Empty World

By Alex R. Knight III

Jim Avery is nowhere. Or maybe he’s everywhere. Either way, there’s no one around. Except a nameless, faceless pursuer who shadows him through the endless succession of hallways and strange rooms. But Jim remembers a time and place where there were people: His parents, his schoolmates, and Jill Gillis, his best friend. Then everything began changing. Everything became an Empty World...

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alex R. Knight III
• Release date: Apr 26, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311461681

Alex R. Knight III

Alex R. Knight III grew up in Groveland, Massachusetts, where his earliest influences were the comic books of the 1970s, and J.R.R. Tolkien. He today resides in southern Vermont, and loves to scare the hell out of people.

Book preview

Empty World

by

Alex R. Knight III

SMASHWORDS EDITION

* * * * *

PUBLISHED BY:

Alex R. Knight III

Empty World

Copyright © 2015 by Alex R. Knight III

License Notes

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Table of Contents

Part One

Part Two

Part 1

Here is a long and silent street.

I walk in blackness and I stumble and fall

and rise, and I walk blind, my feet

trampling the silent stones and the dry leaves.

Someone behind me also tramples, stones, leaves:

if I slow down, he slows;

if I run, he runs I turn : nobody.

Everything dark and doorless,

only my steps aware of me,

I turning and turning among these corners

which lead forever to the street

where nobody waits for, nobody follows me,

where I pursue a man who stumbles

and rises and says when he sees me : nobody.

~ Octavio Paz

The Street

1

Is a number good enough to keep track of things? I suppose it’ll have to do. There’s space – plenty of it – but no real sense of time. I haven’t come across any clocks or calendars. No windows either. That’s the worst part. There’s no connection with anything. No night, no day, no weather. And the silence. The haunting, impenetrable silence. Miles and miles and miles of silence

Except for…it.

But I haven’t heard it at all for what seems like a long while.

I found this notebook and pen in a desk drawer when I passed through a study sometime during my last walking period. It was a big mahogany thing. The room was lined with book cases filled with dusty old volumes – mostly reference materials, encyclopedias and such. The plush carpeting was mint green. No one was there, of course. Just the furnishings. And stillness. Quiet stretching out like the eternity of death.

As I said, there are no windows anywhere that I’ve yet found, but everything seems to be outfitted with electric light. There are wallswitches in some places, and I’ve tried them out. They work just fine: On, off, off, on. But I’ve always left them back the way they were when I move on. I’ve stopped experimenting with them altogether, for that matter. I can’t be sure, but it might know about any such changes. Or find out about them if it ever passes through a place where I’ve been before. I don’t want that. I can’t be sure whether it knows of my presence, but if not, I prefer it never finds out. I want to find a way out of here. And I sure as hell don’t want it following me.

The study was the first room I entered after waking. I spent my sleep time in a bedroom adjacent to it. On the floor. In the closet, with the louvered sliding doors closed. I used to always examine the next room by peering in before settling down to sleep, but I don’t bother anymore. What’s the point? Even if the room’s empty when I go to sleep, it doesn’t mean it will be later. And if it’s already in there when I check…then I’ll see what it is. But I don’t want that.

Not based on what I’ve heard.

Not ever.

It wouldn’t do to sleep in a bed, out in the open in some room I come across. It could enter at any time, unexpectedly, catch me unawares, and then…

So I sleep only in concealed places, and minimize any signs of my passing. When I’m walking, on the move, I try to be as quiet as possible. I make myself stop and listen often. Sometimes the stillness is so complete you can hear your ears ringing, and your heart beating – the breath whistling in and out of your lungs. When you’re in a place where there aren’t many lights, it’s eerie beyond description.

I always try to stay out of the open. Some time ago I was in a huge tiled hall lined with Romanesque pillars, statues, and massive basilica ceilings. The only lighting was from a few low-watt lamps mounted above a random selection of the statues. Their faces were leering, hideous. Had ancient people actually worshipped such beings? Do they still, somewhere

Although I tried walking through quietly, my shoes still made ghostly little tapping noises off the glossy smooth black and green flooring. At the far end, near a dais, was a door. I tried it and it opened onto a normal sized well-lit hallway with white painted walls and burgundy carpeting. I closed the door behind me, as I always do, and continued on. On to other hallways, rooms, chambers, stairwells, and doorways. Those lead to more of the same, and so on. Endlessly. So far.

