There was a strange quality to the scene. It was in the middle of the afternoon, and the rain had slowed to a light drizzle, no more insistent. I sat with the air-conditioning turned low, shivering against my lightly-wet shirt. Kay sat unbelieving and quiet.
Through the speckled drops on the windscreen we could see rising before us a concrete monolith given to peeling paint and crawling, brownish algae. It rose and rose like a many-storeyed skyscraper above us, the illusion of height gripping us as we looked up and above, right at the feet of that concrete thing.
The concrete screed of the ground about my car was littered with scraps of pink and red and green. Bits of cloth were scattered about with pieces of broken wood, and the ground had the colour of wet, age-worn cement. The muted whirr of the air-conditioning was the only sound we heard as we gazed up to the heights.
“I’m not going in there alone,” Kay said. His hand was on the seat-belt release but he didn’t move. “I wouldn’t want to go up there alone,” he said. I shifted into first and took the car down slowly, watching out for nails and other calamities, the bite of broken cement crunching against the tyres in a slow grind.
We stopped some distance closer to the abandoned condominium. I turned off the ignition and we got out of the car. The cool wind drove raindrops into my face and body, and it was suddenly cold. The wind moaned and howled, and the sky grew darker. The dark maroon of the shingles blended together with the backdrop of light blue clouds, its surface daubed with dust and rust-coloured growth. I’ve been in graveyards that felt like this, I thought. Strangely like home, but spotted with muted guests, standing still.
We walked to the large foyer, its roof structured like domed angles and lines, the remnants of its apex shorn off by wind, rain and other men. The lobby was littered with broken furniture, and there was a smell of rat, and water-blown, rotting wood. The building leaked, and streaks of rainwater filtered down onto the walls, following down routes marked by water-stains weaving down to the floor like faint roots. The empty doorways, bereft of door or lintel, looked like yawning rectangles opening up into yet more signs of apathy; it looked as if a person - or persons - without a care in the world had made a home for himself.
“Look at this,” Kay said. I turned and found him peering down the shaft of an elevator. The cavity where the elevator car should have been was dark. The steel rails that lined the walls of the shaft looked old with rust. I walked over to Kay, picking my way past wood and decomposing bits of cloth.
“It’s deep,” I said. The shaft disappeared down into a thick blackness. How deep it went I didn’t know, and neither did Kay.
“It must be several storeys down,” he said, staring back up the shaft into yet more darkness. The elevator shaft was the other side of the world, I thought, and things linger there.
“We should get to work,” I said. I turned to leave, and found a small walkway leading off deeper into the building. We followed it, like a walkway suspended above the foliage of yellow, algae and concrete; I recalled how when I was younger we’d build suspension bridges amids trees. We kept to the walkway, the railing on either side long gone, and our footsteps could not be heard above the wind. Out of the rain, the wind was refreshingly clear. It felt like the only clean thing in the confines of the building.
We found the emergency exit opening up into a staircase of sorts; it reached up to the roof, it appeared. The open, crumbling bricks that made up the walls gave it all the appearance of a flimsy network of dead branches leading up to the heights. We climbed carefully, head down and watching each step. The fear of slipping off from the unrailed sides kept us silent; I entertained thoughts of vertigo and falling over, but kept my eyes on the steps. I found myself thinking of that dark, bottomless shaft.
“We’re here,” said Kay. I nodded and navigated past broken sofa sets and into the unit Kay pointed out. The floor was strewn with papers and candle stubs. The place bore signs of habitation, and recent, too. I wondered what reason occupants had to have abandoned that place so completely. Kay got down to work, and I walked over to the balcony. It overlooked a field of green and lighter greens; it was a field of trimmed grass and young trees at the sides. The rain had begun in earnest again, and soon the field beyond became a smudge of green behind the curtain of moving drops of water.
A flight of fancy took hold of me, and I imagined myself in a Tanelorn, an anti-Tanelorn: no less mysteriously bereft of life, but a testament to decay.
“This would’ve been a nice place to live,” Kay said, blowing cigarette smoke to the wind.
“Yeah,” I said.