by Darcy Coates
Arlo’s desk phone rang, jolting him out of his daze. He grabbed the receiver and tried to sound more alert than he was. “Arlo here.”
“Hey,” the voice said. “Everything okay down there?”
Arlo recognised the voice as belonging to the property owner, Mr. Chase. He carefully nudged the beer farther out of sight under the desk, despite knowing his boss couldn’t see it. “Yeah, all good here.”
“I’m going to need you to check on Dr. Beaufort on Level Four, West Wing. I’ve had a couple of noise complaints. Tell him to keep the volume down, okay?”
“Sure thing.” Arlo waited to hear the click as Mr. Chase hung up, then took his tools—a flashlight and a notebook—out of the drawer, and tucked them into his pocket. Then he marched down the empty tile hallway to the lifts at the opposite end of the room.
As he waited for the doors to open, he tried to remind himself of who Dr. Beaufort was. He would have seen him every morning as the building’s occupants filed in, and again every night as they filtered out. He ran through the faces that passed across his mind, trying unsuccessfully to match names to them.
The elevator doors opened. Arlo stepped inside, pressed the button for level four, and waited for the lift to take action.
The Argent labs were leased to a wide variety of industry professionals. Because of its location in the heart of the city, rent was expensive, and the labs had a reputation for housing some of the greatest minds of their generation. At least that was what Arlo had been told. All he saw was a lot of bickering and occasionally smashed equipment when an experiment failed.
As the elevator doors opened, Arlo snapped his fingers. He’d remembered Dr. Beaufort: the shortish man with a ruffle of greying-brown hair and the permanent frown. While most of the tower’s occupants said good morning as they passed the guard station, Arlo didn’t think he’d ever spoken to the scientist.
Arlo turned right, towards the West Wing, and followed it until he found Dr. Beaufort’s door. To his surprise, the lab’s lights were off. Maybe he took a different lift down while I was coming up?
He didn’t expect it to work, so Arlo felt a small shiver of surprise when the door opened with a nudge. As he stepped into the lab, he felt on the wall beside the door for the light switch and pressed it. The room stayed dark. Maybe he overloaded the generator? It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened.
Arlo pulled out his torch and switched it on. As the narrow beam of light skimmed over the shadowed shapes cluttering the space, unease grew across Arlo’s skin. It wasn’t the standard mess. The lab was destroyed. Chairs had been overturned, expensive-looking equipment lay shattered on the ground, and the largest table had been crushed. Stains coated the wall closest to him. Computers had been torn apart. Arlo licked his dry lips and stepped into the room. Glass crunched under his shoes; he stepped back, then looked towards the ceiling. It wasn’t a power outage, after all—the bulbs had been broken.
“Dr. Beaufort?” Arlo kept his voice low for reasons he couldn’t fathom. “Hello?”
No voice answered, but as he held his breath, Arlo was sure he heard something stir deeper in the room. He moved forward cautiously, sweeping his torch over the debris and being careful to step around the broken glass and torn book pages.
He passed the largest desk and saw something under the smaller bench. It looked almost like feet. Arlo crouched so that his torchlight could illuminate the rest of the figure, and his breath seized in his throat. The familiar scowling face stared back, its eyes wide and wild, its skin horrifically pale. Rivers of blood dripped from where the back of the head had been torn away.
Arlo gagged and lurched backwards. He bumped into something solid and turned to see one of the large reinforced crates he’d often seen the scientists shipping their live experiments in. The metal reinforcements had been bent, and a human-sized hole had been punctured in the side.
“Oh…” Arlo turned towards the door just as something nudged it closed.
50
In the Space above the Wardrobe
The rain drumming at Laura’s window nearly drowned out her cat’s wheezing. Octavius, the ancient tabby, lay curled beside her pillow. Later in the night, as the temperature dropped, he was likely to burrow under her blankets to leech off her body heat.
“You doing okay, champ?” Laura asked as Octavius gave an extra-gurgly exhale.
He blinked slowly in response. The vet had said he was doing remarkably well for his age, and Laura had interpreted that as a gentle warning that she might not have her childhood pet with her for much longer.
She turned back to her phone and continued scrolling as she filtered through her Facebook feed in case anything new had cropped up. It was well past her usual bedtime, and she was procrastinating in the vain hope that the rain might stop so she could have an undisturbed sleep. When it rained at night, her dreams were always erratic and disturbing, and they often devolved into nightmares before morning arrived.
Octavius gave an extra-deep wheeze, and Laura looked at him. His eyes, fixed on something above her head, had widened into the perfect circles he usually reserved for when he begged for food or saw another cat on the backyard fence. Laura followed his gaze towards the dark patch above her wardrobe in the corner of her room.
There was only a foot of space between the wardrobe and the ceiling, which meant neither the room’s light nor Laura’s lamp were able to completely scatter the shadows there. Laura squinted into the darkness, but as far as she could tell, it was empty.
“What’s-a matter? Seen a moth?” She gave Octavius’s head a brief scratch.
The cat showed his front fangs, and a low rumble echoed from his throat.
Laura turned back to the corner, suddenly uncertain. Octavius really seemed to think something was there. Even though she couldn’t see anything, Laura found herself focussed on the area, matching her cat’s gaze, as though a shape could appear in the thin block of shadows at any moment.
“Enough,” Laura said, shaking herself out of the stupor and putting her phone back on the bedside table.
Octavius maintained his stare, and although she thought his tail might be a little puffed, he was no longer growling. “I don’t know what’s up with you tonight, Oct, but you’d better get over it. Goodnight.”
She gave her cat’s head a final scratch—not that he responded—then turned off her bedside lamp and wiggled under her covers. The rain continued to beat at the window, creating a strange symphony with Octavius’s thick breathing and the ticking clock. Laura closed her eyes and tried to sink into sleep, but she was excruciatingly aware that Octavious was still next to her and that his wide eyes continued to focus on the shadowed corner.
Sometime during the next half hour, between the beating rain and wheezing breaths, Laura fell into an unpleasant, disturbed sleep. She dreamed she’d rolled over and opened her eyes to see the creature crouched above her wardrobe.
It was entirely black, which allowed it to blend into the shadows perfectly. Water dripped from its moist, leathery skin and ran down the side of the bookcase to soak into the carpet. Its eyes were the worst; they were large and round, with horizontal pupils, like a cat’s. They flicked from Octavius to Lauren’s sleeping form, back and forth, back and forth, as hunger drew its lips apart to expose the many rows of shiny white teeth packed inside its mouth.
Lauren started awake with a gasp. It took her a moment to remember where she was, then she scrambled to turn on her bedside lamp and scanned the space above her wardrobe. Empty. She sighed and rubbed her palms against her eyelids.
A low rumble from her side drew her attention to Octavius. He was crouched in the space beside her pillow with his hackles raised and his bushy tail curled around his body defensively. His huge green eyes remained fixed on the corner of the room… the space where she’d dreamed she’d seen the creature.
“There’s nothing there,” Laura said, more to reassure herself than to calm her cat. She looked back at the corner for the fina
l time.
Something glistened on the side of her wardrobe. Water drops, catching her lamp’s light, dribbling down the wood towards the carpet. Lauren opened her mouth, but no noise escaped her.
Lightning flashed through Lauren’s window and dispersed the darkness in the corner of the room. The split second of sharp white light was just enough to illuminate the leathery flesh, the wide, hungry eyes, and the long shiny teeth hidden in the darkest corner of the space above the wardrobe.
The End
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