed the stairs, he kept an eye out for weapons on the path.  There was nothing to grab, the stairway was bare.  He stopped a moment and watched the fireworks going on out of a narrow window where a bench sat welded into the stone floor, the loud jocular blasts from below like a distant echo.  The face of Daryl sprung into his mind, his eagerness to relinquish the equipment for Chief.  Why had he so readily given it away, and why had Chief taken it so easily?  Chief shook it off, he couldn’t start thinking about conspiracy theories now, he was on a mission.  He was going to get that boy out alive, get out of here, and go back to the East Coast to live near his wife and son.  The haze lifted over his eyes, he had worked at the mental hospital long enough, saved up enough money.  He was lost here, he spent his life in this small town, he wasn’t ready for the culture shock at the time. 

            He could see into the room at the top of the tower five stairs before he finished the stairs.  A chandelier covered in dust and cobwebs was suspended from a velvet red ceiling, the candles in its grasp dripping wax in spite of themselves.  They looked like little islands trying to avoid being swallowed up by the ocean. After a moment of trepidation, he pushed the door open, with no idea what he was going to see on the other side.  This can’t be real, this is some strange dream.

            This was the proverbial closet full of skeletons.  The room was covered wall to wall in book cases, each one filled to the brim.  A thick volume of US history stood out like a sore thumb, it was sitting on an angle and the rest of the books were straight.  Chief removed it from the case, settled down in the spinny leather chair behind the desk and peeled it open.  There was a loud click from where the book had been in the case and the wall swung open.  Not unlike every other episode of Wild Wild West, he thought to himself.  He had just got to the part about Stonewall Jackson, too.  A favorite of his.

            Chief left the book open on the desk and decided when in Rome you should check out the passage that just opened.  He pulled his Jesus necklace out from his bosom and kissed it, although he wasn’t normally a religious man and would have forgot that he was wearing the thing in the first place if this situation hadn’t sprung up.  He tucked it back in, feeling foolish, you’re not Van Helsing.

            He walked with his ear leading the way into the darkness.  Shadows danced over the damp corridor, a wooden Rumpel Stiltskin alchemy wheel at the end of the hall. It had been dismantled and was sitting with its pieces each set against the wall. A doorway stood straight away, how a tunnel could exist inside of a tower was beyond Chief’s reasoning.  A candle flickered through the complete darkness. 

A constant tapping came from the end of the hallway, like someone was wrapping a long pair of fingernails on a desk.  Chief couldn’t tell if it was actually fingernails, or what would make a sound like this, but so far it hadn’t reacted to him. He walked back to the staircase, stared down it, and stomped in place like a child for a second.  He should have called the police, he knew now.  He could have got aerial shots of this maze, invited reporters to investigate it, be at the festival tossing horseshoes with the hospital staff.  As a matter of fact, he hadn’t had any inclination at all to do anything but climb to the top of this thing. 

            “Well, I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place here, that’s no doubt.”  He said aloud to himself and slumped back on the chair, kicking his feet up onto the desk and grabbing the history book.  “What would old Stonewall Jackson do? Well, first thing’s first he wouldn’t have came up here at all.  Or he atleast would have brought his trusty revolver.”

He read a segment on Stonewall Jackson out of the book.  Apparently, Stonewall loved lemons.  He ate them to prevent his dyslepsia, but even Richard Taylor, son of Zachary Taylor, had no idea where he’d get these lemons from.  The irony struck the Chief that he was stuck in his own moment of action, and here he was reading about a man of action’s unactiony side.

The rattling from the bottom of the hall had ceased, the creature must have freed itself and looked for an alternate route.  He ran from the stairway back to the secret passage way, centering his attention in his ears, the hand kept scraping away at the desk, and the monster was gone.  If it were something that wanted to kill him, it would have killed him by now.  But, that’s probably a lot of peoples last words right before they get maimed in seemingly innocuous circumstances.

He crept back down the stairway, let’s let that thing at the end of the hall eat itself alive he thought.  The castle halls looked pristine and unchanging, the type of hall where if you were walking in boots you could hear each heel to toe sequence clearly.  The tail of the monster reached around the corner to a pantry like a lit wick.  He rushed past it into a wide kitchen area, hanging cabinets as tall as he was ran along the walls, a shiny wooden rectangle table surrounded by chairs covered the middle of the room.  This is a dead end, he thought.  What the hell am I doing in the kitchen?

He crept back past the tail, it twitching spasmodically like it were asleep.  He peered past it, the creature must have gotten into something edible in the pantry.  The smell of mothballs and eggs ran past him.

The opposite end of the hallway showed no sign of prisoners either.  As far as he could see this was just a normal, average castle.  He caught himself off guard about the monster, he knew it could turn its attention back toward him at any moment, but as he continued to search through the vast emptiness of the castle a wave of calmness swept over him.

In the center hall, a mantelpiece hung over a fireplace full of ashen logs.  The room still glowed a golden color, the mounted heads of deer and elk enveloped in a yellow hue.  The mantelpiece shined with reflected moonlight, it seemed to be directed in a beam straight through the skylight.  A number of columns separated the inside from the outside world only superficially, and a staircase descended up to a floor above. 

It killed him inside, but he knew he had to go back to room at the top of the spire.  He could stall for as long as he wanted exploring this fictitious castle, but what he was supposed to find was in that room.  He was going to have to face the witch.  He retrieved a fire poker from in front of the burning pit, tapping ashen cinder off of it into the fireplace.

When he returned to the main hallway, the monster had disappeared again.  He ran into the spiral staircase as quickly as he could manage, and found his way back to the top undeterred. 

“Hey, witchlady, where’s the kid?”  He shouted before he entered the far room, with a feigned bravery that could have easily been mistaken for actually bravery.

The witch sat surrounded by antique dolls, porcelein skin and beady eyes looking more living than some people.  She rocked in a chair behind a spinning wheel, clicking her long nails against the shitty wood like a perpetual motion machine.  She stirred slightly, turning far enough to ascertain Chief’s presence in her peripheral vision, scoffing under her breath and turning back towards the wheel.

Chief closed the door behind him as he entered and took a seat in an overstuffed leather chair facing diagonally away from a window.  He stared at the old witch, her hypnotic movements like the opening scene of a Russian resistance play.  Her body was cloaked with a mane of long white hair, her face a ceramic mask of evil. 

From behind the closed door, he could hear a frenzied scurry of a million little feet.  The witch suddenly rose, her thick fingers still gripping the side of the wheel. 

“What business have you here, Chief?!”  She said as she floated inches from the ground.  Her voice stunk up the room, a noxious gas like a tube had been disconnected.