Keen's Turn: The Vampire's Appeal

Chapter 3: Look Up for the Plant (second half)

Straight after dragging himself out of bed and a quick breakfast, Jared headed for Gowanus. He'd skimmed most of the sections on demons in Judy's books before bed, but had found little more use in them. And so his pack was stocked with the same hunting supplies as last time, minus the crosses lost in the alley, plus a flashlight and an old map of the borough so he could find his way right to the canal.

From the canal it didn't take him long to locate the building the vampire had described. Bricks and broken windows. The names and advice of local artists and vagabonds stretched up the sides and hung down over the roof, competing with the spread of ivy. His progress was unimpeded by fences, and he slunk around the side, away from the street. Trying to look as nonchalant as possible, he found himself in an overgrown lot behind the power station. Cracked asphalt formed around spurts of thirsty plant life like freshly cooled lava.

He approached the building, feeling uncomfortably exposed, trespassing out in the open in the bright of day. But there was no one in sight, and he made it to the back entrance, where a row of large doors, perhaps once loading docks, were blocked by sliding metal gates. One of these gates was not quite all the way down, and he got on the ground and worked his way under, dragging his bag after him.

Inside it was cool and shady, a welcome relief from the heat of the day. He reached for his bag for the flashlight he had brought but found he didn't need it yet. The partly bricked or boarded windows let in ample light, revealing a picture of decay. There was rubble everywhere, the walls and corroded support columns decorated in graffiti. The main room branched off into smaller ones, and a staircase was visible through a doorframe on the left.

He set out exploring the interior, working his way along the ground floor, picking through the side rooms, kicking aside pallets and debris in his search for traps. Not all the rooms had windows, and he scanned the darker ones with the flashlight. The emptiness of the place began to feel strange. The bricks were wallpapered in spray paint, but there were no other signs of life. No mattresses, no furniture save some that lay overturned or broken up in heaps of garbage, no belongings of any kind. Whoever all had visited here, none had stayed.

The second floor was much like the first, but with larger rooms lit by the glassless windows and descending into darkness in the far corners, the corrugated ceiling pressing down overhead. After a superficial investigation, he returned to the stairs to climb to the top.

As his head cleared the stairwell his breath caught. This floor was enormous, the entire span of the building, lit in a ruinous glory. Two walls were dedicated to the words of previous interlopers here, black and white lettering exploding from the yellow brick canvas on vibrant splatters of blues and reds. The other two walls were daubed in text as well, but broken with lines of arched windows, only partially boarded over, though these were not the major source of light. That was the ceiling.

The ceiling of the powerhouse was a skeleton of steel with swaths shorn from the metal sheeting topping it, allowing the sun to spill through. It was lined with panels, perhaps once used for sound dampening, back when this desolate space housed engines and dynamos. The panels were made of some yellow-beige material or fabric and shaped like human teeth, stitched up alongside each other in rows. Many of them were damaged or put out entirely, some rotten with splotches of black mold, one of them fully black, with strips hanging down, and all reflected in the shivering pool beneath the gouged roof. Ringing the walls was a catwalk, and again above the panels another was just visible between the crisscrossing beams. This story alone contained three.

There was something about it all that filled him with awe. A beauty in it, in this ravaged frame, abandoned but still standing, still alive.

He gave the floor a brief scouting, finding his way up the catwalks and onto the roof, which was mostly bare and afforded nothing more interesting than a view of the city.