One Thousand Words

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At the same time the White City glittered and glimmered along the Lakefront, promising a bright future of electric lights, clean water, and a police force that prevented crime instead of chasing it after the fact, the man known as H H Holmes was firmly ensconced in his “castle,” murdering women with whom he’d had sexual affairs. Every light has a source of darkness, after all.

After his capture and arrest, investigators found a single, perfect footprint etched in the enamel of his incinerator door. They surmised that he had coated the floor with acid, and one victim had gotten that acid on her feet, burning her footprint into the door as she tried futilely to kick her way free. The City tore down the building in 1938, and erected a large post office on the site. As with most government buildings of the era, it has a bomb shelter in the basement.

The door to the bomb shelter is marked with a clear, perfect, dainty footprint.

The door has been replaced twice.

The footprint reappears.

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It is an old folk remedy: when someone in the household is ill with flu, place a cut up onion in a crockery dish near their bed. Refresh the onion as it shrivels or dries. This will lessen the severity of the illness in those afflicted, and prevent the spread of the ailment to others in the home.

Some take it further; during flu season, they place cut onions in crockery dishes near all window sills and doorways.

Modern science scoffs at this idea, that germs can be drawn into a vegetable and absorbed.

It is not germs the onion absorbs.

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It’s a hotel, one of the old ones. The rooms are large, spacious, with plenty of room to store clothing and shoes and your empty luggage; they’re large enough to live in genteelly, which was common once. The large windows, flanked by heavy drapery, look out over Lake Michigan.

One of the spacious, well-appointed rooms has a large dent in the wall.

This is an upscale hotel, and not the sort of place that accumulates dents and dings and stains. Every time the large, round dent is noticed, it is repaired. And soon the dent is found again. Sometimes there is an explanation: a hotel guest tripped and hit the wall with a bowling ball, a room cleaner banged something into it accidentally. It is quickly patched, only to become dented again.

The dent is probably there right now, although currently a large and heavy piece of furniture is against that wall, hiding the dent. Out of sight, the theory goes, out of mind.

Yet guests who spend the night in the room all report the same dream: that of a dark haired, large eyed child with no mouth standing by the side of the bed, slender arms outreached as though imploring wordlessly for some sort of assistance. There are heavy footfalls, in the dream, and the child looks over his shoulder. A rough hand closes on his shoulder, no other body part visible in the thick darkness, and drags the child away. There is a sudden wet smacking noise, and then silence.

The dent returns. The dream recurs.

It is an otherwise pleasant room.

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Forty feet below street level, beneath the water mains and electrical lines and telecommunications lines, there are 62 feet of tunnels and connections. Freight in the form of packages, deliveries, and coal (as well as removal of rubbish and ash) were moved beneath the streets from their construction in 1906 until their closure in 1959, and cool subterranean air was drawn upwards to cool movie theaters and businesses.

In 2002, Joseph Konopka was arrested on terrorist charges after being discovered secreting containers of cyanide and other dangerous chemicals in an unused storage area in the CTA’s Blue Line. The entrances to the unused freight tunnels were then welded shut, to the disappointment of urban explorers and the relief of those who know what non-human entities continued to use the tunnels.

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Like many large, old cities Chicago is full of high rise buildings with marble entryways and dimly lit brass-grilled elevators. These buildings, when labeling the floors, skip 13. This is a desperate attempt to avoid the bad luck associated with the number thirteen.

It is rumored that if one stops an elevator between the 12th and 14th floor in certain buildings, the elevator will open its creaking doors to reveal a still and dusty 13th floor: one that is perhaps abandoned, perhaps the site of a great and terrible crime, perhaps inhabited by ghosts or demons or the trapped souls of dead office workers.

These rumors are false.

There is nothing magical or ominous about the thirteenth floor of any building, at least in Chicago.

It is the elevator shafts that one must watch out for.

(Happy Friday the 13th, everyone.)

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Chicago, like all of America, does not have Fairies native to it. Some immigrants brought their pookas and brownies and kobalds and rusalkas with them, but most did not fare very well. Their places were already filled, for the most part, by the dark and secret beings native to this land.

The ones which did survive, of course, were the most terrible and stubborn. They are the blood drinkers, the shadow lurkers, and the stealers of children.

They do not literally steal children, no. They do not take a precious, tender infant and replace it with an enchanted stick or an elderly Fairy, some baby masquerade. Nor are they some groping excuse to explain away Autism or cerebral palsy or hydrocephaly.

No, they evict and devour the humanness of the child and fill that child’s body with themselves. The child looks and acts normal, grows and develops as normal, smiles and plays and throws tantrums as normal.

