Shade City

by Domino Finn

  One minute I had been sitting in a diner with friends and the next I was carefully engaged in an interlude with a complete stranger. I hadn't even made the first move. I like to think I skillfully handled the situation once it was presented to me, but the truth is it was random providence, a single moment where two people with similar needs crossed paths.

  In the end, the whole nightcap was so perfect that she didn't even stay the night. Rachel got a phone call and said she had to go. I had only managed to put on my underwear by the time she typed her number into my phone and was out the door.

  I collapsed onto the couch again. It was a good night and I would sleep well; the sun wasn't even up yet. I poured the rest of her cocktail into mine so that I almost had a full glass and brought it to my lips. For some reason, all I could think about was Eva.

  Dream

  The dream started the same as it always did.

  I was trudging down a long barren street amidst the towering brick buildings of Downtown Los Angeles. I didn't know why it was always Downtown—it wasn't where I lived—but it felt like I belonged here. Like this was where I was supposed to be.

  I was familiar enough with the neighborhood. I'd walked down these corridors and been to countless bars and other spots in the area. I knew it and it was recognizable, except everything was off. A little bit older and unkempt, but also twisted, if that was possible. There was a darkness that blanketed everything; it was as if a veil was tied around my head and all of my senses were muted. Firm shapes appeared blurry, loud sounds were muffled, yet I could see the most innocuous wisps and hear far away mutterings as if they were all meant for me.

  The most eerie aspect of this world was the light. Or more accurately, the complete lack of it. It felt like a dark day. A dusk. As if the sun had already bowed out but still graced the world with its trailing magnificence. Everywhere was the same, simultaneously bathed in shadow yet blanketed with this ever-present light that had no radiance. As for electricity and light bulbs and whatnot—they did exist here. But they fought against the oppression so fruitlessly that their influence was nothing more than a washed out whiteness. An overexposed black and white photograph with a ghostly vacancy. It wasn't light because it failed to illuminate. It wasn't shadow because it was more of a presence than an absence. The hot spots clashed with the dark world but were neatly contained, often extending only inches from their source.

  Truly this was a bleak place.

  I pressed ahead with the sort of overdone effort that dream worlds force upon us, where mundane actions require great bouts of concentration and still occur too tediously. Yet my steps were methodical and my labor was true, and before I knew it, I was walking down a strip I didn't recognize.

  I was somewhere in Bunker Hill, but as with all things on the Dead Side, the surroundings were constructed not out of brick or stone, but from the remnants of the many memories that were trapped in this place. The world was an amalgam of the experiences of its inhabitants. It modernized itself as new souls took residence. Still, the occasional stubborn memory persisted, and in testament to that, I watched as a Temple Street Line cable car groaned past me guided by invisible wires.

  This dream that was more than a dream was recurring; every two to three months I would find myself walking the lonely streets of a Los Angeles perverted by its inhabitants. Yet the dream was never the same. I always wandered, but as in the real world, I could choose to turn left instead of right, or get on the cable car, or go into a building. Endless opportunities presented themselves to deviate from any pre-scripted conclusions, and I often took advantage of them and discovered new things. I learned about the city through surreal experiences that I couldn't explain.

  Except I was barely able to interact with anyone else. The muted shade over the world prevented me from breaking through and making real contact. And that was why, after years of wandering the gloomy corridors of the city, even back when I had lived in Miami, I still couldn't, for the life of me, understand what any of it meant.

  But this time I did.

  As I arduously strolled down the sloped walkway and passed the aging wood balustrade of the St. Angelo Hotel, I heard my name called out. Foggily at first. Then again with certain clarity. Up the small steps, standing at the main entrance, was a little girl in a dress of horizontal red and black stripes. Her bangs and long hair blended smoothly between the colors of white and purple and black, and this hue was matched by her eyes. The young girl just stood there and fumed at me, then stormed inside.

  There was no doubt it was Violet.

  * * *

  "What's going on here?" I asked.

  I had entered the St. Angelo and was in a thin lobby with high marble walls framing a set of three brass elevators. I wasn't sure if the solid architecture of the inside matched the ornate wood of the exterior, or that I was even in the same place anymore. Sitting on a large wooden reception desk was Violet, swinging her knee-high black boots freely as her legs hung in the air. I had never actually seen her before.

  "Welcome to my world," she said.

  The girl wore a mask of depression over her outward features. There was a white cartoon skull in the middle of her red and black dress and she had scores of black gummy bracelets and linked chains around her throat and arms. Her purple gloss lipstick complimented her eyes and hair and she had way too much black eyeliner on her pale face. She was a skinny girl but had a sort of chubbiness to her cheeks that could be the last vestiges of baby fat, perhaps the only pure and cute thing left about her otherwise goth appearance.

  It was funny for being so overdone. Especially in this place. The goth look is a phase that many twelve-year-old girls go through when they first learn they can express themselves through style. They fight so hard to be unique and different that they copy others to a tee. Rebellion through conformity. It is an irony that takes time to outgrow. Violet never had that chance.

