A short, flash fiction story written for the Halls of Pandemonium (hosted by Bradley Ramsey) daily prompt for May 27. For the record, the first few paragraphs of this fiction story are true. Enjoy!
The people in the stalls do not touch me. They never do. That doesn’t stop my terror.
How old was I when the dream started? Two? Three? I don’t know.
I remember waking from it screaming after the car hit me, trapped inside the heavy white plaster shell wrapped around my body from toes to clavicle. Heat gathered below the wrappings, my skin itching where I couldn’t reach. The cast pinned me flat and useless in the dark while my own screams bounced off the bedroom walls.
When I described the dream to my mother through choking sobs, she smoothed my hair, one of the few places still uncovered and touchable, and told me it was just my imagination. Just like before.
I was four then. The cast was new. The dream wasn’t.
I wake from a dead sleep crying. It’s the same childhood nightmare, back after decades, sudden and whole, shredding my tissue-like sleep. One second I am breathing slowly beside my husband. The next, I am back there again.
My husband’s hand rests on my arm where he has been trying to shake me awake. I shove him away before I even understand where I am.
“You were screaming,” he says. Even through the bedroom’s dark, beneath the irritation of being awake, I hear the worry in his voice.
“It... it was a bad dream.” My fists hover near my face like a boxer guarding her jaw. I force them down to my sides. “Sorry,” I add, weakly.
“It’s stress,” he says, as if this is the only answer. “You’re worried about this job interview. It’s okay. We’ll be okay no matter what happens.”
“That must be it,” I agree.
But it isn’t. And he is wrong.
We need me to get this job. We are drowning, not all at once, but it is happening. I feel like a swimmer abandoned miles from shore, scanning the horizon for a rescue boat that will never appear. My legs grow heavier with every passing minute. The water presses against me from all sides. Each kick buys a little less time than the one before it. Keeping my head above the surface takes everything I have, and still I can feel myself sinking.
Slow can kill you too, and it’s a lot fucking crueler.
The interview goes well. I’m nervous, but I’ve done my research. I understand their market, the job responsibilities, the awkward little niche their technology fills. I’m slightly overqualified, which usually works against you in interviews like this, but experienced people are hard to find. As long as I don’t panic, overshare, or accidentally call the interviewer by the wrong name, I have a good shot.
At the end of the interview, she taps her notes into a neat stack and smiles at me over the top edge of the folder. “Well,” she says, “I think I can tell you now that you’re our top applicant.”
I smile back, and this time it’s genuine. Relief loosens my chest as I let go of something I hadn’t realized I’d been holding to for weeks. “That’s wonderful. Should we talk about next steps?”
“Soon,” she replies. “But first, would you like a tour of the production facilities?”
“I’d love that.”
I stand and start gathering my things, but she lifts one hand. “Unfortunately, you can’t take your phone or personal items with you since you’re not an employee…yet.” She gives me a bright, practiced smile. “Too much proprietary work on the floor. We’ll lock the office when we leave and swing back by on the way out.”
Something cold flickers through me. I glance down at my purse resting against the chair leg, my phone half-hidden inside it. The office suddenly feels farther from the front entrance than it did ten seconds ago.
But what am I supposed to say? No?
I can’t.
“Oh... okay.”
I follow her down a long hallway lined with bright glass offices toward a bank of elevators. These are different from the ones I took up from the lobby. Those sat out in the open near reception. These hide deeper inside the building behind a locked door she opens with a keycard.
My stomach tightens.
We step into the elevator. She uses an actual key this time, not a badge, then taps a code into the small black keypad beneath the floor buttons.
The elevator drops, fast and heavy. My stomach lifts as the numbers above the door tick downward past the lobby level, past parking, past anything I realized existed beneath the building. I almost ask how deep the facility runs, but the question dies in my throat when the elevator dings and the doors slide open.
We exit to a different-looking space. It’s not the industrial gray and short blue industrial carpet I expected from a research facility. It looks wrong. It smells wrong. The air is dry and hot, like overheated wiring coated in dust.
We pass through another set of doors.
Beyond them stretches a long white hallway. It is bright, blindingly bright. One side is blank. The other side is clad in rough clapboards. The boards are nailed haphazardly to the uprights. Some are crooked and overlapping, leaving gaps to the stalls beyond. The nails are old, heavy, iron. They look hand forged.
The stalls sit open at regular intervals. Beyond, the rooms glow red, not from any light source in the walls or ceiling, but from the figures resting on the plain clapboard benches bolted to the walls.
The figures pulse softly, heat shimmering around them. Some are small, child-sized. Others are broad-shouldered and heavy, stripped down to muscle and tendon. Some bodies curve. Their heads tilt toward me as I pass.
When I was little, we had an old Edison Quartz heater in our bathroom with two glowing red tubes behind a metal grate. In the middle of winter, the coils would hum softly while my mother bathed me. I hated that heater. I hated the smell of hot dust rising from it. Hated the way the red bars glowed brighter when you got too close, as if it were alive somehow.
This feels like standing inside that heater.
I turn toward my interviewer. I don’t even know what I’m trying to ask. My throat has gone tight with panic.
But she isn’t beside me now. She has stepped back into the elevator without me noticing.
She watches me from inside with an expression I can’t fully read. Pity maybe. Maybe amusement. As if I brought this on myself. The doors close, and I am alone.
I walk, stiff-legged, past another stall. The heat presses harder against my skin with every step.
Inside the nearest stall, one of the figures rises from the bench.
Then another.
Their movements look wrong. Not stiff exactly, but uncertain, as though each knee and elbow requires a moment's thought before it bends.
They step toward the opening.
Toward me.
One reaches out.
For my entire life, in every dream, they have never touched me. Never, not once. They only watched while I ran screaming past the stalls.
But now the glowing hand closes around my wrist.
And oh God.
It burns.
It burns.
It burns.
If you enjoyed this story, take a look at my serialized novel and some of my other short fiction here.
If you’ve ever dreamt of opening a bookstore, come read along as I cover all the ins and outs of opening one.
Holy moly! This is terrific! The way the pace and oddness increase in synchronicity is extremely effective! Bravo!