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It was now obvious, rather suddenly, that deciding to take a trip to the old prison just as night was falling was certainly not a good idea. The winds outside were in a frenzy and the waves of the ocean pounded at the sides of the island, crashing at the bridge as Jasper made his way across. He'd made an attempt or two to keep his hair from flying about, grabbing it with one hand, then both, but finally he dropped them in defeat, head hung and trudging along on his way. Getting at the actual building wasn't all that easy either. He ducked under rusted fences, slipped over broken barbed wire and, when he finally made it to the entrance of the building, the sun had already disappeared from the sky.
The inside was cold and musty, which immediately made him wrinkle his nose up. It smelled like garbage, really, or what the back alleys of Europe used to smell like. This didn't keep Jasper from continuing on though. Instead, he ignored the stench and traveled on, slinking is way through the dark building. The wind howled through the windows of the penitentiary, giving the whole place an even creepier feeling, which is certainly did not need. The de le Poer boy stopped now and then, peeking inside cells, shuffling the trash on the ground around with his feet. People had said wondrous things about this place and, thus far, Jasper had yet to really see anything worth traveling there for. |
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| | The dark girl nudged a pile of human bones, previously locked inside of the many cages, bars like metal teeth of a massive, gray monster that had licked the flesh off of all who it caught. The bird bones in her pocket told her stories (true or false, she did not know, did not care) and she wondered what the bones of humans would say. Her eyes caught on a skull with its jaw bone laying nearby, and mumbled "Hello," at it, stiff and dry as she expected it might answer her back. After staring at it for a long moment, she shook her head and left the cell while pulling a flash from her long coat's pocket.
Poe didn't often drink hard alcohol, but she was still making a point of avoiding her city home (even with its stash of wine), Just as much for fear of finding Luz there as for confronting the last words that had been dropped from that bed. So she filled an antique flash up with overaged whiskey from the west side of the city, and wandered to the coast to allow her pixie smiles to slide, and her brushed-off sullenness to hang free off her shoulders. Yes, deep down, Poe D'Angelo still cradled her angsty emo inner-child from time to time.
With the small lip of the flask kissing her own, she turned down the corridor, only to see a figure meandering about, peeking into the cells from the opposite end. A swallow and a squinted consideration, it took her a second to recall the familiarity. The boy she had ambushed in the suburbs a few months back. His name alluded her, or she had never caught it, but he was certainly the same one with that one, trademarked black ear. And their mutual long-shielding bangs. "Hey," she called out to him, just loud enough to carry over the wailing wind.
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It wasn't that he had a weak stomach or that it bothered him when he saw something dead, but the sight of the skulls resting inside the cells gave him an odd feeling. The whole atmosphere was working against him, it seemed, from the howling winds outside to the cold feeling that chilled him right to the bone. His nose wrinkled up each time he passed by a skull or a bone, quickly making his way in the opposite direction. Even worse than being in such a creepy place by himself was the fact that he didn't want to go back out into the wind and the frightening night. A scaredy cat, of course.
Through the howling of the wind Jasper could hear steps, but each time he turned to look over his shoulder he saw nothing. Growing increasingly paranoid now, his pace quickened and, instead of doing the smart thing and going back the other way, he was heading deeper into the prison. A voice came then, rather suddenly, and Jasper almost jumped out of his skin. Feet left the floor and his whole body shook, spinning around in a flash to meet his doom. It was then that he realized just who it was, the same girl that had scared him out of his skin before, and his whole posture dropped.
"Helloo." He called back to her, shuffling a few steps back in her direction. From what he could tell, she didn't seem at all bothered by the atmosphere, which made him feel a bit better. Just a very small bit. Though he couldn't admit it aloud even if he wanted to, he was glad to not be alone anymore. |
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| | She could excuse it by pointing to her childhood backdrop. The Moaning Woods with its groaning trees and skeletal landscape, an bedtime stories and an imagination ridden with ghouls and goblins, and real monsters of her own blood laying under foot. Nature or nurture, the combination of both, Poe was drawn to the spooky people and places, and there was an illogical sense of security around them. But that was not to say that she was unafraid of many things.
The boy was, if only briefly, terrified by her sudden presence but it quickly melted into what may be some kind of relief. Company could do that in many contexts, but this was probably higher on that scale than others for a youth. If he was actually a youth, she wasn’t sure—he looked about full-grown, but his voice and gait suggested that his bones had not relaxed in his flesh yet. She smiled at him, warmer than she felt at the moment in some attempt to assure him before making a move in his direction. “The human audience giving you stage freight down these halls?” she asked lightly, glancing at a gape-eyed skull in a cell to her right and back.
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