Tabula Rasa(23)

And there had been music in the castle. Ren Fair music, but still. And at least Trevor spoke to me.

I could probably manage to fit most of my conversation with Shannon since leaving the castle onto the back of a napkin.

He’d had to make a detour to the airport where his car was parked and drop off the rental SUV. He carefully kept me out of view of cameras without making it look too odd, then we got into his car and continued.

His real car was a shiny black four-door Cadillac that looked like something you’d drive the president around in. The license plate said, Georgia. I half expected to ride in the back with a glass divider between us, but he put me in the front with him. There was no glass divider.

I could have screamed for help in the airport rental place, and I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have been able to stop me. But there was that luggage with Trevor in it that we were dragging around. What if I got help but then they decided I’d been an accomplice? There was also an insane part of me that trusted Shannon, despite all reasonable evidence that I shouldn’t. There was still a part of me that wanted to crawl inside his cold dead silence to escape the scrutiny of the world.

Shannon was a man of utility. He packed the most practical, versatile things. He drove the most unobtrusive car. He spoke the fewest words necessary to get his point across. When we got to his house, I knew it was his because the inside matched everything else I knew about him.

A little cold. Very minimalist. Clean. Regimented. It was a big, nice house in an equally nice neighborhood. It wasn’t flagrantly lavish, but it screamed either upper middle class or, I’ve got a f*ckton of money, but I don’t need you to know about it. Considering all the illicit jobs I’d imagined him holding during our endless trip, I was leaning toward the latter.

As soon as we crossed the threshold, the security system blared at us. Shannon turned it off, locked the doors, then turned it right back on again. Message sent. Nobody went in or out of this house without him knowing about it, and it was going to be locked up tighter than Fort Knox at all times.

Inside, everything was gray and black and white. The only splash of color was some red here and there. The color of blood. I wondered if he realized how much of his internal state he broadcast just with his decorating choices?

“Stay. I’m going to put my stuff up.”

Anybody else would have tossed his bags beside the door and handled it later. We’d been driving all day, and he was obviously tired. But in Shannon’s world, it seemed everything had a place, and nothing ever deviated from where it was supposed to be.

He took his bag upstairs while I stood in the living area glancing around awkwardly. A bright red photo album caught my eye from the coffee table. To give myself something to do, I sat on the sofa and flipped through the album. It was filled with pictures of abandoned amusement parks. Decapitated mermaid heads and fins and creepy peeling clowns abounded. There were broken down wooden roller coasters that looked to be rotting and seemed held up only by vines. One rather sad image showed a couple of paddle boats abandoned in the middle of a lake.

What was it about these places that drew Shannon? They were so empty. Maybe it felt familiar. He wasn’t in any of the photos, making it clear he’d been the photographer. But there were almost never other people in any of the photos either. Occasionally there was a stray leg or arm, even the side of a face and body as someone walked through the frame—no doubt his fellow urban explorers. But people in the photos were clearly accidental, never intentional. People weren’t what Shannon was interested in.

He’d traveled all over the world for this hobby. Not only were there several photos of signs in foreign languages but Shannon had put labels on each one of where it had been taken. As I worked through the book I saw he’d been to Canada, Spain, Italy, Korea, Japan, China, Vietnam, Russia. He seemed to have been everywhere, capturing all the strange, wacky, and creepy of these theme parks.

There was one photo with people in it. It was a picture of a cluster of found photos of smiling employees from a South Korean park. It was telling that Shannon needed to be this many degrees separated from real people to take a picture of them.

Despite the emptiness in these park images and my fears that it reflected far too much of Shannon himself, something about this hobby made him seem more human to me.

I took my time perusing the album, sure Shannon wouldn’t mind, but he was upstairs for quite a while, so finally I got up and went to explore the kitchen. Unlike the photo album, I was pretty sure my going through all his cabinets and drawers would annoy him, but I was curious.

There was nothing unusual in the kitchen. I didn’t find any heads or fingers in the freezer. Much to my relief.

I ended up standing in front of the sink with the faucet on, staring at the water as it came out, like it was the most interesting thing I could have ever discovered.

I could have been standing in that state for five minutes, ten minutes? An hour? Hell, I don’t know. Time melded together, and all that existed for a while was moving water.

The only thing that broke the spell was Shannon’s hand pressing down firmly on the handle, making the water abruptly stop. “If you’re this fascinated with running water, you could have a future as a plumber,” he said.

He took me to an office on the first floor and sat me down behind a desk in front of a laptop. A browser window was open with several tabs to clothing stores.

“Do you know your sizes?” he asked.