Wriggling Flesh

Eleanor was staying on late one night when she heard the first suggestions. The first intimations that it was worms wriggling underneath the skin—that she labored in the corpse of a dead ghoul-thing.

Pained cries, in the night. At first it seemed to be nothing more than a part of the shaggy dreamworld that flickered around her. She was used to imagining screams—the sounds of children turned to simple background obnoxiousness, though once she'd let it shake her. Every so often though there were screamed that seemed genuine—beyond the world of kids' play. They were back-alley screams, deep-metropolis screams. Sometimes she though they came from below—and there was a strange aquatic echo to them, as if there was a pond or pool buried under the store. She thought of far reaches of the store laden with the scent of rotting bodies.

Then she straightened up and reminded herself that that smell, too, was the customers. And nothing but. Or so she hoped. Even if that opened up different avenues of horror.

This night it was different. The screams were different, that was to say. She didn't dare hope now there was some sinister underground lake below this place, because if there was there was it probably had a weirdo living in it. But these didn't come up from below, even if they were close. Like, front office close.

Turning to the nearest cashier, she explained she was going to the bathroom. She flipped her light off, and started heading for where the head cashiers did their bookkeeping.

She'd had a glimpse of the office now and again, even if, as a non-head, she technically wasn't supposed to go in there. As she approached the alcove that hid the office from the customers, she heard nothing. She waited for the scream to come again, and she realized she was accepting this so casually she couldn't even properly recall what kind of scream it was: male or female, young or old. But now it was gone, and it didn't matter. There was nothing.

But then came something quieter than a scream. And as such it was much more horrible. It was a string of whispers, which rose briefly before disappearing, like those bad smells.

Something called Eleanor to the source of these whispers. The dreaminess of the night seemed to intensify, and she wondered if this second door had always been there. She tried the knob—it seemed unlocked. Again the whispers came, and against all of her best judgment, she opened the door.

Inside was a room of unknowable dimensions, full of deep darkness. In the center was a single spotlight, shining down on a single figure. Somehow it took time for Eleanor's neurons to register this centermost figure. The ones who ringed him, stared down at him attracted more attention. A couple of the managers were there, including Evan and Natasha. They took no notice of her, which she sighed a breath of relief over. But she saw that one of the figures was staring at her.

It was dressed in a shroud nearly darker than the room around it. In the place of its head was a skull, which glinted under the single naked light-bulb—within the dead sockets were two recessed eyes of hideous black. She considered that the skull was a mask of some kind, but that made it worse. That the skull shone blue showed an unnatural quality to it, but if it was an ordinary man willing to spend money on a costume, then it was worse than unbelievable. It was real. And reality was a jagged-weaponed warrior, cut and polished like the facets of that jewel-like skull.

There was no getting away from the fact that the skull-man saw her. But then, those black eyes turned in the dark, towards the bizarre scene which seemed to take place on a pearl-colored platform that floated on a sea of shadows.

He was a short, thin young man, likely not much older than 25. He seemed naturally skinny, but the way his ribs were taut against his pale abdomen suggested that maybe he was at the dawning of starvation. She could see his ribs and skin because they had him clad only in a minuscule bikini bottom. In the goosebump-cold silence of this room, he was performing a vague, seemingly improvised dance. From the look in his eyes, and the blisters on his feet, he had been at this for some time. But the strangely-casual look on the managers' faces made the whole scene even worse.

And who were these others...? Somehow the managers and the skull-man were clearly visible but the figures farther to the periphery were harder to make out. Yet these others looked more methodical, more calculating, than the visible entities. For only a split second, Eleanor was aware that she couldn't focus on these figures, no matter hard she tired.

She stared for what seemed to be countless eternities, watching the pillar of flesh wobble unsteadily. Then, finally comprehending what she had stumbled across, Eleanor turned away and silently closed the door.

She went back to her line, secretly praying someone would ask her what was wrong. But she already knew: this was work. No one would ask. If that skull-man had turned out to have a reaper's scythe, and he had impaled her and left her guts hanging in her hands, she'd have to explain what disembowelment was before anyone would get it. Then the customers would have to ask twice and at the end of it all they'd just be mad their service didn't happen in a single microsecond.

These thoughts answered the question of whether she should call the police.

Guilt hit her at once. She had to help that guy in there. What was the worst that could happen to her...?

No, she remembered: she was thinking like things were different. What they were doing in there was probably legal in this world. Managers could traffic folks if they could prove it was a boost to business. It facilitated competition, even.

Then, in an instant, she knew where she'd seen the young man's face before. She gasped, and held her lost mother's beads close to her chest, which she usually only tried to do jokingly. She squeezed her eyes shut and knew at once that he was the kid getting interviewed a few weeks ago.