Dwelling Solo RPG Session 7: The Gehenna Task List
BASEMENT
Conjure: The basement is bathed in a sickly red glow. Everything I imagined from the most fear drenched moments of my childhood are summoned here in the basement around me. Bodies, forms, beings etched into shadow, and wall, floor, and even the red light that is spreading through the basement.
They seem to mill around and at the same time not move at all: In the naming sounds of this hell, they are called CORdy, Derek, and molmolmolmolmolRIC, but also sometimes they are called Krabeltst or Elemena-tuh-tuh-tuh-tuh — or maybe these are simply other words they use often.
In the light of other places they would be handsome protectors or kids who could sell you something useful at a fair price, but here they will, with the same charming half-interest as in the other lights, help themselves to the marrow. CORDeeee or is it molmolmolmolmolRIC are in charge of a great camera rig, which they move around as they banter.
The rig is like a bulbous scepter of fused seeing devices with a single metal stalk and tripod, lenses of all sizes jutting out. It is not always clear who is holding or moving this array. They seem to understand not only which way it’s supposed to point, but that whatever it captures will not cloud one happy afternoon on patios full of the handsome and ravenous.
They don’t bother to issue direction or let me in on the script; they have already won in the last scene under the light of other worlds, I think. There are old Minolta 35mms and many telephotos, hooded security cams and phone screens; the Gordian recesses of their cabling glisten with fluids.
There are women also — maybe three, maybe four — called Mllllghean, and gribn and Melanimanianuhnuhnuh. These Friday casuals, they gather and chatter as producers or directors would with extras in earshot. It doesn’t matter if the help hears the plan. What are they going to do?
Their overlapping chatter is a train of rushing cuneiform cars at the edge of the bed…there is a bed now, by the way — an immense bed set violently against what I think the basement should allow.
I am naked under the comforter, the top edge of it arched enough to see the personnel. I am trying to burrow into the bedding, but the edges of it give with the room’s breath and the smallest gap, though a body’s length away, jolts my legs into fits of weak pedaling motions.
Some of the women stand, some sit at the edge of the bed as they burble to each other in the dream tongue. Simultaneously I want to be joined under there or left unseen, but in their talk, gales of oblique assignments batter me, planting false memories of emails or spreadsheets stacked with barked orders in the same unforgiving dialect.
I am being transmitted directions in the ur-language of every deadline, the soundbed of every two-minute span before you’re three minutes late — of hallways you failed to navigate in buildings where you didn’t belong.
The senseless instructions keep coming. Gribn and Mllllghean keep laughing and I want them to know I need either rest or touch, either will do. The boys reposition their rig for the fourth time, the air pressurized with the hatred of its seeing. I writhe again in the void of the blanket that refuses to cover or hide me.
I never noticed the small hinged door of the soot trap nor knew there was a wood furnace down here; there are several of these tin doors now set into the brick at irregular spacing, and Melanimanianuhnuhnuh or one of the others goes to one of the doors every so often, not breaking a sentence, and admits another rust-colored bird from a new door, which flaps out with a puff of ash and alights near my pillows.
They have rust eyes and black, rectangular pupils and they, too, wait for me to execute instructions. They arrive constantly.
Sleep, God give me sleep, one bundle pinched at the edges against the vapor of a poison moon or give me one body to hold that muffles this language forever. One cuppable butt in the night would be the rondure of one perfect word in the manifold unasked questions of the savior’s tongue.
God, give me rest.
The instructions keep coming.
Somewhere diagonal and down from my heels, I feel a rush of cold as the bottom corner of the comforter is raised again.
Next: Back to the First Floor