by B.J. Keeton
***
Golden sunlight beamed through high windows. The group found themselves in a circular office lined with bookshelves. A desk stood off to one side, and a meeting area with a couch and two chairs sat in front of it. In normal circumstances, the office would have been quite luxurious. Currently, however, the office was more terrifying than awe-inspiring.
Chuckie noticed the body on the chair first. It had been a woman, but she was headless and her skin had been flayed from her upper torso. Blood was everywhere. It coated the chair she was in as well as the couch opposite her, and there were random pools of it on the ground. Saryn screamed before Chuckie could bring anyone's attention to the dead woman.
Saryn had apparently found her head. Resting on the desk, bloody and skinless, its lipless grin and empty sockets stared at the newcomers.
Beneath the desk sat an even more disturbing sight: a man had been split in half, and his organs lay on the floor in clumps. Oddly, though, there was no blood, only a black gel coating everything near him. Upon seeing the head and the halved man, Harlo promptly threw up, which prompted Saryn to follow suit. Chuckie maintained his composure, but it was more out of stubbornness than anything else. He also didn’t want to vomit all over Ceril, who was blissfully unconscious to the discoveries.
Saryn gagged a few more times then asked, “What is this? Where are we?”
“Dunno,” Chuckie said. “But I'm not real excited to stick around.”
“I don't see why you would be,” Saryn said. “Who could or would do this to someone?”
“What about that?” Chuckie said, pointing to the headless woman.
Saryn choked back vomit again, but Harlo was not quite so lucky. She dry heaved because her earlier stint had emptied her of everything else she could have regurgitated. Saryn walked past the dead woman, barely daring a look, and stood in front of the giant wooden door.
“Oh, no,” she said.
Harlo straightened from her heaving. “What?” she asked.
Saryn turned from the door, keeping her eyes on it, and sprinted back to the halved man in front of the desk. She leaned down and took hold of his head as carefully as she could. The last thing she wanted was to mutilate him any worse than he already was. Or to put her hand inside him.
“What the hell are you doing?” Chuckie asked.
“Checking something,” she said. Her eyes scanned the office and then dropped to the dead man in her hands. She flipped the half she was holding over, causing more of the black gel to ooze out of him, but she was able to get a good look at the dead man's profile. “It's Headmaster Squalt,” Saryn confirmed. “This must be his office.”
“What?” Harlo asked.
“It's him. It's Squalt,” Saryn repeated. “When the Gatekeeper sent us somewhere adjacent to Ennd's, the closest Instance must have been the Headmaster's office. There's always been a rumor that Academy headmasters were given private Instances, and now I guess we've confirmed that.”
“Who's the woman?” Chuckie asked.
Saryn looked at the body across the room and the head on the desk. “No idea,” she said. “You know, doc?”
“No way to tell,” Harlo said. “We'd have to run tests, and umm…”
“Yeah,” Saryn said. “Yeah.”
“So what do we do now?” Chuckie asked.
“Get back to Ennd's. If their bodies are still here in this condition, that means no one else knows about this.”
Chuckie nodded. “Can you get us out of here?”
Saryn said, “Yes. It's just the matter of putting in Ennd's code in the panel by the door.”
“And you have the code?” Harlo asked.
“Yeah, unless they’ve changed the code.” Saryn let go of the dead headmaster, wiped her hands on her pants, and walked determinedly to the door.
She keyed the code and waited. She heard a slight buzzing, and when she pulled on the door, it opened with a whuff-pop. She peered through the opening, then threw the door open as far as she could. “It's Ennd's,” she confirmed. “Let's go.”
