Thereafter Chapter 4: Michael
The fourth Hero of Legend Michael discovers something sneaking around at his night shift job, and chases it into further adventure.
Michael found himself slipping into sleep, and awoke with a start. The time was 23:45, and he had been at work for a little over two hours. The air around him felt thick and goopy in a way it seldom did in the waking world, yet he had no doubt he was not dreaming. His job was, frankly, entirely too boring to be something his subconscious cooked up. The standby light on the alarm button blinked, as it always did, the “ready-to-go” green of silent vigilance. Deep in his heart, Michael knew that the monitors showing every possible angle in the museum did not hum. It was a LED screen, there were no parts in it that could produce a hum that a human being could hear. And still, Michael had always figured that surveillance camera screens should hum. There was something about the noisy video files it displayed that should have a similarly textured audio note accompanying it. Michael wasn’t sure why, CRT screens hadn’t been in common use since he was a child, then again the video quality sure didn’t scream modern AV solutions. Maybe that was part of it.
Sleep tried again to invade Michael’s mind, he shook it off. Normally the night watchman routine fit him like a glove, but his sleep had gotten uneven on him lately. “Faen’a” He chided himself. He couldn’t sit in the video surveillance room all night or he’d snooze the night away. Although that might seem sensible to most people, Michael knew that his boss, Mr. Meyer, did not see it that way, and would be most unreasonable if given a chance to start up his “this is not a resting night watch position” and the equally beloved hit “this is a museum, not a motel.” It was a pain, but Meyer paid well, and he didn’t get on Michael’s case about his somewhat reserved attitude, so Michael usually decided that going a ways to placate the man usually was worth the effort.
So, to stave off sleep, Michael prepared for a patrol. His work contract only stipulated that he needed to take one physical patrol per night unless irregularities were to show up in the surveillance video feeds. Then again, Michael thought as he kicked off his shoes, there were no limitations on how many patrols one could make at night either.
Michael found himself hesitating. Similarly to the previous stipulations, he hadn’t seen anything in his employment contract that what he now wanted to do was prohibited, discouraged, or featured into the execution of his duties in any meaningful way. Still, it felt forbidden in a way Michael was in no way ready to examine too closely, at least not in his current state of impending slumber. Discarding the feeling of guilt in a sudden burst of entirely unearned confidence, Michael pulled off his socks, balled them up and stowed them in his right shoe for safekeeping before he set out on his patrol barefoot.
The marble floor in the main exhibit wing was exceptionally cool, beating out even the carefully managed interior climate in chill. Michael didn’t regret his decision to go barefoot as much as he had come to view it differently. It was still something that he wanted to do, but the way it was ever so slightly uncomfortable also made it easier to swallow as an experience. There was also, of course, the Sense.
Michael was not much of an art fan, and reluctant as was to spend more time at the museum than the 30-ish hours he spent there each week, he’d only had a cursory glance at the paintings he guarded. He couldn’t tell you about their composition, or their color or what sort of emotions they provoked in what kind of viewers, if appreciators wasn’t the correct term for someone who consumed art. He could, however, navigate the exhibition hall blindfolded. The first few weeks, he had brought a flashlight on his patrols to keep up appearances, but once he learned how surveillance videos were handled, or rather how they weren’t, Michael didn’t see the point any longer. It was up to him after all, to mark the data from a given camera at a given time as Important Enough To Keep, or it’d all get reformatted over once the next shift begun. If any of the automatic alarms were triggered, it’d be out of his hands of course, but on a quiet night such as this, Michael would have to bungle shit pretty badly for that to become an issue.
The exhibit hall was so very quiet around him. In the silence, he could even hear the faint creaking of the security cameras turning back and forth in their near-imperceptible routine. He passed paintings by the lesser known masters, those who failed to make as big as splash as their contemporaries. Mr. Meyer’s boss, whatever oil hotshot owned this collection, had a bit of a thing for near-modern also-rans Michael figured, or maybe he was just cheap, and relied on the apparent age of the paintings doing enough for his prestige without their cost graduating from Exorbitant to Ludicrous. There was, Michael figured, at least some sense to that.
Through the marble floor, Michael could feel the minute vibrations that allowed him to efficiently map out the place. He wasn’t quite sure where they all came from. A lot of it came from the large, painfully modern design air conditioning fans at the end of the room. Some came from power transformers for the now on-standby screens that usually told visitors about opening hours, the location of the gift shop and so on. There was, however, Michael realized, a source that wasn’t usually there. It was faint, practically imperceptible over the bolder vibrations, but now that he had noticed it, Michael couldn’t ignore it if he tried. He closed his eyes, the scant extra focus he could bring to bear would have to do, and it did. With rising curiosity and non-negligible amounts of terror, Michael realized what he heard was a heartbeat.
