~ When Evening Falls ~

by

Kay LeGrand

The place was like a prayer.

But not exactly that, either.

Forward Architecture, the building that housed it, the one Gran had called ‘that place’ with such loathing, was like a prayer left incomplete. A prayer... many, many prayers... unheard and unanswered.

Shuddering as the flesh along her arms and at the back of her neck prickled, Camille glanced around again.

And what was that... thing... she’d seen?

She hadn’t been in the building three minutes the first time she spotted it, and she’d noticed it several times since, always in places where she wasn’t really looking. It was creepy as hell, whatever it was. Tall and black, almost floating and vaguely female, heavily shrouded as the Muslim women often shrouded themselves, in flowing robes and diaphanous veils.

It hadn’t been an evil thing. Not exactly.

Just creepy as hell.

Just desperate. Or maybe pitiable.

Camille had gotten the strongest, strangest feeling from it. Stronger by far than the usual intuitive things she picked up sometimes in emotionally-charged places or situations.

Her grandmother, the most unromantic and jaded soul Camille had ever known, would scoff at her for sure. Would call her flighty, and foolish, and half a dozen other things if Camille ever found the opportunity or the nerve to say anything to her about the atmosphere inside this place where she wasn’t supposed to be.

But flighty aside and foolish notwithstanding, what Camille had felt--what she still felt--was unquestionably real. It was enough to raise goose bumps on her arms, enough to stand the fine hairs straight up beneath the thin silk of her brand-new blouse.

She just wanted to get up from her desk. And run.

“So.” Ike’s voice dragged her away from her gloomy daydream. “What do you think?”

Snapping out of her trance with a jerk so strong she wondered if he could hear the muscles in her neck creak, Camille went back to what she’d been doing before she’d let herself get carried away. Before she’d started to let her mind wander in all sorts of bizarre directions. Gathering up the papers on her desk quickly and efficiently, she shuffled them into order and didn’t look at him. “What do I think about what?” she asked, then immediately hoped like hell he wasn’t going to tell her. So she wouldn’t have to answer.

There was no way she could look at him. No way she could let him see her eyes and not lose the last little vestiges and shreds of her cool. And it wasn’t just the skin-crawly effect the place had on her, either.

Her problems had as much to do with Ike himself, as much to do with his looming shoulders and dark eyes as it did with creepy shadows and crawling unease. Because he had eyes that could change so easily. That did change, in less than the time it took to draw a breath, from stern and unforgiving to something she strongly suspected was incipient laughter about to boil over.

Laughter, no doubt, at her expense.

“Your first day on the job,” he replied, no trace of laughter lurking in his tone.

“Well...”

She’d come close to quitting a dozen times. For sure, she’d come close to quitting every time she caught a glimpse of that black and drifting nothing at the corners of her vision. And of course there was the man himself to consider. Besides being almost insufferably attractive, Ike Barnett had turned out, incipient laughter and the accompanying gleam in his eyes notwithstanding, to be a too-often pompous know-it-all.

Even if she was fresh out of college, the ink on her Fine Arts degree barely dry, and even if he did have his much-vaunted seven years’ experience in the field, she did know a thing or two. Which he’d absolutely failed to notice.

Camille sighed. Her head was starting to ache. Really, really throb and pound in ways that couldn’t be good... had never been good.

Gran had been right.

She should never have come here. Though how Gran had known that, seeing as how she never went out of the house except on her endless trips to mass was beyond Camille.

“Can I count on you being here tomorrow?” Ike asked somewhat stiffly, and so sternly that she started to retort. So that she only just managed to contain herself.

“If I say I’ll be here,” she replied, lifting her chin. “I’ll be here.”

Come hell or high water, Gran or floating, creepy visions.

“Like you were here this morning?”

Camille bristled. “I told you...”

“I know.” His contrition, sudden and apparently genuine, caught her completely off guard. It left her defenseless.

“I’m sorry.” Ike hesitated, seeming to consider carefully whatever he wanted to say next. Or maybe he’d retreated back into that not-sure-where-to-go-now mode she’d sensed in him at the start of the day.

Silence fell. Long and ticking, it was utterly peaceful,

Seizing the opportunity the silence presented, Camille gathered her things. She pulled her purse and still-folded newspaper from the lower desk drawer where she’d hidden them. Getting to her feet, she shivered all but uncontrollably as the world seemed to...

Shift.

That was the only word she could think to describe the wave of strangeness that swept over her.

She might have thought it was nothing more than imagination, fired up by all the other accumulated strangenesses of the day, none of them all that big in and of themselves but adding up to a pretty impressive whole.

Might have, if she hadn’t glanced around and if that glance hadn’t struck the wide row of low-set, modern windows looking out and very nearly into the windows of the red-brick rectory next door. Might have dismissed it as imagination for certain, if in that instant she hadn’t suffered the strangest, the most discomforting and disorienting sensation. That she was looking through other windows. Very old windows of a small-paned style used in buildings built a hundred years ago. Or more.

With that brief shifting of the world around her, it was as if she had slipped into some kind of formless time or place continuum. In the time it took to draw in a startled breath and feel the sharpness of it lock deep inside her lungs, she saw the small panes very clearly. Many, many of them stacked in row after row, forming an enormous whole... a window with a sill so high she could barely see over it. And in that instant, seeing the window that wasn’t there, Camille felt...

Panic?

That was as good a word as any to describe the rush of desperation to run to those ancient windows. To fling herself against that towering sill and pull herself over. To use a terror-driven strength and agility like none she’d felt before to pull herself up and throw herself over, throw herself unheeding down to grievous injury against unforgiving pavement in the alley below.

She heard a low keening, A sound of pure terror, pure agony, that seemed to rise from somewhere inside her own head.

And then the moment passed.

Then everything was as it had been. As it should be.

Everything was modern. Sparkling. The windows gleamed, polished and unbroken panes of glass wide enough to illuminate the room with golden, October-afternoon light that slanted down through the narrowness of the alley. Light that swept effortlessly across the low, built-in benches at their bases. Everything was... now.

That was a very curious way to think of it, but it was perfect.

Everything was once again now.

“Camille?” Ike had gotten to his feet, too. He’d come around his desk and taken her arm, though she hadn’t been aware of it until he spoke, no small amount of concern mingling with his own kind of unease in his voice.

As he should be concerned, if she looked even half as strange as she’d felt there for a second.

“I think I really need to get out of here.”

Nodding, Ike retrieved her raincoat from the coat rack behind the door and held it out so she could slip her arms into the sleeves. He flashed a broad smile that didn’t even begin to cover the concern in his expression.

Shivering, Camille glanced around one more time.

Late afternoon had fallen. Shadows lay long in the upstairs hallway as the sunlight, falling once again through harmlessly modern, thoroughly now windows changed its direction. As it no longer penetrated the room or the alleyway outside completely. As it began to fall instead on the weathered gray roof of the priests’ residence directly opposite.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” she said, pausing long enough on her way to the door to sniff at the air. “What the hell is that smell?”