by Ben Farthing
"I believe you," Eddie said, and he was mostly telling the truth. "Dad won't get rid of me."
"Get rid of you? The hell are you talking about? He just adopted you, didn't he? I thought you were afraid of going on punishment. This 'not helpful' bullshit has you worried you'll be out on the street?"
Eddie didn't know how to respond.
"I keep saying, people yell and fight. You try to be nice--or be helpful--but sometimes you screw up. My mom tanned my hide more times than I can count, but I never worried about being thrown out. What the hell is wrong with your old mom? Come on, you text your dad, and then we're going back downstairs."
"No."
"I wasn't asking."
"If you're right, my dad still needs to save his house."
"Oh. Yeah. Well, text him that we're going to the top floor, as soon as we find an elevator."
Eddie sent a text apologizing, and telling Dad he was going to search the top floor before going back outside. It sent, but the message didn't get marked "delivered."
"Hopefully he sees it soon."
"Tell him what time is for you."
Eddie sent another text.
"Okay, let's find a way up."
They walked out of the empty room, through the hole.
Twenty feet into the trashed office, a small green circle glowed near the ceiling.
"Was that there before?" Cam asked.
Eddie shook his head.
They crept towards it.
As they drew near, their flashlights revealed a single elevator. The glowing green circle had an up arrow.
"Weird," Cam said.
It's for me.
That weird thought again.
This time, it wormed its way into his head. An unwelcome intruder. He wanted a bath and some mouthwash.
This building wasn't empty or full, it was exactly what it was meant to be, and even though Eddie had no idea what that meant, it made him achy like when he had a fever.
Cam said that people should like each other whether or not they have problems. Well, this building didn't seem to want him when he was scared about Chris. Now that Cam had convinced him that maybe - just maybe - Chris would love him whether or not he was helpful, the building wormed this thought into his head that it was for him.
Eddie took a deep breath. None of that made any sense. It was creepy because the lights were off. Sure, it went up overnight, but scientists were always improving technology. The elevator didn't magically show up - they just hadn't noticed it before. Maybe the green light had just turned on.
"You lost in thought again?" Cam asked.
"No, I'm fine. Let's go find the treasure."
They entered the elevator and pushed the highest number: 120.
49
Chris scooted away from the open elevator shaft.
The car overlapped the door by six inches. Micah pressed her cheek to the floor, looking outside. Behind her, Roberts dropped down into the car. He must have jammed the mechanisms above.
"What's out there?" he called.
Chris looked at the wall of windows in front of him. Twenty feet across a tile floor, he was finally looking at the real edge of the skyscraper. The glass he'd seen from the outside.
Gray clouds hung low in the sky, close enough that the tower probably pierced them near its top.
He was on floor 88. From the ground, the tower had looked to be no more than 60 floors. But as Chris approached the windows and looked down, he saw the Northside of Richmond, Victorian revival homes and blocky apartments. To the south, he looked down at the modest skyscrapers of downtown.
But beyond the city itself, where there should be forests and the James River and suburbia, Chris wasn't sure what he was seeing.
Gray, instead of green. Not a light gray like the clouds, but a slate-colored jagged blur. Shadows suggested irregular, squat structures, but when he tried to focus on a single point, the landscape swirled like the first mental room they'd seen in the tower, but without color.
Down in the Northside neighborhood surrounding the tower, life continued as normal. Cars arrived and departed. People who looked small as a dime walked from cars to homes.
Chris felt a small measure of relief. The farther strangeness wasn't an apocalypse that he'd missed while inside. He was seeing something else. Maybe the spaces where Leon and Dr. Terry were trapped.
Behind him, Roberts and Micah argued. The elevator car groaned.
Chris ignored them.
He wanted to collapse into the couch at home and bury his face in the cushions. He couldn't deal with overlapping dimensions. He couldn't even deal with one dimension, and living up to his responsibilities with Eddie.
Something moved behind the Richmond skyline, big, barely hidden. Organic motion blocked out the gray landscape between the bank towers, and the government office buildings. When the massive thing should have come into view east of the city, it was gone.
Chris backed away from the windows. He was a mouse stalked by a lion.
Behind him, creaking and jolting from the elevator shaft.
Roberts lay on his back, hands on the upper frame of the elevator door. With an upside-down pushup, he forced the car down with a shaking grunt.
He slid out and hopped down, chest heaving from the effort. He helped Micah down.
Micah walked to the window, eye's glued to the horizon.
"What are we looking at?" Roberts stood next to Chris.
Chris shrugged. "More reasons to find Eddie and get downstairs."
And now that he was in the outermost hall, he should be able to find that path down.
Micah breathed in, slow and loud. “The Deviser is out there.”
“The what?” Chris asked.
“The builder,” said Roberts. “That’s what her family has always called it.”
The outer room was a single corridor that wrapped around the outside the building. The ceiling was twelve feet high. The inner wall was cinderblocks painted white. The elevator doors were the only feature on the wall.
Chris walked to the southwest corner of the building.
