by Greg James
She should not have let it follow her home.
The Lift
No-one used the lift these days, not after the accident, not after the rumours, not after all the blood that was found. That's what they said anyway.
The office building was a dirty grey lump of forsaken masonry erupting out of the city's concrete and mortar. A carbuncle with cracked glazing for eyes and a narrow aperture overhung by worm-eaten wood for a mouth, or entrance, however you wish to perceive it. Everything about the place was broken and gracelessly ageing. The light-bulbs within, depending as eyes might do from the frayed cords of their electrified optical nerves, flickered beige and sepia shadows across the walls. Their low-wattage lives were short and sour quickly fused by the ancient wiring threading the ceilings like black-rot veins. The computers occupying the splintered desks were white, battered boxes with dust-heavy screens scrolling steady streams of green text over pitch-black backgrounds. Not as ancient as the wiring but, in popular terms, these computers were antiques. Their constant static humming set teeth on edge and made eardrums ache. The heat emanating from these over-worked, out-of-date machines in this cloistered environment created a precipitative atmosphere and the workers of the building blamed this for the stench permeating every single floor. Every face was a sunken, loose mask of slightly yellowed flesh, shoulders slumped in a permanently defeated attitude and nostrils always twitched, cloggily sniffing. The stench was an all-pervading misery they dutifully endured but it was not the thing they feared most in the building.
“No-one uses the lift these days. You're best to use the stairs if you want to get up and down to anywhere.” The speaker was a young woman; strikingly slim, cobalt blue hair and as untouched by the building's oppressive blight as her colleagues were its sure and certain victims. Her eyes were crystal clear and glacial whereas theirs were foggy, threaded with shifting veins of some milky foreign substance. Her skin was as unblemished as theirs was stained and sallow, hanging from their porous bones. Her fingers were finely-sculpted whereas theirs were stunted, callused clumps of mallow. Her name was Raya and she was showing the new boy the ropes. His name was Stuart and he was as clear-eyed and untainted as she, for now. Stuart followed Raya dutifully; the docile beta to her domineering alpha. He wondered at how she had managed to keep herself clean and pure in this diseased environment. Every so often, as she took him from desk to desk, from team to team, explaining the tedious and repetitive work cycles they all observed in the same way as nature observes its seasons; he felt the urge to ask her why she was so different. But, each time, he thought better of it. Nothing had been said yet there was an air of the inviolate about her - Raya was not to be questioned. She was to be accepted as surely as Athena, Aphrodite and Freya once were. The comparison to goddess might seem excessive but Stuart could see it in the eyes of the people they passed as they awkwardly shuffled to their feet to shake his hand with their clammy paws. Their well-worn faces seemed to be long-past the point of exhibiting feeling, even incapable of showing the stronger emotions for fear of what it might do to the atrophied muscles beneath the skin.
And that was it.
Fear – a sparkle of it, a mote, a light in the dull, bovine darkness of their eyes. It was there whenever Raya came close, whenever she was near enough to touch. These people were tentative enough after their years of drudgery but, in her presence, they became positively meek in their submissiveness. Stuart was sure there was the faintest hint of a smile, thin with calculated meanness, pulling at the corners of her mouth whenever Raya witnessed this occurring.
*
It was later and the tour of the offices was done. Not that there was much to see in terms of variety, there was just a lot of the same-old same-old, stacked up high, floor upon floor. The thrumming cubicles of disintegrating wood and over-heated plastic were much of a muchness. All leading into and out of one another; creating a colossal labyrinth of mouldy, muttering faces, rustling stacks of poor-quality print-outs and the ever-flickering, off-colour light-bulbs that, unshaded, swung as elderly eyeballs overhead. The stench, he could taste it, over-ripe, on his tongue, feel it burrowing into the moist cells clustering at the back of his throat. He felt sure he could take a bite out of it if he had a mind to.
“Doesn't the air conditioning work in here?” he asked.
“No, the Directors wouldn't let us install a system. They said it would spoil the building's character.”
“The character's pretty well spoilt already if you ask me.”
She did not laugh.
“We have other candidates for this role, Mr Williams. You don't have to stay here.”
“I was only joking.”
She looked him up and down, curtly dismissive, wrinkling her pert nose as if she had finally caught a whiff of the stench that seemed to touch and sicken everybody else except for her.
“Look, I'm sorry, I really need this job. I apologise, it was a stupid joke.”
She snapped a smile at him, “Yes, it was.”
They walked on through the maze of shuffling paperwork, teetering file-mountains and peering puckered visages for some time. The only sounds passing between them being the klakt-klakt of her stilettos on the grubby tiles of the floor and the duller snap-snap of his laceless patent leather shoes. They came to the lift, passing it not for the first time, but this time it arrested Stuart's attention, “You said no-one uses the lift these days.”
“That's right.”
“Why not? Is it broken?”
“No, we just don't use it anymore.”
“But that makes no sense. All these stairs, all these floors in the building, surely using the lift would make life a lot easier.”
She stopped walking, turned sharply to face him, “We don't use the lift. The Directors decided it was to be considered closed after the accident.”
