Ayden in a Dark Room

Ayden sat in his car, parked with the lights off in the side parking lot of a convenience store that was closed for the night. He had spent the last two hours scouring his apartment, looking for anything that was out of place, anything that might be missing. Nothing. He had been almost ready to write off the entire escapade at the fountain earlier that evening as some kind of hoax...

But the way it had looked; the lighter had just popped into existence right in front of him. Whoever these people were, they weren't kidding about what they told him. They might be insane, but they weren't kidding.

But two hours of searching his apartment yielded nothing missing. Nothing in his car had disappeared. Nothing in any of his clothes. Everything in his home was the same, right down to the rocks he had brought home from Yellowstone three years before. He had been ready to right it all off and celebrate the witching hour with a cold brew, when a dark thought occurred to him.

So now he sat in his car, glaring across a deserted street and down a dark alleyway. He had driven in circles for twenty minutes, and was quite convinced he hadn't been followed there. His eyes darted around, roaming over the intersection on which the gas station sat, seeing that no one was watching. He quickly rose out of his car and crossed the street, walking around a concrete wall that sat adjacent to a convenience store, and paced softly down the alleyway behind.

Moments later he stood outside a door; it was a thick, metal door with faded and cracked paint, just like the plain concrete wall that it lead through. The light was poor in this alley way, and he felt comfortable that he had not been seen as he pulled out a set of keys, clumsily unlocked the deadbolt on the door, and pulled it open, creaking loudly, entered, and closed it behind him.

He stood in the dark for a minute, taking in the silence. The scents of dust and paint were heavy on the air. The room was chilly- it had been a cold day and the building had no heating powered. He fumbled in the dark for a moment, until his hands found a power strip hanging from the ceiling in the dark. A pair of florescent bulbs flickered for a while, taking a long time to actually fill the large space with any semblance of light.

The back wall which had just entered had two small windows; each was papered over from within, and had bars on both the outside and in. The two doorways leading forward from this room were dark, covered with plastic sheeting. Ayden stood, surveying the space: To his left he saw a set of heavy metal shelves lining one side of the room, filled with assorted canned goods, bottled water, various household chemicals, and four 5-gallon cans of gasoline. To his right the room was dominated by a large something covered by a tarp, with a small set of shelves containing a set of car batteries and a couple of tool-boxes.

He let out a short breath- relief. "Well at least the provisions are safe..." He mumbles softly to himself.

He pressed a second button on the power-strip that hangs down from the ceiling and light began to flicker through one of the doorways beyond; a much larger space, at lest fifteen by twenty, though it appears far more constrictive. The space was lit by only a handful of florescent bulbs along the ceiling, and Ayden turned on a number of desk lamps as he walked in. The room was filled with cabinets and bookshelves, lined up in broken rows and interrupted isles. Cork-boards and chalkboards lay spaced around the room, most filled with a menagerie of pictures, photographs, papers, etc. Books and moving boxes cover most flat surfaces in the space. Near a sidewall there a large desk was set up with a computer and other equipment.

He entered the larger chamber and stood with a soft sigh. "This is going to be a long night..." He crossed the chamber, powered up the computer, and opened all the drawers of the desk. He rooted around in all the drawers of the desk, occasionally pulling out pens, a stapler, various cables, disks, and other odds and ends.

"Right, of course. Nothing simple or easy would go missing..." Sighing again, he pulled out a set of folders from a drawer of the desk and sat in front of the computer screen. He clicked through a number of password screens and went into his records. "Alright, lets start at the top... Antarctic topography... 27 files, 107 pages. ATF activities..." His eyes fluttered back and forth between the screen and the pages of the folder in front of him. "8 files, 32 pages. Bilderburg Group... 13 files, 86 pages."

With that, he lifted one of the folders, stood, and walked to a cabinet nearby. He opened one of the drawers and began counting off folders and pages. Ten minutes later, he sat back down at the computer. "Boothe diaries... 2 files, 41 pages. Byrd Mission logs... 4 files, 57 pages." He lifted the folder again, turned, and looked up at the dozens of cabinets, bookshelves, and containers that fill the room. He sighed heavily with a notable slump to his shoulders, and walked off to another cabinet.

It was almost five in the morning when Ayden sat back down to the computer having just confirmed that all his information on N.S.A.'s ECHELON program was still in place. He looked at the time, rubbed his eyes, and realized that he would have to leave if he was to avoid notice departing. He closed down the computer, promising himself that he would finish the job the next night, and started turning off the lamps in the chamber. He walked back into the rear room and entered the other doorway, pulling on the string that dangled from the ceiling.

The tiny bathroom illuminated cleanly, and he washed his face from the long night's work. He stared into his reflection for a long time, and eventually spoke to it too. "I am not crazy to be looking for something missing. I know what I saw. I am not crazy."

Shaking his head, he turns and opens a locker on the bathroom wall. He peers at an old photo hanging on the side of the locker door; a pair of young people, in their late teens, a boy and girl, both dressed in deep red and black, with a snowy hill behind them. The girl is striking an evocative pose and the boy is staring at her with a mixture of emotions- it might be lust, laughter, adoration or fear. Maybe even love.

Ayden shakes his head and reaches into the locker, pulling out a shirt and jacket. He begins disrobing, setting aside the clothes of the previous day, and changes. He is a few steps into this process before his hand reaches into the locker and comes down on an empty shelf. With a furrowed brow, he looks in, shuffles a few things around, and looks through the other shelves of the locker. Confused, he looks around the small bathroom with darting eyes.

"Where the hell are my clean boxers?"

(This is exactly what I meant for Interludes. Awesome job, Klutz.)