Lily led Adam down a twisting path between the cubicles, never pausing or deliberating once. The vaguely threatening forms of desks, chairs, and cubicle walls grown sinister for their partial concealment flew past them. Adam gripped her hand tightly, perhaps more tightly than he meant to, feeling the slick moistness of his hand mirrored in the dark anticipations which wrought havoc on his whiskey-soaked mind. As the gloom blurred around them, the only constant fixture was the large body of hair at the center of his vision. Adam focused the whole of his attention on the scant light passing between the curls, ignoring the periphery.
Suddenly they were back in the small kitchen. Two wooden doors opened off of it, opposite the refrigerator, each bearing a plaque with the faintly visible outline of a person. Adam squeezed Lily’s hand once, gathering his courage for the solitary ask ahead of him.
“Do you need me in there?” Instead of her usual flirtatious tone, Lily sounded somewhere between challenging and sympathetic. Adam swallowed what he could of the knot that had formed behind his throat and decided to latch onto the former.
“You wish.” He muttered, fighting the tense clamp of his teeth. The words were out of place and hung on the air awkwardly. Adam couldn’t tell what he had hoped to achieve; perhaps some kind of humor to break the malevolent spell that had wound around them. Lily had mentioned that the Tower was weird at night. Adam forced that thought from his mind, pushing out his jaw at the door. He wasn’t some undisciplined child to fear a trip to the bathroom by himself. Feigning confidence, he cast Lily’s hand away from him.
Adam strode forward, keeping his head slightly bowed like a charging bull. The door swung inward on silent hinges and the lights inside clicked on. The fluorescent gleam was bright against the white tile. Adam let his eyes adjust as he flipped down the waistband on the sweatpants Emily had been provided him. He pushed out into the air around him as he released himself, desperately willing the four walls around him to be a bomb shelter against the aura he had felt growing since he had left his office.
Whether it was the lights or his silent resolution that kept the dread at bay, Adam didn’t know. He washed his hands, eyes firmly on the sink below him as he steadfastly ignored the mirror, and began to breathe a little easier. By the time his hands were dry he was feeling so much improved as to take the used paper towel and toss it into the bin by the door in a mock jump shot.
White and comforting light streamed into the kitchen as Adam passed through the door, a confident step replacing his recent fearful crouch. His eyes cast themselves about the small room.
“Lily?” Adam called out to the empty air. There was no response, no sign of her. He balled up the fingers of his right hand with such intensity that he felt the nails break into his skin. The restroom door swung shut slowly behind him, the air filling with an otherworldly hiss as it strained against the contraption designed to prevent the door from slamming. Adam waited, the tension he had felt from earlier slipping back over him in an instant.
“Lily!” Adam felt himself shouting, in spite of himself. Twisting fears contorted his mind, forcing him to relive the nightmares he had been having since Susan’s disappearance. His whole body tensed, and he felt his knees wobble beneath the strain.
Adam ran.
He burst forth from the room in an explosion of movement, unable to wait a moment longer. Adam charged forward full force down the narrow hallway. His shoulder bumped against something hard, and he heard a crash behind him as he blew past whatever it was. He heard footsteps coming in behind him with all the force of his own. He ran into something solid.
Adam groped the wall in silence, frantically searching for a door knob. His hand continued off to the right, finding neither knob nor frame. The footsteps echoed louder behind. He twisted to the right, charging down that hallway, frantically hoping he was still heading toward the exit. The sound of the steps grew closer in Adam’s fevered mind. He threw his arms out in front of himself. Something bumped into one of his fingers, jarring it painfully and sending another object tumbling to the ground. Whatever it was, he heard it shatter, briefly breaking the monotonous sounds of the footsteps and his own heavy breathing.
Light cut through the abyss in front of Adam, illuminating his salvation. He could feel the murk closing in, clawing at his ankles as he fled down the short hallway. The adrenaline thundering through Adam's veins stretched the short hall into a marathon. He took it at a full sprint, racing to keep ahead of the terror shambling rapidly behind him.