“What accident?”
This time her smile was not a snap but a long, slow development across her lips tapering out to just below her incisive cheekbones, “There was a boy, a new starter, just like you. He asked too many questions, was too curious, too ambitious, too keen.”
“What happened to him?”
“Like I said, there was an accident. So don't use the lift, don't make jokes and don't ask questions, always say yes, never say no and you'll be fine, just like everybody else here.”
She spread her arm out, encompassing the nearest ninety degrees of nullity, ambulatory depression and washed-out, wheezing despair. Stuart nodded dutifully. There was a recession on, the world was crumbling financially, he had no choice when it came to answering her inevitable question. The job would pay well, he couldn't complain.
“When can you start?”
*
Stuart was finishing late. Over the days, weeks and the months that he had been here, he had tried to keep to his contracted schedule. Work in the morning, break for lunch, work in the afternoon, leave by early evening. Though it was the season for the nights to be drawing in, he still should have been leaving when there was some little light in the sky; a trace of amethyst, the slightest turquoise smear. No, he was still here, working later and later and his lunch-breaks were gradually growing shorter and shorter with no end to the accumulating piles of print-outs strewn across his desk.
What on earth was the purpose of it all?
The interview process had made the job out to be administrative support at a senior level with considerable training built in and advancement options, horizontal and vertical. But, as far as Stuart could see, all he did was printing, photocopying, filing, stamping, hole-punching and clipping papers into place. It all swam before his eyes, becoming no clearer, making no sense other than empty nonsense. The few colleagues he spoke to could tell him nothing, which told him everything. There were no prospects, there was no training programme, only people shuffling reams of paper and the ceaseless drone of dying machinery. But it paid well and there was a recession on so he couldn't complain.
Or could he?
He could. He
did.
He made his complaint.
And, as the days went by, after he made his complaint; Stuart thinned and found that he was growing a little yellow like the other workers in the building. His hair began to come out, first lone strands, then as clotted lumps going grey and brittle at the roots, virtually snapping off like strings of glass. His skin absorbed moisturiser and heavy smears of foundation make-up as a desert drinks away water; leaving his flesh starting to sag away from its bones, just like the other workers. And his little flat, whenever he sat in it alone for a while, was beginning to bear the tell-tale odour of the office stench.
And when he dreamed, he was passing through dense layers of obscurity, with no colour to them that he could name, all heaving and shifting laboriously around him. He could see people moving about in it, their shapes but not their faces. He could hear the sounds but not the words they were speaking, if indeed they were words. In his hand was the letter of complaint, crumpled tightly into his fingers. He was going to give it to the Directors in person, that would show them.
The things, the people here, became clearer. Some were sitting. Some standing and gesturing. They were Human Resources and they served the Directors. Well-made latex skins were drawn tightly over what passed for their flesh. Their voices were titters and flirting giggles coiling through the ripe air. He could smell their sutures. He could hear the splitting of stitched scabs as they scratched at themselves with scabby fingernails. Not a patch of the skin on them was healthy. Glistening insects peered out from the drooling ulcerous recesses of their congested eye-holes. Their perfume was a caustic fusion of formaldehyde and bleach catching at the sensitive membranes of his throat’s tissue. What horrors were crawling around inside them, he wondered, laying dewy eggs, fucking and bleeding then crawling out to lie down in empty corners and die, alone and unseen. They cooed and called out to him – such enticing necrophiliac forms they were.
Stuart crushed the letter in his hands, drawing some strength and resolve from the anger laced into it. He moved through the pressing bodies towards the office doors resolving out of the smog before him. Plain pine surfaces broken up by squares of frosted glass. Looking in, he could see nothing for sure but the space within was a pregnant roiling opacity; a rancid fog of amniotic waves. The Directors were in there, somewhere, waiting, indistinct and tremulous. The stench: the sour, uncirculated, substantial stuff that ran throughout the building must be their doing. They need it. He rested his hand on the door handle, meaning to twist it hard, turn it harder, stride in with purpose, make himself heard.
Then it came!
Rushing from out of the depths of the office, seething and amorphous. Violently pink and scar-tissue raw. Enraged sloth. A mouth, many mouths, perished rectums oozing fluid, hanging wide open, hungry and gnawing. Limbs outstretched, stumpily twitching as they struck against the other side of the door. Glass shrieked, shrill and high, as a great, wet weight went dragging down over it, fumbling at the door handle, making it turn, turn and turn.
It was opening the door! It wanted to come out and get at him!
It was then that Stuart woke up, in the dark, breathing heavily and all he could taste in the air was the stench. Overhead, he saw his bedroom ceiling as loam composed of compacted cemetery earth; teeming with charnel orgies of grave-lice, their moist and corrupt forms as moon-silvered as silk worms. A steady rain of stinking black soil and bone-nuggets spilling down onto him. And, in the outer gloom, the Directors lurked, hissing fumes out from their flatulent bodies. They spoke to him, a damp choir of synthesised gastric bowel harmonies. He saw her standing there, their PA, their pale puppet, this was why she never became tainted or aged like the rest of them. Wood lasts, flesh rots. Raya smiled at him and it was a smile born of awful, red dreams as she translated the foul speech of the Directors.
