The streets started out narrow, and then they got worse.
It was gradual, subtle. From the outskirts, it was easy to overlook. Trudging from one street to the next block, the sidewalk disappeared. Lawns in the prefab housing developments got narrower, the houses were positioned closer to the roads.
Trees older than any of the buildings here loomed over the road itself, branches knitting together overhead for a third of a block, frozen into a kind of icy archway. Two blocks down, the overhanging trees and branches loomed over half the block, bigger. Here and there, people were perched on porches, leaning forward, or clustered in tight groups.
Still not so unusual that she would have raised an eyebrow, if she weren’t in the know.
The road sloped slightly downhill, bending around a strip mall, a one way street with no street leading out, no good spot to turn around and go in the other direction.
Time was different here. She’d met the twins around noon, but the sun loomed on the horizon, the sky a peach hue. The wind always blew steadily, unfaltering, the sky was always the same color, the sun in the same height above the horizon, only shifting to different compass points in the sky, confusing any sense of direction or ideas about whether it was early or late in the day.
The attitudes of the people who congregated in the streets seemed to reflect the atmosphere. A lack of direction. A hundred people, a dozen cars, and half of the people looked like they’d just come downstairs and walked into the kitchen, only to realize they’d forgotten why they’d just come downstairs.
A hundred people, just going through the motions, checking the fridge, visiting stores, perpetually in a daze.
An Other stood behind a fence, arms folded on the bar that held the chain-link upright. Massively fat, horrendously bad complexion complete with peeling skin and pimples, his eyes were spaced too far apart, mouth far too wide, his nose too flat. A toad of a man. Still, he wasn’t quite so unusual that she couldn’t have dismissed him as a human being with a severe syndrome or something. Most people didn’t even look at him, and the ones that did looked away, embarrassed.
For his part, the Other was looking at her. His eyes were spaced far enough apart on his broad head that only one could watch her at a time as she made her slow progress, his head unmoving, eyes slowly shifting to track her. He raised a cigarette to his mouth and puffed on it.
Her leg was hurting, made worse by her burden, a fat, four-foot-tall, eighty pound goblin. The ice and the compacted snow of the street made him easier to drag, but his skin was so loose that it compounded the little traction that did exist, and the same smooth surface made it harder for her own feet to dig in. People who looked at her glanced away, much as they had with the Other. They kept to the usual pace, the dissonant wanderings.
Her expression was stern as she rounded the curve in Harcourt street.
Right here, at the end of the curve, the place got more twisted. A few more signs, a three-way intersection. Convoluted streets that made her have to pause to figure out how to get where she was going. Everything was crammed in together.
It was like Mara’s setup, in a way, but the goal wasn’t to keep people out. Just the oppsite. This was a pitcher trap. The unwary insect could perch on the edge, only to slip and fall in. Entering was easy. Leaving, every curve would bend back, leading toward the city center. The one way streets would point the wrong way, and if Johannes willed it, the city would adjust. Try to drive out along one of those one way streets, and a car would start coming the other way, or a cop would arrive.
Or, even simpler, the streets one took to get in wouldn’t be there when the traveler looked away and back again.
The older part of Jacob’s Bell was perpetually asleep. Excepting bursts of activity here and there around the time everyone left for work or school, Jacob’s Bell tended to be the sort of place where you could walk from A to B and only see one person or one group of people.
Here, though, it was busier. Newer housing developments, low property costs, an hour’s commute from Toronto, and the new setup at the station all brought people in.
It wasn’t asleep, but it was… how was she supposed to even parse it? It was waking up, and it was poised, still half caught by the twilight of near-sleep, ready to leap up and strike. To get out of bed and start running and never ever stop.
It was like something she might imagine seeing if she had taken a bad hit to the head and she feared another. Except she was the seeing man in this land of the blind. It was the rest of the world that didn’t make sense, here. Stuff didn’t quite fit together, her eyes had trouble tracking from one point to the next without getting caught or snagged, and anyone who wasn’t wandering around in a daze looked like they were perched. Tensed, even.
The people sitting on their front steps, hands or arms resting on their knees, as if they couldn’t quite relax, even when sitting.
People and Others gathered in tight groups, conspiring. The people would be talking amongst themselves, trying to voice their vague concerns while trying to keep their unsteady grip on reality. Across this entire domain thousands were caught in the same precipitous state.
Scarf flapping in the incessant wind, hands a little bloody, face spotted with flecks of goblin blood, she dragged the goblin behind her. Nobody commented, nobody looked. All for the same reason.
They weren’t real people.
They were shadows with an illusion of depth. Snapshots. Reflections.
Dissonance was as dangerous to them as any knife. Once their reality was challenged, they cracked a little.
They would go well out of their way to avoid that, acting on a thread of self preservation that existed on a level well below the instinctual.
Another bend in the road, leading her to a shopping center. Individual buildings were set up on separate city blocks, connected by tunnels that extended over the street, from building to building.
It was the busiest part of all of Jacob’s Bell, and every road was a single lane road. With no sidewalk, she was forced to walk on the edge of the road, side-view mirrors of passing cars passing within a foot of her. Someone honked.
This, right here, was the point where an ordinary citizen might start wondering what the fuck was going on, but they were liable to blame themselves, to wonder if they’d missed a sign.
The road on the way out of the area had a spike strip and a parking attendant’s booth in the complete wrong order, with two cars parked nearby, tires shredded.
This was where the pitcher trap started catching its flies. She struggled for a minute to get the bloodied goblin past the spike strip. She got him halfway over it, the spikes digging into his gut, then pulled on his leg to bring his lower half over, increasing the amount of weight on the spikes. She managed to get his limp body to do a somersault over the spikes, grabbing one foot to resume dragging him, his face scraping against ice and snow.
Entering into the uptown area, she saw taller buildings, breaking up the view, crowding together. A small collection of Others, three or four, were gathered by a ledge in a parking garage crammed with cars that looked like they were in pretty rough shape. Each of the Others was about seven feet tall and slim, brown skinned with glossy black hair. They were similar enough in appearance to be related, all wearing long winter jackets and either ankle length skirts or loose-fitting pants.
One of them, the youngest looking by appearance, was sitting on the ledge, feet dangling over a two story drop. She had her hair in black dreads, tied back. With how black her long jacket and dress were, even her brown skin looked light. She watched with an intense stare, her eyes showing too much white at the edges. Given her height, the people who passed by didn’t break the Other’s line of sight. Psychopath eyes. Unnerving.