Adam burst through the heavy glass doors and into the light of the fourth floor lobby. His shoulder erupted into fresh pain as he rammed his elbow against the bar to open them. It didn’t occur to Adam to celebrate his escape; he simply jammed the ‘call’ button on the elevator as soon as he was within reach. He heard the light electric chime calling down the elevator and hazarded a glance over his burning shoulder to the door he had burst forth from. The darkness glared back as the light around him seemed to fade. It was reaching for him, hungry and baleful.
The doors to the elevator slid open with another chime, revealing the empty stainless steel cage. It reflected Adam’s haggard expression in its fuzzy, mirrored finish. He stepped toward it, feeling the trembling tension in the back of his knees rebel. The elevator was open and waiting for him, like the mouth of some cyclopean giant seeking to devour him whole. Adam stared into the mouth frightfully, sweat running down the back of his neck. The light grew colder around him.
Adam fought to breathe, stretching out his hand as if he could somehow physically stop the oncoming panic. He was caught, trapped between the malicious hallway and the elevator that had already tried to claim his life once before. Eyes darting like a cornered rabbit, Adam tried to think above his screaming instincts. The lights flickered as they grew dimmer in his sight, urging him forward.
Whirling around, Adam darted past the elevator’s open maw to a recess at the corner of the wall. Nestled between the elevator and the far wall was a skinny door with a jagged pictograph on it. Whipping it open to find a brightly lit stairwell, Adam hurried to to climb the stairs.
Adam could hear other sounds echoing off of the concrete. He silently hoped it was one of the Tower’s more mundane occupants as he rounded the top of a flight of stairs. The sounds continued, indistinguishable from their heavy reverberation. Adam’s scrambling footsteps added to the chaotic chorus.
Rounding his third flight he slammed the outside of his elbow against the hard iron handrail. His arm throbbed in time with the dull whine of the railing vibrating back and forth.
Adam cursed and soldiered on while the light waned above him, praying it was a result of his haunted imagination and intoxicated mind. He rounded another curve, legs burning from the formidable terrain. He hurt everywhere. Stars swam in his vision as he raced up the last flight of stairs, breathing heavily, and emerged onto the sixth floor.
The hallway was quiet, but the short, blood-red carpet bent and twisted in the vision of his suffocating eyes. Adam was able to reach his room in a few long strides, producing the key from his jacket pocket with haste. He could hear steps progressing down the hallway opposite the elevator. Heavy, thudding steps. Adam fussed with the key, his trembling hands unable to perform the task he demanded of them. Adam almost gave up, overwhelmed with the long flight from his office two stories below.
Finally, after what seemed to his strained mind like an eternity, Adam felt the key slide in with a faint click. As he twisted the key to the right, the heavy footsteps turned the corner.
Chapter Twenty-One
Detective Caputo was working late. He was not in the habit of working late; personally, he left that to the cops on television. When he had first started with the Slendervale Police Department he’d put forward a lot more overtime. He’d also had a lot less salt in his hair. As the years progressed, he had developed a stricter routine of working his shifts, finding who he could find, and putting the rest out of his mind. It wasn’t perfect, nor was it glamourous, but neither
was anything in his world. He had come to grips with more than one disappointing fact of life during his tenure in Missing Persons. A lucky few were found, but more wouldn’t be. Some simply didn’t want to be found.
He cursed softly to himself and continued to examine his notes. His caseload sometimes got too full for him to juggle in only a 40-hour work week, and as close as he was getting to retirement, Caputo wasn’t about to give anyone an excuse to question his work. So there he sat, puzzling through his files, trying to find a winner in his box of duds.
