Chapter #16The Nail by: Seuzz   "What do we do with him," Giddings asks. He stares at you with a worried expression, though he's talking about you, not to you. The glare from the fluorescent office lights plays in a watery way over the wrinkles on his scalp. He can't be more than thirty-five, but most of his hair has already gone.
His colleague doesn't immediately reply, and then there's a rumble from beneath the floor. They exchange a glance, and Anderson gets a furtive look. "It's getting hungry," he says quietly, and jerks his thumb at you. "Maybe chuck 'im in to it?"
Giddings sucks in a breath, and turns even paler. "I'm not taking responsibility for something like that. That's a VP-level decision."
"Well, how do you think you get to be a VP? You gotta take risks, show you got initiative--"
"If you want to-- Well, I won't back you up, it's not my place. But I'll make damn sure they know on the forty-fourth floor who did it."
Anderson's lips twist. "Yeah, you would stick it on me, wouldn't you, same as you stuck Barnes with the blame for the Bullard LBO fiasco."
"You got his cubicle. Light allergy, my ass."
Anderson glowers a little, then looks back at you. There is fear and worry in his eyes. "We have to think of the company," he says uncertainly. "Not our asses."
"So who will think of our asses," Giddings mutters, and points at you. "This is a serious breach, and procedure--"
"Procedure is to send a memo through Grier's office," Anderson snaps. "It'd be weeks before we heard anything back."
"That's what the 37-3s are for. Expedite action."
"That's why everyone uses them," Anderson retorts. "I used my last 37-3 when the toilets on twenty-six started backing up."
You interrupt in a pleasant tone, despite the bonds tying your wrists and ankles to the chair. "And whatever you decide, HR will have to be involved," you say. "A termination notice filed. Accident benefits started if I'm deceased, and a memorandum of discharge if you try covering up--"
Anderson punches you in the mouth, but Giddings looks worried. "He's right," he says in a deathly quiet voice. "However the situation's resolved, HR is going to have to hear about it."
"Fuck HR," Anderson says, and bites his knuckle fearfully. "Oh, fuck us, I'm not touching this asshole if they're gonna parachute in."
"So we're back to 'What do we do with him?'"
"I suggest we convene a meeting of department heads," you say. "I'm tied up for the next little while, unless--"
"Shut up!"
You brace for another blow. Instead, the copier starts to hum.
The two junior executives exchange another glance, and Anderson strides over to it. Sheets of paper are whirring out at a rapid rate, and he snatches one up. His brow furrows. "Smash the corporate-syndicalist agglomeration," he reads in a dull voice.
"That doesn't make any sense," Giddings says, sounding worried. "You can't smash an 'agglomeration'."
"Maybe it's supposed to be 'accumulation'," you suggest in your most helpful tone. Giddings just looks at you blankly.
"Christ, someone's hacked the servers." Anderson's eyes widen in horror. "You know what that means? IT's gonna go back and start reviewing browser histories!"
"I haven't been looking at porn!" Giddings says in an accusing tone.
"No, but you have been researching positions at other companies, and you know how forty-four feels about short-timers!"
Giddings gasps. "How did you know I've been--"
"Same way you know I've been looking at porn, you short-fingered weasel!"
The lights flicker out. Forewarned by Hal's message, you use the darkness to shift into Adrianna--your very smallest form--long enough to wriggle free of the bonds before changing back into the body of a desperate-to-be-employed, thirty-four-year-old corporate intern. At the same time you throw your cloak out over where the others had been standing. When the lights come back on they gasp at your empty chair and start arguing with each other while looking wildly around. But when all the PCs in the room turn on simultaneously with an unnervingly unified chime, the two panic and bolt for the stairwell. You trot along carefully behind, letting them take the lead.
It's a good thing too. Anderson is only a few feet ahead and has almost reached the door of the floor below when he screams in a terrible voice. Something yanks him off his feet and slams him into the wall. With a shrill, piercing wail, he vanishes.
The thing has pulled him through a duct near the floor--one not more than a foot wide and six inches tall.
Giddings bolts back toward you, but slams into your open palm. You grab him as he sags and pull him back up a flight.
