ENIGMA

Chapter One: SIMON

Thus the deluge began. The storm of all storms, rain upon rain. Water plummeted from the sky like fiery rocks, smashing into a layer of water already covering the ground. The lightning struck, revealing her face, crouched on the roof top in the darkest shadow she could find. But light reveals all. She could feel the power surging through her, the power that made her run and hide. She could feel it within her, an uncanny charge of energy from some unsought after location which had long since become myth. Legends are reborn. Her eyes reflected yet another lightning bolt as she catapulted from the roof top with spring loaded legs and ran with all of the fury of her angst into the tempest and into the night. She ran until her legs burnt with exhaustion, no matter how much she ran she could not extinguish this feeling, this energy, built up inside, leading her toward her destiny.

On the same night at the same time another one had received the message. A communication that had been misread as lunacy. His eyes widened as he tried to throw this sentiment, this odd sensation, from his mind with ferocity. The cold wind blew into the room and drops of rain flew in with the gale and hit his face sporadically. His lips moved to the words he’d been told, the word’s he’d taken to be falsehood, fallacy, and tools of deception. Could it be? The thought crossed his mind like a black cat in his path. Another Dimension? Was it truly so farfetched a concept? He tossed his hair throwing the water that had been clinging there across the room. He pondered to himself about what his ears had heard and about the energy that sent his heart racing. He flipped the TV on and off tossing ideas about in his head like ships in a microburst. What did he mean, that enigmatic man in the coat, when he talked of another dimension, and was he right? Was there another dimension, perhaps outside what he could perceive? There came a knock at the door, he put on a robe, ambled over to the closed door with the apartment number, sixty-two, hanging on the inside of the door.

“Who is it?” he spoke, feigning exhaustion with his voice.
“It’s me, Lora, I need to see you.” she spoke in an almost inaudible whisper, but even though he struggled to hear her Zack had no trouble detecting her blatant sincerity. He opened the door to see her drenched from the rain.
“God, where were you?” he asked calmly. She came in and hanged her coat while Zack prepared coffee. They sat in his small kitchen, for a while no words making it past their teeth; all that could be heard was the ticking of a solitary clock and the deafening roar of the incessant storm.
“I was on the roof,” she said, sipping the heated drink from a bland white mug which Zack had provided, “I was drawn there,”
“Why?” Zack asked.
“Because of the man, he told us a great deal Zackary, a great deal more than we can ever hope to prove.” she stood, water dripping to the floor from her hair caught Zack’s attention.
“We don’t even know who he was, he was probably some crack-pot, forget about it.”
“Bull. You know damn well he wasn’t some crack-pot. I know you, I know that at least some part of you believed what he said.” her voice boomed for once, and at the same moment thunder rumbled in the distance.
“I wish I could believe what he said L, I really do, but even if he was right there’s nothing we can do.” Zack stood too, now moving closer to Lora.
“It’s weird. I can feel it now, ever since we met him I’ve felt strange.” she spoke softly again, looking uneasily into Zack’s eyes.
“I know, I felt it too, but we have to let it go, it will pass.”
“We have to find him, I have to know.”
“You still have the card he gave you?”
Lora pulled out the metallic card from her pocket and gave it a once over with her eyes.
“There was another.” She whispered, “Someone else heard what we did, we need to find them.”
“No more, now come on; I’ll get you some dry clothes and pull out the sofa bed.”

Chapter 1, part 2

Zack dug out some clothes of his for Lora to change into. She lay on the couch staring at the ceiling, and he in his bedroom twenty feet away. The door to Zack’s room hung open and his ears were anticipating words, words from Lora’s lips, but none came. Lora lay on the couch, her still damp hair dripping every now and then onto Zack’s couch. Her eyes darted over to Zack’s door, the blue glow of the television from his room made the darkness not so foreboding. She wanted to speak, there was so much on her mind, but she feared Zackary wouldn’t understand. Zack stared at the television, but he looked past it, the focus of his thoughts was in his living room.

But among the uncertainty came an idea. A mystery had been set before them and needed to be solved. But they would need to uncover clues, proof that what one man in a tattered coat proclaimed was founded in fact and not the ravings of a madman. Zack knew exactly what a madman sounded like. He picked up the remote and shut the television off but he didn’t remove his eyes from the monitor. He remembered his father. His father, the philosopher, was a quiet man if you could get him to shut his mouth. But Zack’s recollections of his father were far from happy. The painful ravings of a madman had been the words of his father; Zack and his mother had tried to stop it, but madness is an ill that can prove impossible to cure. His father had it in is head to blow up a building, but he never got to blow up any buildings, he was ratted out by Zack’s mother. As punishment for her interference his father had taken her life; in his madness he had destroyed what he had claimed to love most. The scars left were healing slowly, thanks to Lora’s friendship, but he had felt betrayed by both his father and God. Lora was the only living being, besides his father and him, who knew his past. He feared that following his curiosity could lead him to madness, especially when dealing with topics like other dimensions and alternate realities. Still, there was something different about that man in the coat, and something about the words he’d said had impacted him.

