[pirate witch]: 524.Novels.NaNoWriMo 2007 Chapter 6

It was harder to find the apartment in question than Livia had first expected. The street that she had chosen to go down was very long, and very dark, the shadows cast by the tall buildings making stripes across the sidewalk in front of her. It didn’t quiet her nerves much, and her nerves were already taking enough strain whenever she remembered that the person she was going to find was a known drug dealer, and that she was the daughter of a cop. She didn’t know, of course, that the known drug dealer was grumpily sitting over his typewriter at the time, downing tumbler after tumbler of rum and muttering to himself. 

There was a small band of teenage boys sitting at the corner near an abandoned drug store, one of them absentmindedly strumming a broken guitar and the other fashioning a drum set of sorts from several upended trash cans and one live duck. The duck was trying its best to escape, and as Livia watched it flew lopsidedly through the window of a packaging store nearby. It was strange, to say the least, but Livia took the strangeness of the situation as a sign that she was on the right path. 

The quacking of the duck and the screams of the boss lady at the packaging store were still ringing in Livia’s ears as she crossed a bridge that went over a muddy river that consisted mainly of slime and dying lily pads. It wasn’t a pleasant part of town, to be sure, and she was almost positive that she was lost. Lost, it seemed, was a word that could be used to describe not only Livia, but also the buildings that found themselves on the street that she was walking. Very few of them seemed to be inhabited, and most of these sounded nearly as dead as the rest of the ghost offices and apartments. The only thing that gave a hint of life to the entire street was the whistling of a blind woman and the clacking sound that her cane made against the bricks that made up the water fountain she was walking by. 

All in all, it was an eerie, disconcerting place and Livia shivered uncomfortably. She made up her mind very quickly that she didn’t know where on earth the street that she was looking for when a pit bull growled loudly at her and started thrashing itself against the chain link fence that was obviously put up to keep it in control. The fence was not doing a good job, however, because there were several large holes in it that were just the size that a large and angry dog would make by barreling through the metal. 

It took considerably less time for Livia to make her way back to the center of town, where she saw the comforting sight of the fountain that she had been at earlier that week. More people were around it this time, and Livia didn’t really feel like seeing anyone that she knew, so she kept to the shadows, dodging around people who got in her way. The address was now just a smudged ink stain on her hand, and she hoped that she could remember the street name correctly.

Through the crowd, Livia spotted the tech guy who worked at the theater where she did ballet performances looking in her direction. She didn’t know if he could recognize her or if he was just looking that way by chance, but she decided that it would be best not to risk it. He was an obnoxious fellow, always thinking that he was best friends with everyone whom he had ever had a conversation with, and telling people about the “heart to heart” chats that they had shared. Livia didn’t mind him nearly as much as the other dancers did, but she didn’t want to have to create polite conversation either. Not to mention, she had disappeared so nicely that she didn’t want to ruin the effect, she liked being off the radar for a while, a stranger in her own town.

The nearest door was the bookstore that Livia had seen Katrina in before, the one that had been locked somehow. This was the first time since leaving the hotel that she had remembered Katrina, which was strange, since she had been appearing absolutely everywhere for the past few days, and her continued absence for nearly a day should have been a surprising relief for Livia. She reasoned that it was much easier to forget about someone when you were glad that they were gone. 

She hadn’t meant to actually browse through the bookshop when she ducked through the door, but there were so few people inside that she didn’t really have any other option. Without a crowd to blend into, Livia shrank back into the rows and rows of bookshelves. It was not an organized store, like the bookshops that Livia usually went to. There was no strict design to the decor, not that there was much decor at all. The bookshelves were all made of different wood, some of the deepest cherry wood and some that looked as though they had been sanded the previous day. These shelves were haphazardly crammed throughout the interior of the store. One had obviously been too tall when it was purchased and had been sawed in two so that it could be crammed in the space provided between the cracked ceiling and the uneven floor.

“My mother would have liked this place,” Livia mused out loud, trailing her fingers along the spines of books. She appeared to be in the history section, for the old, linen bound books that were at her eyes’ view boasted knowledge about Ancient Greece and the Napoleonic wars. Livia had never enjoyed history while she was in high school, and if she ever went to college she would not be studying it but the books made her smile regardless. 

A muffled thump came from the row behind Livia. It was followed by several more of the same noise and some angry words in a language that was probably Yiddish. Livia took her hand off of the book she had been examining and went to see what had happened. 

The old man who owned the store was sitting on a foot stool, staring in despair at a mess of books that seemed to have leapt from their respective shelves with an amount of might that one wouldn’t necessarily attribute to books. The man was holding his elbow and winced as he bent over to pick up one of the fallen volumes. Livia felt bad for him and, as she was the only other person in the store, obliged to help him clean up. As she bent down to scoop up some of the heavy tomes of unsought after knowledge her knees made a loud, almost metallic, popping sound. The man winced again at the sound of this.

