by Brian Harmon
At last Kyle heard the sound of pee on porcelain, and in spite of the unromantic nature of the situation, he was again struck by that strange arousal, a feeling that he somehow felt too young for. It certainly had nothing to do with her bodily fluids. It simply had to do with her nudity. Had he ever felt this way before? He thought he had, but he couldn’t quite remember.
Cat suddenly screamed, startling him out of his thoughts. He heard a thump as she struck the inner wall of the stall and then she burst out and stumbled into the middle of the floor, her shorts still around her knees. There was another short series of low vibrations as the factory laughed at her.
Kyle raced to her and wrapped his arms around her, startled, confused.
“Something touched me!” she sobbed. “Something in the toilet!”
He held her close, rocking her gently in his arms, calming her, his eyes locked on the open stall from which she’d just emerged.
Nothing moved.
“It was cold and…and gross…” She was sobbing too hard to talk now, scared to the point of frustration and tears.
“I believe you.”
“I just want to go home.”
“Me too. Come on. There’s a big set of doors up at the receptionist’s desk. It’s just down the hall.” He did not know how he knew this but he did. “Pull up your shorts and we’ll go.”
Cat looked up at him, her eyes wet and pitiful, her lower lip quivering. “I peed on myself.”
Kyle smiled a sympathetic smile and kissed her forehead. “That’s okay. It happens now and then. You should try being a boy sometime.”
“I couldn’t imagine it.” She smiled in spite of her embarrassment and began to pull up her pants, trying hard to keep herself covered.
Kyle stood up and stepped away to give her some room, respectfully turning away. When she had her shorts fastened, he took her by the hand and began to walk toward the door. He did not like the idea of going back into the dark hallway, but there was no way they were getting out from here.
As they stepped into the hallway, Cat stopped. “Oh my god!”
“What?”
“Something happened here! Something really bad!”
Suddenly, Kyle’s brain began to feed him horrible images. Vivid memories bubbled from the depths of his mind of people screaming and running, of blood and panic.
Cat turned and hugged him fiercely, shoving her face into his shoulder, trying to block out those terrible recollections.
“Everyone went nuts,” Kyle said, hardly believing what he was seeing in his head. “They just went nuts.” He remembered these very halls, bright with fluorescent lights, filled with screaming, horrified faces as people rushed toward the doors, many of them covered with blood.
Cat held him with a ferocious grip, her fingernails digging into his skin like small knives.
He closed his eyes, trying to make the memories stop, but something inside him told him not to suppress it. They needed to find a way out of here, and there was only one way to do that. They had to remember what they’d forgotten. He opened his mind and saw the factory, Vertical Foods, just one of several owned by Vertical Industries. It was nothing more than an ordinary food manufacturing facility, an ordinary work day. But then something went dreadfully wrong. It was not an equipment malfunction or a fire or even some disgruntled employee with a rifle. It was nothing anybody could explain, nothing that should have ever happened. For no reason at all, everyone just went nuts.
No. That wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t everyone, but it was a lot of people. They just stopped what they were doing and went on a rampage. People were killed. A lot of people. Some of them horrifically.
Suddenly, Kyle remembered the fryer. The oil. The horrible screaming.
“Kyle?”
“I know, Cat.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, God!” She pressed her face into his shoulder, trying to force away those terrible memories. She lost someone that day, she remembered. Someone close. Someone special. But she couldn’t remember who it was.
Kyle clenched his teeth as he fought against an urge to scream. What was he doing here, anyway? Why was he even here that day?
“I want to go home!” Cat sobbed.
Kyle nodded. “Okay.”
A loud, reverberating crash startled them, and they both turned to find that one of the ceiling tiles had fallen to the floor behind them. Kyle seized Cat’s arm and began to back away as his eyes drifted up to the ceiling.
Something was moving up there. A dark shape twisted and churned among the shadows in the plenum space above the tiles. It was barely visible, almost imagined, but Kyle was certain it was there. It seemed to be looking back at him through the hole.
“What is it?” Cat whispered. But Kyle had no answer. Nor did he have time to even speculate. At that moment, the other tiles began to rattle and crack as the thing began to move toward them through the plenum space.
They turned to run, but with his first step, Kyle’s ankle twisted painfully and he staggered forward.
“Kyle!”
“Go!”
“Come on!”
“Just go!”
“Not without you!”
Kyle groaned. What the hell had he done to his ankle?
Cat clung to his arm and the two of them pushed on as fast as Kyle could manage. He staggered along beside her, nearly dragging his right leg. They limped up to where the hallway turned left and then all the way down to the receptionist’s office as broken ceiling tiles rained onto the floor behind them, shattered beneath the weight of their invisible pursuer.
The whole time, the floors and walls shook with that strange laughter.
Kyle was aware that the thing had stopped following them even before they reached the receptionist’s desk, but still he pushed on, not wanting to stop until he was altogether free of this awful place. But this would not be the way out. The huge, double doors he remembered, the ones that should have led them to freedom, gave them instead only more darkness.