“When can you finish?”
And this time he was awake, rushing to the bathroom, emptying himself of what little food and water he could bear to consume these days.
*
Breathing hard and heavy, Stuart approached the entrance to the lift, drawing glances from beady, sticky eyes tired of staring at computer screens and endless mounds of print-out paper.
Arbeit macht frei – work sets us free.
He heaved the metal doors apart. He was not sure if he was here for real or here in a dream. He listened, as he admired the dangling outcrops of blackly-greased machinery, to the echoes travelling up and down, up and down, unable to escape out into the light and the air of the external world. No, for them, forever was this vertical tunnel of unlit interior horror where their last moments were smudged and scraped into the crumbling brickwork. He chanced a glance up into the blackness above, feeling woozy, so sick on his feet.
Falling, falling, smashing, crashing, bones breaking through bleeding pulp, fractured ribs stirring as stiff fingers through him, splitting open his insides and spilling his blood and fluid as unappetising spatters of steaming raw soup all over the place.
The lift-shaft was an open black throat waiting to swallow him. He was leaning over, looking down into the pit. He saw them, all of them down there at the bottom of the shaft. Lumps of leprous blubber in mildewed suits and skirts, splitting at the seams. Pasty faces made hoggish and bloated by time, by decay, smeared with crusty traces of blood and sputum. The source of the stench, what was rotten about this place, the bodies of those who said no.
And he heard movement behind him, lots of pairs of little shuffling feet, towers of paper print-outs slumping and falling as they were disturbed by the passage of squared shoulders and bulbous hang-dog heads. The masses of the workforce, his dull and dead-eyed colleagues, were there, encroaching, and he was retreating before them, nowhere else to go. They were herding him, guiding the sacrifice to its final resting place. They had their work to do. Enough was enough.
The lift-shaft exulted, issuing an ecstatic groan that was dreadful and dimensionless, emanating from a deep, dark place that few of the living can knowingly perceive. And Raya was there, at the rear of the herd, smiling, her cobalt blue hair shining. She ran the corpse-white slug of her tongue across her lips and gave him a lingering wink. He was sure he heard the klakt-klakt of wood on wood.
“We don't use the lift because … something else does.”
Stuart stepped backwards one last time and, when he cried out, there was an echo, ascending and descending. The doors shut without a sound. The floor was no longer there. There was no more light. And Stuart went tumbling, crashing, and smashing down, as he had been doing his whole life, as we all do, falling from one uncertain point to another, not knowing what waits but knowing it is there, out of sight but always there, waiting to claim us as its own.
Waiting to set us free.
A Perfect Day
Summer sunshine bled through the leaves, making patterned wounds of light upon the shaded ground. The grass was thinning and turning yellow; unused to the intense heat of the past two weeks. There were patches of sandy soil showing as the earth of St James’s Park dried out. Garry wondered if it would need to be re-sown when summer was at an end. So far, for him, it had been a perfect day. The usual grey British sky was nowhere to be seen, replaced instead by unbroken clear blue and the piercing white light of the sun. The shade itself was warm and close rather than cooling. There was no place to escape from the heat but it was not oppressive, not yet.
Garry was lying on the grass with Esther. He could feel her small body at ease and the beat of her heart as she pressed herself against him. Five months they had been dating now but it felt like much longer. He thought about the old clichés where you think that you have known a person for years before you actually met them – and then he thought about how maybe there could an equation for that. Just as time stretches out to seem like an eternity when matter is swallowed into a black hole, the same could be true of falling in love. The deeper you fall, the more time seems to stretch out, the more static you become. He felt like he had not moved from this spot in the sha
de for hours.
Esther’s freshly-laundered summer dress rustled like the fallen leaves on the ground as she unfastened herself from his side and sat up, running her fingers with their bitten-to-the-quick nails through her dark, tangled hair. Blinking, she turned to him and smiled, “All this relaxing has had some consequences,” she leaned forward and kissed him on the nose, “I need to visit the loo. Back in a mo.”
He smiled, kissed his finger and pressed it to her lips. She nipped at it with blunt teeth, leaving an enjoyable pain to play through his nerves. Giving her backside an affectionate pat as she got to her feet and slipped on her worn leather sandals earned him a look that made him wish they were in a darkened bedroom together under cool, clean sheets. Garry closed his eyes and laid back down on the ground, listening to the soft sound of her sandals slapping away from him towards the lake and into the trees. She would be back soon and they could continue their perfect day.
*
Time passed, and Esther didn’t come back. Garry tried not to worry. You’re over thirty, he thought, not a lovesick teenager. She’s a grown woman and she’ll come back soon. But time kept on going by and it did so in a way that made him feel sick inside as if seconds and minutes were masquerading as hours and days. The further you fall, he thought, the longer the passage of time seems. Am I in love with her after all? Definitely? Really? Truly? He wasn’t sure. Thinking about it made his heart feel tighter somehow. Where was she? Why wasn’t she back yet? The toilets weren’t that far away.