Why would God *ever* listen to someone like you?

  No matter how much space Ruby puts between himself and the lobby’s wretched, helpless voices, nothing seems to change. It feels like a prison, the path of the ghoul – a sobering place where his demented laughter dies and every step he takes feels like the first.

  One died, and it didn’t bother you… he takes a momentary pause, frustration flashing in his eyes as he watches his vibrant flames wither to damn all. Not a sear remains where they raged… stop.

  Every bend he takes through the hotel’s narrow, white innards leads to the same exact modality – an endless array of poorly numbered doors, each one looking just as insignificant as the last, and none the least bit capable of alluding to the way down he seeks.

  Another died, and you only pretended to care… grimacing, the addict shifts his gaze to the shockingly unsoiled, marble floor, and pinches the crumpled skin of his forehead… please, fuck off.

  A pattern of glares, spawning from the walls’ shiny, golden light fixtures, and reflecting off the polished, marble floor, does not help his onsetting headache in the slightest. Neither does the air’s subsisting, formaldehydic poison. Nor the internal strife, freezing him in place now that Kaicif’s cigarette has run its full course.

  You kept going. Their deaths didn’t seem to affect you the way it did the others. Socio- “Damnit, will you shut up?” he pleas, and while God certainly *was not* listening, something else *was*. A humming wraith, not far, cuts her darling song short at the sound of Ruby’s outburst. Lost to all but his strife, he fails to notice her approach.

  I know I won’t see them here. You don’t know that. You can’t be sure. No, what you know is how they must think of you, Ruby. And when you see them, you know exactly how they’ll look at you, Ruby. Scared eyes that see your insanity for what it is. Expressions that assign *all blame* to you. It wasn’t my fault, not all of it. It *was*. It can’t… it can’t be all on me. It *is*. “I KNOW,” he screams, labored breaths shifting his shoulders and feet as if he were struck in the gut. The echo of his voice drowns out all traces of the lobby’s chaos, insubstantial as they were, that still lingered in these damnable, white corridors.

  __________

  A mere five feet away, unable to stop herself from swaying with the neurotic’s dizzying shuffle, the wraith thinks, he doesn’t look so rough for a… is he even human? What kind of dreams would someone like him have? Someone so… strange-no, someone so different than every other victim. Is it even possible for the dead to look so alive? Other than… she straightens up and tries to meet Ruby’s eyes with as intense a focus as her excitement will allow. “Are you a demon?” she asks.

  At the same time, he takes up his forward march once more, swiping his right arm through the air to shoo the wraith away… like she were nothing more than a fly.

  “Hel-lo?!” she cries, all charm in her voice devoured by distorted vexation. Just like the wraiths of a long, snaking line before her, her body, too, disperses into a cloud of shade in Ruby’s wake. Vision fragmented, the gift of a hundred simultaneous perspectives of the promised world of light fills each of her scattered shards of being with a motion sickness she lacks the ability to vomit away. And all the while, an addict’s frenzied chant echoes through the halls, “I know I won’t see them here. I won’t find them down here. I won’t…”

  Who? Who… are you even talking to? Invisible needles pierce her mind from every angle. They threaten to steal her will, casting her deep within the darkness of her absent heart – a void amid a hundred hexagonal doors. Each one is wide open, glancing at polished marble, numbered rooms, golden sconces and trims littered with demonic imagery. Wildly disorganized, they are, as if each segment of her scattered being possesses an eye, and each eye can only see a small part of the whole. But she finds a start, a singular door that retains a view of her assailant’s distancing, black leather jacket. She reaches for it, and through an excruciating, conscious effort, manages to grab hold. It becomes her central view, that tiny, hexagonal image of Ruby’s back, and the shard of her scattered soul that sees it… acts as an ethereal core.

  Lost within herself, the wraith rearranges doors, placing them like puzzle pieces in a honeycomb reflection of reality. As each picture connects to her central view, her motion sickness lessens, and her expanding web of vision resembles that of a fly. An insectual identity… assigned to her by an agitated wave of an addict’s arm.