He had not dreamt it. The room was here and so was the desk, just as he remembered it, but the doors were different. No big, glass windows looked out over the main parking lot and the doors were solid and heavy, no longer friendly, well-lit glass. Such easy access to this empty factory had been replaced, probably to discourage trespassers.
Cat clung to him, afraid. The thing in the drop space had ceased its pursuit, but the silence left her little comfort.
Kyle tried the door, but it was chained from the outside. “Whatever is in here with us is playing games. If it meant to kill us it would have done it by now.”
“I’d rather not gamble on that.”
Kyle continued, ignoring her. “It sneaks up and screams in our ear, makes farting noises, touches girls when they pee and chases us just to see us run. It laughs at us, for God’s sake. It’s like a kid who’s figured out how to turn invisible.” He walked back to the door and peered into the hallway. “It stopped chasing us way down the hall. It knew we wouldn’t find a way out. It was just…laughing at us…”
“So what do we do?”
“We figure out what we’re doing here and what this place is. We know it, so why can’t we remember it?” He looked at Cat, wondering. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“I’m not sure. Everything’s sort of fuzzy. I can’t remember what came first.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“What does it mean?”
Kyle shook his head. “I don’t know.” He led her around the receptionist’s desk and into the next room. Here, as with every office, there was a window that let in enough light to see well, but was reinforced with wire to prevent break-ins. He let go of Cat’s hand and sat down on the cold floor.
“We can’t just stay here.”
Kyle shrugged. “What else can we do? This place is huge. How can we find our way out if we can’t even remember how we got in? Besides, my ankle’s killing me.”
&n
bsp; Cat stood in front of him, staring down at him as he sat.
“I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “Why?”
“I can’t get us out.”
“Yes you can. Look how far you’ve gotten us already. You’ve taken care of me so far.”
Kyle smiled. “I’ve tried.” Looking at her, he was again overcome by that strange feeling that something wasn’t right, that some little thing was out of place.
Cat knelt in front of him. “You poor boy.” She licked her fingers and began to wipe at his blood-caked face. “That had to hurt.”
“It did, but I’m okay.”
“Does it hurt now?”
“Not really.” It did hurt, actually, but not as much as he might expect.
She wiped at his lips and cheeks, slowly cleaning him off. There was something romantic about the situation, something very intimate. They both felt it.
“You’re very pretty,” said Kyle, and to his own surprise, he felt no embarrassment in saying so.
Cat stopped and stared at him, her dark eyes bright and beautiful, her lips lightly parted in an expression of stunned surprise. “You think so?”
Kyle nodded. “Very.” He leaned forward and kissed her, a very slow, soft kiss with their mouths closed and their eyes open. They kissed for several seconds this way, staring into each other’s eyes, a million thoughts racing through their heads.
When the kiss was over, Cat drew a shuddering breath. “Kyle…”
Kyle stared at her, unable to shake that feeling that something was not right about her, something small, but something just the same. He remembered the way he’d found her, curled up in a dark room, crying. He found her just the way he’d found himself, terrified and confused.
He kissed her again, this time more briefly, with his eyes closed, feeling the dry, smooth texture of her lips.
Cat stared at him, speechless, breathless.
There was a sound in the next room, like something jumping onto the receptionist’s desk and Cat turned to look, but he took her chin and held her.
“No,” he said, and kissed her again, this time with his mouth slightly open.
He almost had it. He was sure of it.
Something entered the room. They both felt it, a ghostly, eerie presence, watching them from the doorway, but still they kissed.
Kyle pulled her closer and she held him in return. He kissed her harder and she met his aggression. A childish crush grew into a larger thing. The first sparks of passion began to burn somewhere deep within and rise to the surface, bringing with it the truth. He tasted her lips and her tongue and her breath. He thought about her lipstick and how it must be smearing onto his lips and it only increased his passion.
That was it!
Her makeup!
She wore so much, though she was only a child. He pulled away and stared at her, putting it all together at last. The distant memories, the strangely adult feelings, even her watch and jewelry seemed such grownup tastes.
He stared at her, amazed. Before him sat not a pretty girl at the threshold of puberty, but a beautiful woman with the same dark eyes, long brown hair and smeared makeup. She was no child at all.
And neither was he.
Cat stared back at him, eyes wide and concerned. “What?”
The thing in the doorway was no longer a formless shadow. From the darkness, something had emerged, a figure with hateful, accusing eyes, but Kyle did not look at it. He stared at this woman, amazed that she was the very same little girl he’d just kissed, but all grown up.
“Catherine,” he said, “how old are you?”
Cat pondered for a moment, not really sure. “I don’t remember exactly. Maybe…”
“Ten? Eleven?”
“Yeah… I think. Or maybe twelve… I don’t know.”
“Listen to me. You are not a little girl. You’re a grown woman. You know this place for the same reason I do: You used to work here. I was a supervisor. I’m Kyle Alters. I’m thirty-four years old!”
Cat shook her head. She wanted to argue, wanted to say that it was impossible. He was only a boy and she was only a girl. But what he said made a strange sort of sense.