There's a hard, ear-shattering whistle, and you leap away as Hal slides past on the hand rail. Hair flying and tattered arm bands waving, he drops to the floor, and in one smooth movement pulls a spray can from the rucksack on his shoulder and paints a glistening hammer and sickle over the broken vent.
"Fuck, Hal, can't you leave the agitprop at home for one mission?"
He dashes up the stairs to put a fist in your face. "Fight the power your way, Will!" he cries. "I fight it mine! If it can bust the seal of the proletariat, you can suck it off!"
You brush the fist away. "Well, come on. The monster's in the sub-basement."
"It's everywhere, Will!" he shouts, and raises his clenched fists into the air. "In every home, every office, every church, every pub!"
"It's already metastasized?" you gasp. You shudder at being too late.
"Open your eyes, Will! Tentacles down every wire! Fingers 'round every throat!" His eyes bulge. Then he blinks and lowers his arms. "Oh. You mean Shurl-neghh-cthoth. Oh, right, he's in the sub-basement. Come on!"
Hal trots along in front, and his earlier, radical charge down the stairs notwithstanding, he moves very cautiously as you exit the stairwell onto the basement level--four levels above where you want to go. He leads you on a circuitous route, with one hand gesturing you to advance, stop, or move or hang back. With the other he studies the screen of a hand phone that is at least seven years past its date of planned obsolescence, and taps at its screen. Lights go on and off; fans whir or shut off in the distance; you help him push a cart of printing supplies to the stairwell and send it clattering down. No sound of a crash returns; it is as though something has swallowed it in mid-flight.
Finally, after a tedious half hour of this, you arrive at the door to the sub-basement. Hal gives you a hard grin, and opens it.
The offices of Fane-Powers (USA) Holdings, Ltd., were erected on the site of a former steel mill, and the sub-basement still holds a lot of its detritus; it doesn't surprise you that they've left so much intact, for you know what is down here. Still, you weren't quite prepared for the oozing, pustule-studded arteries and capillaries (the smallest the size of your thumb) that run over the walls, pulsing and glowing with a chthonic light. A raw rasping noise, as of the breathing of hundreds of throats and lungs, saws the air.
Hal chucks his chin at the center of the room, where a pile of twisted rails and ties suggest the ruins of a railroad track. In the floor, a huge iron dome, like the lid to an airlock, is propped open. "So, we've only to drop that thing shut--" he starts to say.
A groan ripples through the room, and from out the hole in the floor a dozen thick, slimy tentacles--scarlet and ochre--erupt. The discs on their undersides pucker, and in their rippling patterns you see eyeless sockets and gaping mouths screaming at you.
Anderson is at the end of one of them, still in his suit jacket. His eyes have been gouged out and his broken jaw hangs to the side, but he waves his arms. "Buy! Hold! Accumulate! Engulf! Devour!" he moans. He has no legs, of course. He not only resembles, he is now the thing's finger-puppet.
As though he hadn't been since joining the company.
You swallow with horror, but Hal calmly cranes his neck and looks all around the room. His gaze travels in straight lines, and ends when his eyes lock onto a big red button in the wall right by his head. Calmly, he punches it with his fist.
The iron door drops shut, severing the tentacles; they briefly writhe on the floor, and are still. The arteries along the wall freeze, whiten, and shatter into dust. "Like I said," Hal starts again. "We've only to drop that thing shut--"
With a groan, the door opens again. "B-- Bibubb--" Hal stammers. He punches the button; again the dome slams shut; and again the thing below pushes it open. Hal turns a worried grin on you.
"Fuck, Hal, we have to seal it. Unless you want to take a second job here, punching that button over and over again."
"A job?" he shrieks--the first real note of horror you've heard from him during the entire adventure.
Well, you get it taken care of, using the next sigil in that damn sequence to enchant one of the cast-off railroad spikes, which you then drive into the lock of the portal, sealing it permanently. Only you--not anyone at Fane-Powers, not even the thing on the other side--can now open it again.
But Hal remains white all the way back up and out of the building as you leave. "A job," he murmurs over and over again, and shudders.
To wake from this reverie: "The Boy from Before Everything, Part 2"   | Members who added to this interactive story also contributed to these: |
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