Title: Pricks & Thumbs-10
Fandom: Fear Mythos
Characters: Rich Providence
Rating: G-(L1 N0 S0 V1 D0)
Warnings: Nothing explicit. Three words in questionable taste, with regards to Fish's job.
Notes: Fish has taken to exploring the city, but it's not revealing much. He's determined to make something of these dreams, though.
The dreams are more interesting than work, but that's not really surprising. Work's the same thing it always is. Rubies and Dolls, blood and strings, grand choreographed bondage orgies on film. On the bright side, a few natural shoots does mean less work for me. No fake skins on these, just some touch-ups where stuff doesn't look quite right. Saves on re-shoots.
But, the dreams… The dream, I should say, because it's really only one, and that's starting to get a little weird. I mean, yeah, sometimes you have a dream more than once, but … the same dream every night? I thought that only happened to Dolls. Some of the actors told me it's how they learn their lines for stuff at the playhouse — they dream it every night, and She Who Walks Before Them performs with them as puppets, until they don't need her help to do it just the way she wants it done. Saves on practice time, but they tell me it's really exhausting, because it's like not sleeping.
This dream, though, I'm not a puppet. I can change my mind or my direction, but I always end up coming back, because the other streets start to lack detail. They get blurry after a couple of intersections, and the road just trails off into grey fog. I'm pretty sure that fog and I don't want to be introduced. Don't ask me how I know, but I just have a terrible feeling about it. So, I always come back to centre. Always to the road that follows the sun. Always to the shop with the girl in the door. There's something between us, and it feels like a terrible distance. I can't get close to the door, and she can't get out of it. I've tried calling out to her, but the words she's singing never change.
Last time I was in the city, I tried to go into some of the other buildings, to try to find something that might help, maybe a rope or a ladder, something she could grab onto, so I could try to pull her out. Or maybe she could pull me in. I don't know which one is more likely. I don't know which one would be better. But, everything I found was pretty useless. Some magazines from twenty or thirty years ago, trash bins, computers, lots of hangers, some mannequins (but all the clothing was gone…), tinned food and snack cakes… Definitely stuff you'd find in a city, but nothing useful. There's a hotel along the way, but all the furniture's bolted to the floor, and everything else seems to be behind locked doors. I couldn't open them, but maybe the keys are somewhere I didn't look.
Hotel's a weird word, by the way. It doesn't seem to have anything to do with what it represents — not like automobile or skyscraper, which we don't have, here, but the words make sense. I didn't know 'hotel', until I read it in a book about the Old World. I guess it's a place people would stay when they were in cities they didn't live in. Sounds pretty useful, if you do a lot of travelling, but … yet another thing that didn't survive. We don't have one, in town, because nobody comes from other places, any more. We used to just let people stay in our houses or at the doctor's, but nobody's come into town in years.
But, this building… it doesn't have a sign, any more, but it does have some papers on a long counter, inside, and one of the few words that isn't totally faded away is 'hotel'. Most of the doors don't open, but they don't look like they have locks on them. There's just a door handle and a weird slot under it. There's some doors with places to put a key, though, and those are the ones I'm going to try to get into. I get the sense they're for employees, just because it's a small number of doors and they're in strange places, not numbered and in rows like the rest.
I know, it's probably kind of weird that I'm talking about this place like it's real, but it's there every night, and every night, it's the same. If I can be in any kind of control in my dreams, I should see how far that goes. I should see how many doors I can open, how many things I can find, and whether I can figure out a way to bring that girl out, or bring myself in. It's like a puzzle. Some sort of challenge. I wonder if she's testing me.
