Community Property

Chapter 1
Prologue

Chapter Description: Chapter One will be posted on Tuesday, 15 April 2014.

Bump.

He had nodded off again. Jack had nodded off again on the bus ride home, and the forces of the universe had assessed a tax on the teenager for his sloth. The school bus hit a pothole, which meant Jack’s entire body would jostle up and down, which meant that the scrap of forehead he had leaned against the bus window would bounce away from the plexiglass and back again. His skull would hit the window and he would be awoken, bleary-eyed and sucked dry of energy… and he would look at his watch, use the minute hand to determine how close he was to home, and put his forehead back right where it was against the bus window.

The grease marked the spot.

Bump.

At some point between social studies class and now, Johnathan Brite – who his friends called Jack, so so few people called him Jack – had decided not to get off at the bus stop in front of his house, but at the one three stops prior. His hobbies were not common among high school students. Urban exploration, the one in which he indulged least frequently, but most passionately, was the order of the day for him.

An abandoned service station here, a cordoned-off rowhouse fallen into disrepair in the downtown of a city there… these were not eyesores to Jack, nor were they monuments to human imperfection or what-have-you.

They were simply adventures. Potential adventures, cooking with energy and waiting to happen.

Bump.

The bus door hissed and whined open. It wasn’t Jack’s stop. So, today, it was.

He moved steadily up the aisle, trying not to draw attention to himself, hoping that the bus driver was new or too hungover to care that an extra kid was getting off at the wrong place. No one paid him any mind, as was common in his day-to-day interactions with the world.

Jack Brite’s sneakers met asphalt. He was free. The bus, goldenrod and coughing, moved on.

The teenager adjusted the backpack on his shoulder and looked at the building before him. Time and poor municipal records had done a decent job of obfuscating the location’s original intent. To the wandering eye, it could just as easily have been a school, a mental hospital, or even a collective of offices wherein men in their fifties balanced the books and wondered how far they might have gotten in life had they just taken that one little risk they passed up instead.

In any case, the building was tall, mostly concrete, and abandoned. Signs warned of prosecution for trespassing and more than once had the fuzz come by to collect a vagrant or a crack smoker before moving on to feign utility elsewhere in the city.

Jack walked into the building quietly but deliberately. The less seen of him, the better.

For several minutes, the quiet high school student wandered the halls, loading the memory stick in his phone with photographic evidence of his malfeasance.

What did this building used to be? C’mon… tell me something.

There were scant few objects accumulating dust motes in the stead, and they were so generic as to reveal nothing; chairs, tables, the occasional desk that looked too big for a pupil but inadequate for a CPA.

The building simply wasn’t telling Jack a story. But the boy knew the building had a story. Every building did. And those stories were actually the confluences of hundreds of thousands of stories carried on the shoulders of the men and women who interloped among the corridors.

The sun was not yet beginning to set when Jack’s eyes fell upon a door that demanded his immediate attention. It looked so peculiarly out-of-place, and on many levels, at that: The wood shone glossy, as with polish; the brass doorknob was showroom new and hypnotically reflective…

…Even the sheet of stationery tacked to the door looked pristine. On it, written in ink:

Da Capo

Jack crooked an eyebrow.

A music school? It was not a lot to go on.

No windows opened into the room, so Jack could not see inside. A brief side trip to the back of the house revealed that no window opened to the outside world, either.

Whatever’s in that room… can only be seen by whomever… or whatever’s… in that room.

Moments after he retook his place at the summit of the stairwell, Jack looked at the polished oaken Da Capo door and the golden knob it seemed to offer as a handshake.

Jack moved his hand towards the knob; his shift in posture reminded him of the cell phone in his pocket.

Maybe I should call Chris, thought Jack.

He tapped the hard plastic in his pants. He looked at the door. The weird door, the lone well-kept piece of the whole place, almost ugly in its perfection when rated against the radiance of the surrounding delicious disarray.

There was no Bump, so Jack knew it wasn’t a dream. He was off the bus.

Off the bus and somewhere new.