On her way to the vending machines, Lussi stopped at the conference room doorway. There was no sign she’d ever been held captive here—no cut-up strands of Christmas lights, no tipped-over cat carrier under the table. No dripped wax from the candles, no soiled spot where the editor in chief had collapsed and died.
No doll.
Had she expected it to just be sitting around, waiting for her?
“Hey, if you can hear me, I don’t want you to hurt anyone else.”
Worth a try, but naïve to think it could actually work.
She would be damned lucky if it didn’t backfire. It reminded her of when her mother had told her to stop reading “trash” like The Exorcist. Lot of good that had done.
She went into the break room to pick up Digby’s pop—Diet Rite, none of that RC crapola—and then headed to her office. She needed to find her handbag with her compact. Her plan, if it could even be called that, was to tell Digby everything. The doll, his father’s role, Agnes’s suicide—everything. Cleaning herself up wasn’t necessary, but looking like a bag lady who’d been dumpster-diving wasn’t going to help her cause. Especially when it came time to convince Digby that there were forces beyond this world at play here.
Lussi stashed the pop inside the box and tried her office doorknob. Unlocked. Good news since her key ring was inside her handbag…which was right there on her desk, where she’d left it. Her coworkers might have rummaged through it but they hadn’t thrown it out. That was nice of them. She pulled the chain on her desk lamp and sat down.
She fished her compact out. The light wasn’t all that bright in here, but it was enough. She snapped open the compact and raised the mirror to eye level. She’d touch up her foundation, and then—
She inhaled sharply.
Someone was standing behind her.
There was only a small gap, maybe two feet, between the back of her chair and the bookshelf. Impossible for someone to be in that space and for her not to hear them, not to feel them. And yet. The figure was tall. Too tall to be human. It was veiled in darkness, the only color two bright red, burning eyes. She was gazing into the abyss through the mirror, and the abyss was gazing back.
Lussi had done her fair share of abyss gazing. Always within the safe confines of fiction. Horror took you right to the precipice, where you could stare into the darkness without falling in. Without losing yourself. She enjoyed that feeling, giving death the finger.
She didn’t enjoy whatever this was.
She craned her head only as far as she needed to in order to see what was behind her with her own eyes. She didn’t know why this was important—she didn’t know what it would prove or disprove, but she did it anyway.
There was nothing there except for the doll on the shelf. Grinning as usual.
—detestable—
She was almost certain it hadn’t been there when she’d sat down.
She glanced back at the figure in the mirror. A glimpse of the spirit’s true shape. Its edges were undefined. Blurred.
Holy. Shitballs.
It was real.
If this wasn’t a dream—if she was really in her office—then all of her beliefs about how the world worked were null and void. Lussi had crossed some invisible line between what she understood was possible and what was actually true. Her assumptions about reality now belonged to a world that no longer existed.
Keeping an eye on the shaking mirror, Lussi reached for the box. She carefully lifted the lid. The ancient hinges squeaked as she flipped it open. She removed the pop. It trembled in her hand, too. Her whole body was trembling, she realized. It wasn’t fear. The chair was quaking beneath her; the floor, humming under her feet. The building was rattling, as if a train were passing through the lobby.
She would have to act fast. Swing around, grab the doll, and stuff it into the box. She snapped the compact closed; she couldn’t work up the courage while seeing that…thing out of the corner of her eye. Just pretend it wasn’t there. Because…it wasn’t.
The can of Diet Rite, shaken to its bursting point, sprung a leak. A fountain of pop erupted, showering Lussi. A momentary distraction, but it was all it took for things to go south. The manuscripts stacked in the corner took to the air, shooting straight at her like they’d been fired out of the world’s fastest Xerox machine. Lussi crossed her arms over her head to protect her face—she needed a papercut on her eyeball like she needed an asshole on her elbow. The pages were circling her desk, a great white cyclone. Her hair was whipping around, too—Aqua Net was no match for a supernatural twister. The slush pile meant to claim another victim.
Lussi pulled the box into her lap and pushed herself away from her desk, ramming her chair into the bookshelf. A handful of paperbacks rained down on her, plunking off her head and onto the floor like Plinko chips on The Price Is Right. The doll tumbled off, too, landing right in the open box. She didn’t take time to question her good luck. She flipped the lid closed and held the wooden box tight to her chest and waited for the storm to die down.
The whirlwind spun its way out of her office and into the hallway. Her ears popped as the air pressure changed in the room. A few final pages flitted about, taking their time falling to the ground. She snatched the last one out of the air. In Dog We Trust, this page. She balled it up and tossed it across the room. The crumpled paper bounced once and then rolled for the door, rounding the corner and chasing after the cyclone.
What the hell? Why hadn’t it died down? It continued to rage in the lobby, battering the building from within. She should’ve known better to think she could just walk in, grab the doll, and leave.
Finally, a deathly silence fell over the building. She took a moment to gather her wits and then crept slowly down the hall, box under one arm. Digby would have to forgive her disheveled appearance.
She paused at the railing to marvel at the state of the lobby. It looked like an F5 had come through, which was about what had happened. Pens, pencils, scissors, and staplers were strewn about the lobby, mixed in amongst the manuscripts that had taken flight from Lussi’s office. The needles had been shorn off the Christmas tree by the wind, leaving bare wooden dowels. The scattered tinsel gave the ruinous scene the luster of midday. The cyclone appeared to have burned itself out. Lussi prayed to a god she was putting more and more faith in lately that it had been the last gasp of the Percht. The twitching eyelid of a corpse.
In the steady calm, the disquieting stillness that only follows storms, Lussi heard a muffled cry. The door to the basement was open.
The shout came again, this time less emphatic. Help.
Fabien.
Lussi didn’t think. She ran, taking the stairs by twos and threes. Her silver bracelets jangled as she rounded the staircase, down, down, down. It wasn’t until she was at the top of the basement stairs that she hesitated.
Something about this wasn’t right. What was Fabien doing here? He was supposed to be on the Upper West Side, sleeping like the dead. It smacked of a trap. The setup was perfect: there was only one way out of the basement. If the door were to be locked on her…
Lussi heard Fabien call out again. Help. This time his voice was weaker. More pained. Screw it. She didn’t have time to overthink this. If it were Fabien, she needed to get to him fast. She descended into the bowels of the Blackwood Building, not even slowing when the door swung shut behind her.
She was right. It was a trap. But the bait was real nonetheless.
On the floor at the bottom of the stairs, Fabien lay in a pool of his own thickening blood.