Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Doctrine’s contribution to the Six Sentence Story bloghop.

Hosted by Denise

This being a continuation of last week’s Six, here’s a handy link, in case you didn’t read it.

This week’s prompt word:

ERUPTION

The tall, thin man looked over at the Sophomore, his index finger to his lips, eyebrows cursoring the young man’s attention towards the far side of the rooftop where the stairwell door was sighing closed behind the dark silhouette of the Proprietor known as the Raconteuse. Hair, like angry coals in a forge, rode her shoulders as she passed among the skylights, under stilted wooden water towers, her black robes dusting the inverted ‘J’ of beaten-metal air vents, to the base of an open staircase, the granulated crunch of her Eloise Bottas’ modulated into flattened, nearly-musical, bell tones as she ascended to the structure referred to as ‘the penthouse’.

“Ain’t no shame in letting the little subconscious alarm-bells get to you, kid,” the older man was now, somehow, at the edge of the roof as far from and in the opposite direction from where the Proprietor Chris disappeared.

The college student looked out and down at the enclosed bridge structure connecting the building housing the Six Sentence Café & Bistro to the adjacent mill, beneath which at least four horizontal rows of soot-glazed windows continued down to the alley, loading docks and alcoves.

Hoping to laugh off his mood, the Sophomore turned away from the post-industrial abyss only to come face-to-face with a sign, riveted to the brick wall of an additional stairwell; across the top: ‘Warning! Permitted Individuals Only!’ beneath that: ‘Rules Governing the Workpeople’ the list, long since obscured by the passing of seasons and time, except for the odd words: ‘the Overlookers’ (and) ‘The Masters’; what made him fear a four-alarm eruption of his battered subconscious was the slogan across the bottom of the Notice: ‘The Engine That Changed The World’.

The tall, thin man, sounding too far out over the alleyway to make any sense, laughed with restrained joviality, “I know, right?”

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