365 Days (Part 1) | ✓

42. Warehouse

42. Warehouse: Write about being inside an old abandoned warehouse.

Based off of David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

He took a deep breath, inhaling the musky air and dust motes and stale scents. Many of the windows were broken, all jagged glass and harsh lines. The chill air blew through them at an angle that caused it to whistle, as if it hissed in pain to glide over the serrated edges.

He didn't know what devil possessed him to return here. David thought he was done with his past. He thought he had tucked it away after he wrote the memoir of his life, and vowed never to drag it out again.  He didn't think himself particularly inclined to grudges or nursing old hate, but he found he could not forgive what had transpired to him here. Some bestial, masochistic side of himself prompted him to visit the place where he had lost his innocence.

Perhaps that was too definitive. He should rather say, the place where he fully realized he had lost his innocence. After having wrote down the details of his life and been forced to consider it s contemplatively and thoroughly as any writer, he had to admit the loss of his infantile naivete began the day his stepfather beat him...

David turned away from the shattered windows, as if to physically turn aside from the memory. But what was he now, or soon to be, but a memory?

Murdstone and Grinby's had been a shabby place when he had worked here, as a boy. After years of neglect it had fallen into irremediable disrepair: the floors so firmly encrusted with dirt that it was more of a floor now than the decaying planks hidden beneath. The walls were blackened from layers of smoke never been bothered to be removed. He could hear the skitter of tiny paws down in the cellar, although these days his ears were beginning to fail in making everything audible. The rat population  had thrived in the absence of humans. He could see their fat, grey bodies now, as clearly as he had back then.

David had been one of the boys that dealt with the wine bottles, and the station for which was still set up in the corner. It sat dismally, as if balefully accusing me of abandoning it to disuse. There had been other slants to the trade business Murdstone and Grinby's was involved in, but David always primarily associated it with wine. Simply recalling the utter, humiliated drudgery of being a warehouse boy at such a tender age and so full of bright promise... David compressed his lips.

Everything about this place made him shudder. Every memory connected with it was terrible to his conciousness: the water lapping at the wharf outside, the smell of soot, and even the little stool in the counting-house, where Mr. Quinion had been accustomed to sit and watch over the warehouse workers, and which was still there as if awaiting the return of his seat.

David found it strange that after the place should fall so entirely in disgrace. He would have thought Mr. Murdstone would have made some provision for the business even beyond the grave.

Maybe, David reflected, still looking around, Maybe that is why I find this place to odious, even after many a long year of restorative happiness. It is that this place is irrevocably linked to my stepfather...

His stepfather. Mr. Murdstone, in his brutish firmness and cruel sovereignty, still left traces of unresolved anger in David's mind. He had not had occasion to dwell upon the subject of his unhappy past when Agnes had been alive, but that relief had been taken from him. His beloved wife was now in Heaven, as all good angels such as she will be. Yet he, David, deprived of her, felt the loss acutely. The sun he had loved for so much and for so long was gone, and David felt himself withering in the lack of its light.

He felt himself drawing close to his own end, and as all such men will do when blessed enough to preempt this knowledge, he turned upon his life in reflection. Thus, the visit to the warehouse, one of the places in his life that figured most prominently into the formation of his character, and one which he unknowingly included in part of the definition of himself.

He thought of his fellow worker-boys, whose crude, unlearned company he had been ashamed to keep, and so he had sought intellectual  refuge in the grandiloquent Mr. Micawber, his landlord and friend, until his death some twenty years previous. Also tainting the air with his visage was Steerforth, though David's handsome friend had never set forth in such a foul warehouse as this. Yet Steerforth's memory -- the one David held of him when they were boys, and before Steerforth had betrayed them all -- surrounded the place. David attributed it to the fact that he, fresh from Steerforth's delirious friendship, ruminated so frequently on the lad while David was working that the impression of those distracting thoughts remain even to this day.

David let his eyes rove restlessly around. He determined that there was one benefit from his spontaneous visit, slim as it may be: With an adult's perspective, he distinguished that the warehouse was, in the end, just a warehouse. It was not a place of unexplainable horror it had imprinted itself in his mind of being since he had escaped from it so many years ago. True, it was unsavory, and the fear had been real to him. He would not treat that lightly. But childhood fears ought to remain in childhood.

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A/N: ALL HAIL CHARLES DICKENS.