Roberts said something to Micah--who still stared outside--then followed behind Chris.
Out the window to the west, instead of the neighborhoods of Glen Allen, Chris saw the slate-colored unevenness that the skyline had blocked to the south. Even with direct line of sight, his eyes refused to focus. Jagged structures rose from the hazy ground, half the height of Richmond's downtown, but four times as wide. Though the periphery of his vision was clear, a blurriness sprang up whenever he tried to focus. He touched the window, wondering if it was the building shielding his view. The glass was chilly against his fingertips.
The view outside demanded his attention without revealing detail. He tried from different angles through the glass, but it didn't help. No matter how he looked at it, the Northside neighborhood directly below was the only part of his surroundings that looked normal. The farther from the building he looked, the more it hazily shifted to the dark, shifting landscape.
As if the curve of the earth had flattened out, the view went on forever.
Chris looked at his feet then squeezed his eyes shut.
His heart thumped. His missing finger throbbed. Cuts on his thigh and ear pulsed blood.
He couldn't face an infinite plane. He didn't have to. But he did want to make out the closest squat structure, to the southwest. If it had been normal Richmond, the structure would have sat near the baseball diamond, home of the Flying Squirrels. A localized fog gathered around the low building that had too many angles and corners to be a baseball stadium. Chris thought if he held perfectly still, he might spot the thing quivering. He held his breath.
The tight fog bank thickened.
There was something eternal about the shape it contained.
The foreignness of the thought snapped Chris back to himself. He stumbled back from the glass. Blood dripped down his neck and leg. How had he let it make such a mess? He applied pressure to help it cl
ot.
"You're pretty cut up there." Roberts came up behind him.
Chris stared purposefully at the tile floor. He couldn't look outside again. The landscape had the hypnotic effect of the inner rooms, but with less intent. He didn't feel any change in his mental state, like when the inner rooms had instilled contentment. Instead, the landscape only hypnotized.
Chris pictured Eddie's face. He thought of his boy's dimples, and the way he squinted when his giggles exploded into belly laughs. He practiced his next conversation with Eddie, explaining that Sherri leaving didn't mean anyone else would leave. This morning, his goal for the day had been to make sure Eddie still felt secure, and the insanity of this tower hadn't changed that.
"You alright?" Roberts asked.
Chris stood up, his back to the windows. "No. Have you looked out there?"
Roberts shook his head. "Just enough to know that it's not for me to see."
"I should have done that from the start." Chris rubbed his temples. The fog that shifted in response to his focus, and the massive thing moving behind the skyline, those had been disturbing enough. But the way the landscape extended infinitely--Chris didn't want to ever think about that again.
He made himself plan out his next steps.
He'd made it to the outermost edge of the building--outside where the builders had meant him to go. Or where Micah’s “Deviser” had meant for him to go. This was a hidden pathway that Leon had talked about. There had to be a way back down.
He turned another corner. The building was back to its normal size out here. No extended, curved hallways. But the only doors on the inside wall were one elevator door on each side. None of them responded when he pressed the buttons.
Two air vents were on the wall in each hallway, at knee height.
He and Roberts passed Micah. Her hair hung loosely around her face. Her arms hung loosely at her sides, and her fingers twitched. Her lips moved as if she was whispering.
Roberts stopped to talk to her.
Chris crouched over an air vent.
The metal cover was the same style that Leon had inspected downstairs in the lobby. The screw heads had the same odd pattern of slits. He grabbed at them with his fingernails, but they were too tight to budge. He pushed the vent cover itself. It bent inwards.
Behind him, Roberts' voice grew more pleading.
Chris thought he could probably bust through the vent.
But not without attracting the lurchers.
Maybe one of the elevator shafts had a service ladder he could climb down.
He circled the building again, only catching glimpses of the foreign landscape outside. He pried open the other three doors. None had an easy way down.
When he made it back around, Micah faced away from the window. She stared up at Roberts, who had his hands on her shoulders. He whispered to her.
Her expression was as blank as before.
"What's she doing?" Chris asked. "Is she going to be a problem?"
A flash of light outside. He looked before he could stop himself.
Micah turned back to look outside.
Lightning flashed again, far in the distance.
This foreign landscape wasn't so foreign as to not have lightning. Maybe it wasn't as strange as Chris first thought. Maybe it had been nearby his entire life, just out of sight.
He walked back to the window, ready to jump away if he felt that hypnotic effect again.
Roberts watched the lightning over Micah's head. He blinked slowly then looked as his feet. "Let's go back to the elevator."
Chris's phone dinged.
He finally had cell service. He reached into his pocket, nicked his bandage over his little finger, and pulled out his phone. The darkening handkerchief turned bright red again.
Chris fumbled to put pressure on his hand while also reading his phone.
The time surprised him first. It was later than he'd realized, already mid-afternoon.
A text message appeared. The received time said right now, but only because that's when he received it. He couldn't know what time it was sent.
It was from Eddie.
