Grayling Junction - Chapter Thirteen

Freyja's Dream

A long, windowless wall painted blinding white. The colour is like new bandages. At the far end of the room the white continues over a smaller wall. The head of the room is a wall with a set of heavy double doors that are always locked. A toughened glass window looks onto a tight, white corridor. The remaining wall consists of a long, smoked glass window, the brown tinge defying hope.

There are tubular steel tables and chairs, painted the same blistering white as the walls. Immense metal bolts, also creamed in persistent white, hold the furniture in place. There is no possibility of any of the furniture being used to break a window.
There are no sharp edges.

A man thin enough to pass as a shadow approaches on soundless feet. His hair is a clutter of spiders climbing within and without one another. He opens a long jaw and instead of words there is a quivering of yellowed teeth and the sound of wind howling over a winter moorland...his ideas are not voiced, but sneak in through a door marked consciousness...
He talks of Mister Thomas, the old man of Talacharn, as he points through the treacle window. The late Mister Thomas is to be seen in an icy yard, smoking cigarettes as he paces within a ring of elder trees.

Doors are bound with frowns and all the windows have folded arms.

With frantic movements her gaze echoes around the room, trapped between corners that make no home and angles of non-exit. No matter the eloquence, the carefully knitted arguments, no exit will show a face.

Attempting an escape bare feet slither on floors polished to a diamante shine. Sideways sliding she howls like an animal rearing against the cold clutch of the abattoir.

The floor is heavy with Michaelmas daisies seething with the eye blind reek of disinfectant as memories flicker like a bad bulb. They flare...but as they might be caught...they fade, and fade, and fade anew.
Through the flourished weave of dreaming she drowns, her mouth open in a sagging, wet scream, as recollections draw back, into to the depths.