  On the outside, shards of her fragmented being gravitate towards her chosen core – the only fraction of her soul with a clear view of the demon dressed in black leather. Their magnetic movements mirror her internal, puzzle piecing struggle, and the moment her vision is made whole again, its honeycomb lines fading to reveal a clear image, so too does her wraithly body complete its reunion.

  Three seconds, it took. One to suffer, and two to find herself again. More than enough time for her to decide she hates the addict. She hates him for treating her like an insect. She hates him because *he* will get to dream while she can only watch. Still, she hates herself more for watching. She wonders what haunts his mind… how he will scream when his nightmare is devoured by a night terror and the vines rip his unmolested visage to shreds. And then, she swallows her pride, begins to hum and pursues her quarry once more.

  __________

  They wouldn’t end up in a place like this. Not if it was my fault, Ruby reasons with the discord, and for once, it offers no argument… only music. Somber beauty. He cannot remember the last time it produced something beautiful. This might be the first – a melody with taste and temperature. A sweet sound that embraces each inner voice with comforting warmth.

  And then it occurs to him, spotting dark movement in the corner of his eye, that, he never learned how to sing. No, the melody follows him like a second shadow, its volume intensifying the closer it gets… external, far from subtle, but never overbearing. A song like that has no right living in hell, and neither does the entity it escapes from – a “fly” Ruby could swear he just dealt with… resurrected to bother him a second time.

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  Its glassy eyes are like those of an insomniac, and its lips, defined by a vague femininity, move softly with the music. Besides those, its semitransparent face is featureless. So too is its torso, lacking limbs or a stable shape, and a midnight cloak flows from the top of its head to its ghostly tail like half-brushed hair burning slowly in a black essence.

  Ruby rests his eyes, the wraith now at his side, and his steps slow to a stop as he searches within to find nothing but clarity. A wicked grin meets his lips.

  He turns towards the humming spirit, bringing his face close to hers, widens his eyes until a band of white separates the grays from the lids, and says, “you’re in the wrong place… the other door was meant for ghosts like you. The dark one. Didn’t you see the sign?”

  His frigid stare violates her promised world in a way she can barely tolerate, and against the backdrop of white-painted walls, her dark form shutters, a couple notes falling from her lips in the wrong key. They sound uncertain, scared of his brash smile and lifeless eyes. But knowing that, human or demon, the insufferable’s wakefulness is not longed to last, she reclaims her rhythm just as quick as she lost it. Only a matter of time before this place does what it’s meant to do…

  And so, in a way that is not quite singing but flows as if it were, she pauses her song only briefly to ask, “why would *you* be worried about one misplaced soul? You here on business, demon?”

  A slight confusion washes over the addict’s face, his head jutting back half an inch before his gaze shifts upwards to catch an impossible glimpse of the top of his head. In its deep recesses, he can just barely pick up on a screaming, venomous tongue. So vastly distant, all but silent, an ocean of lovely sounds away. So indecipherable that his wicked smile returns, and picking at the tip of his right horn, he replies, “not a demon, much worse than that. And my business… doesn’t seem like it’s here.” He begins to walk again. She follows.

  “Oh?” Does he mean to warn me? In her mind’s eye, she watches a dragonfly pass a spider’s web by, its curiosity drawn to the refraction of light in the threads. “I think you’re where you’re supposed to be. At least for now. As a guest… even just passing through, you have the right to your own room. Surely you were given-”

  “Do the *horns* make me look like a demon?” Ruby interrupts, throwing off the song’s rhythm once more. Just for a moment. A moment in which, beyond the distant, internal echo of venom, he detects a great exhaustion looming. Although desperately drawn to the music, the draining force cannot seem to shimmy its way through the yelling crowd at the song’s outer edge.

  “Horns don’t make you a demon,” she tilts her head, letting one of her own tiny, translucent horns peak out beneath her hair, “I have them too, but I’m no-”

  “You look like one.”

