Mall-086

A loud thud lulls the silence.
The capricious slamming of a bygone door echos through and through.
A carbon copy of the same mall stretching in front of my very boots.
Fresh air flooding my nostrils, a tide of the new.
Yet somehow identical to the last.
Putrid carpet expanding, besetting the ground in the anterior.
The rest girdled by cold porcelain tiles.
Patterning emerging, and equableness absorbing.
My thoughts were taken away by a sudden gust of invigorating air.
Recurred to the present.
Endless halls, forever, and always stretching further and further.
Shadows coat the far-away unknown.
Hidden from sight, yet still as clear as day.
Dusky wisps for every scare, hidden away in some unseen dull corner.
Never seeing eye to eye.
Never seeing any baby blue.
Yet each gloom swings in like a stoplight.
Cold waves of bitter air beaches on my bridled skin.
My muscles tensing from shock, yet immediately releasing in reassurance.
Albeit the uncertainty of the uncertain remains.
My foot shivering from each step forward.
My leg physically disgusted by my choice to continue onward.
A shock of galvanism emitted, electrifying the ground.
Inching ever further, aching ever more through a slight murmur.
Hoping to eventually find an exit door, yet I remain trapped within my own thoughts.
As I slender from corridor to corridor, I pray to find another exit door.
But even after turning corner after corner, it all remains the same.
The same mall greets me over and over again.
The slightest differences shine as clear as a lighthouse.
Strange enough to be noticed, but not prominent enough to advocate for change.
Traversing empty store after the other.
Searching for something to bring me forward, even if it was just a small amount.
Although each barren store seems to be the same.
Coated in a blanket of darkness, hidden in dull, resourceless.
A few empty cans here and there—nothing more, nothing less.
The sparks of a luminescent light turning off and on again disturb the tenebrosity.
Over and over and over and over again.
Never halting.
Never catching its last breath of electricity.
Never staying in a state of here and now.
As I make my way back, another cold gust of air brushes against my skin.
As if a door far away was left open by someone or something.
As if a fresh yet venerable gust of the troposphere slashes aback.
As if a light ignited, set aflame anew, by someone long departed.
But is the contrast ever truly clear?
A flash of sudden sound shatters the silence.
The ringing of an old rotary phone can be heard marginally somewhere far in the distance.
My body flinches from the unexpected call.
The first sound reminding of humanity in ages.
But who is calling?
Or, better yet, where is the call coming from?
The more I walk or even run...
Why isn't the call getting closer or further away?
Why won't my only chance to contact someone fool me like this?
Why hasn't the call stopped after about 15 minutes?
Who would even be calling this place?
How would you even be calling this place?
After all my time searching, is there even a phone?
Could there be a phone?
Is there even a realm of possibility for a most likely non-existent phone to ring the very moment I stand here?
There's barely enough electricity for flickering lights; how would a phone even ring here?
Why have I sacrificed all my nous for a single phone?
Have I been sinking everything in the hope of finding a single phone?
Have I attached all hope onto a single phone?
Why won't it stop ringing?
Why is it ringing exactly now and not before or after?
Why would it call in the first place?
Where even am I?
Why does the phone feel like it is fading into the common monotony?
Why does it sound none different from the rest only now?
Why has it sunk into the pile of bygone human structures?
After washing the rotary phone away from my mind, I set out to find myself in my surroundings.
It's no different than the rump that resembles a mall.
Now I know what's real, what's fake.
Rather sleep than stay awake.
Hoarder of quarters, no boundary boredom.
Slap myself across the jowl to erase the ringing from my mind.
Return on track to search for an egress from this place.
At last, my hope does not fail me.
Alas, I do not know how long that may last.
I'm left with no other choice than to maunder.
Maunder through the far and wide.
Maunder through the large, empty mall.
Maunder through the long, long, dull corridors.
Maunder along the corners of abandoned stores.
Maunder until my legs cannot stand any longer.
Removed from context, where is there to go?
Soft boots crackling under the dusty porcelain.
One step...
After the other.
A miscellany in the hundreds, far in the thousands.
Corner after corner, store after store, hallway after hallway.
Don't know if I can shift the tide along my shore.
Soft, muted remnants of a bygone rotary phone still vibrating within my ear.
Long gone, yet remaining as vibrant as ever.
Couloirs line the tapestry without a silver lining.
Left in a gleam of bloodless gleams.
