nocturnalist

I think I may be a minor character in a Japanese horror flick.

Earlier this evening, you see, I ducked back into the office during the evening to collect a bag of stuff I'd left at my desk, and while I was there I stopped off to use the loo. Said loo is in the depths of the building, with ventilation but no natural light, and all the ceiling lights were out except one fluoro panel over the far stall, which was noisiliy blinking on and off.

So I'm going about my ablutions, the buzz gets louder, and suddenly the room goes from shadows to pitch blackness. A click and there's gloomy light again. Shorter pause and darkness. Longer pause, gloom, longer pause, dark. The intervals were never quite the same length so it was impossible to get used to a rhythm, and when I was at the sink the light shining down into that far stall made it look like something in there was glowing.

The whole thing looked so much like a scene from some atmospheric Asian creeper-movie that I actually caught myself looking over my shoulder once or twice: the whole room was achieving the exact effect that those directors use to indicate that reality's going screwy and something Bad is about to happen. And of course I did what every minor character in a horror movie does: I looked over my shoulder, then shook my head and shrugged and went on with what I was doing.

In some parallel universe, I'm lying dead on those tiles with the sink tap still running while something unnameable vanishes in the shadows and the broken fluoro light goes tick.dark... tick/light-tick/dark tick light... tick/dark...