William walked quickly towards his desk with the intent of dropping off his keys and heading to the break room for a drink of water. The lights were dimmed, several of the fluorescents turned off or burnt out. He passed by a handwritten note pinned to the department announcement board:
In an effort to save the environmint management has implimented several energee saving measures. Thank you for your cooperasion.
His cubicle had been relatively untouched during his bereavement leave. There was only a small stack of new paperwork and a single envelope on the keyboard. He felt a thin greasy film across the desktop, like furniture polish that hadn’t been adequately wiped away. He traced his finger across the surface and though he couldn’t see any residue he did detect the earthy scent of mildew.
The front of the envelope read Welcome Back William. The contents felt strangely bulky and thick. The card inside had an odd texture as if it were patched together from several layers of parchment. The black, blue and red ink had soaked into the porous paper, creating thick arteries of purple that obscured the messages inside. He squinted, pushed his glasses to the bridge of his nose to focus his vision. He couldn’t decipher who had written their well-wishes; the scrawled platitudes were indecipherable. He suspected one delicately written message was the handwriting of the analyst he’d trained just before leaving. He tried to remember her face but it was indistinct, preserved in his mind as a smooth oval with smudged depressions for eyes and a wide stain of a mouth. Pressure swelled in his chest, pinpricks in his brain made him see flashing lights. It was difficult to recall names and he was frustrated at the lack of faces to attach to the missing names.
He glanced down the hall and saw a stack of boxes and filing cabinets blocking the aisle, toppled in a heap like a hastily constructed barricade. This bothered him for the rest of his shift. It was an uncomfortable weight in his head on the drive home.
Business Day 2
“Hey, welcome back.” Jensen’s head peeked over the cubicle wall and his hand offered a breath mint. “You back for good, buddy?” The illusion of his hand hovering below his unattached head was discomfiting in the dim light.
“Hey. Thanks, Jensen. I am back for good. I’m surviving. Thanks.” William took the proffered breath mint and smiled in return. The mint was the same color and shape as his wife’s sleeping pills so he just let it roll around on his palm in a closed fist. William liked Jensen, but his voice seemed different, his eyes a different shade of gray and his face puffier than he remembered.
“You look tired, buddy. Fresh coffee in the breakroom. I just put on a pot.” Jensen didn’t seem to notice when someone coughed far too loudly several cubicles to his right, theatrically, as if on cue.
“Look, Will.” Jensen’s voice lowered conspiratorially. “You ever need anything, say like to talk or something, just let me know. I’ll be a cubicle away, neighbor.” He seemed uncomfortable with his magnanimity and played it off with a wink. “This McKinnon lawsuit is killing me. Too much work, not enough time in the day. Well, back to the tombstone, I guess.” His head rolled its eyes back into their sockets in mock exasperation, wobbled and floated back down behind its cubicle wall as the sound of typing commenced.
William smiled and asked, “Shouldn’t that be ‘grindstone?’”
“That’s what I said, buddy.” But Jensen’s voice seemed to come from somewhere far beyond his cubicle, lower, as if he’d hastily crawled away, pressed his head against the floor and responded while his hands continued to type.
William glanced back to his welcome back card. Its thickness made it lay slightly open; at that angle, under the fluorescent lights’ flicker, he thought he read an oddly cordial expletive in florid handwriting. But when he opened the card under direct light all the well-wishes become an amorphous mess again. He smelled the scorched coffee and his stomach clenched.
“Jensen, how do I get to the breakroom now? Looks like housekeeping made some changes.” William waved in irritation towards the clutter of filing cabinets.
Jensen’s arm popped up over the cubicle wall and gestured vaguely to his right. William heard him talking low, slurring into his phone. He walked towards the wall but didn’t see the door’s outline until he was standing just before it. The doorknob had been painted the same gray blue as the door and walls, the color of moldering fruit. The doorknob felt fuzzy, a slight brush of filaments tickled his palm. Once inside he swallowed three pills and chased them down with a large coffee cup full of water. The pressure in his chest deflated, the lights in his head dimmed.
