Benji clamped his hands over his ears and squeezed. “Arghh!”
He heard a strangled moan, before realising the gurgle was his own. His nose started to bleed. The drips splattered the desktop to spray his shirt front. He could have blamed his physical state on the suffocating fumes, which smelled the same as burning sulphur in chemistry, making his eyes water. But there was also the loathsome scratching filling his skull like a horde of screech beetles. Even more alarming, the guttural whispering of many in his mind.
“Aceldama, Aceldama, Aceldama.”
A lyrical speaker wove a poem to the rising and falling rhythm. Benji gradually gained the entire verse. He could not defy its merciless drag. It would eat his soul if he did not move!
“This world resembles a cadaver,
And you around it bark;
And who eats from it is the loser;
Who abstains takes the better part.
And certain is the dawn disaster
to those unwaylaid in the dark.”
The woman trilled laughter, which echoed until it became as shrill as metal on glass. Was he hallucinating? It had to be an hallucination. He staggered to his feet, swatting blood across his cheek. What Benji needed was to run, to burst out into the starlit night and pelt home as fast as his custard legs would carry him without turning back. But he was hooked now, his personal desires no longer relevant. Why hadn’t he accepted that dull waiting job at the café surrounded by the living?
Trancelike, he picked up his torch, increasingly concerned by the warm redness splashing his gym boots in an ever-widening pool. He felt light-headed. What was the medical term for bleeding out? Exsanguination. That was it. Was it possible to exsanguinate by nosebleed? He should never have been so callous about that poor Deputy mottled by livor mortis down the corridor. If he got out of this he swore never to disrespect the dead, no matter the financial benefit.
He dragged himself from the meagre refuge of the janitor’s nook, fighting the dizziness by leaning on walls, smearing white tiles with a bloody trail. It was the siren’s call! Some devilish spell that cursed him to stay beyond safety or sanity. The lights buzzed and flickered, adding to Benji’s vertigo. A noxious cloud pricked his skin with a thousand stinging needles. He fell on all fours and violently heaved. Benji noted the office coffee tasted not much different coming up as going down.
Waiting for the spasms to pass, he laboured vertical once more, finally reaching the stainless steel door to watch a disembodied hand that might have been his own slowly extend towards the metal’s vibrating surface.
Don’t do it! Don’t do it! His voice screamed in his head.
But it was the command of an unseen power. He had absolutely no control. The moment his skin made contact, Benji was flung across the hallway, slamming the cold wall. Shattered tile hailed down in pellets that nicked his exposed skin. He slid to the ground and slumped over, the air whistling from his lungs. Overwrought muscles gave a final twitch, and then, Benji’s body went as still and white as those draped in sheets within.
