The Tell-tale Squonck

As an observer, 3rd class or not, Rachel was forced to be a diurnal creature. Staying up so late enough that she wound up on the last bus back from Manqu’s had only been accomplished with the aid of Joss’s delicious and spiked cuisine. Now, she had been summoned to a crucial meeting which started so late that the last bus would deposit her there with hours to kill.

The red-eye was almost deserted. Not a single suspiciously suspicious character boarded, only tired-looking night workers, and only one or two at a time. For the last 20 minutes of the trip, it was just her in the back and the driver in the front, and although she thought she preferred that to the jam-packed condition, she was finding that isolation was just the other side of the coin of notoriety. Either side of that coin would buy her dysphoria.

The bus arrived at the end of the line. Now the driver, no longer harassed by schedule, opened the door and left it open as she collected her lunch bag and other odds and ends.

Looking out the window, Rachel felt no hurry to disembark. The bus stop was next to a huge vehicle maintenance station lit by harsh floodlights, yet deserted at this hour. On the other side of the street was a giant waste processing plant. There was no sign of activity in either, and even through the safety glass of the bus she could hear the desolate buzz of the intense security lights.

The driver got up and gave her a questioning glance. Rachel rose reluctantly and trekked to the front, nodding to her as she left, without real eye contact. She forced herself to follow the map to the rendezvous by thinking of the friends she would meet there after her long wait.

Her journey on foot did nothing to assuage her alienation. It was a interminable-feeling trek through a hopefully deserted ghetto of fuel depots, recycling centers, receiving and shipping facilities, and power substations, to the huge yet scruffy warehouse-garage where she had been told to wait.

As she approached the sprawling building, low-slung except for the central section, where a pair of four-story garage doors dominated the facade with their implications of behemoths in motion, a fulminant fleur de mal blossomed in her brain, a flashback to her recent “ice cream truck incident,” despite the fact that it had occurred outside a much smaller garage, in broad daylight.

The intrusive memory made her shy away from the building itself. To her surprise, to the left of the projecting and overshadowing garage section, she observed a small tree set back from the driveway. It offered some minimal screening from potential prying eyes, and somewhat of a respite from the sterile, hard-edged, hominid-made world she had exclusively inhabited since getting off the bus. She made her way over and sat down on the tree’s little patch of grass, making sure a spray of leaves intervened between her and the building. For once thankful for the Sprawn City climate, which in the middle of the night could be described as balmy, but wishing for a smoother backrest than the tree trunk, she tried to settle in for the long wait.

The freak-out factor at the other garage had been the monstrous cacophony, while at this one it was the total silence. She had been afraid she would fall asleep but the long, anxiety-ridden walk had driven her heart rate up, and now the lack of stimulus from the external world caused her imagination to pump to the point where the danger seemed more of screaming than of passing out.

Rachel knew she had a long time to wait, and that her panic could make it an eternity. Fear of learning how little time had passed swamped all other fears. With iron will, she rejected all compulsions to consult her timepiece. The absence of sense-input was profound enough that she entered a stretch of time that paradoxically, could only be described by its lack of descriptors. It was an event-free interlude that could only be ended by an event.

But what if the ending sense-input was so feeble it might not qualify as real? That event was a sound was so faint that she questioned whether it ever could be validated consensually. No matter, there would never be another person to ask about it.

But whether it existed or not, what was it? Robust sense impressions had a way of presenting themselves with ready-made descriptions, as though proffering calling cards, for example:

Ice Cream Truck

(if you couldn't already tell from the tinkly music!)

Walkups Welcome

The sound in question, if it really was a sound, made no civilized gestures. If it existed, it was sneaky, not a sound that wanted business or renown, but a paranoid sound, creeping below the radar. She had no word for it, but she had a feeling from it, and that feeling was frightened.

Rachel cursed the day she had noticed the fall in the reservoir level.

For a long time there was only her heart beating in her ears. When that faded to nothing, she soon teetered over the abyss of sleep. As she began to fall, a noise snared her mind and jerked it back.

It was soft but a noise, too ugly to be dignified by the term “sound,” not a straightforward knock, tap or bump, but a sound suggestive of a mechanical intermediary, a vulgar bubbly popping made more disturbing by being on the verge of audibility. It came from below, as though a suction-cup footed colossus, remarkably quiet for its size, was trying to sneak around upside down, with feet attached to the roof of a subterranean passage.

The extremely faint squoncks seemed to come in groups, separated by silent intervals. This pattern continued for long enough that Rachel, no longer iron-willed, began counting and found that each group had 14 individual sounds. She was pondering what that might mean when, immediately after one group, a different, even more disturbing sound began-a rasping, yet sibilant scrape that lasted just a few deciseconds before pausing, then repeated with subtle changes, like consecutive phrases in a mockingbird’s song.

Frightened as she was, Rachel maintained the presence of mind to look at her timepiece. 3:28 AM- 2 minutes before the meeting time. But they would never be early ... Late, yes , because there must be so many obstacles ... But early?

Nevertheless, she girded her loins in the same way she had on the observation tower stairs, and tried to discern the direction of the sounds.

In the garage ... Just where I don't want to go ...

But she owed it to Manqu, Yarawi and the Huari cause to investigate whatever was lurking in the bizarrely hypertrophied building. She forced herself out of her patch-of-grass-refuge beside the tree and slipped softly around the corner. Her heart had resumed its pounding in her inner ears.