William returned to his desk and performed his daily duties with perfunctory attention. The next eight hours rolled by with clockwork banality. Just twenty minutes shy of the end of the workday he realized his VP hadn’t welcomed him back yet. It was the end of his second day back yet she hadn’t called or even sent him an email. He found this strange, but chalked it up to the chaos of the company’s financial difficulties and his own rather insignificant position in the corporate hierarchy.
He stood up to say good night to Jensen but he wasn’t in his cubicle—in fact, he hadn’t seen him since that morning. Another day down, a lifetime to go, William thought as he grabbed his coat to leave for the day.
Business Day 3
William’s commute took him through older neighborhoods he didn’t remember being so ominous. He couldn’t recall details of the previous day’s drive, but he did remember this part of the city hadn’t always been so sparsely populated. The few folks he saw now were clearly homeless, but their rag draped figures stepped through the lopsided doors of ambiguous storefronts as if they owned the places.
He noticed the lack of law enforcement when he drove by a store whose entrance was a gaping hole surrounded by broken drywall and glass. He glimpsed furtive movements within, no doubt looters at work. On first try his cell phone wouldn’t get any reception and when he finally received a few bars he dialed 911. But the call wouldn’t connect and the ring continued in an odd drone. William chalked it up to atmospheric interference from the fog layer that coated the city and was all the talk on the news lately. The closer he got to work the denser the air became. The gritty fog shrouded the streets like a haze of spores clogging the city.
William didn’t want to be here. He stared at the company’s bright yellow logo prominently displayed on the entrance to the building. A bubble of anxiety grew inside him, expanded painfully against his brain. He took several deep breaths to calm the panic attack. He needed to get inside to wash down his pills with a glass of water or coffee. He clipped his dog-eared employee badge to his shirt pocket and walked for what felt like a lifetime to the entrance. He hesitated as the automatic doors failed to open, cupped his hands to the distorted glass to see if there was anyone inside.
A massive shape lurched towards the doors under the fluorescent lights inside. The ground shook violently. The door slid open in jolts, vibrating the floor, revealing the corpulent security guard pushing it aside. Stagnant air washed over William’s face. He didn’t recognize the guard. The fat man simply mumbled, “Power outage,” and then walked back to his station, the back of his shirt umber from his copious sweat. He kicked up fat dust motes as he went. William removed his glasses and cleaned them with his shirtsleeve. When he replaced them the motes had diminished in size, yet the musty fog still permeated the air.
Jensen was bright and chipper first thing this morning. William couldn’t see him but his enthusiastic voice projected far beyond his cubicle walls. “Morning, Will. Wanna see something?” He heard Jensen’s question closer to his ears than seemed possible. His voice was phlegmy and padded, like he was speaking through the thickness of a furry growth. William looked over the cubicle’s wall and Jensen was staring back, his wide smile flaunting tiny off-white teeth like the petite buds of mushrooms freshly burst through soil. “A break isn’t gonna kill you. C’mon,” Jensen insisted. William reluctantly agreed.
He followed Jensen down a side corridor he’d never been down before. Th
e lights here were even dimmer than in his work area and the few that were on flickered and sputtered like gaslight. The air became progressively thicker and moister. They walked for about 10 minutes—William had never realized the building was so vast—then stopped at the entrance to a dimly lit, unpopulated room. Rows and rows of low-walled cubicles stretched out into the darkness.
Jensen turned to William, “Go on. Check it out.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“The new department. The new VP’s office is back there.” William started to ask another question but Jensen shook his head impatiently and nudged him into the room. He walked slowly down the aisle, glancing at the empty cubicles on his left and right then back at a grinning Jensen. You’ll see, Jensen mouthed silently. Keep going.
