'The towers are haunted.' Declared
Piers
'What?' Asked Red still only in his
first week at the institution, tipsy and a little incredulous.
'Yes – haunted. By ghosts.'
Red's face persisted with its doubting
shape – go on.
'Ghosts are the hopelessly drunk,
utterly classless ones that they never mention in campus media,
prospectuses or, for that matter, acknowledge at all. I heard one of
the management say they're here simply to fill quotas and that
they're encouraged – financially - not to attend any lectures.
They've nothing to do, so at night they roam the plaza beneath the
towers looking for victims. Be careful, Red.' Piers burped for effect
and then waved, dismissively at his own superstitions.
The towers to which Piers -
'Why do they call you Red, anyway?'
Red delved into the rapid retrieval
part of his brain for his memorised response:
'Apparently I was a very red baby.' And
quickly anticipated the follow up question
'Surely loads of people were red, or at
least pink when they came out?' Burp.
'Yes – but they never thought about
taking it for a nickname.'
- was referring were located to the
south of The Union, the centre piece of the campus, at their base was
a plaza with a small arcade of shops, three bars, a smattering of
coffee shops which seemed to change name and ownership almost twice
daily and a large oak at its centre. This area was seen by the richer
students to be the dirtier, more exhilarating place to go drink and
vomit and they would regularly when not attending their affluent
lodge's rooftop terrace bar.
Some of the more tribally minded
students attempted to cultivate a rivalry between the two towers –
writing offensive songs, slapping juvenile flyers on the opposing
tower and occasionally erecting banners inviting confrontation, but
this partisanship existed mostly at the base and petered out the
higher you went. Those on the upper levels tended to become jaded. On
days when the lifts wouldn't work, they would have to march up twenty
or so flights of stairs through the degradation of the lower, tribal
floors, beginning to believe that somewhere, across the plaza, in the
other vast monolith, something better existed. The upper-halfers
found their discontent at its greatest during the innumerable fire
alarms that plagued the towers.
*
Monday Faraday looked out
his twentieth-floor cage window. There was a deep, deep blackness
outside. At its centre Monday found the candle of Block Two – lit
at its tip by the lights of the upper-half insomniacs and darkening
down the wick as those able to sleep did so. Monday was engaging in
his regular ritual of scanning the illuminated rooms for a presumably
like-minded girl with whom he could have a tortuous, unconsummated
relationship of distant glances.
It was only the third week
and, whilst this had not had any effect on the speed with which the
traditional behavioural patterns of the inmates of the towers were
established, it had meant that Monday still had a number of rooms to
study. One in particular interested him. It was the fourth from the
left on the 19th floor. Its light had not yet been lit
during any of his observations – a late arrival, Monday assumed –
and thus he had been forced to skip it and continue his gazing
rightwards. He allowed himself a little uncharacteristic superstition
– this was the empty room, this would be the room in which his
would-be lover would lodge. He convinced himself that he was sure of it –
and sure enough as the light came on in his third week (the second of
observations), the figure at the window was a girl. A girl who he
considered himself obliged to believe was beautiful. And it wasn't
hard – she was beautiful (probably – Monday became aware at this
point that the distance between the towers was greater than the
optimum distance for assessing the attractiveness of a girl). Monday
could at least tell that she wore comfortable shorts, ready for the
tiredness that seemed to elude the upper-halfers and a baggy, white
t-shirt, bearing what Monday suspected was the legend of a favoured
band. Monday was struck by the incredible pallor of her skin - it was difficult to identify where her t-shirt ended and her skin began, Monday, not unreasonably, presumed there to be such a point. She appeared to be smoking and Monday briefly wrestled with his
mother's contagious disdain for the habit and the intangible New Wave
charm it brought. It was a brief tussle though, as it soon became
clear that she was peeling and eating her cigarettes – three in a
row.
'Chocolate...' Monday
breathed. Then looked around the room nervously, embarrassed to have
disturbed the silence.