  Who could really blame her for her dark disposition anyway?

  "This is it?" I asked. "The Dead Side?" I moved more easily now, like I wasn't underwater anymore.

  "Did you ever think otherwise?"

  "I didn't know what to think. I mean, I understood things." I considered what it was exactly that I had thought. "You know when you're having a really weird dream but you innately just 'get' everything? It's like you're familiar with the backstory, but it only makes sense while you're asleep. As soon as you wake up all rationalization is gone..." I watched as the fuzzy world crystallized around me. Everything blurry was adjusting itself, coming into focus. It was as though my senses were experiencing HD for the first time. "How could this be real?"

  Violet shrugged. "That's where you've got me. There's something about you that shares a closeness with the immaterial. I can't explain it. All I know is that, when you saw my pocket watch in that antique store, you could hear my voice when I spoke to you."

  "If you live in the watch then what are you doing here?"

  "Don't be stupid, Dante. This is where I live. My home isn't a little piece of metal and glass. The watch is just a conduit I attach to." Violet revealed the brass watch in her hand. I instinctively reached for it in my pocket, but of course it was gone. I never had it in the dream. Now I knew why. "It's a connection between our worlds," she continued. "A window. It allows me to be here and—"

  "Talk to me up there."

  "Yes," she answered. "I'm alone in this dreary place, but I can sense the old world through the watch. It keeps me content. But before you, I've never been able to speak with the living."

  The living. It was hard to think of this little girl, the one I had known for the last four years and could see sitting right before me, as something else. "So you don't age, then? Even though you died six years ago, you're still a twelve-year-old girl."

  She smiled dryly. "Sorry if that ruins my birthdays."

  I didn't know much about Violet, but she had told me how old she was when she died. She never talked about her past life, but after a lot of persuading I had
finally gotten her to tell me her birthday. November twenty-second. The same as mine. The same as tonight. I never celebrated it much—I was out in LA alone—but I had made it a habit to point the anniversary out to her. I don't know why.

  I approached the girl and tried to put my hand on her shoulder. I wanted to comfort her. To tell her that things were okay. That it was good to finally see her. But she swatted my hand away.

  "Don't think you can sweet talk me and squirm out of this." A hint of anger twitched in her purple eyebrows. "I'm still mad at you."

  I backed away. "What are you talking about?"

  "That man last night. You let him get away."

  "He saw me, Violet. I told you from the beginning that I was down for this, but I need to tread lightly around crowds."

  "That was four years ago and you always work in crowds. Clubs wouldn't be clubs if they were empty."

  "It's not the same. When you get in a fight in a club, you deal with security. In the streets, it's the police. I could get arrested. Or worse. I tried to be careful."

  "You decided to joke around with your friends and get some pussy."

  I gritted my teeth. It was jarring to hear the little girl talk like that, but she had learned a lot since she died. Then I got annoyed and tried to remember if that had ever happened in a dream before. But of course, this was something real.

  "What was so important about that guy anyway?"

  Violet almost answered but stopped herself, unsure of what to say. "Maybe I could've told you if you'd got him."

  "Maybe," I said, "or maybe I'd be dead. Or maybe he would have realized what I knew. Which would be a trick because I don't actually know anything about him at all."

  I felt warm all of a sudden, as though the front door had opened and let a stale breeze in. It was a shock. But it was also somehow comforting. The heat energized me. It made me feel alive in this desolate place. And then I was unnerved. We appeared alone but we didn't feel alone, and I didn't really know why until I stepped back and focused on the spot.

  In this strange limbo of absence and shadows, there was something in between, a faint glowing radiance that drifted past me. It looked like a ghost but not like a human. Like something I'd seen in fuzzy photographs of haunted houses on horrible cable channels. Except I knew those photos were fake. Spirits couldn't wander in the world of the material; they needed something physical to inhabit. But this place wasn't physical. And this presence, while having no form, was real. It seemed to move of its own accord. It glided by the elevators and into the back hall where it disappeared through the wall.

  "What the fuck was that?" I asked.

  Violet just rolled her eyes.

  "I mean, I know it's a ghost, right? Can you do that?"

  "I've told you before. When people get trapped here, they warp into all kinds of things. They forget themselves."

  I nodded. "Sure, you told me that some spirits forget their names. Or they go crazy. Apparently others get really emo and dye their hair purple to match their name. But you didn't say anything about floating and moving through walls."

  Violet narrowed her eyes at the joke and jumped to the floor. Her boots landed on the tiles with a solid thunk. "Listen," she said, "I'm a girl. I died. But I still have a strong connection with the material world. I see it every day. I remember who I am. I remember my family—"

  The girl stopped talking and put her hand to her mouth, then pulled it away quickly and turned around. She was obviously struggling with something personal and doing a poor job of keeping it under wraps. I knew she didn't want to get into it, though.

  "That one," she continued, pointing to where the spirit had passed through the wall, "it doesn't even know that it was once human. It can't talk. Maybe it can't even think. It's mostly just energy now. A discarded sentience. My dad studied them a lot."

