FICTION - ISADORA

A corporate office with a sinister secret

There was an impervious bleakness which crept through the office. It wasn’t particularly noticeable at first, for the office appeared like any other…mundane, stale, slightly cold. But this bleakness wasn’t particularly subtle. The entire building was heavy with its breath, and it was like a spider, in the way it wove its dark joyless web along the ceiling and desks, covering them with sticky silk that ached for skin to cling to.

It had dwelled here for years. Conjured by those it devoured, neither was it alive (or dead) in the usual sense, and it didn’t feel satisfied or fulfilled in the way that one might expect it to, given its preoccupation with its victims.

The nature of those victims varied, but one thing was consistent: they all worked in that office, sat behind screens whose unnatural light bore into their eyes and whose monotonous tasks readied them as vegetables for the oven. It was quite simple. In a manner of speaking, they were washed, peeled and seasoned, weighed down by the dread that work so often brings when it does not ignite passion. From there, it was easy for the bleakness to settle in their soul, to sit upon their shoulders and whisper in their ears of all that they were not doing, of all the potential that they wasted.

Slowly, it paralysed them, and if it felt anything at all then perhaps it was glee, but that was too living an emotion for something such as this.

Isadora had been one of its victims, not so long ago. A milky eyed worker who had forgotten how to dance to the music of the world, the sound made dull by the web that surrounded.

She’d awoken slowly, unexpectedly, and then the rush of realisation came, swift and sudden. It had been brought about by a promotion at work. Or, rather, her failure regarding the promotion. It had practically been promised to her by her manager, sold to her as a guarantee despite the interview which had been presented as a formality. Well…she hadn’t received the promotion. That was when she began to notice the bleakness that consumed her place of work.

It had started with a soft buzz in her ears, which she’d first attributed to the booting up of computers in the morning. That theory hadn’t lasted particularly long, because this buzz hadn’t hummed like electronics heating but like thousands of flies as they rubbed their wings together. It had niggled in her ear at first, nothing but a mild irritation that she could brush aside. But the longer she ignored it, the worse it became, until eventually she’d rushed to the bathroom, certain that blood was dripping from her ear canals. The mirror had revealed that her ears were perfectly fine, no blood to be seen.

So, she tried to tell herself that it was stress, a phantasm she’d (unfortunately) manifested. But nothing ever improved with ignorance and shortly after, thin silver strands appeared, draped lace-like across the office landscape. She began to not only see, but perceive the torment that surrounded her, that was within her. A terrible dullness that said, “I endure.” There was no strength in it, only sad acceptance.

It was easier to overlook all that than one might expect. After all, she’d devoted her adult life to this company. She wasn’t going to throw it away for what could be hallucinations.

On a grey evening in the middle of the week she was sat at her desk, and, as usual, she closed her monitor and laptop down for the day. The shiny black screen stared at her, peered at her with an inscrutable expression. She gazed back, watching the reflections of her co-workers on its smooth, dark face. Then, she’d seen it. Attached to everyone she could see, it looked as though there were two hands gripping each skull, fingers sunk below the scalp like cables.

Heart shot to throat, flushed with sweat, Isadora peered into that deep abyss to see her own mirror image. And, plugged into her mind, its fingers chugging, swallowing as though they were throats, she saw that the creature which was the bleakness had her in its thrall, and she could deny it no more.

She drew her mind back to the present, where she stood in the lift beside Morwenna, her companion, confidant and ally.

“What do you think it’s eating?” That had been the first question she’d asked Morwenna, and she asked because, from the second she’d seen the creature’s strange finger-like throats, it’d seemed clear to her that it was consuming something. That it was taking something.

“I don’t know. Dreams, maybe? Creativity?”

“Not joy? Or happiness?”

Morwenna had taken a moment before she answered, eyebrows furrowed, forehead wrinkled. “Where do you think those things come from?”

Now, Isadora clicked the button for the top floor. “Do you think we’re ready?” she asked.

“Yes,” Morwenna said, clutching her hand tightly. “We can do this. We can face it.”

“Do you think it woke us up?”

“I don’t know, but we can’t ruminate on that any more than we already have. We woke up by chance, and thank God you saw it too or I’d be all alone.”

“Well, not completely alone. You probably would’ve ended up in a ward somewhere.”

Morwenna chuckled. “Don’t speak too soon.”

They smiled at each other, kissed and clicked the button for the top floor. Up, up, up the lift sped, no stops, as if the bleakness knew their intention and was ready for them.

