by T. R. Briar
“Maybe they moved it up?”
Teeth clenched, Rayne brushed past Hawkins, trying to hold his composure. They moved up the meeting? Why hadn’t anybody told him?! Another late night, just what he needed. Having to present on Thursday was flustering enough, and now they’d moved it up two days.
Rayne stumbled into the office of one of his firm’s senior partners, a grey haired man with a distinguished demeanor and an office to match.
“Ah, Mercer, I was starting to wonder,” Mr. Bastley said. “I need to be certain you have everything ready.”
“Y-yes, sir. I’ve got all records of acquisition, and I think I’ll be able to negotiate this. I don’t think we’ll have to take the matter to court.”
Rayne laid out his strategy to his superior, who seemed to approve of his methods as well as his calm professionalism. Yet despite his placid appearance, Rayne’s insides churned with questions, stressed to breaking point from uncertainty and far too many late nights.
“Good, everything appears to be in order,” Mr. Bastley said.
“But why wasn’t I told the meeting was moved up to tomorrow?”
“Yes, about that. I moved the meeting up because I need you to meet with a representative of the Marotech corporation on Thursday.”
“Marotech? They’re one of our biggest clients.”
“Yes, and they’re undergoing a vast international expansion. We need everybody on this.”
“But what about—my meeting is—?”
“Yes, you’ll still be handling your previous accounts. But, they will come second to this. I’ll have my secretary send you the paperwork; I’m certain you can handle it.”
This was too much for Rayne. His head reeled, filled with a haze that clouded his reason. He slumped over as he struggled to focus. Wasn’t there something more important? Was he forgetting something?
“But I’m already stretched so thin handling that account,” he argued. “I barely see my son enough as it is, and I—”
“Rayne, this is a very important client. If you don’t think you can handle what is asked of you, than perhaps you should reevaluate if you really want to pursue a career in law. It’s not about what’s best for you or your family. It’s what’s best for all of us. Swim along, or drown in the current.”
Those words, coming from his superior, snapped Rayne back to reality when he remembered his place here. The strange, foggy feeling crept through his mind again, despite his efforts to drive it back. He straightened himself up.
“Yes, yes, sorry. No worries, Mr. Bastley, I’ll have everything ready by tomorrow.”
“See that you do. I expect great things from you, Mr. Mercer. Ever since you first came to this firm, fresh out of university, I’ve always thought ‘there’s a man with a keen mind. There’s a sharp observer who can talk his way out of anything.’ I know one day you’ll make something great of yourself. Keep moving forward, as they say, and you’ll get there someday.”
Those were words he needed to hear, reassurance that sacrifice would pay off in the end, regardless of how vague. Rayne’s eyes met his superior’s while he nodded and reached out to shake his hand.
“I won’t let you down, sir, I promise.”
“Very well, then. Have a safe trip home.”
* * *
Rayne could not get out of the office fast enough, still in a slight daze over what had just happened. Perhaps he was too tired from all the stress. He straightened himself out and checked his watch. To his shock, it now read a quarter to six. A thunderbolt struck as he realized he was late. Trying to maintain his poise he raced to his office and stuffed the remainder of his paperwork into his briefcase. Then he looked over the files Hawkins had brought in. One file didn’t have the right name at the top; it wasn’t even from his case. His heart skipped a beat. Hawkins must have screwed up.
“Dammit!”
He rushed to Hawkins’s office, but he wasn’t in there. No sign of him in the hallway either.
“God, I can’t wait to hit the pubs,” Rayne heard Hawkins say as he neared the break room. “Is it too much to ask to have one day where Mercer isn’t breathing down my neck?”
Rayne froze. They were talking about him?
“Watch it now, he’ll write you up.” This time it was Jenkins’ voice.
“I know, I know. I hate being on a team with him. I mean it’s great he does all the work, but you can’t talk to the man at all. Such a bloody bore. All he cares about is work, and sucking up to Mr. Bastley. Like he’s his pet, you know?”