It was a tough part of the job. Reading through the cases, Caputo had to determine which ones had a shadow of the feeling he was looking for. It was almost a smell to them, somewhere between champagne and decay. Either way, a result was a result. The stack of files he was browsing through now weren’t necessarily unsolvable, just undesirable. These people might have had loved ones, family, and friends, but not anyone that mattered. There weren’t enough to make a ruckus; either there wasn’t enough money, or as Caputo would only admit to himself in the deepest part of his mind, they just weren’t the right color.
Ash tumbled from the cigarette he held gripped between his fingers, falling onto the open file on his desk. Caputo cursed again, trying to brush off the ash with his hand and succeeding in producing a long gray smear across the page. He glared down at the page for having the audacity to test him.
Sighing, Caputo loaded a fresh sheet of paper in the electric typewriter and began to painstakingly copy the contents of the stained page to the blank one. His fingers moved stiltedly across the keys, as he searched for each letter with weary eyes.
Something caught his attention as Caputo worked. He stopped for a moment, taking another slow hit from his cigarette. Ash fell again, down his shirt instead of into the ashtray. He didn’t notice. The wheels were turning in Caputo’s mind. He didn’t have to solve a case in order to get it off his desk. It would be enough to shuffle it over to another department. If he lined up enough questions he could easily redistribute a case to Slendervale Homicide. Caputo had found his first question.
“Current employer: De La Poer Venture Capital,” Caputo read aloud as he typed. Well, that raised one question. Now all Caputo had to do was go about finding others.
♖♖♖
The man’s mouth moved; presumably he was saying something. Adam couldn’t make out the words, and couldn’t read the lips. He merely sat there on the carpet with one hand still on the doorknob, sweat trickling down his face. The world was spinning around him too fast and too bright. Adam wondered through the daze in his mind which was truly worse, between the darkness or the light. He struggled to gulp down a breath, but couldn’t get any air.
“Are you okay?” Adam’s wild eyes searched to find the source of the voice. He caught the tail end of the phrase. As the lips contracted to form the ‘O,’ Adam searched to identify the face. Thick eyebrows were furrowing a protruding brow, and the thick jaw on the shaven face wouldn’t conform to any fixed position.
The mouth was moving again while Adam gawked dumbly, trying to make sense of the quagmire of features in front of him. He tried to stand, to defend himself, but his weak legs wouldn’t respond to his commands. Adam tried to use the door handle he was still gripping to pull himself onto his feet and face this potential attacker. As he shifted his weight to the occupied hand, the handle turned downward, rapidly. The door opened, and Adam fell backward into his dark room, feet kicking out into the hallway.
The unidentifiable man, with the constantly shifting features, took a step forward. Adam’s instincts screamed, carrying well-received warnings to his brain. He bent awkwardly at the waist, kicking his legs up over himself in a backward half-roll. The move had the added effect of alarming the man, Adam’s loafer clad feet flying through the air toward his exposed face. The man jerked back, and Adam used the momentum in the adrenaline fueled motion to kick shut the door to his room. He was alone, in the darkness, but safe at last.
The night passed with creeping slowness. When Adam had finally stilled his rebellious heart enough to move, he turned on the overhead light and every lamp in the room. Still clothed in his mismatched outfit, he shut the curtains tightly and sank onto the bed, waiting with terrible anticipation until dawn.
The dawn was long in coming. Adam, who had at last recovered some use of his barely functioning frontal lobe, was tortured with dark fantasy after dark fantasy until the heavy curtains over the windows finally showed hints of pinkish orange light at their edges. Rosy dawn may have banished the darkness which occupied his mind, but it took away the survival-fueled powers which had kept him awake all night.
Adam was no soldier, nor strict disciplinarian. He had dealt more than once with issues arising from too little sleep. This he normally attributed to the cost of having a good time. But Adam had never, even as a teenager, attempted to soldier on through a day without getting any sleep. He wondered idly if it was acceptable to call in sick during his first week. He was, more or less, at the beck and call of Francis, which might mean he wouldn’t even have to call in.
