Babel.
Nightside.
Not _just_ Nightside. At the Wall of Night itself. Shimmering indigo and ebony. Sickly swirls of shadow and night. Blackened colors dancing and playing across its surface -- the rainbow spectrum made not by light split through a prism but by some impossible splitting of darkness itself.
A thin, steady rain patters on a roadway swallowed by the Wall. Dull orange lamps and colorful neon reflect from garbage-clogged puddles. Occasional gunfire echoes through the nearby labyrinth of buildings. Faint screams. Moans. Laughter. Mechanical noises of some great factory. The sounds of a city full of life and the activities of life and the making of life. But here the street is dead. Empty save for the rain and the garbage and the Wall of Night.
The Wall swirls more quickly. Darkness and sickly black colors spin and twist in psychedelic patterns that make the effects of the harshest hallucinogens appear tame by comparison.
The Wall bulges at a point on the street. Stretches. And then snaps back into place like rubber as a man steps from the darkness into the relative light of Nightside.
He is of average height. Average build. His face is average. Everything about him is average save for his skin. His skin is black -- almost mirror-reflective with the sheen of water from the rain. He wears a button-down shirt. Jeans. Biker-boots. A denim jacket. His hair hangs to his shoulders. All are the same uniform black as his skin.
He stretches his arms to his sides and closes his eyes. His skin melts from gun-metal black to a more natural caucasian-flesh color as he inhales deeply through his nostrils. His clothing shifts to faded blues as he exhales through his smiling mouth. He looks pleased. Content. The look of a man happy to be alive and out of bed and getting his first scent of a fresh spring morning when all is right with the world.
A black derby appears in his outstretched hand and he places it firmly atop his head. His brown hair, all traces of black drained away in the rain, drips from beneath it.
"Ahhhh!" He breathes. "There's _nothing_ like the smell of midnight in the morning!"
He begins to sing softly as he walks casually into the wilds of Nightside.
"De Camptown Ladies sing dis song.
Do Dah... Do Dah...
De Camptown Racetrack five miles long..."
*****
The laundromat -- smelling heavily of detergents and fabric softeners and ozone from an overworked air-conditioner that was getting ready to blow its last fuse and pass into the air-conditioner afterlife -- had emptied out fairly quickly when _he_ came in.
The walking dead had a way of doing that to a place.
Of course, it was Wednesday, so the only people even patronizing this particular laundromat on this particular day were the ones that didn't know that _he_ always did his laundry on Wednesday. The regular patrons -- the ones who had been coming here for years -- had stopped coming on Wednesdays. And this suited him just fine.
This day, as all other laundry days, he strode imperiously into the laundromat and fixed his milky-white gaze on those poor, unfortunate, ignorant souls who were unaware of the specific importance of Wednesdays in the laundromat. Dry tendons rasped against each other as rotted lips pulled back in a fierce grin of decaying teeth. He doffed his top-hat and bowed, showing the gaping empty hole punched through dry skin and bare skull. As if that weren't enough, three zombies -- not the Voodoo kind of living-zombie created through drugs and socio-psychic religious magic, but actual corpses brought back to a shambling semblance of life by some supernatural, reanimating spark -- came walking in carrying three baskets of dirty laundry that smelled as though a cemetary had exploded from a buildup of methane.
The few other patrons had cleared out without bothering to gather up their half-washed, half-dried and half-folded laundry.
The majority of the wash belonged to the zombies but it was next to impossible to get them to do it on their own. Zombies, after all, being what they were, tended to forget things like separating light clothing from dark clothing or actually _measuring_ the laundry detergent instead of just pouring in the whole bottle. And _he_ would be damned if _his_ undead were going to walk around in shabbily laundered clothes.
His own outfit was, of coure, impeccable if not a tad ostentatious. It was an attention-getter. A sensation-causer. And, most importantly, it was a badge of office. The tuxedo, full black tie and tails, combined with the top-hat, let everyone know that they were dealing with Baron Samedi -- King of the Dead. Or, on Wednesdays, King of the Wash as he quickly separated lights from darks and cottons from delicates.
Six front-loading washers loaded. Six cups of detergent measured and poured. Six fabric-softener balls filled and added to the loads. Twenty-four quarters slid into slots and dropped into coin hoppers and Baron Samedi, King of both the Dead and of Dirty Clothes, kicked back in a plastic chair to read the latest issue of "Nexus Geographic" left behind by a patron who, if she remembered to come retrieve her laundry, probably wouldn't mind at all. The Baron particularly loved the articles by Dingo O'Darby, photojournalist extraordinaire.
Of course, it was warm in the laundromat, as laundromats often are. And each washer, happily washing away, sang an almost hypnotic tune that spiraled around and over and through the song of its working neighbor to create a resonating melody.
...ta-whut-ta-whut-ta-whut-ta-whut-ta-whut-ta-whut-ta-whut-ta-whut-ta-whut-ta-whut-ta-whut-ta-whut-ta-whut-ta...
He dozed lightly, "Nexus Geographic" on his lap opened to a Dingo O'Darby photo of a human woman surrounded by thousands of oily-black tentacles that seemed to be coming from the head of a small being that looked like an overstuffed teddy-bear.
It was the slight change in sound that woke him.
...da-wayne-da-wayne-da-wayne-da-wayne-da-wayne-da-wayne-da-wayne-da-wayne-da-wayne-da-wayne-da-wayne-da-wayne-da...
He looked around, still groggy. Half-asleep. The laundromat seemed cooler. The air hushed. The lights somehow darker. The shadows deeper. And his zombies gone. Baron Samedi sat up a little straighter. His eyes opened a little wider.
...da-wayne-da-wayne-da-wayne-da-wayne...
The foam in the front-loading washers was a disturbing pink. The water a frightening shade or red. He stood up, all traces of sleep long gone, and carefully approached the machines. Peering inside their bubble windows where ragged pieces of his zombies churned around and around in a bath of soapy blood and water.
His first thought was anger. Anger that someone dared to accost the servants of the King of the Dead. But as he thought about it, that emotion was quickly chased away by the fear of someone -- or something -- who could quietly dismember three living dead and load them into six front-loading washers without making a sound and without spilling a single drop of blood in all of... he looked at the battered clock on the wall and froze... in all of one minute?
He backed away slowly, the litany of the washing machines suddenly becoming sinister. His eyes flicked left and right in an unmoving skull.
A hand touched him on the shoulder and he screamed.
"Boo!"
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