NaNoWriMo 2008: Day 5
-=Facts, Part IV=-
Life is sometimes spent in mediocrity. There are a few cases in which life is spent in utter extravagance, and every day seems like a day that belongs to a movie star. Other lives are spent wallowing in even less than the mediocre, where turmoil after tribulation seems to appear at all of the worst available times.
But those swathed in the mediocre life, in the average and boring, those are the lucky ones, whether they're aware of the fact, or not.
In a mediocre life, there is always room for a sudden and dramatic change. In a mediocre life, predictable and dull as it may seem, anything could happen. Anything.
Poverty stricken or rich; that life had already reached the top, or hit rock bottom. What else could possibly happen after that, that would possibly be a surprise any more? Those with these sorts of lives have seen the extremes. They have no truly stimulating experiences left.
Live a mediocre lifestyle, and dream of something bigger (good or bad. That's up to you, mostly). Leave yourself open for dramatic change. Let things go as they will. Your life might just become more amazing than anyone would have expected.
~~~
-=The Keyholder and Sophie Together, Part I=-
Grasping the refrigerator handle with a steady preparedness to clean up whatever mishap had happened inside, Sophie opened the door, waiting for the inner light to click on. And out tumbled...
“A hat..?” She blinked. There had been a hat in her fridge. A silk, gentleman's top hat, to be exact. It had fallen out as the door swung wide, tumbled over her feet, and was now rolling to a slow halt beneath her kitchen table.
She stared at it with something mildly akin to bewilderment.
“How on earth...?”
“That's mine, I'm afraid.”
A voice intruded Sophie's confusion, making her turn away from the top hat and look back towards the fridge. From the inside of the thing, a gloved hand came out and grasped the outer edge. Then a second hand, and a foot, which made a pleasing sort of click as it touched on her linoleum floor, and then...
“WAAAAHOhmygod!” Sophie flung herself backwards, away from the refrigerator. Her legs tangled over one another, and she tripped.
Falling! she somehow thought in the flurry of split second events. And there's a...There's a...!
The edge of the table came up, very quickly, to meet her. She shut her eyes and readied herself for a particularly uncomfortable blow to the ribs, or arms, or whatever body part her furniture was about to attack her at.
Tensed and eyes shut tight, she waited. Impact at any second.
Waiting...
It actually took her a rather long amount of time to finally realize she was done with the falling part. It took her a few moments longer to understand why her fall seemed to have stopped in midair, and why she was standing somewhat (somehow) diagonally, and why (this was the most confusing part), she had been stopped by something warm and soft.
She peered upwards.
“Oh,” she said.
One brow raised, black hair falling in short, heavy curls over his face, a man stared down at her. His expression seemed a little bored.
“Are you quite all right?” he asked, not sounding like he cared too very much about the answer.
Sophie had almost hoped she would have clonked her head on the edge of the table, and then woken up later to discover that a man stepping out of her refrigerator had only been an hallucination induced by the over-ingestion of very strong coffee.
Instead, she was a little more than distressed to find that a man had indeed just come out of one of her kitchen appliances, and had elegantly caught her while she was busy flinging herself headlong into the various types of furniture.
In a state of incredulous shock, she continued to stare.
There was a man in my refrigerator...
“I said,” the man said, trying to right Sophie, “Are you alri-”
A jar of preserves toppled out of one of the refrigerator shelves and clattered loudly to the floor.
The noise seemed to bring Sophie back to her senses. She screamed.
~~~
-=Chad and His Carousel, Part II=-
Things sound a little discordant, from the inside of a carousel. Granted, the music played by such a ride is a little discordant anyway, as akin to a music box as it sounds. But from the inside of one...
Usually with modern carousels, the songs come from a tape or CD, which is played on some sort of electronic device or another inside the ride. The playing device is then wired to speakers which are mounted in discreet corners, somewhere where the riders won't notice them too very much.
But for older carousels, the music usually comes from something that is quite literally a giant music box, which is set up on the inside, and powered by the rotations of the carousel itself. As the ride turns, the gears feed a particular amount of motion into the the windup apparatus, which in turn, moves the cylinder (which can sometimes be the size of a grown man's torso), which causes the pins of a large 'comb' to be struck. This creates the song.
Very old carousels only featured one, permanently positioned cylinder. But others, slightly more modern, would have a variety of cylinders that could be changed out each time the ride was stopped.
