Rifts (12) : Maybe it’s a trick of the eye. Maybe it’s a firework, or it’s too hot and you’re seeing things. Maybe something is actually just wrong. Strange tears are appearing throughout the city, as though something has clawed right through reality. Maybe you can’t exactly see it, but you definitely feel it. There are strange, cold pockets, and random air currents even in closed rooms. These strange rifts either appear transparent or, if you are close enough, you might see a strange blackness inside. Sometimes you can make out a strange sound, like a croak or a wail, but nothing ever comes out. There’s something magnetic about these weird rifts and it’s almost as if they’re trying to suck you up. They appear and disappear randomly, and quickly, and never show up on film.
Adrian didn't often read, but when he did, it was the HELP WANTED ads in the local newspaper, spread over his bed, with his mag light trained on it. Sometimes he had to hold the mag light in his teeth while he took notes in the dark – promising little things, temp jobs or other suspicious entries that required little to no education or experience. Didn't matter what he had to do or how unscrupulous it was, as long as he was getting paid well and didn't have to put in too many hours. Or use what the Negaverse gave him, he supposed, though he didn't mind it if he could keep his identity under wraps.
This week's ads were mostly nonsense stuff – requests for something highly specific, like a new mortician (and he wondered if someone finally bumped off his old partner in crime), or a unicyclist with experience swallowing fire, or an accountant with five years' experience and a willingness to move across the country.
"Hell," Adrian remarked around the mag light. He shifted into a sitting position as he glanced from the open paper to the notes he wrote in sloppy ink. Only two entries, and neither sounded terribly more promising than his current job. He blew out a heavy sigh, and the pages furled and unfurled in response.
A chill drifted through the apartment, and Adrian wrapped a blanket about himself. Had he left a window open? Was it getting that cold out, in the middle of summer? Maybe they had some kind of storm blowing in, and he missed hearing about it. Pretty likely, considering how his life boiled down to working his construction job and draining at his other job. Cell phone use was discouraged at both jobs, and he was always trying to conserve battery anyway. He couldn't remember the last time he checked the weather.
With a blanket wrapped around himself, from shoulders to knees, Adrian slid off the bed and went hunting for that open window. His apartment was on the small side – one of those single bedroom affairs that most landlords were turning into AirBnBs these days. Was the second floor of a converted house, and one of four units – one behind him, one above and one below. Not that he heard much from any of his neighbors, with the ones behind him on vacation, and the topmost apartment sitting vacant between short-term renters.
His apartment, for the floor being split between two, was the smaller one. A single bedroom with those windows that got all round at the top, the custom-made ones that he hated finding quotes for. They also looked weird with straight curtains, so he took his down not long after he moved in. The rest of the curtains in the place were taken down after the power was shut off. That promised a doubly easy search, what with it being the middle of the night.
Adrian exited from his small bedroom out into the hallway, which ended abruptly with one of those dumb little phone areas from the days before cell phones. He rented the place pre furnished after he'd gotten out of the slammer, and the lady who owned it stashed that end with some art nouveau desk, a fake Tiffany desk lamp, and some ancient rotary phone that she probably bought new. It looked cute, what with the doily on top, but it wasn't any part of Adonis's style, and he never had need for a house phone without power. He guessed it was there to draw attention away from the awkwardness of a stopped hallway, and to call attention away from the newer-looking wall.
He walked away from that tiny mess and went further down the hall, ducked his head into the tiny bathroom where a frosted glass window looked out at the neighboring house. Not much there but the diffuse light from the moon.
Pausing, Adrian felt his hair drift forward. He squinted, perplexed, then glanced back at the blank hallway. He backtracked to his bedroom, peered in once again, and stared at the shut window. Reaching up, he took the mag light from his mouth and shined it about the bedroom for any cracks or holes.
Nothing.
"What the hell?" Adonis murmured to himself. There had to be some weird physics explanation for that. He wasn't going to dwell on it – not until he found the source of that damn draft.
There wasn't that much left of the apartment to explore. Down the hall, there was an odd banked room with seven walls, defining a combined kitchenette and living room space. He hadn't enough counter space to turn the kitchen into something useful at the time that he rented it, so it became something akin to a work space when he thought to do anything at home. Now, it was simply the accumulation point for the past three months' worth of mail that he stopped checking, the home base for all the job hunting notes he'd amassed, and a reminder hub of sticky notes that he hardly ever checked. Half of them were time sensitive and long past their usefulness now.
The kitchen had a window, standard size, and used to have cute checkered curtains that looked like something out of a grandmother's country home, but those had long since become a tablecloth for the bistro table that looked like it was a better fit for an outside garden. The exposed window gleamed with sodium light from the nearby street lamp, and was not only closed, but securely locked. Adrian was starting to get real suspicious.
From there, he could see across the rest of the cramped little apartment, where the last three windows were each in a row. They were each shut and fastened as they'd always been.
Adrian furrowed his brows at the rest of his apartment as he searched about with the mag light. If all the windows were closed, and none of them were cracked or broken, then where the hell was the draft coming from? He crossed into the living room, beyond the couch that had seen far too many children grow up, and peered up into the fireplace's flue. The old lady had said she had it sealed off, and that the thing hadn't been open in a dog's age, but as he peered inside…
He realized she was right. The thing was stuffed up, sealed, and Santa Claus wasn't cramming his fat a** down that pipe for decades to come.
So he paused again, thought about it, then glanced at the door to his apartment. He kept one of those under-the-door snakes to prevent any draft, but that door just opened out into a hallway that was shared with the other unit. There was still a stairwell to descend and another door to the outside world, so his snake companion (which was actually a bright green, with a forked tongue) was just a precaution. The draft couldn't have come from there, but he crept up to it anyway, and grabbed his lighter off the granny-style end table to double-check the flame.
As he lit it near the wedge in the door, Adrian found that the flame remained as still as it could. Adrian raised a brow at it, which quickly became a furrow when the flame suddenly blew toward the door.
That was impossibility number two.
Whipping his attention back toward the apartment proper, he wondered if he was looking for the mundane in the middle of the fantastical. Like there might be some supernatural bullshit afoot, and he was the a*****e with the gun who was thinking he could shoot it. If this was some youma thinking it could get the jump on him –
Adrian picked up his henshin pen off the end table, muttered his dumb magical catchphrase, and stood as Super Sailor Adonis in the middle of his own damn apartment. Thoroughly irritable, he waited for any auric senses to tip him off to youma tomfoolery, or White Moon shenanigans, or even one of those Dark Mirror kids waltzing through his bathroom.
He felt nothing. Not even a fart of magical aura.
Alright, then… His apartment was haunted? How was he supposed to get rid of a ghost? He didn't have a ouija board, and he wasn't going out at this time of night to pay a premium at some permanent Halloween shop, or one of those new age places with all their crystal nonsense. Well, Adonis knew what would scare him off for good.
Dropping his henshin, Adrian shouted, "Pay rent, you cheap b*****d!" Then he waited.
And waited.
And he didn't feel another draft. But he felt a sudden, algid drop in temperature that precipitated goosebumps all over his skin, even under the safety of his blanket. That could've been anything, he told himself, but he didn't really believe it. His air conditioning unit was long dead, and wasn't coming back to life until he paid his power bill. He was out of ideas.
So maybe it was time to leave. Adrian turned around, then stopped sss
Before him was his door, but it wasn't his door. It wavered languidly, as if part of some other space, and in the very center of it was a darkness so pitch that his mind couldn't fully process it. "Hell," he muttered, and he doubted he was that far off.
Word count: 1571
