All Your Fates (Currently editing/updating)

Chapter 9: And a Dash of Pepper

I was more than two hours late for work when I finally strolled into Atticus's cramped broom-closet sized office and knocked on his door. Atticus registered my existence with a stiff smile from in between the towers of paperwork on his desk. You would think for a guy whose research depended largely on the latest sophisticated technology, Atticus would be a little less old school and use a computer. Atticus wouldn't even communicate by email. Everything had to be either by phone or carrier pigeon. His words.

"So I'm here," I announced, leaning in the doorway, arms folded, in a very non-committal pose. Just because I'm here and accepted your money doesn't mean I'm staying. Take that, Jerk-face.

"So I see," grunted Atticus from behind his desk, not looking up, while painstakingly writing out handwritten notes in his pigeon scrawl. He made no other motion.

Sigh. Even when I'm two hours late, he still manages to make me wait and waste my time. I was surprised he didn't use a quill pen and make me run outside to skin a deer to make parchment.

When Atticus was fully satisfied he had tortured me enough, he suddenly rose from his chair. Without saying a word, he waddled past me at the door. So I followed him wordlessly, assuming that was his wish.

Atticus and I didn't talk while strolling along the long, dark, empty corridor with our four legs and a cane. Sure I had a lot of questions, (and accusations to hurl), but the less said between us, the better. Instead, I kept trying to slow down my impatient pace to his old fart's mosey. Besides, any talking would have been hampered by the echoes generated from the low ceilings and polished linoleum floor. The building might have looked gleaming and brilliant and modern back in its heyday, but now it looked and felt like the crumbling, faceless institution it was. We could just as easily have been roaming the decaying halls of an abandoned school, prison, or a psychic ward. Not fit for restoration, the building was slated to be demoed and a brand spanking new student residence built on its spot...any year now.

Although the semester was in full swing, not that many students ever visited the lower depths of this department's floor...unless they had a really esoteric reason for being here. It saw research fellows who had been turned down from every other school but ours, visitors from abroad Master's Music and Technology programs who wanted to comfort themselves on how rich their impoverished departments were in comparison, and new students who were looking for a different building entirely and managed to lose themselves here. To be honest, the unpopulated remoteness of the department was the only thing that kept me from nearly crapping my pants when anyone new and strange passed by. I felt like a fraud walking the halls of the institution that I had been recently and unceremoniously kicked out of. And although not banned from the premises, I kept feeling like the "academic police" in the guise of Donald Sutherland would suddenly rear round the corner to violently thrust a pointed finger and screech, "FOR SHAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMME!"

After Atticus led me through a previously unknown labyrinth of dark dingy corridors, he turned a corner to a long narrow hallway sporting an ominous, large, metal, red fire door at the end. The kind of door that made you wonder what in tarnation was being kept trapped behind it for the good and safety of humanity. Despite my misgivings that this doorway was surely the Gateway to Hell, Atticus took out a jailer's ring of old school metal keys, unlocked the door with shaky hands and heaved it open. The door squealed loudly for oil before clanging against the peeling painted plaster inside. A cloud of musk tinged with the delightful aroma of rat pallets and black mold spores hit my face and so I pinched my nostrils close and took a step inside.

I stood at the entrance, agape, not even able to process the chaos the room was in. A single beam of murky light managed to break through the filth-covered panes of glass near the ceiling (leading to the bramble bush outside) and cast its gloomy haze on the orgy of bizarre objects strewn around the room. By the looks of things, this cabinet of curiosities might have very well have been forgotten since easily the sixties. Rickety metal cabinets, skewed out of shape, were stocked full of twisted anthropological masks, giant jars of floating specimens (which I prayed weren't human remains), and an assortment of rotting stuffed gnarly toothed rodents, leathery lizards and feathery fowl. Rows of semi-bleached skeletons, rusty music stands, and wartime filing cabinets were crowded beside stacks of monochrome abstract paintings that were too rotted to invest time identifying.