At this point, wishing away entire life times.
Hours, days, weeks, months, all ticking away within the flinch of a pendulum.
What a great escape, but the sky remains shut; no hope under the baldachin.
No relegation zone.
The din of water droplets dripping and descending, devoid of delight, drills throughout the desolation.
Rippling rushes of rainwater revealed from the roof, racing through rounded rifts revealed in the rug.
A mirror-matching model of myself manifests in a millpond moving in front of my mukluk.
Low light luminous and lustrous luminating from the lagoon, leaving and lining my lamp.
A standardized split second of sheer silence supervenes and stems through surpluses seas of the sonorous.
Pure nothingness.
Silence.
Infernal taciturnity.
Clocks melt down time into molten iron, liquid steel, far removed from process.
Clocks melt down time, far removed from liquid process.
Clocks melt time, far from process.
Clocks melt.
Walls melt.
Corridors melt.
Ceilings melt.
Floors melt.
Water melts.
Molten down into the process, that is time.
Molten down into the obsolete.
What purpose does time serve in the face of infinity?
What purpose does infinity serve in the face of the unending?
It is exhausting, draining, and tiresome.
I plead of thee to let me rest.
A place where I can truly proclaim to be free.
But.
In my current situation, I remain crushed between plates.
Tied myself to the tracks, with no going back.
Continuance clamping down onto my mind like a balaclava.
Jaunting through closed and locked doors.
Dashing through the mall further...
and further...
and further...
and further...
Until a set of damp stairs spans in front of my boots.
A slight mist varnishing my eyelids.
A single faint light illuminating the staircase.
Not more, not less.
The stairs leading up end abruptly in the ceiling, an incomplete and unfinished symphony.
Veiled in darkness.
Unpermeable through commonplaceness.
Thorough-sighted through the monotony, my only sensible step is to descend.
White, dusty bricks line the sides of the long way down.
Timeless and ever-remaining.
Slight puddles of water drench the stale concrete floor.
My shoe soles deluged with every following step.
The stairway getting tighter and tighter, the ceiling nearing my scalp.
My breathing is slowly condensing.
Staring over the railings reveals the long, far-away darkness, following hundreds of landing treads.
One after the other.
Spanning further than anything that would be melodramatic, not even pragmatic.
Protracted and enlarged through eternity.
Each and every step in this escalier is bleaker than the one ahead.
Myself descending while the stairs remain as infinite as before.
The loss of brightness wilts the seasons as the shadows start absorbing more and more.
Coldness grasping me and leading me astray into the unknown.
Palms shivering from the pure gelid.
The blooming apple of life dims ever so further.
Eyelids shivering, occasionally falling, and struggling to keep the soul awake.
Sleep deprivation as commonplace as the wantonness of the mall.
Visage frozen, entirely still.
All while the ever-ringing echoes of my footsteps draw closer.
An endeavor of mightier magnitude than what once was.
The stairs overshadow the mall in its entirety.
Scrapes of brick becoming ever so more noticeable.
Like an ever-so-slowly burning out lint, a fuse readying to seal a fate.
One out of many.
splish-splash
A sudden sound breaks the still silence.
splish-splash
Water?
Am I nearing the bottom?
Have I finally reached an end to this bottomless stairhell?
splish-splash
My movement accelerating faster and faster.
Dashing towards the bottom of the stairs, if there is one, as if reaching for the unreachable stars.
splish-splash
A dreadful stench filling the air, smelling like it was straight out of a sewer.
splish-splash
A door revealing itself to be swimming in the water.
The sudden end of the staircase hiting me like a train.
It looked as if there were hundreds of steps left, how did I reach the end so quickly?
splish-splash
Multiple scattered leaves float quietly on the ebony aqua.
With me having reached my destination...
My only way is forward.
 
Author: 20Tom07
Background Image: Daniel X. O'Neil - Source
1st Image: Jack van Dyke - Source
2nd Image: Seph Lawless - Source
3rd Image: Ian Robson - Source
4th Image: Seph Lawless - Source
5th Image: Agitprop Shoppe - Source
6th Image: Ayne Bales - Source
7th Image: Century III Mall Memories - Source
8th Image: ArcticMonkeysVEVO - Source
9th Image: Unknown
10th Image: u/WendyRunningMouth - Source
Edited and Modified Audio from the Seeburg Music Library: Mood Music record M7A from 7-1-1964
Category:Tales