by Ben Farthing
The metal on metal echoed ahead.
At the first intersection Chris found, he turned left, towards the center of the building.
His panic at Eddie going to the top floor was more contained now that Chris had a plan. His gut said the top floor was bad news, but this whole building was bad news. At least now he knew where Eddie was, and could go get him.
Gravity yanked the flashlight out his hand.
It clanged agains the duct walls as it fell, then slammed into another floor after less than two seconds.
He'd found a path down.
Right when he needed to go up.
Still, it would be good to test whether this was actually a way down, to use after he found Eddie.
Chris lowered himself down the ductwork.
He pressed against either side of the vertical duct, shimmying in quick bursts until he found the bottom. He'd gone down two floors at most. Still eighty-five to get to the bottom, but now he knew there was a way down.
Now to find a way up to the top.
He hurried through the ducts, always turning closer to the interior of the building. He found another drop but crawled across it this time.
Another sharp right angle turn, and he saw a grid of fluorescent lights. A vent cover to an inner hallway.
He kicked it out, then hurried through it as the lurchers arrived.
He backed up to let the freakish things make their repairs. The flickering white light overhead lit up only a small patch of the curved hallway. The air was chillier in here--it numbed the open wound where his finger used to be.
Chris looked around. The lights on this floor were few and far between. The next one was at least a two hundred feet away. Chris thought he saw movement in the dark stretches between.
But past the next fluorescent light was the soft glow of an elevator lobby.
Chris ran towards it. He felt like a little boy running from the bathroom to his bedroom at night, refusing to look to either side for risk of coming face-to-face with the boogeyman. Or in Chris's case now, seeing the cinderblock walls turn organic, then reach out to swallow him.
He ran under the next light fixture, then reached the lobby.
The walls spun. He leaned on the elevator door. How much blood had he lost?
He looked up at the LED screen above the doors. Focusing took effort, but he could do it. He was on floor eighty-four.
He pushed the up buttons on both elevators. No response.
His heartbeat thumped in his hand.
Another push of the button, still no response.
Chris pounded on the door. "First you try to force us up there, now you won't let me?"
It was as if the building didn't want him to get to Eddie.
Except that didn't feel quite right. The building was a building. It may have been built with a purpose, but it couldn't change its mind about specific people.
Chris inhaled slowly. He couldn't reason his way into the doors opening.
He felt a familiar tug in his mind. A major setback. He could jump from setback to setback, failure to failure. That's what he did with his job search. Circling around his own failure. He'd failed here, too. Failed to stop Eddie from entering the building. Failed to find him.
Chris mentally swatted away that incursive train of thought.
He couldn't make those same mistakes as before. Eddie needed him.
There were other elevators to try on this floor. And if they didn't open, he'd go back into the ductwork to work his way up, one floor at a time.
It occurred to him that this mindset would have been helpful in dealing with failure after rejected job applications. Even in dealing with Sherri leaving.
He could think about that later. Now he had to find a way up to Eddie.
The elevator doors slid open.
He hesitated. It could be a trap.
Of course it was a trap. But Eddie was the bait, and that meant Chris had no choice but to spring it.
He walked through the doors, trying to figure out how he had reasoned the elevator into opening.
The button for the 120th floor was already lit.
The doors closed, and Chris rose skyward to find his son.
52
The doors opened to reveal floor 120.
Orange fog hung low over what looked like a commercial office space after a riot. A central light source somewhere ahead reflected in the mist like a car's high beams, shrinking visibility.
Chris could see no more than twenty feet. Toppled cubicle walls were piled atop each other, forming a hill that disappeared upwards into the mist. A pile of copy machines was stacked just as haphazardly. The machines on the floor sank into the tile, joined like Chris's finger had with Leon's.
Chris stepped forward, into the valley between the mountains of office equipment.
Tile shifted beneath his feet. The floor was made up of stacks of square tiles. Chris peered into the cracks. The light reached three feet down, but the unstable stacks of tile went even deeper.
His gut said to flee. Every creeping bit of insanity in the building below had dripped down from the madness that was the top floor.
The orange mist was too close the mist around Dr. Terry when he'd pleaded for help. And it was too close to the mist outside, that had hid the roiling flesh of the thing that came to see Micah.
Anything could be hiding up here, lurking behind piles of office equipment, hiding in the otherworldly fog.
Eddie was up here.
Chris expected that once Eddie stepped out of the elevators, seeking treasure, he'd have taken one look around and then tried to leave.
Chris looked behind him, at the two elevator doors. The elevator bank was a little hut disconnected from the outer walls. Not that Chris could see the outer walls in any direction.
He tried the down buttons. Nothing.
"Eddie?" he called.
Once Eddie realized the elevator wouldn't take him back down, he'd have looked for stairs. But there weren't any nearby doors. When Eddie didn't immediately spot stairs, where would he have gone? Any other kid would have sat and waited. But Eddie tried to fix things. He would have thought up a plan--no smarter than any other nine-year-old's--and then instantly put it into action.
Chris looked around. The thick mist hid everything except the the phased-together copy machines and the mound of cubicle walls.
