Forest of Rope

Chapter 1

Aug 18

Riley was alone in the bedroom.

The opaque and dreary fog outside mirrored his sulky disposition. It was the height of August but the temperature felt more like December. San Francisco was notorious for its cool summers and tedious inflictions of haze. Both of which Riley could not stand.

Maybe that's why she made us move here. A frustrated voice said irritably in his numb head. Just another way to get under our skin. The twenty-two year old sighed lonesomely. This had become a regular habit over the past few months: talking to himself.

Don't be stupid. He argued with the first voice. We all know the real reason why she wanted Fog City.

Riley stood up from his brooding position on the great canopy bed and crept to the windowsill with limited interest. The view had pretty much been committed to memory, memorised enough to convince him he was sick of it.

To be fair, from their humble settlement six floors up the city looked appealing enough on a good day. Today had not been one of those days. At that moment in the dwindling hours of evening, the occasionally pretty lights of downtown San Francisco were bleak and blurred beyond comparison. The view was so hazed that the only object visible within the impenetrable blanket of mist was Alexis's motivation for moving there in the first place:

The Golden Gate Bridge.

Renowned for its vast size and structure, the bridge held a very different attraction for Alexis. At about two-hundred and forty-five feet above sea level, the deck had seen countless jumpers in its time. Nobody really knew just how many had gone over the railings since its completion in nineteen thirty-seven. Yet the famous landmark had infamously become the number one suicide destination in the world.

Riley squinted at it with trepidation. The distant glow of the bay lights and of orange vermilion tint projected faintly onto murky waters, mixing together to form a sinister shade strikingly familiar to blood on the simmering surface.

He eyed the telescope in the corner of the room darkly. He had packed it away not a few hours earlier from its usual position by the window. When in use it could be well concealed within the chipped plastic slats of blinds to give the viewer a magnified perspective of the urban landscape. Though Alexis Moore used it specifically for one purpose:

To catch a person falling to their death.

It was a perverted image in Riley's unravelling mind. The sight of her bending forward to the lens eagerly, her eyes dead set on The Golden Gate. It discomforted him to say the least.

She kept a ledger full of names and dates of all the known suicides as well as detailed reports of her own observations.

Sometimes Riley wished if there could be some other outlet Alexis could indulge in but struggled to see her dedicate countless hours to the likes of birdwatching or trainspotting. It just wasn't for her. So bodywatching remained the pastime.

To that day she had witnessed a total of eleven jumps. They consisted of six males, two females and three unidentifiables. Riley had been present at four of these occurrences and each time had later felt petty and disturbed.

Alexis on the other hand watched in utter fascination when a body hit the water.

'It's beautiful,' she'd whispered breathlessly after a weedy figure in a brown overcoat had leapt over the railing, plummeting gracelessly out of view.

'What was beautiful about that?' he'd later argued, horrified by what he'd distantly seen.

Alexis rolled her eyes in disappointment, scrawling the jumper's best description into the handbook and noting the time from her beaten wristwatch.