They all started laughing. Rayne stood there, stunned, waiting for the laughter to cease. A minute later, a few other lawyers walked out of the room, glancing behind them. They didn’t even notice Rayne as they all returned to their offices. Hawkins came out a moment later, and nearly crashed right into him. He glanced at Rayne with a rattled look on his spectacled face, like a child who’d been caught stealing from his mother’s purse.
“Oh, hey Mercer, I was just on my way out—”
“It’ll have to wait. You gave me the wrong duplicates; please tell me you didn’t send this file to our client.”
“Yeah, I sent it out when you told me to. I’m certain that’s the right paper. I had a sticky note and everything.”
“It is not the right file, these are records for a banking company our firm is handling.”
Hawkins looked at the folder. “Oh. Well I guess I mixed them up.”
“Do you know what you’ve done?”
“It’s fine, I can just get the proper ones later; they’ll have them by tomorrow.”
“It is not fine! They need time to review the briefs before the meeting! I’m already late for something very important! Now I’ll have to call them and apologize, and make certain you didn’t just fax them confidential information from a completely different company, and—”
“Hey, hey, calm down. So it’s just another late night, that’s routine for you.”
“Don’t fucking tell me to calm down!” Rayne’s voice thundered, his eyes maddened, nostrils flaring as he lost control of his temper. It only lasted mere seconds, but once he realized he was screaming, a deep horror chilled his spine. He took a step back, aghast. He never raised his voice. He never got angry like that at all.
In his deeply embroiled emotion, his gaze met with Hawkins’s round face, hidden behind his spectacles. Dead silence followed, and the short man’s face went pale as he looked into Rayne’s eyes, his own opening from narrow to nearly circular.
“Well, sorry to have—all right, I’ll have that file—I’ll e-mail you the document,” Hawkins stammered, “And I’ll call the client right away. T-terribly sorry.”
He rushed down the hall, as if he couldn’t get away from him fast enough. Rayne just stood there frozen, horrified that he’d lost his temper. Closing his eyes, he pushed those emotions deep inside him. He didn’t have time to be upset. There were more important things to deal with right now.
Trying to keep his hand steady, he returned to his office for his briefcase and staggered into an empty hallway. Not a single soul passed him on his way to the elevator. Even the lobby was devoid of people, save for the receptionist, but her nose was in a magazine, and she didn’t even notice him walking by.
The deep snow outside covered the streets and sidewalks, soaking the hem of Rayne’s pants within moments, but the cold didn’t bother him. Instead of taking note of his surroundings, he glanced down, and across the street at the bus stop, where he could see the approaching bus off in the distance. The sense of panic welled up again and he felt his legs break into a run, almost unbidden, in his desperation to catch that bus. Luck seemed to be in his favor as the light opposite of him turned green, leaving the way clear for him to cross the street.
As he ran across, a sudden dreamlike sensation crept up upon him. Everything around him slowed to a creeping crawl, and reality suddenly didn’t feel so real anymore. The immense disorientation forced him to stop for just a moment, trying to get his b
earings. A sudden screech broke through to his consciousness, and he turned his head to see a black car spiraling on a patch of ice, barreling towards him at unbelievable speed.
There was no time to get out of the way, no time for Rayne to even think beyond impending doom as he stood right in the car’s path. He heard shrieking tires against pavement, and a crushing metal weight colliding with his body. He could practically hear his bones shattering before his vision went black, and all warmth left his body.
It took several painful minutes for Rayne to force his eyes open again, but he didn’t feel that any time had passed. The fog once again permeated his mind and, for a moment, he remembered nothing, not who he was or how he got there. The feeling didn’t last long, as he began to remember his name, his past. Then he remembered his job, the presentation he had to give the next day. But, before he could even process that, he saw Levi’s face flashing into his memory, and with horror he realized how late he was. He jumped to his feet, and the world tumbled around him, like he’d been thrust into a blender. Nothing felt right to him at that moment, not even himself.