And the bright glow, somewhere deep within the orange fog. The only option for a little boy desperate for a plan.
Chris followed the light.
Past the valley of cubicles and copiers, Chris found a forest of black poles. He rapped his knuckles on one. They were pulldown screens for projectors, stuck down inside the stacks of tile. Black liquid pooled in the cracks and crevices.
Chris passed through the forest, moving toward the light. Ink stained his shoes.
He stumbled and almost fell into an open hole. He grabbed a projector screen and held tight. His wounded hand started bleeding again.
The pit was ten feet across, and went twenty feet down before it curved. Its edges were lined with desks and office chairs. Orange fog sank down, around the curve, and out of sight. It reminded Chris of a bathtub drain.
Cursing to himself, he circled the maw. This wasn't what he'd expected. What about this office junkyard would help mental health? After everything else, Chris wouldn't have been surprised to see a fully functioning counseling center on the top floor.
But there was no calming feeling. Despite the junkyard of office furniture, it felt empty. Unfinished. This was where the builders had discarded their extra materials, not dumping them like a normal landfill, but placing them in space following the same logic and methods they'd used to instantly construct this tower.
Chris started to walk away from the pit, and then a terrible thought occurred to him.
He turned on his phone's flashlight to look deeper into the hole. The LED white light reflected off chair legs and steel desktops.
"Eddie?" he called down.
> If the path to the light passed directly over this pit, Eddie could have fallen in.
But Eddie was nimbler then Chris. He could swing across monkey bars like their namesake. Born to wealthier parents, he might have been a gymnast. He wouldn't have fallen here.
Chris called his name again, this time turning around, towards the light.
No response.
Metal scraped on metal somewhere off to his right. He peered into the orange fog.
The tiles were piled higher in that direction, forming an irregular staircase.
He bounced on his heels, ready to flee if Leon or Dr. Terry came staggering down out of the mist.
Chris waited for the scraping sound to repeat itself. Nothing. He continued toward the light.
He called for Eddie again.
A hand closed around his mouth. He was yanked backwards, against a warm body.
Roberts whispered into his ear, "Keep quiet. Micah's hunting."
53
Eddie held tight to Cam's hand.
He did not like this top floor.
The dark rooms downstairs were better than the fog up here. It looked like someone spilled orange Kool-Aid onto a smoke machine.
When the door first opened, and he saw those piles of copy machines and cubicle walls, Eddie thought it was neat. It'd be fun to climb a playground like that.
But then he noticed the way the edges of the copy machines were stuck into the tile floor. Like they'd been halfway sucked in.
"Let's look for the treasure somewhere else," Eddie had suggested. He didn't want to walk between the two creepy piles of work stuff, so they'd circled the little hut with the elevators.
"Same shit back here." Cam squeezed Eddie's hand and smiled down at him. But she looked as worried as he felt.
This place wasn't right. Behind the elevator hut, the mist drifted through a huge tangle of cables. They were black and beige and orange, and the whole jumble could have hidden ten school buses. It made Eddie think of the wall of brambles in Sleeping Beauty.
"Let's go around," Cam said.
Eddie agreed.
"What do you think we're looking for?" Cam led him by the hand over cracked tile. She kept the cables out of reach to their right, which made Eddie happy, since he kept picturing an orange rubber cord snaking out to wrap around his ankle.
"Something worth a lot of money. That man wouldn't have hired my dad otherwise." He kept his eyes straight ahead. The orange mist didn't let him see far.
"Yeah, but what? When you knew specific spots to look, we didn't have to know what we were looking for exactly. Now that we're looking all over, we gotta have an idea of what it looks like. How else are we gonna spot it?"
She had a point. But Eddie didn't know what the treasure was. Only that the man in the driveway wanted to pay dad a lot of money to find it.
"That dude who hired your dad, what'd he look like? What was he wearing?"
Eddie closed his eyes to remember. "A fuzzy coat. Big glasses. He looked smart."
"Did he look like a gangster? Like from the movies? Maybe it's a suitcase full of money. Or some stolen diamonds."
Eddie didn't know how they'd ever find diamonds in this mess. Even if they were as big as the diamond in those D.C. museums.
"He looked like a librarian," Eddie decided.
"Maybe it's some rare books."
They approached something blurry ahead. As they walked closer, it grew more clear.
"Now what the hell is this?" Cam whispered.
Big pipes stuck up out of the floor, stopping at shoulder-height. Big enough around for Eddie to fit inside, not that he would.
"Could be treasure inside one of them." Cam let go of Eddie's hand to go peek down through the open top of the nearest.
Eddie hurried behind her.
Cam leaned over, and light from within the pipe lit her face in a shifting gray glow. Her eyes went wide.
"What is it?" Eddie leaned forward, but Cam held him back.
"Let me see!"
"It goes all the way down," Cam said stiffly. "We only saw that one guy, right? There's so many people in here."
"Do you see my Dad?" Eddie tried to push forward again.
"They're all working. Something's making them work. I think they're dead, but they can't stop."
