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st_affBy afternoon, the pale blue of the morning sky had bleached and deepened to an icy slate gray. Seagull cries haunted the beach gone missing in an impenetrable fog. Even the lighthouse at the point barely pierced the rolling boil above a choppy, murky, bottle-green sea.
All the living souls in Bonesville clung close to the lights of The Hangman's Grill, like terrified barnacles on a pier. Even the stranger and more criminal folk that made up the population of Bonestown avoided the ocean on days like this. Idiots who beach-combed in fog were how ghosts got made. Well, some of them.
So even had their (mostly) human gazes been able to make out the strange glowing as a new cave mouth opened at the base of the sea cliff, there was no one near the beach to do so. A very few ventured down to the cove on matters of "business" late in the afternoon when the weather settled to something slightly less legendary, but they appeared not to notice the new cave or anyone leaving it until they crossed onto more traveled paths.
For those at the Madonna Inn who had been there the last time a door opened to another world, the experience was familiar. The door to Room 144 had preemptorily sealed itself shut and refused to open until whatever happened beyond it had happened. When it did, the bank of windows that had been at the outer wall had disappeared and the rock walls extended out into a cave.
From within the room, the sounds of screeching seagulls and crashing waves carried and echoed, but none of the coastal moisture crossed the spatial-temporal barrier. And when the first to venture forth emerged, they were greeted by a slowly reddening nautical warning of a sky.
All the living souls in Bonesville clung close to the lights of The Hangman's Grill, like terrified barnacles on a pier. Even the stranger and more criminal folk that made up the population of Bonestown avoided the ocean on days like this. Idiots who beach-combed in fog were how ghosts got made. Well, some of them.
So even had their (mostly) human gazes been able to make out the strange glowing as a new cave mouth opened at the base of the sea cliff, there was no one near the beach to do so. A very few ventured down to the cove on matters of "business" late in the afternoon when the weather settled to something slightly less legendary, but they appeared not to notice the new cave or anyone leaving it until they crossed onto more traveled paths.
For those at the Madonna Inn who had been there the last time a door opened to another world, the experience was familiar. The door to Room 144 had preemptorily sealed itself shut and refused to open until whatever happened beyond it had happened. When it did, the bank of windows that had been at the outer wall had disappeared and the rock walls extended out into a cave.
From within the room, the sounds of screeching seagulls and crashing waves carried and echoed, but none of the coastal moisture crossed the spatial-temporal barrier. And when the first to venture forth emerged, they were greeted by a slowly reddening nautical warning of a sky.