“My God, call an ambulance!” a woman shrieked.
Turning around, Rayne saw a woman rushing towards him. Other concerned passer-bys also hurried up to him, eyes filled with concern.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said, forcing a smile. “I’m all right, just had a dizzy spell.”
But the woman rushed right past him without a glance, as did everyone else. Rayne turned around to follow their movement as he saw a crowd gathered in front of a stopped car. There was a man, bleeding, fumbling for the driver’s side door holding him inside the car. Some people moved to assist him out, but others stepped forward to stop them.
“Don’t move him, wait for the ambulance!”
Rayne could already hear sirens, and the past few moments came flooding back. He remembered the car coming right for him, the shock and agony compressed in a single moment before he’d blacked out.
“What about the other one? I don’t think he’s breathing! What do we do?” Someone else yelled from the crowd.
“But I’m fine—” he started to speak before realizing nobody was looking at him. He gazed a moment at the crowd gathered in front of the car, and pushed his way through them to get a closer look for himself. He could see now the front fender had an enormous dent in it, smoke billowing out from beneath a twisted hood over a car engine still running. Below that dent lay a crumpled body, lying in a pool of blood. It only took Rayne a moment to recognize himself, and an intense chill filled his entire being.
“Th-that’s me—? I’m—I’m dead?”
The noise around him went silent, and the world fell away. Rayne struggled to rationalize the situation in his mind, but found he just couldn’t.
“Please, I’m still here,” he babbled, still dazed. “Somebody tell me I’m still here!”
Desperate, he reached out, waving his hand in front of the person closest to him. She made no visible reaction to his movements. He reached out and placed a hand on her face, and she shivered and backed away without acknowledging that she saw him. He stood dumbfounded.
“A dream?” he wondered, any alternative still too much to think about. “I fell asleep at the office. There never was a car, and I’m not really here.” He continued to think aloud. “But if it’s a dream, I wouldn’t know, would I? I’d wake up once I realized it was a dream, right? Shouldn’t I be waking up now?”
The sirens wailed even louder, and Rayne could see emergency vehicles pulling up at the intersection. An ambulance stopped right beside him as emergency workers jumped out and ran to the scene of the accident. One ran past him but the other one ran right through him, a horrible sensation, like his bones and blood had turned into custard. He felt like he no longer had substance, his existence nothing but raging thought, alone and unnoticeable. The frustration from before burned through him again.
“Acknowledge me! ” he shrieked in fury, and he whirled and struck the man who had passed through him so carelessly. He felt his fist connecting, and to his shock, the man went bowling over backwards, sprawled out in the snow with a visible mark on his cheek.
The rest of the crowd gasped in shock.
“What was that?” several people cried out. The paramedic pulled himself up and shook his head.
“Are you all right?” his partner asked.
“I’m fine. It feels like somebody threw a rock at me.”
“Why would anybody do that?”
The man rubbed his cheek. “I haven’t got time for this, there’s a man dying here.”
One of the policemen on the scene scanned the crowd. “All right you lot, who threw that?”
Nobody answered. They all shuffled around and glanced at each other in confusion. The officer made his way into the group of spectators, searching for whatever unknown delinquent that saw fit to cause a disturbance.
“I am still here,” Rayne murmured in disbelief. “They felt me. I’m real. I am real.”
He muttered this to himself over and over again in a broken mantra. The people around him fell away, and the world became much more muted and colorless, full of disjointed forms casting dark shadows everywhere. The street melted, no longer looking like a real street, but a strange moving mass, like a waterless river. Odder still, an intense bright light illuminated the air, but brought no warmth with it. All around him, Rayne could now see hunched shades shuffling into the distance, where the strange, cold light shone the strongest. Recognition filled him.
“That light. Something terrible lies over there,” he whispered to himself. And, yet, he felt drawn to it, just like the figures around him. He resisted the pull for a time, as a feeling of dread stirred inside, and it only grew the longer he watched that light. But, at the same time, so did his curiosity grow, and he couldn’t help himself; he began to walk towards it. Yet, unlike everything around him, he did not do so in a mindless state, nor did he shamble, but rather he walked upright, steady yet cautious.
