The magnificent vista of an atrium's façade walled off from the rest of the city. Malachite slabs assembled into columns, titanic proportions. An amphitheater fountain filled with jade neo-classical statues. Outside the walls of this overwhelming, private compound: black city streets, rearing pillars of black exhaust.
*
You receive communications from a blonde woman's trembling specter. Her words cause your body to vibrate: "Ululuh-gon." You are being contacted in an empty pub by a Kiontu spirit, able to perceive every phoneme.
*
An armed tussle with police at a gas station. Grenades are thrown. Afterward, you squeeze through the narrow passages of a frozen rock formation, above ground, in a pine forest. Something very much like the vacuum at the borders of a videogame level.
*
You met the Candlemaker while in prison. There, you are given freedom of movement on the territory of a brick veranda.
*
You have invaded the car port of a home in some remote, overgrown outskirt of Chicago. A stirring or some other movement inside. You run away for fear of being discovered: the inhabitants of this house pose some kind of existential threat. In the marsh grounds on the property, there are camouflaged alligators - some of them the nauseous shade of a US military-issue rain poncho from 1987. At one point, you are dangerously close to one of the dormant beasts, and you shout out loud, "I need to go back!"
*
You have been dropped off in this town by a benevolent middle-aged man who encourages you to get breakfast at a nearby restaurant. It has recently rained. The grass is damp and vibrantly green. There is a busy highway nearby, blocked off by a collision rail.
*
A young doe, which is at first a rat, scrabbles its hooves against the floor in a state of near-death; it is lying in a shadowed, elongated garage freezer. The witch is on the way with her wolves. Water boils in ice trays. The room in which you have taken refuge is an impossible, dislocated space with regard to the layout of the rest of the building.
*
On a military base. Overcast day. The base is Fort Jackson, South Carolina. You see a building in the middle of a distant, unkempt field. It is a neglected brutalist masterpiece, whose architect has begun to call for its destruction.
"But no one has used it for years!"
You approach the outraged engineer over a rubble-strewn lot before the quarantined structure.
"But what a wounded beauty it is!"
Now the architect is a marm of a woman. You implore her to sell the building to you - you'll buy it at any price. As the two of you haggle, you stare helplessly at the monolithic, sculptured exterior. It is a macadam cube with a central recess. This recess contains a pristinely polished knife that is pointed directly at you. The knife is amorphous, its blade unusually wide, and the bulk of it hangs suspended by hidden wires in murk.
You succeed in talking the architect out of destroying the building, which you learn is a barracks. The asking price is $20,000.00.
When you come close to the barracks, you discover that it is not brutalist at all, but rather an American southerner's fantasy of a Chinese palace, before which there is a rotten, curved oriental bridge, half-submerged in a koi pond.
You balance on the segments of the bridge's handrail that still rise above the water. Once you reach the entrance of the barracks, you catch the scent of its interior - it smells like obsolescence and hand-pumped insulation foam.
Each room appears to have housed a soldier and his wife. These chambers are extremely narrow, containing a wedge-shaped leather bed which faces an all-purpose television-cabinet-wardrobe. At the far end of these bedrooms, there is always an open door, through which you see a uniformly yellow bathroom.
The rooms house the abandoned belongings of the previous inhabitants. In the drawers of one wardrobe, you find unopened packages of white underwear. Briefs.
You traipse through the unadorned macadam hallways, entering room after room. The hallways are lit by buzzing orange lamps buried in the petrified ceiling. The carpets are shag, so plush and mottled that they silence your footsteps. They do so in a way that alludes to the opening scene of Last Year at Marienbad, but without the baroque moldings and mirrors: this is what would have been seen as a modern domicile in the early 1970s.
You enter one room which is brighter than the others, feeling intoxicated. You can hardly see your surroundings, but you can see a mirror mounted on a white wall. As you come close to it, you find that the reflection there is not yours. It is that of an overweight, topless woman in her twenties with harried neon-green hair and a face that has been scratched out of view with a scribble of floating black ink. This is an evil presence, and you know that its intentions are bad, but you feel no fear. On the contrary, you are thrilled - so thrilled, that everything disappears.
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