Kyle kissed her again, hard and passionately, and when he pulled away he could see that she saw him for who he really was, a grown man with a soft gut and hair that had thinned a little around the temples. He could see in her wide eyes that her life was coming back to her just as his was. He remembered high school and college, making love to his high school sweetheart, his first job at a Dairy Queen and the car accident that nearly killed him and left him with a bad ankle nearly eight years ago. He also remembered a terrible tragedy at the Vertical Foods plant three years ago, when thirty-six people were killed in these very walls. He had come back because, like many of the survivors of that day, he wanted to know what happened.
He was one of the supervisors. He was in charge. He was responsible for the people who worked here. He’d taken his job seriously. He tolerated no shortcuts when it came to safety, but he was unprepared for the disaster that day. How could he have been prepared? No one could even explain to him what happened. No one knew.
“Kyle…” The emotions of nearly twenty years of flooding memories were too much for her and tears sprang from her eyes. She was twenty-eight, a simple, single woman with a simple job and a simple life. She used to work the line here at Vertical Foods, until the day everyone went crazy. There was no catalyst that she ever saw. People simply began acting like monsters. It was the worst day of her life. The day she saw people she called friends murdering each other senselessly, the day she almost died…the day she lost her lover. It was the day her life was shattered forever.
Somehow, on the same night, the two of them both pulled into the parking lot. Each unaware of the other, they both found a way in, wanting only to wander the deserted halls one last time and ask the empty darkness the one question that had haunted both their dreams for three long years: Why?
Kyle stood up and turned to the figure that stood in the doorway. “We’re done playing with you! Go back to hell. We’re leaving.”
The figure stared back at him with mean, hating eyes, the figure of a small boy, ghostly pale, frightfully thin. He glared at Kyle, a spoiled child stripped of his toys, and then turned and ran away, vanishing from sight before he reached the door, as if blown away by a passing breeze.
“It was just a kid?”
“Not a real one. But yes. Just a child.” He turned and helped Cat to her feet. “Come on. The side door’s broken. It’s how I got in.”
Cat nodded. It was how she’d entered, too, though she hadn’t seen him. She wondered which of them arrived first.
As they made their way to the broken side door, Kyle recalled walking down the corridors earlier that night. “I’ve felt so guilty since that day,” he confessed. “I couldn’t save any of those people. I came here to try to find some kind of closure. To see if I could find a way to finally put it all behind me.”
Cat nodded. “Me too. My boyfriend died that day. I’ve been so lost since then. I didn’t know what to do.”
“So you decided to come back.”
“Like you said: closure.”
“Did you find it?”
Cat looked at him. She even smiled a little. “I don’t know yet.”
“Yeah. I don’t know either.” He thought back to when he first arrived. It was so dark and quiet. He knew there wouldn’t be any answers here, but he thought maybe the voices of the past might help him to move on. But he’d found something in the darkness, something he could hear but not see, something that frightened him terribly.
“I remember being startled by something,” Cat recalled. “And then…”
“And then nothing,” Kyle finished for her. He remembered running. Then everything turned blurry. “Then we were frightened children all alone in the dark.”
“Not all alone,” Cat corrected him. She reached out and embraced his elbow, just as she’d done earlier.
It was odd to think that this was the very same person, and yet the way she felt as she clung to his arm was exactly the same.
Outside, beneath a bright moon and the yellow streetlamps, Cat gazed back at the dark factory. “Why children?” she asked.
Kyle considered it for a moment. “That boy,” he replied at last. “Maybe he wanted to play with someone his own age.”
“Was he real?”
“Real enough.” He stared up at one of the upstairs windows, wondering if it was just a trick of the light or if a small face peered down at him. “Maybe he was a boy who died on the property, maybe a hundred years before the factory was even built. Or maybe he was never even human. Maybe he was some kind of product of the disaster that happened here. Maybe a boy was simply what he chose to be. We’ll never know.”
“Just like we’ll never know what really happened that day three years ago?”
“I’m sure we won’t,” Kyle admitted. “I think it’s all beyond our understanding.”
They crossed the street and approached Cat’s parked car. Kyle’s was parked a few blocks away. He didn’t look forward to walking so far alone. He didn’t want to watch Cat drive away. They’d been through so much tonight. “I’ll see you around, I’m sure.”
“Yeah.”
“You want my number or something? In case you need me?”
She gave him a tired smile. “Kyle, it’s been a really weird night. Kind of makes my head hurt to think of it.”
“Yeah. I hear you.”
“I don’t want to think about anything. I just want to go home and forget all this. At least for now.”
Kyle nodded. “Yeah. I can understand that.”
“So I won’t fool around. I’m just going to say it, okay? Would you come home with me tonight?”
He stared at her, surprised. “I’d love to, Cat.”
She took him by the hand and smiled at him.
Jeremy Fell
The fall should have killed him, but somehow he was still alive. He stared up into the sky through a myriad of dancing stars and saw that the clouds overhead were drifting in and out of focus. He couldn’t blink. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t even breathe. His only thought was that he was somehow still alive.