  She feels a twitch in her lidless, left eye, but this time, her song does not falter. “You look like… you look like you weren’t bothered much at all on your way here. So, if you’re not lying as a demon should lie… if you lived life as a man before you died, how could you manage through everything waiting beneath and still look so… human? It must have been *tiring*,” says the wraith, holding on to that last syllable until it transitions cleanly back into her melody. As she does so, she thinks again of the dragonfly, this time admiring new threads in the spider’s web – rings woven around the center like the years of a tree’s life.

  Her words… her notes spark something in Ruby he has only ever felt precious few times prior. Gratitude. It enters as a phantom, burning pain, the memory of fire consuming his body. Both a torture and a safeguard, it was, forbidding him to rot into something pathetic… allowing him to become the scariest one in the room. To his right arm, his focus shifts, hoping to will the limb alight and show her exactly *why* he is still the way he is. But he fails, and for a second time, spots an exhausting presence roaming the far-off borders of his mind. “I’m not tired. I’m headed down,” he says, motioning towards the floor with his index finger in a bitter moment of déjà vu.

  Headed down? She thinks, finding amusement in the absurdity of his words as she watches the dragonfly inch ever closer to the web. Close enough for a stray thread to reach out and grab hold. He must not know… “but it certainly won’t get any better than it is here.”

  “But I don’t care,” he returns in the kind of tone a concrete wall would use.

  And suddenly, it occurs to her that the spider’s web may have never been the object of the dragonfly’s desire. Her absent heart drops. *She* was the one in love with its silk, while the dragonfly’s focus was on waters far below. A pool, dark green. Its depths, a mystery. Something isn’t right. It’s been plenty long enough… he should be desperate for a place to sleep, but… “you’ll have a clearer head… to continue… after you’ve rested.”

  “It’s not true. Waking moments are the hardest.” Even so, he slows, letting the music overwhelm him… letting it drown out his thoughts like only a cigarette could.

  But all she can see is a swallow, flying straight through the web and off into the trees. Its remaining silk, taken effortlessly by the breeze. Nothing but delicate strands, incapable of catching a dragonfly’s dreams.

  And in hate, her song swells, the black essence of her form reacting uniquely to each note’s heavenly malice. With the highs, small, sharp hives pulsate through her hair. With the lows, her body glitches in place, leaving a trail of split-second afterimages as she drifts right in front of Ruby. His dead, gray eyes are deeper… more disturbed than she had initially noticed, yet the rest of him carries a strange sort of peace. Now moving backwards, at pace with the man’s leisurely steps, she cannot help but think that there is something seriously wrong with… either him… or the keep itself. “There isn’t a shred of exhaustion in you, is there?” she wants to ask, but knowing already his answer, the shadow siren flees.

  __________

  Far too quickly, the music fades away, its weightless body flying down the hall faster than his legs could ever carry him… what you cared about most… was *his blood* on *your seats*. Such a pain to clean, wasn’t it, Ruby? …but he still tries, chasing the wraith’s dark smudge of a reflection in the marble floor as its melodic cigarette drains from his system.

  “Why’re you taking it from me?!” he shouts after her with a gruff, and she responds with a sharp right, veering into an intersecting hallway littered with the same exact stuff. Soft orange light. Pristine white walls. Each door looking just as useless as the one before it. Her promised world of light, the path of the ghoul, is nothing but a maze, and just as Ruby follows her around the first turn, she makes another. He sees only the ends of her long, dark hair disappear around a corner – deeper into the hotel’s innards – and coming around it himself, he loses sight of her completely. Or was your concern the bottle he shattered… left there just so *you’d* get cut cleaning up *his* mess.

  Up ahead, he can still hear her melody amidst his bouts of rebinding discord, but between the fifteen-foot ceilings and dozens of branching halls, it is impossible to tell from where exactly her voice carries. Each note sounds as if it originated behind a different door, and as the last of them fall quietly against his ears, he understands well that they were the only thing keeping at bay the pack of parasitic wolves that have claimed his mind as their own.

  You knew his torment… *caused* his torment, they remind the addict, conjuring images of a night he wished to never think of again, and yet, right up until he left his selfish mark… all you did was laugh.