2019-07-25 - There Are Things Known And There Are Things Unknown

A hot, sticky, terrible Friday afternoon sees Julia finishing some work at Fried Fish a few hours before sunset. The boardwalk is characteristically thin when it comes to tourists - why can Gray Harbor never seem to ramp up tourism the way the neighboring cities do?! - so Julia won't have much issue getting out of work today. She arrives home, with the promise of a shower just on the other side of the door, when something catches the corner of her eye.

Something blonde.

Is that... Violet Whitehouse? On Elm Street?

The blonde woman is walking up the sidewalk in the direction of Maple. She stops at the intersection, looking back, locking eyes on Julia. A finger lifts, crooks, beckoning. And just like that, Julia knows this isn't Violet; this is Alice.

It's not so much that Alice denies her the chance so much as Alice just stays out of reach. When Julia starts running toward the corner where Alice is standing, Alice trots across the street, narrowly avoiding getting run over by some terrible little sedan. She skips on ahead, managing to constantly stay a few dozen yards ahead of Julia, whether by Julia's bad luck or Alice's great luck!

She's heading toward downtown. Specifically, she's heading toward that little antique shop that her sister owns. Just when it seems like Julia will catch her, Alice throws open the door of Memento Mori and disappears inside. All without a word of acknowledgement to Julia.

But when Julia gets to the store, it's closed for the night, all locked up and dark inside.

"You'll have to open the door if you want to come in." The voice could be Alice's? Or Violet's, really, since it's her shop. It's definitely a female voice, but it's hard to be sure whose since the door is closed and all.

Julia gets the vague sense... the fuzzy feeling of something firing off synapses in the way back of her brain... instinct? Whatever it is, there's a certainty that if Julia opens that door, she'll get wherever it is that Alice has gone.

Julia has had bad dreams before. The capital-D Dreams, even. She knows how real they seem, how hard it can be to fight the haze and recognize that this isn't real.

This is not a Dream.

When Julia pushes open the door, she knows that she did something. The connection between the door, her hand, and her brain completes like an electrical circuit. And when she pushes it open - she steps not into Violet's cluttered little antique store but a sanitized-for-your-protection little waiting room. A pair of nurses sit behind a high desk, looking toward the door.

They blink at her. "Julia Velez?" They're vaguely familiar, but maybe that's just because all nurses kinda look alike in their starched white uniforms.

It's funny, Julia walked through a door. But as she takes a step back, she'll find herself backing up into hardbacked chairs. The door that she walked through is now no longer there. There is no door in this room, just the nurses and far too many hallways to make sense of.

"You aren't due back here until..." one of the nurses takes a clipboard, frowns to herself, and flips through a dozen or so pages. She pauses at one, then shakes her head, and blinks up to Julia. "It doesn't matter. You're here for your check up." It's not a question.

The clipboard-less nurse goes, "Oh. Well, that's interesting, dear. We'll be sure to note that down." She waves hands at her colleague - note that down! - and then smiles a too-wide smile at Julia. "But you can't just stay here, silly girl, so you'll just have to come with us." She stands and steps out from behind the desk, beckoning for Julia to follow along.

The corridor she starts down is long, lit by sputtering fluorescents over shitty floor tiles. Her comfy shoes make squeaky noises when she walks down it, expecting Julia to follow her.

And despite her (well-founded!) reticence, Julia can't shake the feeling that the only way out is through. She's not getting out the way she came, and there are no other doors, but - no matter how much she doesn't want it to - this FEELS like the right direction.

The clipboard nurse, who has followed Julia and clipboard-less, comes to step in beside Julia. The question earns Julia a blink-blink from wide eyes, and an all too pleasant smile fits wide across her lips. "This is called the WAITING. ROOM," she emphasizes the words, speaking them slowly and loudly. Just in case Julia's deaf. Or dumb. She makes a few notes on her clipboard with a scratch of her pen.

"You really shouldn't have come until your appointment, dear," she adds after with a sigh. "The facility is in transit again. And you remember dear Doctor Marshall, don't you?" her eyes fill with tears as she shakes her head. "We're terribly short staffed here."

And as if on cue, the trio pass by an open office door on their way down the hall. There's no name on the door - in fact, the name has been scratched off the glass - but the office is not empty. It is filled with the stench of death and rot .. and there is an ancient-looking doctor slumped over the desk, dead.

"Billy happened to me," the stinking corpse in the adjacent office moans unhappily. The sound scares a couple of flies that had been happily scurrying around on his chest, though they resettle a moment later.