After the study, I walked into another bedroom, then a den. There was a TV – a very old one, with dials. It turned on, but every channel was just black and white snow. I kept the volume all the way down, of course, and then only turned it up just barely enough to listen with my ear pressed up against the beige fabric covering a single speaker. Nothing. Static. I turned it off and kept moving.

There was a hallway leading out of the den, with recessed lighting in the ceiling, and it was lined with several doors. None of them were ajar. None of them ever have been. And none have ever been locked, either. In fact, I’ve never seen any that even had locks. Except for bathrooms, on the inside. A long while ago, I slept in a big jacuzzi tub that was in one, and locked the door. Where was the risk? The jacuzzi wasn’t much concealment, and if it came around and tried the door…well, at least I’d have warning beforehand. At least I might’ve stood a fighting chance.

But it didn’t come. And it hasn’t. Yet.

I opened the first door on the left, and inside was a game room: Brunswick pool table, air hockey, pinball machine, jukebox, a regulation British dartboard on one wall done up like an RAF symbol. The jukebox was an old Seeburg Select-O-Matic. All the of the records were rock and roll numbers from the fifties. The glass and the bright green selector buttons were lit up and ready to boogie. I walked out, shut the door, and tried the next one.

This one gave on some kind of conference room. There was a long dark-stained rectangular table surrounded by maybe two-dozen deluxe swivel chairs. The walls were nearly charcoal dark, the carpeting navy blue. A single track light shone down on an empty chair at the far end. On the table in front of the chair was a telephone – one of the executive kind with multiple lines.

I walked over and picked up the receiver. Put it to my ear. Nothing. No dial-tone, no busy signal – not even a faint background electrical hum. There was a line plugged into a modular receptacle on the wall, but none of the buttons lit up when pressed either. I set it back in its cradle quietly. The only other thing in the room that I could see was an empty metal water pitcher in the middle of the table. That reminded me I had to find some soon. My canteen was running low. I was getting hungry, too. No food left in my increasingly less hefty knapsack. Time to keep moving along.

There were two other rooms along the corridor. One turned out to be some kind of a maintenance alcove – it had a bare cement floor and was filled with a lot of wiring, junction boxes, and pipes with valves running through at odd angles and intervals – the other, a completely bare room. That one was nothing but four white walls with bright orange carpeting. Flourescent lights were set in above one translucent plastic panel in a standard suspended ceiling. No furnishings. It occurred to me for no discernable reason when I entered that even had the telephone been working back in that conference room, I wouldn’t have known who to call. I suppose I might’ve just dialed an operator.

But for the fact that I would’ve been afraid of someone answering.

The hallway ended in a T-intersection. To the left, there was one staircase leading down, and another leading up, both of them open steel tastefully carpeted in a kind of autumn theme of oranges and browns. There were landings at the foot and top of each, respectively. To the right the hall extended for some distance, where it seemed to end in another T. No doors lined the eggshell blue walls. And of course, nothing moved, or made a sound.

I opted for the stairs, and decided to climb up. Down seemed like a bad idea. Why, I couldn’t really say. Every time I’m travelling, I rely on hunches. Maybe they work – I’ve always managed to find water when I need it, and most travel periods I find something to eat, as well. Maybe it wants things this way, for some reason. Maybe it has nothing to do with things at all. Both of those are ideas I find disturbing.

From the landing, there was another staircase going to the next floor, and that turned out to be a kind of commercial shopping deck. Brownish gray grouted tile walkways marched around and away from a central stone water fountain surrounded by various ferns and flowers. The paths split in two directions other than the one I was coming from, like a giant disproportionate Y. The fountain peaked in a sculpture of a cupid taking flight and drawing back his bow. But no water geysered out of the cupid’s mouth, and none remained in the fountain’s basin. A quadruple set of white lights shone directly down on the plants. The rest of the little plaza was dimly lit, and vacant. Lining the walkways were the glass fronts of various shops, all dark. I strode along in the gloom, trying to see what might be inside the stores.

