Picture if you will a room-gloomy, crowded with low tables, open crates full of dimly seen shapes arranged in crooked aisles. The jumbled room reeks of ozone, plastic, sweat, cheap incense and... blood.
There are plastic windows down one side of the room, tall, narrow and painted over inside with looping swirls of khaki paint by an indifferent hand.
Lights come and go out there, passing in odd jerks and curves. Cascades of flaking mylar sheeting arc overhead, fastened haphazardly with zip ties to stringers of grimy reinforced plastic that stretch dimly. More dull shapes, sacks, soft outlines and old coats are strung near the walls. Murky laminated signs lean against the stained wall there, offering bargains, sales and percentages off NOW! to the seemingly empty space.
It is not quiet here, no, not here, not now. A strident demanding bass thump tingles the empty hangers, whizzes the plastic crates of odds and ends, and the screeching wail of synthesizer riffs occasionally causes second and third level harmonics to shiver the painted windows, the recycled plastic stringers and bits of nameless impedimenta in murky crannies.
The music comes from below, grinding and slamming music. Music that claws at one's ears, vitals and stirs the cheap rack of mirrorshades by the stairwell.
The music is huge. The sound seems to want to break anyone who can hear it, a violent act of cacophonium slated for immediate and sudden action.
As dominant as the wail of guitars seems, an even deeper, louder howling glow now slowly builds outside, casting sharp snickery shadows upon the rattling windows. The shadows slide across them, blending and mixing with the jittering girders there, finding the graffiti covered wall by the stairwell and slowly oozing down the wall onto the abused humming floor.
The howling light dopplers up into the distance.
The lights come and go outside still.
The music down below keeps on going.
Now the music quiets for a bit, a break perhaps. A muffled jangle of talking, clinking and shifting about fills the hollow space below.
A distant series of out of synch chimes jingles in one of the recycled crates here, announcing the hour of fourteen, several times.
Our viewpoint shifts closer to the crates in the foreground, the lumpy shapes draped here and there. Lumpy clothes, lumpy boots.
Lumpy bodies.
People shapes. Lying very, very still.
The music below starts up again, a shrill caterwauling fugue with electric piano and crashing bass riffs.
A spread-eagled shape is curled up in a collapsed rack of studded leather pants, while across the narrow aisle another body has exploded a ribbed paper shipping container full of colored beads and doll heads. A wicked long metal and ceramic shape is still cuddled up to its chest.
Here a foot juts past a corrugated fiberboard carton half full of used CDs, occasionally illuminated by the casual chaos of outside glows. An odd foot this, grey and smooth -- like dolphin skin -- no toes. There isn't much else though. The foot is attached to a bit of silver-clad leg.
Not much leg really, it is oddly pinched and truncated at the "calf" area. Some thin green goop has dribbled off of the calf and hardened into a little firm pool by the triple knobs of bluish bone that protrude out from it ever so slightly.
The silvery scrap of cloth winks dimly soaked green on one side.
On
Off
On
Off
The blinking emerald light can be seen past the silver leg now, seemingly keeping time with this mad pulsating music.
We get closer.
There is a thin, smallish form dimly illuminated by the green light. A jade screen on a bulky small box is cradled in one arm. As the light throbs we can see the slack face, eyes wide open in a thousand yard stare, seeing nothing or everything.
The pupils in this face are quantum dots. A thin dribble of blood has wandered off of this head onto the floor. It moves along, past a hand cradling a blunt muzzled lump until it encounters the box with the blinking slot.
A display. Throbbing. A word embedded there in a crystalline matrix.
See you Saturday night at 8. Last one in gets to play the foot.