by Greg James
“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.
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 shade 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.
Garry got his feet, absently brushing dead leaves and grass from the seat of his jeans. Esther liked his jeans, they were nice and tight and she liked to walk with her hand slid inside the back pocket. Just checking the quality of the goods, that’s what she called it. He missed having her close to him. There was a part of him that was starting to feel naked and exposed; a nerve wearing itself raw. It was telling him this wasn’t right; something was wrong. She had been gone for far too long now. Garry followed the memory of her footsteps down towards the lake and the trees.
A pungent layer of algae had risen to the surface of the lake and it drifted across the dark water in islands and continents that were barely bound together. Children went ambling by, licking streams of ice cream and melted ice lollies from their fingers. Further behind came mothers and fathers, looking tired. Their faces etched with the lines and aching frowns of parenthood, which would be smoothed away the moment their offspring were watching them again. The sudden smiles told a different story to the steady eyes of Mum and Dad, Garry thought.
Love is never like it is in books or films, so he had believed until he met Esther. Now he wasn’t sure what he believed and her absence was making everything feel so fragile. The sunlight reflected off the swampy water making it look like a dark, diseased mirror. Time was slow around him; the heat was heavy and things unwanted were rising to the surface. He looked at the clumps of algae and deeper to their cloud-shaped roots beneath the water. The bottom of the lake was uninviting. He had an idea that it was very cold down there, that the heat of the day was not reaching those depths and time ran at its normal pace once you sank down into it. A part of him longed to be there, where it was cold, lightless and time went by as it once had done for him. Before love came along and made everything become slow and hot.
So it is love then, Garry thought, that’s what has happened to me.
He scratched at the sweaty roots of his fine ginger hair and set off walking at a faster pace, dodging around tourists and office workers cluttering the path by the lake. He wasn’t sure where the urgency in his step had come from but its momentum carried him along nimbly to the bridge over the lake. Garry had to press through the people crowded upon it; all of them chattering and staring down at the crusted water. He narrowly avoided a large, short woman smearing his shirt with her ice scream cone. She shot him an angry look as if he had stepped into her way on purpose. Garry tried to mumble an apology but she had already turned away, waddling off towards the shade. Garry set his feet down on the other side of the bridge and peered into the trees ahead. There was a small restaurant with facilities further along; that must be where Esther had gone to. He rubbed a damp palm over his breast; feeling how his heart had become strange and tight. Anxiety, the old kind, he had almost forgotten about it. He remembered the twinges, aches and palpitations before Esther came into his life. The old days; they were there waiting for him, watching and waiting – the bad old days. From the shade of the trees. At the bottom of the lake. That woman’s piercing colourless eyes. He felt a sense of absence pass over him; a cold touch that should not have been possible on such a brilliant day.
Where was she?
Garry walked harder and faster now. His eyes searching the shadows cast by the trees and the sallow grass where sun-worshippers and deckchair dwellers seemed to swarm and multiply before his eyes. He was reminded of kaleidoscopes and glass prisms. The way light shines and creates reflections and refractions, conjuring tricks of shadow and light. Then, he thought of light shining on the surface of a world dark with disease and ripe with things that have grown underneath it all. They watch and they wait; just out of sight, only coming to the surface now and then when the time is right. When the moment is perfect. When the sun shines in our eyes and time has become distorted, heavy and slow; they come out to feed.
“And today is a perfect day,” Garry said to himself.
It was
then that he became aware of an odour that was rich and nauseating at the same time. He realised it was the smell of the algae flowering in the heat. And into his head came an image; one of something else flowering, soft and bristling with a shape that dreamed of being human.
“And sometimes dreams really do come true.”
The somnambulant density of the air felt like it was resisting him; trying to hold him back, keep him in one place, like those dreams where you’re trying to run but you cannot. The harder you try, the slower you go; the farther you seem to fall behind everyone else. He felt like he had been falling behind for years until he met Esther then everything else seemed to change and go so fast. There were colours and light in his life. A warmth he had never felt before. He didn’t want to lose that again, not to the darkness and the cold.
Walking on, he came to the restaurant shaded by spreading oak leaves. There was the ladies toilet; its open doorway framed with moss and decorative creeping vines. A place where things could grow, unseen in the damp and the dark. He found his eyes drawn to a shadow leaning against the lakeside railing. Again, there was that smell of richness and pungency that must have been coming from the algae gathered thickly by the bank. Some of it even seemed to have crawled up onto the soil and grass.
The shadow against the railing had Esther’s shape though the heat made him think that she was trailing fingers in the infested water that were not fingers, and that they retreated into her body as he drew closer. He wiped stinging beads of sweat from his eyes and reached out to touch Esther’s shoulder. Under his hand, he felt her shoulder; its familiar shape though it seemed softer somehow, more so than before. Time felt slow again, no longer fast and fearful. He felt like he was falling but not in a good way. The moment he was in felt like a trap that had been set, patiently waiting for him. One that he would never escape. His breathing was thin and his tight heart pounded in his ears, driving out all other sounds.
