The Collector: Three

The scents of rust and iron, cold and damp, filled Iris’s head as she awoke with a jerk, calling for her father. She had been racked with night terrors once more, the first time in nine months. However, these new nightmares were not fabrications, composites of television ghouls, and perturbing stories in the news. It wasn’t only for the distorted and recontorted memories that she was stricken. The alien nature of her new accommodation, most certainly its odor, threw her all the more off guard.
Where she had last been, what she last knew, and even what had filled her dreams was a place of sunlight and familiarity, the taste of salted caramel and copper fresh on her tongue. What she awoke to was a dark room, glowing with a slate blue glow from the sliver of silver prying its way in through a vertical slit in the stonework. Were night not enough to drive fear into her, the queerness of the place, the unreal chill, and aura in the air, certainly was. For a moment, Iris wasn’t confident she had woken fully, that somehow her room had twisted into a new nightmare before sleep could fully peel from her mind, or that this was a false awakening. Yet, the cold stone beneath her feet and the little bites from the zipper of her gown try to convince her otherwise.
Rising to find the room was not incorporeal, ready to fade at the first attempt to dismiss its mimicry of reality, Iris decided she needed to know where she had ended up. Trying to probe her memory only to recoil in agony at what had been seen so recently, she could only conclude she might be in a dangerous place. It was either the strange men who had taken her or, being so weak, Iris had been taken to a hospital. There was no telling exactly what the place was, but she was fairly certain, after visiting her grandmother that final time just a year prior, that this was no clinic of any she would recognize.
A faint yellow light caught Iris’s attention, a flare in the gloom like a firefly buzzing through the brush. She came to the door; its window showed a lantern hung on the opposite side of the wall from her room. At first, it took Iris a moment to operate the door. She tried to push it, pull it, and lift it before accidentally sliding it like the patio door at her father’s home. Once free of the chamber, Iris was quick to take the lantern by its handle and dangle it in front of her. However, with the light, her way was no more clear than before, as looking from side to side from the threshold of her room, she found she was at a junction between corridors. Both halls looked equally grim, quiet, and imposing to the young girl. She could plunge headlong into trouble on either path, so for a moment, Iris took stock of the situation and collected herself.
Firstly, with the light, she now noted she was not in her Sunday best like Dad had laid out for her before the visit. She had been changed, without her knowledge, into pajamas of a sort, but they were nothing like her own or what had been packed with her. Instead of pink shorts and a cream nightgown with NASA printed on the stomach, she wore a button-down flannel nightshirt with matching pants. It was an ugly pattern in mustard yellow and gray, neither of which were colors she would have preferred. Touching again at memory, she found her bracelet with its many charms and the R for her friend Ruth, was missing. Gently pressing a finger to her ear, she found that the little rhinestone studs, opal as her birthstone, were also missing.
Immediately, Iris began to try to justify these things, explain them away, compile all the strangeness about her, and put it in a nice, neat package, bow included. Mother had never liked that Dad had gotten her ears pierced, she didn’t like her wearing jewelry, even the bracelet, and she certainly was not a fan of the clothing her dad let her pick out. At the same time, Iris knew her mother would only voice her disapproval of these things, berate her without question, and gossip to friends and family about how terrible it all was, but she would never go so far as to take these things away. On the other hand, some of her mother’s boyfriends were more firm, insistent on being dominant, as though her dad hadn’t a clue or care about what was happening with his daughter. One of them, Dave possibly, had taken grandmother’s necklace and never returned it after her mother had stopped seeing him. Iris never forgot how easily he had removed it from her, saying it was against her mother’s rules and how just as complacently her mother had let it go on.
As thoughts of mother bungled around in her head, Iris felt her resolve to discover where she had ended up weakened. She began to wane on any inclination of finding the nearest adult and asking what had happened and if everything was okay. But just as she began to slump against the wall, gliding backward gradually to the bed, she heard the melancholic cry of an unknown type of music somewhere not too far off. The sound at once chilled her, uncommon in its qualities and lacking familiarity until the sound of strings, a violin perhaps, though so muted it was hard to tell, came to dance with the celestial sound. In time Iris found her feet moving, but no sooner than she noticed, they were once more stone. Yet, they rumbled along, time and time again, until she was far from the dark chamber and at the mouth of the corridor.
After more twists and turns than Iris could keep track of, the hall deposited her in a room no less strange than the bed she had woken in. The room was spherical though the floor was clearly flat though a rise existed around the rim. This chamber was illuminated in a dull burgundy as though to encourage ease and rest of mind. Within was the origin point of the music, a young man in gray trousers that would have been supported by the violet suspenders hanging about his thighs. He continued trilling away on the strings. He faced away from her and towards an odd mass that was slumped over a sort of organ like nothing Iris had seen in school or church.