William walked deeper into the room until something enormous loomed above him, but it was just another barricade of filing cabinets topped off with chairs. As he continued around the barrier he noticed what appeared to be rusted metal buckets inside the cubicles. Every desk he passed had replaced their trash bin with shin-high corroded pails. He’d wandered deeper into the room than intended. He looked back toward Jensen but there was nothing silhouetted in the room’s sole entrance. He detected a stronger stench underlying the mildew scented air.
“Hello? Jensen?”
Someone began typing on a keyboard somewhere deeper in the room. There was no glow visible from a monitor. William stared into the gloom and politely said, “Hi? Sorry if I’m interrupting.”
The typing stopped. Several uncomfortable seconds passed. The unseen employee noisily cleared his or her throat. William started to explain himself while slowly walking back towards the exit’s rectangle of light. The employee interrupted him with a hacking cough, each exhalation increasing in volume. William detected the clumsy squelch of something moving towards him. It sounded like mud stuffed burlap sacks lumbering down the aisle. The unmistakable odor of feces filled his nostrils.
William walked faster, not quite a run—there was no need to be rude to a co-worker, no reason to make their obvious handicap an issue. He should be more sensitive to other people’s disabilities; they were probably walking with a prosthetic leg or a creaky old rolling walker. He didn’t want to offend them but thought it best if he just quietly and quickly slipped out. He passed the mountain of filing cabinets and chairs, and then broke into a jog towards the exit. As he passed through the doorway into the less gloomy corridor something enormous crashed loudly behind him. Was that the stack of filing cabinets falling down? William broke into a sprint down the dank corridor, past several unoccupied offices back to his desk.
When William logged on to his computer to check his messages he saw that Jensen had been in a meeting for the last 45-minutes. He swallowed four more pills to calm his nerves and for a terrifying five-minute stretch forgot the name of his wife and daughter.
Business Day 4
The skies were gone. The city was inscrutable, the morning fog sloshed through the streets coating everything with a purplish gray film. William’s morning commute took fifteen minutes longer than usual due to decreased visibility. It didn’t matter much; he’d always arrived at work fifteen to twenty minutes early anyway. A migraine had infected his head, spreading to his jaw and neck. He’d already taken two pills this morning to calm the ache.
When he arrived at his desk he was surprised to see Jensen slumped in front of his computer so early—he usually sauntered in a good hour after William. If he were less tired and the pain in his skull less disorienting he would have seen that Jensen’s torso wasn’t collapsed like a rotting gourd, his head couldn’t be a bulbous mass with indentations replacing his eyes. Jensen’s mouth most certainly wasn’t a grin stuffed with mold.
William logged onto his computer and was surprised to see an email from his VP. He stared at his monitor for several minutes, then distracted himself by straining to hear Jensen typing or sipping from his coffee mug. But the cubicle was silent. William knew he dare not look over the wall to say good morning. He opened the email. It was a one-on-one meeting invite for 8:30 a.m., just twenty minutes from now. Remembering that the new VP’s office was a good ten-minute walk away, he grabbed a notebook and left his desk immediately.
The dank hall leading to the new VP’s office had grown a thin layer of green-tinged fuzz. Or had it been repainted and William’s migraine was confusing him? The air was definitely thicker and more humid than it had been yesterday. Spores were lazily floating about and William thought he saw a few that were as large as his eyeball, but his glasses must have been so dirty he was misinterpreting dirt on his lens. He entered the unlit room with its endless rows of abandoned cubicles.
The cubicle walls began to shudder slightly as if they’d anticipated William’s arrival—definitely the result of his myokymia acting up again. The desk’s surfaces seemed to glow with a pale luminescence that quivered under the air conditioning’s flow but his growing migraine was the likely culprit for this optical illusion. William surprised himself by making good time; he had another seven minutes until the scheduled meeting.
