A Future Tale (Part Three)

Our Future Tale began with a woman wandering around her small city, observing and describing the places and people she saw, and ended with her hesitantly entering an alley between two buildings, the first some 100 years older than the second. 

At the end of Part Two, our narrator was deep in the alley, uncomfortably confronting the past - her past, and our collective past. Or, maybe she was seeing into the future? 

Here's where we left her.

Every recess in the wall, every dirty lightbulb, every door I encountered, brought more of the same.

Our real history

Medical care - no patients refused

Judgment-free zone 

All words welcomed here

Free hot meals

A bed for a night

There were a few more doors, offering only more confusion, until there was only a giant screen hanging in front of me, above my head, filled with images, wonderful and horrible, a cacophony of voices and music and noise, piercing the quiet that had surrounded me in the alley. It was my history, my lifetime, and histories and lifetimes before mine, all jumbled together. Good and evil, love and war, despots and dictators, politicians and orators, their words almost physically assaulting me, surrounding me, deafening me. 

I wanted to get away, to escape, to avoid what was playing out in front of me, but the cobblestones were damp and slimy as I tried to run, the trees were hitting me in the face and arms, and the din moved with me with me as I slipped and slid down the alley, tears and grime streaming down my face. 

Let's rejoin her now.

And then it stopped - the barrage of words, and music, and noise - it all just... stopped, as abruptly as it began. It was deathly quiet, and pitch black in the alley, and I stood there, afraid to move. Catching my breath. Slowing my heart. Trying to find my equilibrium. 

Ahead, I saw a light high up on the wall, much brighter than the lights above the doors. It cast a long beam, and I followed it. I moved slowly, cautiously, even gratefully toward the light. And there, at what must be the end of the alley, I saw a door.

A revolving door. 

A revolving door? It was so completely out of place, I almost laughed out loud, but caught myself at the last second. Laughing seemed as out of place as the door, after what I had just been through, what I had yet to fully process. Heck, who am I kidding? I hadn't even begun to process what had happened behind me in the alley; I didn't even know where to start, but I knew laughing wasn't it.

I stopped a few feet away from the door, all glass and brass, ornate like the doors you find in classy old hotels, and simultaneously filthy like you find in abandoned ones. I half expected there to be a bellman in the vestibule, but this wasn't a hotel, there wasn't a vestibule. I'm in an alley for Pete's sake, I told myself, not in some old movie. 

At the very moment that thought crossed my mind, about being in a movie, I became much more tentative about the door. I could get in, push it, and go out on the other side, like in old movies with happy endings, but I had no idea what was out there. What if it was worse than what I just went through? 

I could get in, give it a push, and have it stick, unmovable like in a horror movie, trapping me for who knows how long in a little cage, waiting for someone to find me, to help me. But I'm in an alley by myself, an alley that's nothing like anything I've ever seen before... Would anyone even think to look there? Does anyone even know I'm not home? And what kind of person would be in this alley, anyway?

The thought of stepping into the hug of that door was paralyzing.

I stood there for what seemed like an eternity; in reality, it was probably only a minute or two, as I considered my options. I had only two choices, I realized: try the door, or go back the way I came. Slowly, I turned my body slightly to the right, and took the measure of the alley.

Where there had been the giant screen, I saw nothing. Where I had seen all those dimly lit, frightening doorways, I saw only solid walls. I could barely make out the gate at the end of the alley, still shrouded in the confusing mid-day darkness.

I turned back to the left, towards the revolving door, and to the right again, in the direction of the gate, where this all started. I turned both directions again, and a third time, before making my decision.

Choking back my fear, I started walking.