by Ben Farthing
Chris held his breath, afraid any movement would catch her attention.
Micah sobbed. Her nose slipped inside her face. Her whole face slid downward, then inside, then appeared at the top of her forehead. She gagged, Chris heard the liquid sound of vomit, and her neck ballooned to the side.
She worked her mouth, but her vocal cords were no longer linked to her lungs and tongue.
She crawled a step forward.
Pieces of the floor joined her.
Her heaving sobs turned to jerking spasms. She smashed a fist through the floor. Opened her mouth wide and shuddered, a silent scream of fury.
Chris stepped backwards.
If she touched him with her semi-ethereal form, it wouldn't be a moment of pain like the lurchers. It would be worse than when Leon had locked their fingers together. She would break him apart, make his pieces part of her. He feared his consciousness would survive.
Micah's head swung around. Her red eye and the open end of the iron pipe stared directly at him.
He ran.
59
Chris sprinted around the stack of rolled carpet to make his way back to Eddie and Roberts.
He found them twenty feet from where he'd left them. Roberts was standing again, eyes clear. Eddie clung to his leg, staring back where the lurchers had repaired the floor.
"Is she dead?" Roberts asked.
"Run," Chris yelled. "Back to the elevators. Swing around wide."
Roberts scooped up Eddie, who started to cry.
"It's okay buddy," Chris ran alongside them. "We're going home. Keep your eyes closed."
"What happened?" Roberts asked.
They steered away from the cinderblock wall, back through the center of the room, into the fog.
"She was dead. A lurcher came and fixed her." Chris led them through a tunnel of plastic ferns. He relied on his sense of direct to point them back to the elevators.
Roberts held Eddie against his chest to keep his face away from the ferns. "Why the elevators? They won't let us back down."
"Micah said it wouldn't let us down because the Deviser wanted us."
"Doesn't it still want us?"
They ran along the edge of the stacks of tile.
"Micah said it didn't want her. Figure out why, and we can get back down."
A furious, squelching scream filled the fog.
Eddie turned away from Roberts' chest. "What was that? Was that the lady?"
"Was it?" Roberts asked.
"Yes."
They circled the swamp of ink, and ran past a maze a windows stood on their edges.
Micah screamed again, closer than before.
Chris saw the mountain of copy machines. "It's just up here." His lungs burned.
They reached the elevator bank, a squat cinderblock structure in the middle of the wide room. It made Chris think of the buildings he'd seen outside.
Two elevators. One door was open.
They stopped outside. Roberts set Eddie down. "How do we get it to let us down?"
"Micah said she could go up and down because it doesn't want her. What makes her different?"
"She worships the Deviser."
That didn't quite feel right to Chris.
Micah screamed again, from back the way they'd come. She was following their trail.
"I worshipped it, too," Roberts said. "Maybe it'll let me down if it's just me."
"You'll leave us up here?" Chris asked.
"Of course not," Roberts said. "I'll just send it down a floor. If it moves, I'll come right back up for you."
"And then it won't move with us."
"You'll say a prayer to the Deviser, and maybe it'll let you."
But Chris remembered Micah saying that the Deviser was hardly aware of them, unable to understand their thoughts or desires.
Micah screamed again.
"Do you have any better ideas?" Roberts asked.
Chris squeezed his eyes shut. Roberts' plan didn't make sense. It didn't fit the purpose of the building. It didn't fit their being cogs in the Deviser’s machine. But Chris couldn't articulate what he was thinking.
Eddie backed away from the sound of Micah's approaching screams.
"I'm trying it." Roberts entered the elevator. He pushed the button. Nothing happened. "Maybe if I touch the wires together."
He fiddled with the bank of buttons.
Chris held Eddie tight. Despite the fear in Eddie's face, he didn't appear so broken down and turned inward like he had recently. If Chris could keep away his anxiety, and he could help Eddie stay happy and outgoing, then maybe the two of them could maintain a healthy family.
Everything clicked in Chris's brain.
The light that had cleared Chris's mind and cleared his anxiety--it powered the rooms below. The building polished minds, repaired people mentally and emotionally. Not people--cogs. It wasn't benevolent healing. Maybe "healing" wasn't even the right word. It was polishing them into what it needed.
The Deviser had spent millennia bringing people closer together, ready for harvest, and then determined that they weren't mentally fit enough to make its machine work. That's why this building was different than the others. It wasn't improving urban living---it wasn't part of the slaughterhouse funnel. It was seasoning on the steak. Or the final shaping of the cog before it slid into the machine.
The Deviser wasn't allowing Micah freedom, it was rejecting her. Not because she worshipped it, but because her mind was beyond repair.
"I think I've got it," Roberts said. "You know, once we get out of here, we should stay in touch. Even work together. I've seen how Micah's businesses run, and you've got talent. I feel like I've big things ahead of me."
Chris had heard those words before. "Get out of there!" he yelled.
Dr. Terry and Leon had that same delusion before they were taken. The epitome of mental health, or at least of this building's version of it: big things ahead.
Chris lunged to yank Roberts away from the walls of the elevator, but he was too slow.
An organic darkness bulged from the wall. It enveloped Roberts, sank into the floor, and was gone.