“Early arthritis,” he wheezed, pointing to her legs with a gnarled finger. When Livia stood back up to replace the books to a shelf, any shelf at all since they didn’t seem to have a specific home, they popped again. This time, it hurt.

“Are you sure?” she asked. She wouldn’t have been surprised, dancers often got arthritis if they had been dancing for the majority of their life, as she had done, but it wasn’t her ideal problem. Arthritis at the age of nineteen meant absolute hell at the age of forty five.

“No,” the man replied, and staggered upright from the stool. The electronic bell at the front of the store had chimed, announcing the entrance of a possible customer. He walked, bent nearly in half, to the desk at the front where there was an old fashioned cash register but no computer. The sight of the old man limping over to do his job made Livia both sad and impressed at the same time. She could imagine her father doing that as a police officer, if he ever returned back to work.

“Don’t think about that,” she reprimanded herself.  As a distraction, she turned around and walked among the bookshelves a second time. She reached the science section and decided to turn into it, not feeling a need to go through the row that was stuffed full of books on psychology. The sight of the smiling doctors on the front of the brightly colored covers were enough to deter her. 

At the end of the science section there was a door without a sign on it. Livia was thinking about going through it, just to waste time until she was sure that the tech boy had gone, when she looked more closely at it. This was the exact same door that had lead nowhere in particular at the hotel, down to the carvings and the cracks in the wood. It was strange, to be sure, and Livia couldn’t figure out exactly how she should react. 

If her initial idea had been to try opening the door and maybe discover where it actually led to, that plan was quickly nixed when she tried to put her hand on the handle, as she had done just like any other door at the hotel. When her hand stretched out this time to grasp what she assumed would be cool and brass, she just felt air. After close examination, it was made clear that where her hand was, she should have been able to touch the door. She could see it, she just couldn’t touch it.

“It’s the drugs,” said a voice in Livia’s head, and she decided to believe it. The drugs, it turned out, were actually to blame for this. Livia hadn’t been counting, because that would just be damned strange, but she had not had a whiff of gold dust for almost three days. After the amount that she inhaled in her kitchen when she first found out about her father’s addiction, three days should have made Livia extremely ill. Just as she was wondering whether she had become hooked accidentally, a sickening wave of fear swept over her. 

It was the type of fear that most young children got before they first stepped on stage in a school play or dance recital. Not a rational fear, oh no, but rather pure terror that skipped the head all together and instead began in her solar plexus. Sweat coated Livia’s palms in an instant and goose bumps ran all the way up her spine. It was not pleasant, and she held onto a bookshelf to steady herself. 

By the time Livia had curled up onto the floor, cramps were seizing her up at the stomach like knives or stones being thrown directly at her. This too passed quickly, though, and within ten minutes all that remained was the feeling of cold deep in Livia’s bones and on her skin, and mild nausea. She stood up, trying very hard to keep herself from passing out on the floor. The sensation had left her nervous and inspired the urgent need to find out about Gold Dust.

She started to leave the store, pushing past the man who was standing in front of the desk asking a question of the old man who Livia had encountered before. She felt his hand grip her around the elbow, keeping her from moving completely out of the doorway. She turned around to see that he wasn’t looking at her, but was instead paying the man and thanking him for a bag with a few books in it.

“Could you let go of me, please?” Livia asked, her head spinning. This wasn’t normal, not at all.

“I’m sorry miss,” he said, loosening his grip but not relinquishing it, “but I noticed that you didn’t seem so well as you were walking by.” His eyes were really dark blue, and when they finally met Livia’s brown ones she understood what he was trying to say.

“Oh, thank you, I am feeling quite woozy right now,” she responded, pulling her arm out of his grip but not quite leaving. “I don’t suppose you could point me in the right direction to a place that could make me better?”

With a barely perceptible wink, the man nodded and took a pen out of his shirt pocket. The pocket protector that he wore almost fell out of his checkered shirt as he did this, and Livia watched it with here eyes narrowed, not wanting it to fall. The man wrote an address on the back of his receipt and handed it to Livia. She compared it to the one that was illegible on her hand. Although she couldn’t be possible, they looked like a match. The length of the street name looked the same, and since she didn’t have anything else to put her trust in, she deposited in the good will of the drug addicted of mankind and put the slip of paper in her back pocket. It barely fit, as the jeans she wore were too small, but she convinced herself that this was good, and that this way the address would not be lost a second time. The idea that she was getting fat passed right over Livia’s preoccupied head. 

It was really becoming ridiculous, Livia thought, the amount of times that she had stood in the center of town staring at all of the different streets she could choose to walk down. This time, at least, she had a destination. Picking a different street than the one that had led her to the bizarre place she had recently escaped from, she tried to keep her achille’s tendons from cramping up to bad. The years of dance had made it nearly impossible for her to put her foot completely flat on the pavement, and all the walking that she had done that day was really aggravating her muscles. A break from dance was lovely, and made this strange vacation a bit more enjoyable.