PASSE-PARTOUT: Book One, Chapter 10

When I first hear it, it sounds of a needle being dragged across wood. Jamey looks into my eyes and then tilts her head to face the stairs. We stifle the light as much as possible and begin walking down again. The farther along the stairs we go, the more I sense something else: smoke. I start to descend faster, partially in hopes to get to the fire before it takes the place down, partially to get to the floor, so we aren’t consumed while trapped on the staircase.

I jump the last four steps to the ground and Jamey follows suit, not a half-step behind me. I try to make my landing as quiet as possible, but I only succeed in almost falling to the floor. Jamey steadies me and we both look around the room in search for the fire. There’s nothing evident, but the smell is definitely there. Jamey turns off the phone light and we peer into the darkness, trying to catch a glint of the source of the smoke, a small fire, even a flicker of a lighter.

In the farthest corner of the room, I see a low, orange glow that shines briefly and then goes away. We pad closer to the source, and we see a small form hunched over a candle. The candle isn’t new, and looks as if it’s been burned, melted, then been melted again, and recast into something more functional than ornamental. The light from its flame barely escapes from the crater that it’s melted into the top of the candle. The form appears to be female and seems to be unfathomably old. Her hands are drawn and curved; her whole body looks wracked with malnutrition.

Has she ever eaten?

She holds a long metal nail and every so often she dips the sharper end into the flame and lets it sit until the whole thing glows—this she does bare-handed. When the nail begins to give off light, she lifts it from the candle and places it on the wooden floor. A stream of smoke lifts from the floor and rises into the darkness above. There is no ventilation here, and so the smoke appears as a single string from the floor on up.

The old woman moves the nail across the wood, scribing something into the planks (I can’t tell what). She is folded almost double, and her face is only a few inches from the nail and floor. She writes until the smoke ceases to rise and only then does she unfold to turn to the candle in order to repeat the whole process.

We watch her repeat the process maybe four or five times. Jamey looks at her, looks at me, looks at her, takes a step forward and in her softest paramedic voice says “Hello.”

The woman stops her ritual to look at us. Her face is unclear in the candlelight, but even then, I can see that her face is gaunt, drawn over the bones. I can’t her eyes, as they are so sunken that the sockets cast them in shade. She sits there, looking, not moving. Jamey asks her, “Are you OK? Do you need help?” The woman remains motionless, and the dark sockets keep looking at us. “What are you doing there?” Jamey asks, and the woman ceases her evaluation of us, picks up the nail and begins heating it in the candle.

We approach closer, making sure we remain in the light so as not to startle her (or us). I kneel beside her and look at her work on the floor: lines and lines of angled structures. I recognize some of them as being buildings of some sort. Others are prismatic, burned sketches of faceted shapes. Her hands move at a crawl on each line. Jamey motions to me to come closer and points to a particularly dense set of lines scribed close together.

“They’re words…” she whispers.

I kneel again and lean my head close to the floor. I see the lines as not being single, straight processes of darkened wood, but intricate and deliberate handwriting that flow into lines that flow into shapes. I think back to the top floor. All that writing, all that color on the floor. Did she do that too? Were those words?

I rise from the floor, and I gesture to Jamey to back away from the woman.

“Well, what do we do now?” I ask.

“She’s got to be suffering from malnutrition. I can’t think of how long someone of her age can go without food. Plus, I can’t imagine—if she did all the work on the other floors—how long has she been out of the sun?”

“She’s been out at one point. She’s wearing clothes. She’s using a candle. She doesn’t seem afraid of us at all. I do think that we aren’t the first ones that she’s seen in here. She was not surprised by us.”

Jamey nods her head, “I think we need to get her to a hospital. She needs medical attention. I guess that means we need to find a way out…”

“You know the way out,” the old woman spoke. “You came in here, and you came in from the roof. Go out the way you came in.”

I walk over to her and kneel on a knee. “Are you OK? What are you doing here? We can help you. Can you stop for a moment to talk to us?”

“No. Get out, now.”

“Is there a way we can get out down here?” I ask.

“No. You do not want to be here. You are not safe.”

I raise my head and look at Jamey, who’s frowned expression is fixed on the woman. I turn back at the writer and look at her, trying to see some hint of what she means.

“Why are we not safe? Is there someone else here?”

“There will be, soon.” She places the nail in the candle again, lets it rest in the flame. She looks up, and in the light, I see her eyes sitting at the back of her sockets: a web of gelatinous cataracts covering the pupils surrounded by total bloodshot veins. The candle causes the cataracts to glow a sickened amber.

“Who is coming? There hasn’t been anyone here in a long time. How do you know that someone is coming?” I ask.

“If you believe me not, then wait. They will be here by and by. And when they arrive, you will believe me and will wish you did not. I know they are coming because they always come when I call. Be still and watch to the darkness and know that I have called them for you.”

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