Sketcher's Row [Prototype]

Prologue

Soal was nobody important. Liff, an acquaintance of his, once told him that he was barely even a contributing member of the supporting cast. "Our cartoonist only wants one thing: the dough," they would say, rambling on with unfamiliar terminology, and baffling every character that would come in their way. "You get a minute and forty-five seconds of screen time in our average episode. Your only defining characteristic is that you play the sousaphone sometimes. So, please tell me how you were scheduled to be next season's main protagonist. Besides the dough, anyway."

"I have no idea what you're talking about, but it sure sounds crazy," Soal would shrug before retreating the scene and blacking out, often for hours or days at a time, until, before he was even aware of what happened, he was back on his feet and quipping again with the other children, to the delightful texture of laughter on his disproportionately small ears.

Here, everything was static and eternal. Rarely did anyone new join his school of two dozen, where he lived contently. When someone did, they stuck around for all time, never without a new joke to tell when they awoke from dormancy, which may as well have lasted a second or a century. Time was not a subject often discussed in school, nor were the matters of the non-children, who were invisible (with the exception of their ankles) and spoke in a foreign, if understandable, brass-like tongue. When such topics did come to the table, they were accompanied by Liff stepping in to deliver an unintelligibly nihilistic tangent, to which the skies responded, as always, with a chorus of amused voices.

Deeper voices were a queue for sleep. When they rang, it was time for the next long slumber. Soal never resisted the jolt, instantly shutting his giant, coal-black eyes; he had lived this life forever, as far as he knew, and no one but Liff was demented enough to question it without consequence.

This, however, was somehow all about to change.

Through an archaic telephone one day Soal heard the muffled brays of a non-child, only to hang up and see a trumpet plummet to the floor before him. Behind the trumpet stood the ankles of a non-child that had lost his mouthpiece. He bent down to retrieve it, but not without heeding Soal's attention.

"Ah!" the non-child gritted his teeth in the process, seemingly humiliated. "Well, I may as well speak to you like an ordinary person."

Perhaps Soal had misidentified this man. He was not a non-child, for he possessed all of the bodily and vocabulary functions of a child, but he bore not the diminutiveness or youthful presence of Soal's friends. Fedoras and wrinkles were not in fashion, either. He struck an intangible vibe that was alien, different, somehow wrong. "You're not from around here, are you?" a baffled Soal inquired.

"Not from around here?" the stranger's inky eyes appeared to rotate around an empty centrifuge, like gears. "You could say that. Name's Gulley. Carry P. Gulley."

"Uh... Soal." They shook hands. Gulley wore dark, leathery gloves, and contact with Soal's hand induced a shock. "Nice to meet you... er... You know Liff, right?" Questions like these were the variety he asked when awkward pauses settled in, as they now were.

"I don't know a Liff. What does that matter, though? I've places to go."

"Places? You don't mean the bus stop, right?"

"The bus stop is too crowded. Quiet places are more... my type."

"You could go to the library."

"Too many books. Too many pages, in too small a space for my taste."

"...Well, there's got to be a place for you, right? Why else would you be here, talking to me?"

Then, there was silence. This conversation was not only making Soal uncomfortable, more so than he had been any time in recent memory, but no conversation had ever gone on so long or so aimlessly without laughter to close off the experience. Is this what Gulley meant when he said he preferred quiet places?

"I know a place, not far from here," Gulley stood up once more, leaving his trumpet on the floor. "Not a place you know. But, who knows; you could learn a thing or two. Wanna come with me?"

*     *     *

"This is Sketcher's Row," Gulley prominently announced the title of his residence to Soal upon their arrival. Soal could not remember how they got there and did not recall ever being told why. Nor could he pinpoint how, when or why he would leave it. Only one variable was clear here, and that was the "who", Gulley. "Follow me, Soal. You need to see something."

Sketcher's Row was a different kind of building than the school Soal knew. The erratic brushstrokes on the narrowly separated walls were morbidly muted in tone, and meager bulbs bore the only light in the absence of windows. Here and there, there would come a spacious clearing in the labyrinth, where the walls would be coated by a grid of hundreds of mottled pages -- one blank sheet per square foot, each almost identical, with the exception of a tiny numbered label on the corner.

"A few years back, I started a collection," Gulley explained as he stopped Soal at the fourth sizable room. "It was for a friend, you see. He needed some help, and the only way I could get him out of that little kerfuffle was with paper. Lots and lots of paper."

"But why?" Soal bit his lip uneasily. Sketcher's Row was an entire structure of the uncomfortable feeling Gulley emitted. But where would he go from here?

"Well, where my friend lived, he didn't have something he needed," Gulley reached over to snatch a page, labeled 0527, from the wall. "A need only paper like this would satisfy. So I got some for him." He ripped off a small piece of 0527 and put it in his mouth to chew. "Tastes pretty good. Want some?"

"Oh, no thanks..." Soal took a step back. This was veering into surreal territory. His eyes darted across the room, shocked to find that every exit had somehow vanished.

"No, really; try it," Gulley handed Soal a different page, labeled 1039. On this one, however, a message was scrawled in tenuous ink: EAT ME.

"But I can't eat paper. It's not... food."

"Soal, what real food have you eaten before?"

"Uh... I think I had a peanut butter sandwich once."

"Exactly. Who's to say you can judge something unless you've tried it?"

Soal eyed the "EAT ME" suspiciously.

"Come on, Soal; no one will know," Gulley encouraged. Soal finally caved to the demand, wrinkled up the page into a ball, and stuffed it in his mouth, starting to chew. Almost immediately, Soal's senses dimmed.

Gulley's hand gestures became blurry and distant, his speech as faint as a non-child's. "Oh, I forgot to mention," he mumbled. "The 'sketch' drug is technically illegal in these parts, so I have to relocate shop every time someone follows me here. Where you're going, though, you won't need to worry about that."

"Where...? What... huh?" Soal gulped nervously after comprehending none of what was just said, unintentionally swallowing the unchewed part of 1039 whole. A tsunami of laughter quickly welcomed him to unconsciousness.