I think the treasure is on the top floor. I'll come outside after I check.
Chris's knees went weak.
He heard Roberts' warn Micah about something, but he didn't listen. He turned his back to the foreign landscape outside.
Eddie was going to the top floor.
The building wanted them at the top. Why, Chris didn't know. Maybe that's where it took people after it had finished rearranging their brains to its liking.
And now his little boy was heading up there.
Chris couldn't intercept Eddie on the way up--he had no idea where his son was, or even how long ago he'd sent that text. And the building didn't exactly let him move freely through it.
It had been corralling them upwards.
Chris couldn't stop Eddie from going to the top floor, but he could go bring him back. The elevators our here wouldn't work, so he'd need to find a way back to the inner hallways.
He thought of Leon. He'd force his way into the vents.
Micah's screams interrupted him.
50
Chris backed away from Micah.
She howled at the windows.
Roberts leaned over his boss, his thick hands on her shoulders. He whispered to her, but his wide eyes made him look the most scared Chris had seen him.
Beyond them, the flat, infinite plane drilled its way into Chris's eyes.
Micah pushed away from Roberts to pound her slender fists on the window. "Look at me!"
The ground shifted outside. Mist swirled in a moving trail. Chris thought he saw one of the short structures expand upwards.
"Micah," Roberts spoke calmly. "There's nothing out here. We should go."
She screamed again, wordless fury. She'd been spoiled by her own ability, her own determination, her own success. Micah Rayner couldn't handle failure. "Look at me!"
"We're looking," said Roberts.
"I don't think she's talking to us," Chris said.
The trail of disturbed fog banked a wide turn to point itself at the building.
"Can you hear me?" Micah yelled. "I've kept my part of the bargain. I've waited and watched and studied. And now I'm here. Give me what's mine!"
The fog expanded. Within, Chris saw flashes of gray flesh that somehow roiled like the mist hiding it. He backed away. "You coming?" he asked Roberts.
"I'm not leaving Micah to this." He clapped a hand over her mouth.
She bit him, but he lifted her off her feet.
Chris had seen enough. He couldn't force Roberts to save himself.
He ran for the vent.
Behind him, Micah freed her mouth to shout, "Do you want more? Take these two? I'll bring you whoever you want!"
Chris tried to turn the vent screws with his fingernails. If he still had his bag, he could use pliers to grab the irregular screw heads. But all he had were the clothes on his back, the rag around his hand, a busted flashlight.
The flashlight had some heft to it, though.
Micah squealed in triumph.
The room darkened behind him. Something was blocking the light from outside.
Chris forced himself not to turn around. He backed up from the vent cover.
He held the flashlight over his shoulder like a baseball bat. He charged forward, willing his momentum into the flashlight as he swung it into the vent cover. The impact jolted his wounded hand. Pain shot up his wrist.
The thin metal dented inward. It broke in three places.
He heard a shuffling down the hallway, in the off-beat pattern of the lurchers' steps.
Roberts yelled a curse, and then Chris heard his heavy footsteps, fleeing in the other direction.
Chris jumped back for momentum, and again leapt forward to smash the cover with his flashlight.
The dent grew. Another two pieces of the cover snapped.
The sporadic shuffling drew closer, and now came
from both directions. Chris didn't dare look over his shoulder. The otherworldly appearance of the lurchers would only slow him down.
And he knew that the lurchers weren't impeded by walls or cinderblocks. One of the pale, hopping creatures could appear in front of him, face lifted, narrow tentacles waving, ready to repair the damage and prevent the perpetrator from causing anymore damage.
Chris thought of Roberts' missing fingertips, after the lurcher had come for the prybar.
A chorus of deep scrapes at the windows. Micah cheered.
He kicked in the vent. His shoe went through, and then the bent metal acted like a barb to trap it.
The lurchers slid closer, loud enough now that Chris could sense them less than ten feet away.
Chris yanked his foot out. Broken metal shredded his shoe and his skin.
He dropped to the floor and threw himself through the small hole in the vent cover.
Metal dug into his shoulders. The last dregs of daylight disappeared as his hips blocked the opening of the duct. He clawed his toes for purchase and threw himself deeper into the duct.
Tentacles grazed his ankle as his jerked his foot through the hole.
He was inside.
The duct gave him two inches of clearance between his shoulders and the metal walls.
He rolled onto his back and lifted his head to look back outside.
A solid vent cover separated him from the outer corridor. Gray light painted a grid across his legs.
The lurchers had already done their repair and left.
But on the other side of the vent cover, glass cracked. Between the thin slats, he saw Micah throw her arms up in glee.
He didn't know what was outside. Hoped he'd never find out. Whatever was upstairs couldn't be as bad as what Micah had called up.
He rolled back onto his stomach. Ahead, the duct extended into darkness. Chris gripped his broken flashlight tightly.
Chris crawled forward, away from the chaos behind him.
51
Chris scrambled through absolute darkness. With his wounded hand, he tapped the flashlight against the bottom of the duct in front of him.