It wasn’t like there was a disembodied heart pumping away on the museum floor or anything, nothing quite as dramatic as that. It was just something Michael had picked up, that no matter how quiet you moved, you could not, nor should you, stop your own heart. Granted, with solid enough soles you could dim that which Michael could sense through the ground to nearly nothing. Whoever was in the darkness with him had not taken such measures, in fact, they appeared to either have a considerably stronger heart than a human, or walked barefoot like Michael did. The cardiac rhythm was unmistakable, but Michael couldn’t help but notice it progressed somewhat speedier than normal, which meant that either, this wasn’t a human in here with him, or they were really scared. Michael couldn’t decide which option was the least threatening, and so he decided to not think about it as he moved closer, feeling himself subconsciously slipping back into the patterns he had learned in his childhood, how to make the absolute minimum sound with each individual step, remaining alert and, perhaps more importantly, quiet throughout.
Whoever or whatever was in here with him had learned something like it. Even if Michael could sense the heartbeat moving away from him, he could not pick up their steps, and only infer that they happened at all because the heartbeats moved in such a way as to suggest walking, or perhaps prowling was more apt given the circumstances. Michael wasn’t sure what or who was in here with him, but there was one thing that kept him going, deeper into the darkness, further from the relative peace and security of the surveillance booth. Michael’s first impression was that nobody could move that silently, but deep in his heart, he knew that wasn’t the case, he had met the creatures that could. Molekin, the humble but industrious subterranean creatures whom Michael at one point had saved from the clutches of the Lightlord.
They were a delicate, considerate people, the Molefolk, keeping it as sacred truth that one must always seek to make ones nests safe and deep in the hills, but at the same time be mindful to not upset the Spirits Of The Ground. Michael never got around to figure out if the Spirits Of The Ground had a theological or arcane basis, or if it was just an old wives tale to dissuade ambitious young molefolk from digging carelessly and causing tunnel collapses. Either way, this meant they could be incredibly light on their feet. There was, like in his native Norwegian, no word for “stealth” in the molefolk language, although there were plenty of expletives that described a lack of the virtue. In his adventures, Michael had been called boorish, clump-footed, claw-hungry, snout-blind, and thump-stepping on account of his supposed inelegance, and as a child he had never quite understood why. Now, as an adult trying to move silently towards what he assumed to be one of the molekin, Michael became acutely aware of how true those epithets had been. For a human Michael was quiet, eerily so even, but compared to a molekin? Bull in a china shop didn’t even come close to describing it. The pace of the heartbeat steps increased, it became readily apparent that the molekin, if it truly was one, could stay ahead without even trying that hard.
“Vent, stopp!” Michael found himself yelling after the presence. He had no idea what compelled him, it certainly went counter to his intention of staying quiet, but if the molekin had not noticed his presence by now, it was surely too wizened by age to even hear him yelling. The presence did hear him, at least the way it fled seemed to indicate as much. Michael gave up on stealth and started to run after it.
In some deeper, more sensible part of his brain, Michael noticed that he wasn’t quite sure where he was at this very moment, he had lost track of his position, and running as he was, he couldn’t gather up the necessary data to chart his position. His more immediate thoughts, however, paid no attention, even as the specter of running into a wall loomed in the back of his head.
Quite surprisingly, it wasn’t a sudden impact with a very expensive wall wasn’t what got Michael in the end. Instead, counter-intuitively enough, he ran out of floor. Michael couldn’t explain it any other way. One step, his foot hit the floor with the customary toe strike, the next, his foot struck only air, sending him cartwheeling into some other, deeper darkness. For a brief moment, Michael dreaded the impact, only to realize that having the time for dread meant that this fall was longer than he thought possible. It was a subtle, yet noticeable, change when Michael stopped falling, and the blind, unseeing blackness around him was replaced by the eigengrau of unconsciousness.
Author’s note: We finally meet our protagonist. Michael is perhaps one of the less outrageous of the Heroes of Legend I feel, but that could be because he’s the most similar to yours truly. For those of you interested in the BTS of this whole thing, this is the last chapter I wrote before I started the release newsletter. I’d like to have written more and taken a bit longer, but I decided that if I was going to publish these chapters as I wrote them, I had to rip off that band aid sooner or later. I chose sooner, and I hope my work is better for it. Can’t wait to show you what comes next
-V.S.D