The phone rang. Adam scowled. It was as if the universe had heard his plan and had already designed to thwart him.
“Adam Church.” He answered the phone.
“Adam, Francis would like to see us as early as possible this morning. How soon can you be ready?” It was obviously Alisha, from the high octave at such a ridiculously early hour. Adam checked the small round clock on the nightstand. It was barely after six. He supposed this was his penance for showing up early the previous day.
“Half hour.” He grunted into the phone, letting the grogginess he was feeling seep into his words. The line went dead; Alisha had hung up immediately.
Adam sprung out of bed, trying to use the momentum to keep him going. It was a mistake. The room around him became unstable, threatening to topple with his light-headedness. Adam cursed softly. He was getting old.
After wetting his hair in the shower, Adam slipped on a fresh suit. He tried adding a new tie to the mix: a solid red power tie like the kind Francis favored, but the feeling of the cloth wrapped around his neck was too much for his fragile imagination. Putting on the pants also became an ordeal as he slid the waistband over his angry red thighs.
Nonetheless, with a whole five minutes to spare, Adam awaited the elevator. It came, promptly and empty as ever. He got inside cautiously and wondered at its habitual emptiness. Perhaps the other guests were as fearful of it as he was.
The cage arrived at the thirty third floor, chiming happily as the steel doors parted and Adam began the stroll down the wood-paneled hallway to Francis' penthouse office.
He found there waiting for him, in addition to the towering Francis himself, Lily, leaning casually against a wall.
“Good morning, Sunshine.” Adam could tell from her tone that the shock must have registered on his face. She was toying with him, even after the stunt she had pulled last night. Was it only just last night? Adam wondered.
“Adam,” Francis' deep voice was warm with greeting. “I’m sorry to bring you up here so urgently, but this couldn’t wait.”
“Another ancient knife?” Adam quipped sarcastically. He immediately regretted his short temper, especially in front of a man like Francis. His brows contracted, and he opened his mouth to apologize.
“Property, actually.” Francis' eyes were mirrors, impenetrable and unyielding. “What you signed up for, so to speak.” Adam glanced to Lily. He couldn’t be sure, be he got the sense she was laughing at him.
“It’s here, in Slendervale. A piece we need for the portfolio.” Francis continued as though nothing were amiss. Noting the glance to Lily, however, he added, “I want Lily to run this. You’ll help, in something of an advisory capacity.”
He had been outmaneuvered! Adam chided himself for his carelessness. While he had been running around in a panic, Lily had been currying favor with Francis.
“I’m sure Lily has enough on her plate right now,” Adam started to pr
otest. He had to find some way to cut her out.
Francis shook his head, eyes narrowed. He was an intimidating sight. Already immaculately dressed despite the early hour, Francis haunted his favorite spot over by the large window. The sun was just rising over the tall buildings in the landscape behind him, its light lending him an almost holy aura.
“Lily has a better idea of how I want to be represented. It’ll take both of you to get it done, but you’ll be following her lead.” Lily was smiling, Adam noted bitterly, and Francis' tone left no room for argument.
The wheels were churning in Adam’s mind. This might actually be better for him. The success or failure of this venture was resting squarely on Lily’s shoulders. All Adam had to do was make sure she dropped it. It was far easier to ruin a deal than to make one, of that he was sure. He had never accidentally succeeded before. And once it was all in flames, he could finger her as the reason.
Adam nodded.
“That’s fair enough. What do you need us to do?” He tried to keep the note of triumph from his words, and likely succeeded with how weary he sounded.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“What a shithole.”
It was, no doubt, a shithole. Adam sat in the back of a black town car. His tired body had appreciated the heavily cushioned leather seats as the car wound away from downtown Slendervale and headed north. They gave him a little rest and time to recuperate somewhat. Now, the buildings grew steadily smaller and the trees more prolific until the town car finally turned down a winding gravel road.
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