Eddie didn't like the way that Cam leaned closer to the pipe's opening. Her nose almost went inside. "Let's go back," he pleaded.
"We should help them, right? We can't leave them. They'll never finish working. They gotta leave." She got more freaked out. "Don't they know they gotta leave? Oh god, what if they can't?"
Eddie grabbed the back of Cam's belt and pulled. She resisted.
"We can help them. Grab some of those plugs."
Eddie wasn't going anywhere near the cable-bramble bush. This wasn't a treasure hunt anymore. This wasn't just a dark, weird office building. He'd marched into a scary movie, and he wanted to go home. "Please, let's go. I'm scared."
"Maybe you should look. You'll see what I mean."
Whatever was in there, it had hypnotized her. Eddie punched Cam's thigh as hard as he could.
She ignored him. "Here comes one! Hey! Let me help you."
A dirty arm reached up out of the pipe. Orange dust caked on the fingers, and splits in the skin revealed dusty blood.
Cam screamed. The hand grabbed her hair.
No. It stuck in her hair. Her brown braids went in the palm and out the back of the hand.
"Oh fuck!" Cam tried to pull away.
A shoulder appeared, then the top of a head. Moaning, begging from in the pipe.
Eddie couldn't run away. He had to be helpful.
Cam fell. The arm reached down over the edge of the pipe.
Eddie grabbed a broken piece of floor tile.
Cam screamed. The man crawling out of the pipe yelled in Spanish. He wore an old shirt that looked like it was from a cowboy movie.
Cam tried to crawl backwards, but her hair tugged the man's hand along with her. Cuts and orange dust covered his face. He squinted, and Eddie realized he could barely see them.
Eddie pushed the sharpest edge of the tile against Cam's hair, and against the edge of the metal pipe. He worked it back and forth.
The man stared through Eddie, then swiped his free hand at Eddie's face. Eddie ducked. The man sobbed Spanish words that Eddie didn't know.
He saw the texture of the metal pipe through the man's body. He was like smoke. That made Eddie's stomach flop, so he closed his eyes and pushed harder on the tile.
His hand suddenly hurt and felt wet.
Cam scrambled away.
Eddie opened his eyes.
The clear man was gone.
Cam hugged him around the waist to pull him away. "Forget your treasure. We're leaving."
They ran back through the mist, staying far away from the cable-bramble bush. Eddie refused to look back over his shoulder at the pipes.
It felt like an eternity, but the elevator hut finally appeared.
Cam mashed the button. The doors opened.
They rushed inside and pushed the button for the bottom floor.
Nothing happened. The doors didn't close. The LED screen didn't change from "120." Nothing dinged.
"Why won't it let us go down?" Cam sounded terrified.
Eddie didn't know how to handle a teenager being scared. "I'll try again," he said. He ran out of the elevator to push the down button again.
The doors closed.
"No!" he yelled.
Cam called his name, and her voice descended.
Eddie slammed his hand against the doors. He pushed the buttons over and over.
"Please," he begged no one.
He didn't want to turn around. The weird piles of office furniture were behind him. And there were probably more pipes on the other side.
But he couldn't wait for an elevator that didn't want him.
Somewhere, there had to be stairs. He'd find them.
"Hello, little buddy."<
br />
Eddie spun around. His heart pounded from the shock. It didn't slow down when he saw the skinny old woman. She looked like a skeleton wrapped in tight skin. Her reddish-gray hair was frazzly. The tips of her boney fingers dripped blood.
"Your daddy was looking for you." She reached out and blood splattered on Eddie's cheeks.
Eddie ran.
54
Chris tried to turn around, but Roberts held him still.
"How'd you get up here?" Chris hissed. He wobbled on the tiered hill of tiles. It descended like a haphazard staircase, into the orange fog, toward the bright light.
Roberts shushed him. When he determined it was quiet enough, he whispered, "I jumped across the elevator shaft, back to the inner hallways. Then the elevator took me the rest of the way up."
"Why didn't you just leave?"
"I had to see. That thing out there couldn't have been the Deviser. I came up here to find the real Deviser."
"Did you find it?"
Roberts shook his head. He motioned to the fog and office detritus. "Does this feel like the work of a benevolent entity to you?"
Tile clattered together, back the way they'd come from.
Micah's voice called out through the fog. It was raspier than before. "I hear you. You'll give me what's mine!"
Something heavy and metallic struck the tile. Shattered bits of it scattered and bounced towards them.
Micah was bringing the lurchers.
Chris crept down the hill of tiles. Roberts followed, then stopped him again. His eyes darted over Chris's head, tracking something. He touched his finger to his lips.
Orange mist curled around him. Ahead, the stacks of tiles shortened, forming a downward slope that led to a sunken plot with a grid of toilets, sinks, and broken mirrors.
"How'd Micah get up here?" Chris asked.
"Something must have helped her. When that thing approached her, I ran and was on an elevator within thirty seconds. But she was waiting for me at the top."
It was one more impossible thing on top of all the rest, but Micah's quick journey threatened him more directly than the rest. More than ever, he wanted to find Eddie and escape. "You said she was hunting. What's she hunting?"