60
Chris felt his sanity shaking, but he wondered if it was enough.
He stared at the empty elevator.
"Dad?"
Chris looked down. He thanked any god that was listening that Eddie had been turned around, and hadn't seen the building take Roberts.
"Dad?" he shrieked.
Micah crawled into view out of the fog. She was twelve feet tall now, and at least as wide. Building materials now outnumbered her organs, but both formed a shifting hodgepodge in and on her warbling surface. Skin and drywall and veins and wiring. Her face had scattered throughout her form, but from the top and the bottom, a red eye and open pipe locked onto Chris.
He yanked Eddie into the elevator.
"Where's the other man?" Eddie whined.
Chris mashed the close-doors button. It didn't respond. The Deviser still wanted them.
Chris punched the wall. How could it still want them? Those fleeting seconds staring into the light weren't enough. This monstrosity dragging itself toward them--that had been his professional hero. And he'd turned her into this. He'd beaten a frail old woman to death. He could still feel the sensation of her knee popping, or her wrist snapping.
Eddie pressed his face into Chris's side.
Terror filled Chris as he realized:
He was broken enough.
Eddie wasn't.
Whatever horrors Eddie faced, he could hide behind Dad.
Micah dragged herself closer. A limb of bone, sinew, and copper wire wobbled as it reached towards them.
"We can do it, Dad," Eddie whispered. "Let's go home and you can design the biggest house in the world and the kids at school will want to come see it but I'll only let the ones who are nice to me."
Chris shoved him away. "No!"
Eddie's mouth quivered in a frown. "Daddy?"
"I'm not your Dad! Your r
eal mom didn't want you. Your new mom hated you so much she ran away."
Eddie cried.
Micah reached closer. Her bulk filled the doorway. A pumping lung scraped fiberglass insulation against the elevator doors' edge.
"You have to take care of me," Eddie cried. "You said."
"I lied."
"Say it again but don't lie this time."
"It will always be a lie. I'll never take of you."
Eddie pushed himself against the wall. His mouth hung open. His eyes begged and accepted his loneliness at the same time. The monstrosity that was Micah bulged into the elevator, and Eddie was afraid of Chris.
Chris pressed the close-doors button again.
The doors slid closed, locking Micah out.
Chris pushed the button for the ground floor. The elevator moved. It took them downward.
Down a hundred and twenty floors. Chris didn't dare comfort Eddie. He didn't dare let himself show any emotion, to risk Eddie recognizing Chris's lie and become attractive to the Deviser again.
After a three minute eternity, the elevator dinged. The doors opened.
It was the courtyard. Reflecting pool on one end. Checkerboard floor pattern, square planters, grass blowing in the breeze.
"Outside," Chris ordered. He grabbed Eddie's arm and ran to the doors.
They went through the dark vestibule, and out the glass doors.
Police had cordoned off the block. Some part of Chris noticed them approaching, but he fell to his knees and wrapped Eddie in his arms. "I'm sorry. I lied upstairs. I'll never leave. I love you. I promise, I promise." He wept.
Eddie pulled away.
A teenage girl ran up to hug Eddie. "You made it!"
Eddie squeezed her tightly. "I thought the lady got you."
She noticed Chris. "You his dad?"
Chris nodded. He touched Eddie's cheek. "Look at me. The building wanted you. It would only let us go if you were sad. I had to make you sad. I'm so sorry. I'll never make you sad again. I promise."
Eddie looked at the girl, who said, "You know that building was fucked up. This guy loves you like my momma loves me. I can see that."
Eddie relented. He let Chris pick him up, and he lay his head on Chris's. But he remained stiff.
As news cameras pointed at them, and a police officer approached, Chris exhaled.
He could work with this. As long as Eddie would give him a chance, he could spend the rest of his life proving to his boy that he loved him.
61
Epilogue
The FBI stopped calling after six months.
Chris told them everything that had happened, with the caveat that someone must have slipped him some magic mushrooms.
"I don't know what happened. I only know I went on a bad trip."
He left out the part where he'd mutilated an old woman. He didn't like remembering that part.
Chris, Eddie, and his friend Cam were the only ones to exit the building. Leon, Dr. Terry, and Roberts were listed as missing persons. Chris thought that description fit well. The Deviser had claimed them, and Chris had been powerless to help.
Micah Rayner was also listed as a missing person. That's not how Chris would describe her.
But the investigators never found her when they searched the building. Or at least, the first floor. The elevators refused to work, and the stairwells were sealed off.
Three weeks after the building appeared, it disappeared. One moment it was there, the next it was gone. The news went crazy. Physicists wrote papers. Micah's corporate lackeys went on national news to invent cover stories for her disappearance.
That's when the FBI got really interested. But when they called again, Chris told them the same story. "I can't tell you what happened, only about the hallucinations."
He tried to stop them from interviewing Eddie, but he couldn't afford a lawyer. So he told Eddie to be honest. Eddie tried, but trauma is confusing. Eddie's stories to the interviewing agents did not stay the same. Details shifted. His friend Cam got beat up by a strange man. Then the next interview, his friend Cam beat up the strange man.