He stopped to examine a cubicle more closely but the dim light prevented much clarification. He directed his cell phone’s glow onto the corroded bucket he’d noticed the day before. It seemed to be bolted to the floor. As he glanced into the mouth of the bucket he saw that the bottom had been rusted out, exposing a hole that dropped down into the basement. He gagged and stumbled to one knee as the smell of sewage rose up from within. He tentatively tapped his heel against the bucket and was repulsed by the moist spongy texture. But his curiosity overcame his disgust and he lowered his cell phone’s light closer to the object. It was a fleshy thing, an enormous mushroom with its cap inverted, the stalk’s center hollow and dropping down into the pitch black cellar. He held his breath and peered into the hole, his phone held out like a flashlight. Within its depths, deep in the basement, a river of thick sludge glistened, a flow of what stank like an open cesspool.
William saw that what he had thought were bolts holding the pail to the floor were actually an outbreak of purple fungus spreading from the mass’s base like malignant tumors. He stood abruptly as he realized the entire cubicle was undulating with thin hair-like rhizomes. They began to emit a ghostly glow, then faded into blackness again. He felt a wave of anxiety and horror rise in his chest as he accepted that he could no longer blame his migraine for what he was witnessing.
He knew none of this mattered anymore. He had long resigned himself to this career. He had wanted his wife and daughter to have something to remember him by, something they could actually look back on to substantiate that he wasn’t a complete failure. But they were both gone before he’d done anything memorable. His wife had left a goodbye letter and in it she expounded on her philosophy of life and why she’d decided to take their daughter with her. She’d written that joy is to be found in varying degrees of misery; no intelligent person can ever truly be happy, they can only be less miserable than they were previously. William understood what she had meant. Life was decades of standing neck deep in sewage and happiness is attained when the filth retreats to waist level.
A baby started to cry from deep within the room. William immediately recognized his daughter’s voice. He ran past a large unlit glass wall which had to be his VP’s office. He ignored the massive glowing form that pushed against the other side of the glass wall and coughed his name repeatedly.
His daughter’s voice rose in pitch and he knew for certain she was near. Her cries came from a cubicle to his left, within, inside one of the growths. He crouched over the open mushroom and caught a glimpse of something white drift by in the blackness underneath. He ran in the direction the flow took her.
William ran for hours. He was exhausted from the futility of running from the open mouth of one fungus to another, deeper and deeper into the endless aisles amongst the universe of cubicles. He examined hundreds, thousands of moldering and corroded cubicles, peering into the fungus’s d
epths to find his daughter. He knew his strength would fade eventually. He knew he was inexorably lost amongst the infinite aisles. It was a hopeless task, searching an endless succession of empty cubicles for his daughter’s face slipping by in the torrents of sewage under his feet.
After what must have been days of searching William stumbled into a cubicle and fell to his knees; his body could no longer match his determination. He hadn’t heard his daughter’s cries in hours, perhaps longer. He looked inside the fungus’s throat and down in the basement’s filth he saw his baby girl’s face floating, milk-white in the black sick, honey-colored hair curls spread out. The dimensions of the mushroom’s opening and his baby’s head below were incongruous and distorted by a shift in his memory.
A gust of foulness rose from the depths. His girl’s face, that oh-so-serious face like childhood rushing in a flood of emotion flowing into his head, his baby’s face the most wonderful thing he’d ever remembered. The room seemed to melt into a tainted fog so all that was left was a void and a memory to fill the absence, memory like an island of debris in septic waters. He couldn’t avert his gaze from his baby girl’s eyes because the hole in the floor plunged deeper and the basement’s sewage level rose as the fungus’s fleshy rim stretched to envelop him. I hate myself, I never should have been a father, I’m sweating from the oppressive heat of the office. He struggled to gasp fresh air through the spore-choked air. He couldn’t hear himself breathing anymore. His daughter was far too silent as the sewage gathered around her head and slowly closed over her pristine face.
NO ONE IS SLEEPING IN THIS WORLD
Architecture is the simplest means of articulating time and space, of modulating reality and engendering dreams.
Alectryomancer and Other Weird Tales Page 4
