Escape From Norriswood

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

September, 1991: 

 Rosecliff was in the lobby of the front administrative building when Junior and Mia walked in. He wore a plaid shirt, checkered red and tan, and it was tucked into a pair of blue cords that looked at least a few sizes too big for him. The cords rolled up at the bottom, over a pair of tattered green boots.

He held his hand out to Junior as he approached him.

"You must be Terry's son," he said, and pierced Junior's gaze.

"I am."

"And you," Rosecliff said, turning his head toward Mia. "What a surprise and honour it is to see you in here."

Mia was silent as she shook his hand.

"Let's go then," Rosecliff said. He about-faced himself toward a pair of double doors. He pivoted his back around to hold one open for the Junior and Mia as he pushed through it.

The inside of the mill wasn't anything like what Junior had imagined: pipes lined the walls, and steam exhausted outwards from minute cracks in the thick, black plastic. The place stunk like mould, and the humidity pressed down upon Junior's skin. The place was warm in the way a bathroom is warm with the thick steam of a hot shower after the water has been left running for twenty minutes, or more, and Junior imagined what it must be like to be a worker here, covered in sweat after a few minutes of pacing up and down the concrete hallways.

Rosecliff led the two of them down toward a side hallway cut-off from the rest of the floor by a thick, metal door. When he opened it, a grey staircase ran off upwards and downwards at the same time. Rosecliff headed downstairs.

He led them down a concrete hallway that was lit only for a series of emergency lights flashing along the walls. Water dripped from the ceiling, and yellow signs were erected in the middle of the floor, pools of water seeping out around them.

The sounds down in the basement seemed to be amplified in Junior's ears, and he could the hear things grinding along on the floor above him. Workers pushed trolleys along through the hallway somewhere up ahead, and the sound of the wheels running ricocheted off the walls.

Rosecliff seemed to veer off arbitrarily to the right then, but a moment later Junior saw he was holding open a door for them. He walked in.

The room loomed out wide around them, and Junior sensed something was different about it's construction, but for a few seconds couldn't see what it was. Then he did: the walls were rounded, and curved upwards; the ceiling was domed.

Junior stepped inside, one step, two steps, all the time his eyes nailed to the ceiling. In the very centre of the ceiling, a light fixture spiraled down, the light bulbs hanging off of the fixture like tendrils. The fixture itself looked like a kind of beehive, no, more like a cone, a snail shell, and winding outwards from itself.

"How did you manage –" Junior said, but Rosecliff was cutting him off, leading him towards a squat two-seat table pushed against the curved wall. As Junior neared he realized that the table, too, was circular, the wooden seats at either end had backs that contorted and curved.

Mia sat across from him, and Junior felt her eyes play across his shirt. He guessed what she might be thinking: see, I told you this thing wasn't just a paper mill.

But there was no reason Rosecliff's office wasn't just the result of a well-paid mill worker feeding his eccentric tastes of contemporary interior design, Junior thought.