Even though it wasn’t real.
Warm tea sloshing against her open-toed shoes brought her back to reality with a snap, the movie reel fading away for a moment. She breathed a sigh of relief, but did not smile. The thoughts were leaving fast, but not nearly fast enough. She still thought she could smell the mold of the garbage in the alley she had found herself in.
Huffing angrily, she took one last look out at the empty Factory. Glaring it down, she grabbed her red leather purse and opened it to make sure there was still a pack of Camels and a light inside, then buttoned it again and headed for the door, her left shoe leaving footprints of tea all the way to the door.
Roxanne cursed when she stepped in a puddle as she rounded the corner, her smoke already smouldering in her hand. She took a quick puff from between her ruby lips then brought the smoke away, holding it off to the side of her head the way she had seen women do in old movies from the fifties.
The back wall of The Factory looked the same as it always had, even before it was an arcade. None of her patrons really remembered this except for those that had seen it, but back in the day it had been a gymnasium. For a while, Coral Beach had been a boomtown as industrialists flocked there looking for coal and oil. The coal was gone now and the oil had never even existed, and most modern industrialists couldn’t find Coral Beach on a map of Maine even if their lives depended on it. Around the time when it was a ‘boomtown’, it had attracted many of the prosperity and the problems that came with larger communities. When the success waned as it always does, the prosperity left but the problems remained. The gym had been closed within a month of the mine shutting down. It had sat there gaining rot for three years before Joan had bought it, slowly transforming it into what it was today.
Through all the paint jobs and reconstruction, the back wall was still just as she remembered it. Long and white with the paint still flecking in the same places no matter how many times they went over it again, a large mound of smooth rock jutting up half way through the foundation and combining with the concrete wall to create a makeshift seat.
Nowadays kids called this the ‘old sitting stone.’ She’d heard Tommy and Derek refer to it as that more than once while heading outside to have a smoke, much as she was now. Although she thought ‘old kissing stone’ would have been much more appropriate, as many kids had had their first kiss sitting on that stone after a concert or a game of pool.
Back when she was that age and before she’d gotten her first kiss, the smooth mound of granite was known by the more sinister moniker of The Devil’s Chair.
She didn’t know who named it that. She supposed nobody really knew who named such things around towns all over the world, only that it happened. Unlike ‘The Old Sitting Stone’ (which was, in itself, self-explanatory), The Devil’s Chair had started out as a ghost story. A kind of urban legend of her youth that everyone passes off as rubbish until they were staring it right in the face.
It was a fairly simple tale. One of those ‘heard it from a friend of a friend of mine’ stories that always make it into heritage books and television shows like The Twilight Zone. Legend had it that if one sat in that chair when alone, that the Devil himself would come out to get you. He would rise up from hell and eat your heart before sending your soul down to hell, taking over your body and using it to walk around the earth unabated until it started to rot and fall apart. Then he’d go back to his chair and wait for some other person foolhardy or suicidal enough to climb up on it.
Roxanne chuckled a bit as she took another puff of her smoke, letting it curl out of her mouth and into her hair slowly. The memory of the legend had managed to distract her from her life for a few minutes, which she was grateful for. She recalled how that story had terrified her as a child, how she used to stare at the rock as she passed by the gym on her way to school every day, wary of Satan coming to get her. Once in third grade she’d seen her older brother back there eating a sandwich and wouldn’t go near him for a week, afraid that he had been possessed.
But she wasn’t scared of urban legends anymore. Urban reality was frightening enough. So when her legs began to buckle at the knees from being on her feet all day bussing tables and cleaning the back of house, she walked out and plunked herself down on the stone, taking another draw of her smoke from between two yellowed fingers.
It was an odd feeling for her, sitting on the stone slab. It was like being in the darkness of your room and thinking that you’d seen the image of a ghost in the darkness. You could tell yourself over and over again that ghosts didn’t exist, but in the end you’d have to turn on the light to make sure before your overactive imagination would let you get any sleep.
From her current point of view, though it was only a few feet from where she had stood a moment ago, the fall leaves that had been orange, yellow, and inviting a moment