The instrument looked to be built into a creche of the wall, though plenty of pieces protruded from the spot. Just in front of the mass were the keys, a double set of boards featuring ebonies and ivories, and a third jutting before the whites like tabs. These odd buttons were indefinable metallic that had been well worn and lacked polish. What was no less strange from these face keys were the pads, glowing in a bizarre and almost organic way. These were stationed above the key rows and formed a pattern of sorts, a line of even, a line of odd, then a line of even, horizontally across the wall. Bordering these aspects, two coils had been twisted and configured in an asymmetrical pattern. They seemed to vibrate with the resonance of the chords. As she examined the creeping and crawling instrument, Iris came to the most elaborate and strange feature of them all.
Like any pipe organ, there were tubes leading up, past the pad, and over the coils that rose as high as the heavens. This organ was no exception, yet far from anything she could consider standard. These pipes rose, twinkling in rust red and copper, but just beyond the side coils, the tubes began to snake away. Some rose like healthy flowers ready to bloom while others darted away horizontally, diagonally, and snaking curlycues. Though some were scrawled across the walls in intricate patterns and designs, they were all punctuated by the funnel of the organ. These final strange manifestations were no less unnerving as the rim was black as night and only parted by impressions in silver. The silver markings on each horn mouth were different but all the same for the manner in which they stretched and contorted into faces crying out in misery. They were almost life-like, the creases of flesh and individualized features making them uncanny likenesses of humanity. As Iris admired the network of tubes, some of which gazed into the dark of the hall at either end of the room, she began walking.
Though she had not bid them to, Iris felt her bare feet carrying her further into the chamber until she came near enough to topple one of the towers of books lining the interior. With her body on an odd autopilot, Iris became a passenger inside her mind. Stepping past the perimeter of book towers, Iris was soon orienting herself on a scarlet and gold loveseat. She sat facing the boy, his olive complexion all the better, complimented by his vanilla cream button-down shirt. Though his gaze would have run almost parallel to hers, the boy did not glance over or seem at all to notice her. Following the direction of his eyes, Iris found that he was staring at the organ and the odd lump of ashen cloth there.
Iris studied the queer, slopping mound for a moment as it hunched over the keys. It was not long before she noticed that this mass, this blotch of shade, was trembling all so slightly. Focusing harder on the shape, she could see the edges move as though filled with invisible arms, half a dozen or more to each side. As they danced about the keys, compressed the extra tabs, tapped the lit pads, and contrted the coils, these shapes gave life to the unearthly song assailing her senses.
Now that she was so close, the violin no longer muffled, the notes clear, the lack of cadence or any conceivable rhythm finally became apparent in Iris’s mind. The trek into darkness to reach this place had been so long she had grown numb to the music that beckoned her, but now it had returned in earnest. She sat staring for ages into the face of one of the many silver masks adorning the room, trying to parse out a melody of some kind. Beyond the trills of the harp, it was as though every note played across the keys was coming from another world. They lacked treble, they were not bassy, there was no horn or string or percussion or any type of sound that could begin to mimic this song.

It was an anomalous thing like hearing the noise of the planets so far in the cosmos from Earth. And every moment of the intoxicating display intrigued and fixed Iris in her place until the last note was played.
Finally, when the last of the maddening track had run its course, Iris felt herself at peace, in a total calm that had never come before in her time. Watching on as though drugged, Iris saw the strange mass rise slightly, reaching a full height somewhere near eight feet tall of snaking gray fabric. Then the curving pile twisted about to face the couch where the boy, neck of the violin in hand, was lounging now. Out of almost nowhere, he had gotten a dish of grapes and was one by one plucking them off with his teeth. The boy was a minor distraction, handsome and fay as he was, for the far more startling sight for young eyes.
The mass had a face unlike anything Iris had ever dreamt in the worst of her terrors. From the front of the creature, the face looked to be an arm’s length deep into a grim shaft within the flesh. It glowered in a hollow and dead expression that could have been mistaken for an unused Halloween mask. The features of its cold gray flesh were inhuman, a mix of disgust and abhorrence but also complacency and perhaps comfort. As it floated in the black void that lit the eyes with a clouded night sky, a voice like that of a male kindergarten teacher, soft and kind, flowed out of the facial pit. No word of threat or damnation or any type of illness needed to be voiced. For Iris, the new dread gnawing away her ease and comfort came solely from the unreal, unnatural, almost demonic face and the voice it held captive.