The Room

"There is someone here", said the little girl to the dark and open room. It's newly plastered walls glared back across the emptiness. "I am sure there is someone here," she said again, this time a little more hopeful than confident. There was a dimness that made the contours of the room visible but she could not determine its source. It was as if the room itself exuded only the slightest pale glow, an umber blue cushioning the black. In the center of the room a long rectangular shadow hovered a few feet from the ground. Slowly she made her way toward it. "I don't mean to intrude. Normally, I am a very polite little girl. It's just that I don't know where I am right now... I don't know where it is that I am or where it is that I've come to... I mean, how it is that I arrived here... in this room... with you. So if you could just say something. I mean, tell me where I am or how I might have arrived and thereby how I might return the same way back to where it was that I was. Then you could go right back to what you were..." She bumped into the soft cottony shape at the room's center and nearly screamed.

From all around her there came a long hissing sigh. It surrounded and enveloped her and seemed to come from both without and within her simultaneously. The pitch modulated from high to low then high again and it faded in and out like gusts of wind through a long tunnel. Hundreds of different voices seemed to be speaking independently of each other from within the sigh one becoming distinct only to spill into another. All of them in languages so foreign to the little girl they could have come from creatures of another sun and another time.

The whole of everything grew louder until it seemed that everything, the room, the dark and the little girl would be shattered into a thousand pieces by the screaming wind when all became quiet and the last of the blue dim was crushed by the heavy dark.

"Hello, little girl," came a voice not unlike a human voice, not unlike a little boy's voice, but with a strangeness like touching a metal toothpaste tube with your tung. Even a friendly metal is to be feared. "I am here," and the room was blinked a blinding white by unseen fingers and an unseen switch and before her eyes could adjust to the small figure staring suspended from the ceiling above there was dark again and the camera flash of the room laid upon it from the back of her aching eyes.

"Is your name Amelia?" said the voice as the girl rubbed her eyes in the dark.

"Pardon me," replied the girl.

"Is your name Amelia? Is that what people call you when they say something to you and no one else... when they wish to address you?"

"No... my name is..."

"That's a shame," the voice interrupted. "I have always wanted to meet a girl named Amelia."

The room blinked a blinding white again and directly before her was the upside-down face of a little boy with enormous glistening eyes and a terribly long face like that of a baby horse. The little girl swallowed the terror in her that would not scream at the site of the face blurring into focus a few inches in front of her. At least he looked "like" a little boy. His skin was pale cream under which pulsed tiny blue estuaries. For a moment she was sure she heard the rapid, hungry beat of a digital heart but could not be sure if it came from inside him or inside her. The whole of him was rather tiny, with skinny bird arms and bony knees above chicken legs.

She stepped back and saw the the boy was floating upside-down as though suspended by tiny invisible wires. He had his legs crossed indian style like you sit when you sit on the floor of the school gymnasium. As she backed away he drifted toward her keeping his face only a few inches from hers so that when she stopped suddenly their heads nearly collided. He backed away a bit.

"Who are you," she said.

He closed his eyes slowly then just as slowly opened them while his gaze remained constant despite the lidded vail of flesh: through her, into her, toward something she contained. For a moment there was an underwater stillness. The blueness returned and softened the astonishing white then pulsed away again like a wind blown smoke. The little boy's large snout sniffed hungrily at the air. Something open and something closed in another room. They stared at each other for a long while without speaking. The little girl could not move. Everything was new and as it had been. Everything was awash in a still born light.

"Excuse me, little boy," she said, waking suddenly. "Do you know how it is that I... I mean where is this place... where am I?."

The little boy blinked his long egg shaped eyes and yawned, revealing a mouth that seemed to grow vastly larger as it opened. It was filled with row upon row of small fangs cushioned in the softest and slightest pink flesh. They filled the whole of it and each of the thousand appeared to be moving independently of each other, reaching out, searching, straining towards her eventually in a momentary and unified motion like the feigned bow of a merchant dignitary. A thousand kneeling teeth. And although the little girl knew that she should be afraid she was not. She stretched out her hand to touch them. As she did so the boy snapped his mouth shut, not in response to her gesture but automatically as though some clock had reached the moment of the closing of mouths. His look was still on her like the gaze of a bird, a pure optic transmitting without comprehending, a television lens broadcasting her into the air of an unknown audience.

"Amelia," said the boy, his voice different now... older and younger, dissolving back into a sigh.

"What," said the little girl.

The room went black again.

"Amelia," said the hissing. "Amelia of the unseen hand."