In this specific case, Chad worked in a carousel which had one of the older fashioned 'music boxes', which also featured the ability to have it's cylinders changed out.
After the purchase and restoration of the carousel, Chad's manager had taken it upon himself to find and buy up as many different cylinders, featuring as many different songs as possible. So far, there were about thirty that Mr. Stutton held in storage, and seven at a time that were kept inside the mall's carousel for actual use.
Part of Chad's job was to change out these cylinders after the ride had stopped, and after he had gone through his routine of climbing through the gears and checking them to ensure that nothing had gone awry. Throughout his shift, which usually lasted from noon to seven in the evening, Chad would hear that same seven songs over and over and over and over and over. And over.
And over and over.
It was a little disorienting, really. For the first few weeks that Chad had worked inside the carousel, he would find that he would easily lose track of time. This had his internal clock a little messed up for a while. Sometimes after a shift, he wouldn't be able to sleep right. And he would keep hearing the songs of the carousel.
And the sound of it...
Outside, it was noisy, raucous, chiming and enticing. Inside it was thunderous, deafening, and bizarre. Each note continued to ring long after it had been struck, due to the sheer size of the musical comb. And when a new note was struck, it would bleed into the one before it, and a wall of sound would billow up inside the center of the carousel. The higher notes were sharp and sheer. The lower notes reverberated deep through anything close enough to feel it.
It didn't sound this way on the outside. The wood of the thing kept everything vastly more dulled to the riders than in would for the worker inside.
Eventually, Chad learned that he could drown out the music with earplugs or headphones. (Or rather, he figured this would be an effective method, but hadn't been certain that it was an acceptable one while he was working.) But he had gotten the OK from Mr. Stutton, and so he began bringing a CD player with him to the mall.
Earplugs hadn't worked well enough. Being so close to the music box apparatus, all they were good far was muffling the songs in a near disturbing sort of way. With a CD player, and headphones, Chad was able to play anything he liked to counter the weird circus music, and crank his volume loud enough that it drowned out everything except the low, trembling base notes that seemed to permeate his chest.
Of course, being inside, so close to where the music originated from, Chad needed to turn his music very, very loud to hear it without hearing the carousel in the background.
As a result, his hearing was no longer as sharp as it used to be. In fact, Chad was one step away from being entirely deaf. The only things he could hear well were the things that were blasted at full volume.
So while Chad wasn't checking gears, cleaning, changing cylinders, or getting high, he would use his free time to learn a bit of sign language.
Eventually he would need it.
This wasn't really a prospect that bothered him.
So far, he already knew how to say in sign, 'I work inside of a carousel', and 'where's the toilet', and he could spell out the entire alphabet.
~~
-=The Boss=-
Mr. Stutton knew that Chad smoked weed inside of his carousel. He didn't really approved of drugs, but he knew that kids these days would do stupid things for a while before they learned any better. And he knew that Chad was a good kid. There could have been worse things for him to do, Mr. Stutton supposed. Not to mention Stutton would really rather have Chad high in a place that was safe, where someone who cared about him could keep a watchful eye, as opposed to some dingy alley with diseased hobos that would probably rob or rape the poor kid.
So, at least during Chad Branswith's shift, Mackennely Stutton turned a blind eye to the slight misdemeanors that went on inside his carousel. Though he wouldn't allow it for anyone else.
Then again, none of his other carousel employees had expressed such an avid devotion to the machine as Chad did, and Stutton had formed a bit of a soft spot for him.
~~
-=Facts, Part V=-
It is important to know that working inside of a carousel, particularly where the innards (gears) are concerned, is not an entirely safe job, and one should always exercise the utmost in personal safety. One should never perform their job while intoxicated or under the influence of drugs (over the counter or otherwise), and one should never inspect the mechanics of a carousel during hours of operation, particularly while working alone.
As it stands, the methods in which things were being run inside of Mr. Stutton's carousel were of a ridiculously unsafe nature.
Neither Chad nor Mr. Stutton really bothered to concern themselves with this, because nothing bad had ever happened inside the carousel before.
They thought.
~~
-=Baroque Alone, Part II=-
Approximately one year ago, on the midnight following the day who's particular date had been exempt from the records:
A plan schemed by the young lord of the House of Key had been set into motion. Chaos would soon follow, and the house would fall to ruin.
Sort of.
~~
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Day One
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Day Three
Day Four
Day Five - You are here
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Day Ninteen
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Day Twenty-Five
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Day Twenty-Seven
NaNoWriMo 2009