One of the two nurses (they're all confused now, and Julia's starting to have trouble remembering which is which) tut-tuts and closes the door with a stern, "None of that now, Doctor Marshall. You just be a good corpse and get back to rotting."

She stops at a T-junction, looking left and right as if she's suddenly lost her way. "Oh dear, I always forget from here. Which way, dearie?" They both turn to look expectantly at Julia. Left or right?

"Oh no. We're not like you, Julia, you know that. We're just the help." The nurse looks at Julia for a moment, and there's a flash of fire in her too-kind face: This is a woman that doesn't have any qualms about making the patients PAY for using tones like that with her.

She starts off to the right, impatient and brisk, and Julia gets the feeling that left would be much better. "And I'm sure I don't know anything at all about Billy Gohl," she adds over her shoulder.

"Oh, left?" She wheels around on her comfy-nurse-shoes heel, shuffling on around to follow Julia for a few steps. She walks fast, though, to make sure she overtakes the patient, leaving her colleague to trail behind. In case Julia decides to make a break for it or anything. "Yes, yes. This is the way! Right through here."

She opens a door into an examination room. There is no dead doctor in there. There is no one in there. Just an exam bed with one of those paper sheet thingies on it. "Have a seat, please. The doctor will be right with you."

One of the nurses, was this the one with the clipboard? It's disappeared, tucked away somewhere. "Oh, it's Doctor.." SLAM! Goes the door, and Julia's left without a name. But she hears muffled voices outside, ".. keep -- occupied. Need --- where it went -- he always -- the map." The rest of the words fade into obscurity.

"You certainly ask a lot of questions. Mark that down, please." She leaves a step ahead of that SLAM.

Time is weird. Julia could be left alone in that room for a minute... or an hour... or a decade. There's no clock and no windows, no way to judge the passage of time. There's nothing in the room but the bed and a little table with medical stuff on it - q-tips, tongue depressors, cotton balls.

When the door opens again, the doctor that comes into the room is terribly young, like right outta med school, and he has a bunch of little notecards in hand. "Hello, Miss Velez, how are you." He doesn't care. He has an agenda. "Are you familiar with the inkblot test?"

"Yes, correct. I'm a doctor. Very good, Miss Velez. Now then..."

The first few blots are fine. They're normal. The answers are unimportant; if she chooses not to answer them, then that's just what he'll note down. It's not till the terribly young doctor who has no name gets to the fifth or sixth card that Julia notices it looks an awful lot like Alice. Inkblot Alice, but Alice nonetheless, right down to a faint bluish sheen over the black of her inkblot eyes.

Inkblot Alice is followed by inkblot Alex Reyes. Inkblot Hannah Butler. Inkblot dead aunt Isabel, Julia's poor tia who died in a car accident. Inkblot Doctor Marshall, with inkblot flies buzzing around him. Inkblot flies that start buzzing off the page when inkblot hands reach out toward Julia.

The doctor is patently unmoved. He just watches Julia through all this, even while the inkblot hands claw through the air toward her with inkblot fingers that want to wrap around her neck.

"Ahh, yes." The doctor nods like Julia throwing things at him is exactly what he expected. The jar hits him right in the head. Which proceeds to pop like an overfilled helium balloon, POP! His body fiiiiizzzzles out of air through the big hole in his neck, zipping around the room till it deflates entirely and lands in the corner.

The Rorschach cards scatter everywhere. Inkblot Alice, Hannah, and Alex laugh and laugh. Inkblot Isabel and inkblot Doctor Marshall hop around clumsily, flailing paper cards trying to reach Julia. A few inkblot flies dart upward and resettle every time the Marshall-card moves. They're coming for Julia...

There is only one way out, and it's that door. Julia knows it goes right back into the hallway, but she also knows - deeper than that - that it goes somewhere else, too.

The Alice card calls, "Take me with you, Julia! PLEASE!" The voice is very dim and muffled, and inkblot Alice starts trying to flop toward Julia and the door. "Please!"

The inkblot Marshall says nothing, but the inkblot flies divebomb Julia's face, smashing and popping all over her with little gushes of black that stain her face and the arm she's using as a shield, paper-wings clinging to their corpses, smooshed against her skin and clothes.

The door isn't locked. It opens wide. And into the back parking lot of Violet's shop, empty at this time of day.

Oh, she's still covered in those things. Which is SUPER WEIRD, because doesn't that stuff normally get left behind? What's more... Sticking out of the bottom of the back-door of the shop, Julia can just see the corner of one of those inkblot cards. If she goes to collect it, she'll notice that it is exactly like the inkblot Alice card.

If she doesn't... well, won't that be a nice surprise for Violet tomorrow when she comes to open up her shop, hah!