The best they could, they told the truth.
But Chris left out the key part: what he intended to do next.
His next life choices with Eddie weren't difficult.
He couldn't afford rent--he didn't dare go after Micah's corporation about the contract--so he went with his tail between his legs to his parents.
"We'd love to have you," his dad boomed over the phone. "I've been itching to show Eddie my new fishing boat."
There wasn't much architectural work to be found in Dumfries, Virginia. But Chris had a Master's, and that was enough to be a substitute teacher. He discovered he liked being "Mr. H," and watching the lightbulbs light up in kids faces when they understood a new concept (that is, when the teacher didn't just leave him a movie to put on).
So his work and his living situation were last resorts that were turning out pretty well.
The FBI wouldn't care about any of that.
What Chris liked best about teaching, was that he was off work when Eddie was home from school.
He often wished he could buy Eddie the gaming consoles and Lego sets he say him eyeing on Youtube videos and in the stores. But that wasn't necessary. Eddie's new grandma and grandpa lived on ten acres of woods. Either during the three weeks they spent building a lincoln-log style fort, or during the two months they spent clearing a trail for their mountain bikes, Eddie relaxed more around Chris. He looked him in the eye again. He let Chris hug him for longer. He hugged back.
Chris still had nightmares about the building. The one that woke him up sweating and gasping was always about that last elevator ride down. When Chris convinced his son he was worthless.
Sometimes Chris peeked into Eddie's room after those nightmares. Eddie had a shelf full of books, a box of Chris's childhood toys, and an ever-growing pile of toys from grandma and grandpa. He slept like a rock.
For Eddie, the nightmare on the top floor was in the past. A little boy's mind was malleable. The lurchers, the impossible spaces, the thing that Micah had become--they weren't any scarier than memories of Ghostbusters cartoons. They couldn't hold a candle to his fears of being plucked away from his parents again.
Eddie connected with his grandparents. He rested on that foundation while Chris slowly built back what he'd destroyed.
But the FBI wouldn't care about any of that, either.
The thing the FBI would want to know about--which was exactly why Chris would never tell them--was what Chris did on the Dumfries Public Library computers each morning before work. Fortunately, they didn't require a user login. And fortunately, they didn't block VPNs.
The first few weeks, Chris learned to make a bomb. Big enough to collapse a building. It was frighteningly easy. Not quite as easy if you needed it to be small enough to sneak in somewhere. But if Chris saw another building appear overnight, he had no intention of being sneaky.
He'd drive a truck into the lobby, walk away, and then set it off.
The more time passed, the more Chris decided he should try to get away with the crime, too. So he devised various plans.
After he learned how to make a bomb, his morning library ritual became much shorter. He checked his google alerts for anything suggesting another overnight building. He made friends in chatrooms--people who saw the Richmond building on the news, and were also watching for it to happen again.
And if it did, Chris would deal with it. He hoped it wouldn't happen in his lifetime. Or maybe never again. If the tower in Richmond was one link in a delicate chain of shepherding humans together, maybe failure meant it wouldn't try again.
Maybe the Deviser meant for Micah to build replicas. But Chris killed Micah--or she killed herself after he left her for dead. No Micah, no replicas, no brain-tweaking slaughterhouse.
Chris hoped the chain had been broken.
But Chris still checked google and the chatrooms each morning.
After a y
ear, he started to hope he was in the clear.
Then he got a text message from a blocked number. He hadn't even known that was possible.
"I know you witnessed Micah. I know you're watching for the Deviser."
Chris's heart froze. He was in class--American History, and the teacher had left Forest Gump on VHS, so he was sitting behind the desk in the dark while a class full of ninth graders played on their phones.
At first, Chris tried to ignore the text. He didn't know how to respond. Had the FBI found him through the VPN? Had they watched him at the library?
Then another text came through:
"Micah brought us together, but we didn't disband when the Deviser claimed her. We still seek the Deviser."
A whole cult of Micahs. Chris sank into his chair.
"I haven't told the others about you. They think you're an enemy. They think you tried to stop Micah from meeting the Deviser."
How did they have any clue what happened in the building? What did they want?
"If you got as close as Micah, then you must want to get back. I can't in good faith keep this hidden from you..."
Chris stared at his phone, waiting for the next message, not wanting to see it.
"The cruise liner The Aria of the Seas appeared overnight on the ocean. It was given to mankind like the Deviser’s other gifts. The cruise company found it and is switching it out with an older Aria of the Seas that was about to be decommissioned."
Chris had only been looking for buildings. It never occurred to him that the Deviser could send a boat. He couldn't drive a car bomb onto a cruise ship. Could he?
"Our organization will be on the new ship's first voyage in three weeks. If you want to reconnect with the Deviser, you should be there, too. But please remember, the others in our organization will see you as an enemy. Keep a low profile. I just couldn't live with myself if I didn't give you this opportunity. I had to help you get back to the Deviser."
These guys still thought the Deviser was happy bearded god, sending his obedient children architectural rewards. Chris didn't want to be anywhere he might risk seeing that flat, infinite plane again. Or risk getting snatched away like Leon or Dr. Terry or Roberts.