12-hour deep noir

Now he was in a portion of the downtime and he was struggling, but determined. Boldness and strength, two of the hardest qualities to attain, were there to be conjured, and he was trying to tap into them.

The room’s various sources of light were now fully needed, gaining in intensity almost in offence at the rapidly diminishing natural faint blueness of sky that was being replaced - he could still just make it out in-between the many obstructions taped to the window-glass - with the onset of a 12-hour deep noir; a dark-chocolate tarpaulin.

A quietness. He surveyed the space for any life and failed to catch any, the only breaking of the silence from a pattering or shuffling in areas of the shadows. So Bill Rushcroft slung on his greenwashed mac, and slinked out the warehouse. What he predicted would happen next did happen – he was assaulted from all sides by an attack of memories, inseparable from the geography, or the lie of the land, which had been built upon to reach a stage of sprawling ambiguity that ached with the intensity of legacy.

He was chasing ghosts before he’d even actively decided to try and hunt them out. And tonight he’d got the urge - maybe to lose the sense of displacement brought on when the presses slumbered - to have fun in the chemically underbelly, to stalk a different path to see if there was any way to rid his mind of some restless spirits; to come face-to-face with a heady apparition. To meet a memory that he thought was there, but couldn’t be sure of.

And where would it be? He had to steel himself for it, because it could hit him at any point, with no lead-up signals. In fact, he was inside the warning signs at all times, even when he couldn’t see or hear them at first, like when air was blowing at a great rate from a ventilator out of sight, and he only realised the existence of the pummelling sound and its effects after it had been switched off. Then, a brilliant clear silence followed. But it was a bittersweet silence and a reminder that silence was golden, that it was only respite formed as a contrast to the peaks and troughs of intense noise/sound attacks that never really abated.

But he never allowed this contrast to get to him anymore, appreciated that it wasn’t worth the hassle or worth the effort of wasting any energy or aggression. This was silence only as context. The truth lay in what surrounded it.

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