Lora was almost asleep and yet her thoughts refused to cease their incessant nature, they would not stop. She tossed back and forth on the sofa bed, a cold draft wafting in through the cracked window, leading out to the fire escape, chilled her down to her spirit and she got goosebumps. She couldn’t shake the surreal feeling within her, as though she was being watched. She stood, but she wasn’t sure why. She approached the window sliding it shut. The rain was still falling, the storm would not die. She found herself wanting to cry, burning inside, but she knew not the source of the flame. She ran her hand down the ice cold window pane letting the energy of distant lightning fill her palms, she breathed in closing her eyes and letting out all of her sorrows in one painful exhalation. She needed this, this glimpse of the great beyond, until now her life meant nothing. She’d been a suburbanite in a normal Colorado town, just another one of the girls whose daddy’s got them everything. She looked back on those days with spite towards her former self. The clichéd spoiled brat, she hated what she’d been, and in many ways she hadn’t changed, even now. All she wanted was a deeper purpose. Twenty-seven years of life and nothing to show for it but disappointment and apathy.

Zack was drifting on a sea somewhere; he could hardly feel the waking air about him. He could sense something, something about Lora; he felt a tear trickle down her cheek and drifted into slumber…

Chapter 1, part 3

The morning sun burst through the window violently. Zack sat up with a start to see Lora standing at the foot of the bed; he gave a confused look, swung his legs over the bedside and put on some sweatpants. Lora didn’t move, her eyes stayed glued to the television, Zack approached and found her staring into a static blizzard. He reached in and flipped the old dial on his archaic television to turn it off. Lora fell to the ground nearly giving Zack a heart attack.

“Lora? Lora?” Zack called her name as he rolled her onto her back and checked her pulse, she was convulsing as he spoke, “Lora, Lora, wake up!” she sat straight up, “Are you okay?”
“I’m, I’m fine, what happened? My legs feel tired,”
“I woke up and found you watching static on my TV set,”
“Weird, I, I don’t remember coming in here, but I don’t remember falling asleep either, ouch, my arm.”
She grasped her arm and they saw it, a cut on her forearm running from her elbow vertically for around four inches, it wasn’t too deep, but neither was certain how it had gotten there.
“Where did you go last night?”
“I’d like to know the answer to that as much as you would,” she stood up, nearly falling back down, her legs seemed so tired, as though she’d been running all night, “I bet he has the answer,” she said pointing to the man in the coat out the window. He was sitting outside a coffee shop sipping something from a cup.
“Hey you, in the coat!” Zack called out once they had arrived outside, the man seemed startled, he stood, Zack began to walk speedily towards him, ignoring oncoming traffic. The man stood still as Zack called to him.

“ZACK! Look Out!” Lora rushed in at him in the nick of time and shoved Zack out of the way of the oncoming bus, Zack flew all the way to the curb on the other side. The man in the coat cracked a smile detectable even through his collar; he picked up his coffee cup and threw it in perfect rotation. The cup screeched through the space between the man and the bus now threatening Lora’s life, the cup hit the bus’s bumper, its contents spilling out and causing the bus to abruptly… disappear. Lora was standing, in the middle of the street, braced for her own demise, but demise never came. She opened her eyes and blinked twice, looking to where the bus had been coming from and then to Zack and the coated individual for approval. Did that really just happened, where the hell is the bus?

“What the? How?” Zack squeaked out in astonishment, the man stood there, the smile still residing on his face. Zack redirected his attention to Lora, still standing jaw dropped in the street, he ran in and brought her over to the side of the road, but when they got back the man was gone.

“Great, he left, at least you’re okay,” Zack said still glancing about.
“Yeah, that must have been some strong coffee,” She joked, smiling.
“Ha, ha, ha; well, it’s going to have to wait, I gotta get to work,”
“You’re not serious are you?”
“Just because reality is challenged doesn’t mean the world stops, my apartment’s not going to pay for itself,” he reasoned.
“But you can’t just leave me alone,”
“Well, you’re right about that, but I can’t exactly take you to work with me, Mr. Luigi wouldn’t be too fond of that, dilemmas-dilemmas,”
“Why don’t I just hang around the shop, near it anyway, and if I have any trouble I’ll call you,”
“Chances are if you do have trouble it’ll be like the TV thing and you might not be able to call, but I’m almost late so we’ll have to go with that.”