There was a sporting goods store, with lots of sneakers on display. I considered going in for a pair, but my hiking boots were hardly broken in, so I kept going. An art store with a framed de Kooning print on an aluminum easel sitting in the display. Something with a lot of yellow in it. In the Sky, I think it was. A bookstore. Then a cafeteria.

I stepped inside. It was slightly darker than out on the walkway, but there were a couple of dim lights on. A stale, greasy cooking smell reached my nostrils, but rather than finding it unpleasant, it actually whetted my hunger. I was ravenous.

There was a line that started with a stack of plastic trays and ended in front of a cash register. Along it were a lot of stainless steel warmer bins where customers could grab some chow. But they were all empty. As were the booths along the opposite wall. I walked back into the kitchen area. After rummaging around a bit, I found a refrigerator with two chicken salad sandwiches in it. They tasted like they were starting to go bad, but I wolfed them anyway. A cupboard had two pop-top cans of ravioli, and another of fruit cocktail. I put them in the knapsack. There was a deep sink. The water ran strong and cold, and I drank my fill. Plus, filled the canteen.

After eating, I went back out and kept walking. I’d gone left, and this part of the esplanade took me past several more shops, along with central islands filled with dying plants and surrounded by benches. A placard next to one was soliciting donations for the March of Dimes. I kept moving.

Eventually, the walkway dead-ended in a a wide sweeping half spiral staircase that led upward to another level. At the top was a long corridor carpeted in gray. The walls looked like they might’ve been surfaced in a kind of glossy electric blue formica. Other hallways shot away at right angles and at odd intervals. There were wall lamps every so often that provided small pools of light. My shoes whispered on the rug as I passed along. It was the only sound anywhere.

It seemed there were no doors anywhere along the passageway until I did come to one, of sorts. It was an elevator. The two sliding anodyne panels stood closed. Above were two white plastic light housings, each with an arrow -- one up, one down. No indication of what floor this might be, wherever in God’s creation I was. There were only up and down buttons outside. It was possible there might’ve been some indication onboard the car. But attempting to summon the elevator at all, I decided, might be ill-advised. Especially if it had been sitting on some other floor. The car would’ve started moving, rumbling in all the stillness. The direction lights would’ve lit up above all the other stops along its path. That might’ve been noticed. And I didn’t want to attract attention.

I kept moving along the hallway. After a while it dead-ended, but with a door to either side, as it turned out. The one on the right was metal, and painted white. The one to my left was light-toned but heavy hardwood, possibly oak.

I cautiously opened the steel door. It gave on a concrete stairwell, with sections going both up and down and landings in between. There were black painted metal handrails along the sides. A red fire extinguisher hung on a bracket halfway along the wall on the downward landing.

I let the door snick closed, and tried the wooden one. That gave on what amounted to a hotel room. It had a double-wide bed, a bath with a sink and shower, a bureau, desk and chair, nightstand, and a TV. This one was more modern, and had a remote control. But it also showed only snow. There was a phone, but like the other one had been, it too was dead.

I took another look back out into the hallway. A long stretch of nothing. It was still just as deserted and quiet as ever. As everywhere was. There was no lock on the door, so I propped the chair against the knob.

And here I am. The closet is too small, and so is the shower, so I’m huddled under the bed. There’s enough room, and it’s real clean. I wonder if anyone has ever stayed in here before? Wherever here is.

I’m done writing for now – my hand is tired, and so am I. I think I’m going to doze. Then keep moving on. But to what? Where? A way out, of course.

And maybe an explanation.

2

I may have heard it just minutes ago. There’s been nothing since, and it wasn’t like the other times, but it was something.

The elevator doors down the hallway opened and closed.

Even closed in this room, the sound was audible. Enough to stir me awake, in fact. There was a faint bing!, and then the soft rolling sound of the doors sliding back. A few moments later, the same sound as they closed. Then nothing. Deafening silence.

I laid under the bed frozen, barely breathing, for some unknown time afterwards, straining to hear the pitter-patter of footsteps on the carpet in the hallway outside. I cringed at the thought of their approach, just on the other side of the door. Then the soft, stealthy turning of the doorknob back and forth, as it tried