  Violet stopped again, realizing she had brought up her family twice in as many breaths. She just kind of huffed out air and looked at me again.

  "You mention him a lot, you know."

  Her eyes shimmered. "No I don't."

  But she did. Over the years I'd caught her making references to her father over and over. I suspected that much of her knowledge of possession and banishment and spirits was his doing. She never answered questions about him. But she did just say that she'd never talked to the living through the watch before me. That and the fact that her father knew about the Dead Side could only mean one thing—that he was dead too.

  "Were you killed with him?" I asked.

  Her head snapped away from me. "What? Who said we were killed?"

  "You've let it slip before." I waited for her to come clean. Her mind raced for an explanation. A way to change the subject. I brought a tender note to my voice. "Violet, I've known you long enough. You were the one who told me that most people who die move on. Getting trapped here is a sign of tragedy or unfinished work. It's an easy guess that you were murdered."

  The girl just pouted and walked to the elevator, poking her fingers at the brass door as if drawing an invisible picture that would make everything better. Her silence was confirmation that I was close enough.

  "Or maybe, it was your dad who killed you?"

  "No!" she screamed. "It was Livia. My father would never hurt me like that." There were tears in her eyes as she revisited the painful memory.

  I'd tried looking up deaths of little girls named Violet before. Nothing fitting the circumstances ever matched. Maybe now, knowing she had died with her father and cross-referencing the search with the name Livia, I could find something that lined up.

  For now, however, I had no desire to push her. I needed to cheer her up.

  "Something's different, Violet. Something is happening. If you think following that guy in the plaid trench coat will enlighten us then I'll check into it. I promise. But you need to be straight with me. That owl last night was looking for someone. For me. I need to know what you know."

  The girl leaned on the wall. "I don't know where the owl came from."

  "Where's your dad? Is he down here with you?"

  "I don't know. He's lost to me. I'm down here all alone."

  "Can't I help you find him? Can't I help you find your way again?"

  Violet shook her head. "You need to concern yourself with the world of the living. We don't belong there. In people or owls."

  "And what about pocket watches?"

  "It's just a connection. Maybe that will be cut one day too."

  I smiled sadly as I looked at Violet. Would losing her be a happy occasion, a signal that she had finally moved on and found peace? Was it selfish that I enjoyed her company and appreciated the power it gave me?

  "The path is rough," I recited, "and simple feet step better with a shoe. One's not enough; like lonely streets, they're better walked with two." I thought I saw a faint smile creep past her guard. I decided then and there that I was going to help her, one way or another, even if she didn't know about it.

  "Why did you speak to me," I asked, "back in that antique store?"

  "Have you looked around this place? Do you really need to ask why I would want some company or even... a friend?"

  I smiled softly. "I mean, why did you tell me about shades and teach me how to expel them?"

  Violet stared at the marble floor tiles and thought a moment. Her answer carried the innocence of a child. "I don't know. I guess I figured that people should go where they're supposed to go."

  "And where is that?"

  Violet raised her eyes to me. "If I knew, I wouldn't be here."

  * * *

  Like all dreams, it wasn't clear if time had passed or if I just wasn't paying attention. One moment we were talking and the next the room trembled, threatening to dislodge the glass mirrors from the walls.

  I sensed the disturbance but didn't know what to make of it. I had lived through several Los Angeles earthquakes before, and frankly, they were unnoticeable. Nothing but passing tremors. This incident had the same physical properties that a
cartoon earthquake might. It was more foreboding, though. It wasn't clear why until Violet spoke up.

  "Somebody's coming."

  I turned to the door and noticed the heavy metal frame wiggling on its hinges. The glass panel, however, revealed nothing outside but the desaturated gloom.

  "Get out of here," I commanded. Although I had visited this world many times, tonight was the first that it had solidified. That anything of consequence happened. Really, I was ready to expect anything, and I didn't want Violet to be in danger.

  The little girl wasted no time and banged at the elevator call button. The shaking grew worse.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  Violet just shook her head.

  A loud ding announced the arrival of the elevator as the brass double doors slid open. "You should come too," said Violet, looking concerned.

  "Don't worry about me." The girl hesitated but I nodded her on. She stepped into the car and allowed the doors to close. That should have kept her out of it.

  The trembling came to a head all at once, thrashing violently as if to collapse the building, and then silencing so quickly it seemed to have been nothing more than a hallucination. A complete stillness filled the dense air and I was completely alone.

  And then the front door swung open.

  "Dante Butcher, you say?"

  I trained my eyes on the source of the spectral muttering. A lanky figure materialized on the threshold. It was a sad imitation of a human with ratty patches of orange hair and skin blotched with scabs. He was both flesh and ghostlike at the same time and had the urgent twitches of a heroin addict. I'd never seen this man in my life before, but I had felt him. He was instantly familiar.

  "Soren."

  A bothersome tick spasmed in the man's left cheek as he tried to smile. "That name isn't mine here," he said.

  Of course that was true. Soren was the name of the man this shade had possessed, the name of the man I had freed. This spirit was an entirely different person.