Enigma II : Magic Card

/22.1/ Wall of Wax

Glitches in our hearts and glitches in our bodies,
Hand raises with a rose when I want it to push the ladder from under your feet.

Dark edges seemed to fog up with every step, moving forward enquired a better requirement of more than five senses. Once in a while, we would hear a creak, then some metallic bass. The slightest movements of hands for a better grip had their sounds reverbing like the inside of a metal tank. None of us knew where we were going. It was a climb of some stairs at first, then we were walking before reaching another staircase. One slide-down of the door disconnected us from the world entirely. It was just another world of darkness, maybe not darker than the one we lived in.

Torchlights did only so much help to let us through. Shades of dark greys and whites tiled across both the walls on our sides, dotted by several holes that grew more irregular with our advancement. Tints of fading wall art would narrate lonely outcasts' past time in this place if it hadn't been hidden this way.

Neo's strutting gait held smaller steps, nonetheless, he walked fast. The staircase that led us was short, digging down to somewhere with a depth of pitch void. The flights were taller than usual, prevailing a risk to fall down and never be able to reach up. I was gingerly placing every foot. When I was finally at a place presumably I could provide a name to, Neo was already looking around in crevices with a hawked gaze.

"Rather messy than a place which is used more frequently," He opined, "Funny smell too."

"There-" I stared at the plasma screen placed at a near corner of the hall room, "The whole CCTV view of the house."

"Look at this," he said. He was busy fervently throwing open one of the trash bags stashed in an obscure corner, revealing a jumble of Ammos and shotguns, "Mossberg 590, and oh- Remington! All houseful hefty ones. They sure follow the trends."

"Collect the fingerprints first. And hand me the camera." I scanned through the place in a quick glimpse.

Tiles with blotches of dirt ornating the ground, and a shabby low ceiling, fore was a microcosmic megalith of rusting steel and glass. It was like those stereotypical basements one would suddenly discover in an age-old mansion, with a hint of a modern touch, to say. There was a section of two and a half of the entire, the bigger ones each of at best nine feet length, curtained at the fusion by a stack of bandoliers hanging till the average chest height of a man. Three of the walls apparently had no existence of their own, one with a display of weaponry, another with the alignments of several photographs and notes that created a poorly constructed emblem of red strips hanging onto with vestigial remnant of adhesion. My shoes kept sinking into the placements of drain lines at one-foot intervals with what purpose they might be there for. I wondered who those people in the pictures were, but something ominous in the core of my mind scoffed, telling me that, half of them must have demised already from this world.

I traced my finger along a single line, proceeding upward towards the visage of a middle-aged couple taking a detour along the right, another of a man with evil brows with a red crosshatch drawn on his face to juxtapose the green of his iris. His face reminded me of someone. Maybe if I looked into the database, it wouldn't take me long to find out who it was. He looked like someone to be recognized, but the middle-aged couple, that benign show of their face had me knowing, the file of their unsolved case, if there was one, must be somewhere down the medley, squalor hanging onto it from negligence.

They sure knew not to leave back enough of the evidence whether it was their most secret and trusted hideout or not. Yet it took a few preserved dusty old drafts to have me enlightened with the conjectures of a few of their earlier exterminations. One significant case held info of a drug ring, the whereabouts of the kingpin annotated with a significant date that directly matched with one from my highlights. Neo wasn't so oblivious so far here either. The file was to go in our sack. The basement was a living architecture of evidence, maybe not enough to justify all of their done tasks, but enough to surmise the ones which didn't have any more proofs lying around the bush. The computer settled on one side was the most useless one of all the things. Coming with the password it was secured with, and there was not enough time to go over that at all.