But at night, when you check on that child, and their eyes are open, you can tell. In the darkness their true nature is visible. Their eyes are sunken, dark pits; sclera, pupil, and iris all the same inky color.

When there are enough of them, when they are strong enough, they will begin preying on adults.

(Sorry this is late, Nesko had the day off for Veteran’s Day so we spent the entire day running errands. I need to set these up to auto post.)

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There is a small dry cleaner/tailor shop underneath the El. Across the street from it is the station, which has a snack shop and newspaper stand. It’s squeezed into a space exactly the width of the tracks, and the posters advertising services are sun bleached and faded. There is a closed sign on the door, and idle passers by who hesitate in front of the large window never see personnel inside the shop. It gives every indication of being locked and vacant.

However, if you try the door between 7am and 7pm, you will find it open. The bell over the door is loud and jarring, and it will summon a Chinese woman in her 40s. If you simply ask questions about prices and hours of operation, she will look at you stonily and not answer. If you bring a stained article of clothing, she will tell you to come back in three hours; when you do, the article will be cleaned of any and all stains, including those difficult to remove human protein stains.

The true wonder, however, is the tailoring services the shop provides.

Bring in a single article of clothing that is too large or too small, and state that it needs to be altered to fit you. The woman will come around the counter and measure your entire body three times, including parts of you that you wouldn’t think need measuring– the circumference of your skull, for instance, or the span of your hand. She will tell you to come back in one week, and charge you twenty dollars.

If you manage to return in one week, you will find that the article of clothing fits you marvelously and is immensely flattering; further, you will find yourself more charismatic and well liked than you normally are. People will show themselves eager to impress you and curry your favor. Each wearing of the article of clothing, however, will deduct one month extra from your life span.

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There are fifteen buildings still standing in Chicago which have plaster and lathe interior walls. Some of the buildings are single family residences, others are apartment buildings.

If you live in one of these buildings for at least three months, it is possible to hide something in the spaces between the walls. No matter the size or shape of the thing you want to hide, it will somehow fit. Once hidden away, it will remain there until the building falls (or is torn down), or until the City burns once more.

There is no way of knowing if your building is one of the fifteen until you try to hide something within the walls.

At night, when you sit at your computer or watch television, when you lie in bed trying to sleep, and you hear a faint scrabbling in the walls; a rustle and a rattle that might be mice or might be plaster falling? That is the sound of secret things, of hidden things, trying to escape.

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You see them, sometimes, squat square one story buildings made of limestone. The windows are narrow slits, or nonexistant, and there’s a square plaque over the door saying “post office” or “municipal building” or something else vague. Sometimes there’s a very PWA carving of a blocky eagle clutching lightning bolts, or a design made of three thick straight lines. There’s always the “Y” symbol that Chicago uses, that reminder of the Chicago River’s odd shape.

The buildings always look abandoned; abandoned, but pristine. The windows, if they exist, are dark. The doorways are gated with rubbish blown against them. The small parking lot, if there is one, is surrounded by a sagging chain link fence; the asphalt is cracked and weedy. But the building is untouched by grafiti, nobody has tried to make a home in the doorway, no windows have been smashed nor have they been borded up. The buildings simply wait.

If you enter one, you will find it larger inside than it should be. The floors are clean, although worn from years of being walked upon. The murals that line the walls, representing a City at work, a People working together, are fresh looking and unfaded.

There is a dim glow to the inside of the building, enough to navigate by. If you are able to get to the center of the building you will find a small trap door set into the floor. Oil the hinges of the door, grasp the iron ring, and lift. The open door will reveal a small storage area so dark that it seems to absorb light. Reach in and you will find a small, square box made of bark. Open it, careful not to snap the string made of woven grasses, and inside you will find a human eyeball.

If you swallow this eyeball, you will be able to see beneath the masks that people — and those masquerading as people– wear as they walk the streets and sit in their homes. If you do not put an eye of your own, voluntarily, in the box and reseal it in its hiding place, however, you will not survive the year.

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There is a small, delicate-petalled pink rose with long powdery yellow stamens that is native to the Chicago area. It is also very endangered.

A tincture made of 5 drops of that rose’s oil, 1 drop of almond oil, and 2 drops of dog’s blood, will grease any political wheels. It can be slipped into coffee, passed from flesh to flesh via handshake, or mixed into ink.

It must be reapplied daily or the results wear off quickly.

The rose will not grow outside of certain areas of Chicago.

Some have tried to substitute human blood for dog’s blood, thinking that will increase the potency of the tincture. It does, but the results are more likely to twist and betray the user.