He decided this habit was
one deserving of admiration. Common sense had led chocolate
cigarettes, intended for kids, to be almost impossible to obtain –
and so The Girl In 19D, as Monday briefly toyed with calling her –
must have gone to some lengths to get them. Further to this they were
made of the most repellent chocolate outside of that intended for
dogs – whose poor canine stomachs refused to process the normal
stuff meaning it was imperative to find an alternative. For The Girl
Who Was Ready For Bed to still insist on buying and consuming them,
in Monday's mind, marked her out as stubborn and petty in the most
endearing way.
As Monday tried to imagine
what her breasts would look like as they ignored him in the window of
a tower one hundred feet away, a chain of events was unfolding sixteen
floors below him which would soon result in both Monday, and The Girl
Whose T-Shirt Probably Belonged To An Ex's relocation to the central
plaza below.
Garrett Bourbon on floor
four had returned from his communal kitchen, where he had set in
motion the oven cooking of a pizza for himself and the inebriated girl
he had exercised his minimal charm upon. Reaching his room he
discovered his intended to have already disrobed and to be fairly
intent upon his following suit. Soon engaged in the carnal act,
Garrett began to find the amount of vodka he had imbibed to keep pace
with his partner's drinking was having a negative effect on his
prowess. As something of an athlete, Garrett was able to continue
feeding rope for some time but with little effect on his ability to
climax. All the while his pepperoni burned.
The fire alarms tended to
assume a curious symmetry between the blocks – if one was burning
the other likely was as well. It was as if Garrett's smouldering
charcoal disc had a spirit brother in the corresponding oven in Block
Two. And soon, sure enough, the dreaded sirens were calling all the
occupants of both towers to their doom in the plaza below.
Before decamping, Monday
gave one last meaningful glance towards The Girl With Questionable
Tastebuds. As he did so she petulantly tossed the butt of her
chocarette into the yawning chasm between them and then chanced to
cast her gaze up to Monday's window. Both of their faces moved in
some way, but the distance made it impossible to tell whether they
made shapes of lust, fear or disapproval.
Those at the base of the
towers naturally had more time to prepare themselves for the cold
plaza at night and this, coupled with their fervour for cross-plaza
feuds, meant that by the time Monday had stumbled through numerous
corridors and stairwells of pizza boxes, empty cans and strange
civilizations of mould, the fire marshalls had already lost control.
The basers, eager to use this alarm as an opportunity to inflict a
meaningful defeat upon the opposing tower, had armed themselves with
guns of varying sizes, equipped to shoot foam darts and were now
involved in a tense stand-off either side of the plaza's central
tree.
During his interminable
progress through the fourth to ground floors, Monday had formed the
notion that he would attempt to find The Girl Whose Dismissal Of Her
Chocolate Cigarette Perhaps Meant That Her Tastebuds Weren't So Bad
After All and attempt to strike up a conversation with her, perhaps
based around disdain for fire alarms. Or whoever the band loosely
covering her (he dreamed ample) chest were.
As he shuffled through the
double doors out into the plaza the interchange of offensive chanting
was coming to a head and it started to become clear that any hopes of
this night ending without a dart fired were optimistic at best.
Nonetheless, Monday awkwardly manoeuvred his way through the crowd
towards the frontline. The traditional ill-will that the frontliners
may have felt towards an upper-halfer like Monday was dispelled by
the presence of the greater enemy – Block Two, and Monday found
himself able to slot right in the line of fire.
A few metres from Monday
stood Garrett Bourbon, feeling a not just a little insecure. In his
hurry to disengage from his partner – with whom it had become clear
he was going to be unable to climax – and exit his room, he had
managed only to grab his boxer shorts, which he had applied to his
naked behind back-to-front, and his dart pistol. He now stood at on
the battle line, weapon outstretched, trembling.
Soon all there was to be
shouted had been and a deathly hush descended on the plaza. The fire
marshalls knew better than attempt to solve the situation with
diplomacy and sloped off towards The Union to contact security.