To his left, he saw another person. His face was pallid and his eyes dark, and he was hunched over, not upright, despite a youthful appearance.
“Who are you?” Rayne asked him. “Who are all these people? What is that light? Where are we going?”
The man didn’t answer. He didn’t even acknowledge Rayne had spoken, and kept shambling. Rayne saw another person further away, a middle aged man, sporting the same pale face and very dark eyes, with circles beneath like one who hasn’t slept in over a month.
“Can you please tell me what’s going on? Are we all dead? Is this supposed to be heaven? This doesn’t feel right at all!”
This man didn’t answer him either. They were like zombies, unaware of anything but the light they all shambled towards.
“You have to stop!” Rayne yelled at them. “That light isn’t heaven!”
Nobody paid him any heed. They ambled forward and disappeared from Rayne’s view. He ran towards one woman in the distance, and grabbed her by the shoulders to stop her. As he did so, the strange undulating ground beneath them heaved as it cracked apart into a gaping chasm, surrounded by jagged black chunks reminiscent of teeth. Beneath him lay absolutely nothing, giving Rayne merely a second to contemplate that he was standing on air before he and the woman plummeted down into the darkness.
A scream ripped its way out of Rayne’s throat as he fell deeper into the void. The air around him rushed and pulsated like a beating heart. Strange creatures flew past like shrieking fiends, and once they saw him they dove to tear at his flesh. In his rising panic he could not comprehend what was happening to him; his thoughts were overpowered by a blood-filled stench and the searing pain from the claw marks now carved out of his limbs.
Time slowed, and Rayne could no longer tell how long he’d been falling. It felt like hours, even years had gone by. The screaming imps once savaging him faded into the darkness, their shrieks disappearing with them, and he fell alone through the biting winds. Then, in a single instant, he stop
ped. He now lay sprawled on his back upon blackened soil. He’d felt no impact, no sensation of hitting solid ground. One moment he was plummeting, the next, he wasn’t. He rolled himself over, and ended up with his face pressed against strange earth. It seemed like unnatural ground, a lumpy, Stygian substance of neither dirt, nor ash, nor any other recognizable element. It felt ice cold to the touch, hard, a little slimy, and it trembled like living flesh.
Where is this? Rayne thought to himself. He couldn’t see, couldn’t comprehend, and he didn’t really care to know this place, only to leave and never look back.
He jumped to his feet, but had difficulty standing upright with the ground moving beneath him. He now saw how torn his clothes had become, and the jacket of his suit, along with his shoes and socks, had disappeared sometime during his fall. Dried blood stained his arms over diminishing claw marks, but the pain had faded since his landing.
He decided to pay less attention to what had become of him, and took closer note of his surroundings. Dim and hazy light obscured any recognizable landscape, and a heavy fog swirled at his feet, stretching as far off as he could see. Sparse blades of what looked like vegetation, possibly grass, poked out of the ground, but it was a deep rust color. Everything else, the ground, the air, what resembled trees and rock formations, it was all pitch black. Rayne couldn’t tell if the dying light created this murky tone, or if everything around him was actually this color.
He approached the nearest tree, his bare feet squishing the ground as he walked. Already tall at a distance, it became massive when he drew up beside it. He could see mottled ebony bark, with a gritty ashen-grey powder coating it in parts. Twisted branches spread up above him, their orange leaves standing starkly against the black sky. Curious, Rayne reached down and put his hand against the orange grass growing up against the tree roots, recoiling when a stinging sensation shocked his flesh. His hand burned, yet he felt no warmth. This frozen vegetation was the coldest thing he had ever touched.
“What the hell is this?!” he exclaimed.
Nothing about this realm felt natural, and Rayne refused to see it as anything more than a very lucid dream. He wanted nothing more right now than to wake up.