Chapter 1, part 4

Zack worked at an old antique book store, where all the god forsaken books that no one ever read were stored. There wasn’t much business actually in the shop, most of the sales were carried on in cyberspace where antique collectors were dying to get their hands on dusty books to add to their collections. Mr. Luigi, the elderly man running the shop, claimed the store was in its ninth generation and that many of the books dated back that long ago, and some of the additions that came in over the years may have been older. Zackary dealt with most of the old books, except for one, which Mr. Luigi rarely so much as hinted at, but Zack wasn’t really that interested in his work. Most of his six hour five days a week shifts were spent cataloging new additions, which came in about five or six a month; and preparing the books to be sold to their new rich owners. The job was pretty well paying as far as Zack was concerned, Mr. Luigi started him at eighteen dollars an hour, and gave him a two dollar raise for every year he worked there. Currently he was making twenty-four dollars an hour. He tried not to dwell on Lora as he cleaned off a 16th century Chinese book on herbal remedies, but his focus found its way to her every time. Each hour that ticked by seemed like a year. Suddenly the phone rang. Zack nearly fell from his chair.

“Pick it up, won’t you Zackary,” came Mr. Luigi’s voice from the back room.
Zack picked up the phone and put it to his ear.
“Hello?”
“I figured it out Zack, I remember, I went to visit him.” Lora’s voice came, she but she didn’t sound like her normal self.
“What? Lora? Visited who, the man in the coat?”
“No, the other one, the other guy, I know where he is,”
“Who? You mean the one, who was there with us?”
“Yes,”
The call ended. Zack stood, unsure of what action, if any, to take. He looked out the big glass window, there in the crowd he saw a man, a man wearing a big brown coat, holding a cigarette and wearing a rimmed hat. His eyes studied the figure, yes, it was the same man. He looked at the doorknob and thought about running to it, turning it, and ending this once and for all. The man stood there, staring at Zack, he puffed on his cigarette illuminating his face slightly. Zack stood, his blood verging on boiling, staring at the man, he seemed to be mocking him with his silence.
“Zack,” Mr. Luigi said startling him, he looked back but the man was gone.
“Yes, Mr. Luigi,” Zack said sighing in relief but yet still worried about Lora and past and future events.
“Well, it’s just you don’t seem like yourself today, I thought, since you finished all the days work, you might take the rest of the day off, to get your wits about you.”
“Thanks,” Zack droned, his mind was elsewhere, “that’s exactly what I need.”



[edit on 25-8-2007 by Titen-Sxull]

Chapter 1, final part

Zack raced back to his apartment but obviously Lora wasn’t there, but on the answering machine was a message, 1477 Orange St, the address of the other person who had heard the man in the coat speak. He bolted out the door and drove frantically towards the address he had scribbled on a gum wrapper seconds before pulling put of his parking space; he hoped he would arrive in time. He pulled up to the ancient looking apartment building, urgency driving every motion. He took a deep breath before throwing open the car door and running towards the entrance of the building, leaving the car door open. But before he reached the door he saw something, the faint outline of a figure on the roof, he didn’t give it much thought until he was already several flights of stairs up into the building, He found himself climbing two stairs at a time, each breath filled with a prayer. Finally he stopped, reached into his pocket, and pulled out the crumbled wrapper and read it aloud in winded breath, room 362. He raised his fist and let it fall hesitantly upon the wooden door, six or seven times. He stood still. Every second that ticked by seemed to stretch infinitely, finally he saw the doorknob turn. A man stood before him, a seemingly normal man, with black hair and a rather depressing demeanor.

“I-, have you seen-?” Zack tried to find a logical question to ask the silent man. The man pointed to the roof. Without uttering a word the man led Zack up several more flights of stairs, more flights than Zack recalled seeing rows of windows from outside, and onto the roof. There, in the darkness, were two figures, one was unmistakable.
“Lora,” Zack whispered.
The other figure was only a mystery for a moment; Zack knew it was the man in the coat. He looked back at the man who had led him there, he was oddly familiar, Zack wondered to himself as he walked towards Lora, why in the world he knew this man.
“He’s the one,” Lora said answering Zack’s question without hearing it, “the other one who was there with us,” she then turned her attention to the man wearing the coat who stood ominously silent, “and this is Simon,” Lora said.
“You sure got some explaining to do Mister,” Zack said taking Lora’s hand and leading her away from the ledge of the roof.
“Come, we’ll go inside, the Storm’s coming,” Simon said, looking up at the sky, Zack did the same, but there wasn’t a cloud in sight, the sky was crystal clear.

Author's Note: Seeing how many parts it takes to fit one chapter has given me second thoughts of posting any more of it on ATS... the entire Novel can be read HERE

Originally posted by Titen-Sxull
Author's Note: Seeing how many parts it takes to fit one chapter has given me second thoughts of posting any more of it on ATS... the entire Novel can be read HERE

Are you also CleansingLight as shown to be the original author?

Had to ask for the sake of clarity, not assuming anything here.

Yeah, CleansingLight is another one of my various pseudonyms

Very cool.

I've some reading ahead of me then.