LITMIR.BIZ

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placing the torch on the ledge of the window just inside the building, Jared pushed a few of the jagged shards aside from the middle pane. Pulling his dressing gown up so it wouldn’t catch, he gingerly extended his leg through, reaching blindly down to the bench up against the wall. For a moment his foot found no purchase, but just as he was about to pull back again his shoe reached the heavy timber bench.

      Taking a few deep breaths to calm himself, Jared maneuvered his body through the narrow window, retrieved the torch and crouched down. Everything was musty, still and eerily silent. He was doing something wrong, something dangerous, but no screaming retribution came to claim him. He slowly came to realise that nothing was going to happen. With tentative movements, Jared slid off the grimy bench and edged towards the closed door to the left. Examining the handle, he tested it and was equal parts relieved and horrified when it released the door with only minor protest.

      There was a bench similar to the one he’d just climbed down from blocking the other side of the door. Above the workspace he realized he was staring at the back of a tool pegboard that must have extended along the wall containing the door. Below there was a collection of heavy looking metal tools and debris; a junk pile of ancient machinery.

      After regarding the scene for a moment, his attention finally lowered to a gap in the piles of junk below the bench that appeared to be stacks of paint cans and tins of other descriptions. Jared hunched closer and waved the torch around in small circles, able to just see glimpses past the clutter and into the room beyond.

      There was a sense now, as his thoughts turned towards what to do next, that he was moving deeper into a monster’s lair. Would he remember how to get out? Would he get locked within this abyss? As he proceeded further inward would the lurking beasts finally come for him? But nothing here could match what he was used to, and part of him wanted them to come for him.

      He placed the torch down on the dusty floor and began to remove the stacked cans from the left hand side of the doorway entrance. It only took a few seconds to clear a path large enough for him to pass through and lifting the torch again he cautiously wriggled through the gap.

      The room beyond was only marginally more regularly frequented that the one he’d left. There was much more clutter, tools and machinery scattered around the small room, but the amount of dust and the stale quality to the air suggested it was a sporadically used workshop. Each wall was covered in hooks and boards with as many tools in place as obviously absent. To his right there was another door, this one with an exposed locking mechanism that could be accessed from the inside.

      Taking a moment to absorb the room and its details, Jared finally crept up to the door and examined it more carefully. It was a simple lock, and clicking the small dimple upward, he quietly turned the knob. The clicking as the door popped free of the latch was impossibly loud and Jared’s heart pounded heavily in his ears. Again he expected voices and movement to uncover him, but again he remained in complete silence.

      Opening the door a crack, he peered tentatively out into the darkness beyond. There was no light whatsoever, and, satisfied that there was nobody around, Jared moved out into the corridor and quickly scanned around him. To his left the corridor was extremely long, perhaps fifty metres, and seemed to turn to the right at the very limits of his torch’s strength. Along the left hand wall there were doors dotted sporadically along its length. Turning around revealed uninterrupted walls on both sides terminating in a pair of double doors at the end of the corridor a short distance from where he stood. In coming through the smaller rooms he’d become slightly disoriented, but by his estimation, the room beyond those doors must be close to the corner of the building. The mysterious light should be directly above.

      Fear was starting to wane within him. He’d been in this total darkness for over ten minutes now and nothing untoward had happened. As he walked towards the large doors, his steps were a little less timid. One of the doors was slightly ajar, and Jared pushed it further open. With a dull and deep grinding sound, the heavy timber structure swung reluctantly inward.

      The space beyond was some sort of storage room, a mass of boxes, racks large machinery, furniture, tools, scrap metal, and old stock in unopened boxes. There was a generation or more of forgotten debris filling every inch of space save a few narrow access ways.

      Jared lifted the torch's beam upward to the five metre high ceiling and realised there wouldn’t be an immediate answer to his question about the light. The grubby and aged ceiling was cracked, sunken and in spots, collapsing, but as he played the light over it, Jared saw a small but significant hole, one he thought he could fit through.

      Tracing outward he tried to identify a route up. He wasn't afraid of heights or climbing the rickety storage racks. Jared’s only mild concern was the stability of the metal structures and ancient wood, but given the amount of junk piled up on them, he had little real fear.

      The hardest part was getting through the masses of rubbish packed tightly on the floor. He’ negotiated the worst of it with only a few noisy stumbles. Once he began to climb up the cold and rusty metal rack next to the platform, the lessening clutter made it very much easier. Step after careful step he pulled himself upward and made it up to the level of the broad deck with relative ease, stepping out onto the platform.

      The broad timber ledge extended along the entire length of the room and just beyond where he was standing, almost directly beneath the hole, were a series of small timber crates. He only needed to lift one or two of them on top of the ones at the end and he’d be able to look through the opening.

      As he pushed the last of the pines boxes directly underneath the dark opening, Jared allowed himself a moment to wonder how he’d found the courage to come this far. He felt strong and somehow less defeated than he had before crawling out of bed. There was still a huge weight of self hatred and doubt, but beyond his devotion to his sister there was now the tiniest spark of a new self reliance.

      With a deep breath he mounted the highest of the boxes and found himself kneeling at the height of the ceiling. Looking along its undulating expanse, dimly lit from the cracks of light around the edges of the rickety timber doors next to him, Jared felt the first twinges of height anxiety. Glancing down to the dim floor below he realized he was over five metres above the floor and were he to fall it would lead to enormous injury, or worse.

      “I want to see.” The words were little more than a whisper and, steeling himself, Jared lifted the torch above him and slowly stood up.

      It took a moment for him to understand what he was looking at. The high ceiling space was a chaotic mass of diagonal timber rafters, mottled corrugated iron, and lace like cobwebs. He couldn’t tell how far it extended to his left, the narrow beam of light efficiently stopped by the lace of a hundred years of spiders' work. Despite their best endeavors though, Jared was able to see at least twenty metres into the distance and was awed by the enormous size of the building. The forest of timber and metal was heroic and strangely lonely.

      Once the awe abated a little, he returned his stare to directly in front of him and was confused. Finally he realised why the scene wasn’t exactly what he expected. Instead of a blank wall in front of him, the perimeter wall of the factory, there was a rough brick wall just in front of him that extended just beyond the ceiling line. Beyond that there was another bay which meant there was another series of rooms beneath. Judging by the thickness of the cobwebs, the wall opposite his house was still some distance away. As he pulled himself upward with the torch in his mouth and felt the ages of dust beneath his fingers, he wondered if anyone had come in here since the building was completed.

      The plasterboard had fallen away at a large timber beam and it was easy for Jared to pull himself up into the roof space. With a minimum of effort he was able to shimmy along to the internal bearing wall, though at that point he gave up all hope of remaining moderately clean. Forearms, shins, calves and shoulders were all needed to negotiate the path to the lower wall and all became immediately smothered in the grimy dust, layered over with equally dirty cobwebs.

      Holding the torch in his left hand he was able to crawl along the

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