Garrett felt his outstretched, armed arm throb with an urgency he
hadn't felt in his loins that night and began to feel beads of sweat
collecting on his forehead. He imagined taunts from muscular males
and instinctively tightened his finger on the trigger.
Monday spotted The Girl
across no-man's land, in the midst of the crowd.
The slim, blue, foam dart,
capped with a little plastic for extra menace, flew straight and true
into the chest of a Block Two rugby player who had raised his
significantly larger, automatic dart weapon before the shot even hit
home.
Chaos broke loose. Darts
fired in all directions, combatants and bystanders began running for
cover and Garrett's mark, the angular rugby hulk charged towards him
firing round after round into his naked torso. The shock of this
onslaught caused Garrett to drop his pistol and turn tail into the
crowd. Monday had darted to the cover of the benches around the oak
and saw as Garrett dropped his weapon.
Peering over the bench into
the fire fight, Monday scanned the scattering masses desperately for
Her. In between a group of bandana clad Block Twoers, he caught sight
of Her running to crouch behind a bin. He waited for the right
moment. As the more intense fighting moved towards one of the more
unreasonably priced coffee outlets, Monday made a rush for Garrett's
weapon and struck out across the plaza. Ten feet from the bin
Garrett's rugby assailant, retreating from a mano-a-mano assault on a
Block One rower, barrelled into Monday and knocked him into the
ground. The startled rugby player fired two rounds into prone Monday
before turning tail and running to the doorway of his block.
As Monday regained his
senses the ghost came. He saw him approach from some distance away,
from around one of the dark corners of Block Two, near the recycling,
he was clad in black, hooded and stumbling. Monday had heard tell of
the ghosts from snatched conversations around the base, but had taken
such talk to be anti-Block Two propaganda. The ghost was making a
b-line towards Her bin. Scrambling across the ground, Monday loosed
off a couple of rounds at the ghost but he was no marksman, and the
shots came to rest gently a few metres either side of the shambling
menace. Monday could now see round the bin and was horrified to see
that She was cowering with her back to the assailant and was
gratified to see that her hair was a deep auburn, falling in loose
curls over her t-shirt which he now identified to be promoting a band
whose first few albums were vastly superior to their recent efforts.
'Look out!' He shouted, with
an urgency he was unsure whether or not was misplaced.
She turned in time to see
the stumbling figure bearing down on her and scrambled to her feet,
running through a hail of darts, across the shop front of an inflated
price academic bookshop, and round the corner of Block Two towards
the vast, dark expanse of the sports fields. Her ghost picked up his
pace into what was almost a gallop.
Monday raised himself up and
loosed another couple of rounds at the attacker. One caught the man
in his back but seemed only to spur him on. As he rounded the
bookshop, Monday caught a stray round in his leg, causing him to
stumble to the ground and graze his knee. When he finally made it
round the corner of the block, the noise of the battle died to a
distant hum and the darkness seemed a lot deeper. His breath became
steam in front of his face and he slowed to a cautious walk. Looking
down the hill towards the sports fields, he became aware of an eerie
mist clinging low to the ground. The mist was illuminated by the
light of the moon. Monday was dismayed to find that nowhere in that
mist, all the way to the expansive pitches could he see the telltale
eddy of his fleeing love.
He clutched his stolen
weapon tighter and proceeded slowly down the misty slope. The battle
could no longer be heard. Monday was alone with the moonlight – and
that didn't make a sound, so was of little comfort. He looked back
towards Block Two, leering uncomfortably into the sky. A rustling
metres ahead of him brought his attention back to his path and he
stopped stock still. Eddies in the mist alerted him to a black shape
swimming towards him. He fired at the blur, but Garrett's gun merely
dropped the darts harmlessly at his feet.
Monday steeled himself for a
fight, but as the shape got closer he found his nerves failing and
everything started to fade to black.
Blacker than it already was.