Initially, Isadora thought that its primary location would be the basement, as is often the case with monsters in films or books. However, an excursion with Morwenna revealed that this wasn’t the case. The basement was just a basement, and perhaps the most ordinary of all the office floors, for it was completely devoid of the webs or terrible buzzing that had come to define the rest of the building.

Curiously, it was in the basement she found she could breathe, and she realised she’d been holding her breath for years. It was in the basement that she’d had the courage to tell Morwenna of the light she felt kindled between them.

Eventually, the lift stopped, and the doors opened. They’d never been to this level, not for any reason. It was the home of Directors and Executives, not middle-management and entry-level staff.

The lights were off, the blinds were closed. Their thin grey veneer only allowed in the tiniest amount of sunshine, filtered into a sickened version of light. There was no insectoid-like hum. There was no sound at all, and her ears strained in vain, as if waiting to hear footsteps that would never come.

Yet here the web was thickest, and she felt that it saw her, was watching her as she walked alongside Morwenna. She imagined that it had nostrils and pictured them flaring at the smell of her sweat. It wasn’t alive but it knew she was there and the goosebumps that had raised along her arms told her all she needed to know; that it wanted her, that it sought the warmth of her body, and to wrap her in a cocoon of darkness.

Vines of gluey silk stretched towards the pair slowly, insidiously, and slunk around Morwenna’s leg. It was so gentle as it twirled and tightened itself that she didn’t know it had grasped her until she couldn’t take another step.

“Dora,” she said, her voice trembling, “I can’t move.”

Dread clutched at Isadora before she even looked down, and when she did, a cold chill began to bleed inside her. On their own floor, the bleakness thrived. To touch its silk there meant despair, meant that its fingers started to reach out for you, aching to reduce you, to take you for itself. She didn’t want to know what happened when it caught you in its heart.

“Don’t touch it,” she warned, though she knew Morwenna wouldn’t, and, careful not to let the web tangle her too, she made her way to a nearby desk which had an old binder. She grabbed it and began to stumble back, fearful that the silk would ensnare her.

“What if this was a stupid idea?” Morwenna said, eyes growing dull. “What if we’re here for nothing?”

“Remember all the things we dreamt about? Remember that,” she said, careful as she navigated her return to Morwenna.

“How can we change anything Isadora? We’re just two people. We’re not even two very clever people. We’re not important, we’re not special.”

She was almost back, binder in hand, ready to pound and bludgeon the vines.

“Don’t say that!” Isadora lifted the binder, prepared to strike.

“Maybe we were special…but that’s gone now. We’ve wasted our lives, and we’ve nothing to show for it.”

Isadora brought the binder down hard, and she could’ve sworn that she heard the bleakness squeal. Good, she thought. Let it. She brought the binder down again. And again. And again. She kept going, even as she saw the soul return to Morwenna. She couldn’t stop until she knew her lover was free.

With a lurch, Morwenna pulled herself away from the last strands that clung to her, and hugged Isadora tightly. Her body shook, and she would’ve found herself wracked with sobs if laughter hadn’t found her first. It didn’t make sense, and she didn’t want to investigate it. She only wanted to be held while the choked, desperate mirth took her.

A few minutes later, they released each other, and were silent as they walked deeper into the gloom, mindful of the thickest of the silk strands, heedful that as they hunted the bleakness, so too did it hunt them.

“Dora,” Morwenna said softly, her voice a low murmur. She pointed inside one of the private offices, and they saw a man there, visibly constrained, his limbs pulled tight to him as though he were a mummy, his hands resting on his keyboard. And his face was thin, stretched, starved. His eyes glinted, but he was dead in all but body.

If Isadora squinted, she could see the creature’s throats, so eerily like fingers, attached to his skull. They’d been there for so long that they were almost calcified, arthritic with the effort of swallowing. Perhaps he had been awful, perhaps he had dreamt of terrible things, she considered, staring at him coolly. It didn’t really matter. In the end, he’d fallen to that which he’d helped to create.

They continued forth, deeper into the centre of the bleakness. The further they went, the more she could sense a thick greasiness in the air around her, covering her with an oily substance which she could not see but could certainly feel, as though her flesh had been doused with it and now it lay just beneath the surface.

She glanced at Morwenna. What had she got them into? This was dangerous, and stupid, and, maybe, above all, pointless.

How could they change anything? Perhaps this awful creature was too deeply ingrained in the framework of the office, of the world beyond the office, for anything to ever change. Maybe it would be easier to give up and let herself be cocooned, to let the desolation take her. She wanted to fall to her knees.

It slunk out from the shadows and crouched upon its ghastly terrain. Inhuman, unliving eyes unblinking, it weighed them up like they were supper. It watched her, and she stared back, though her legs had lost their strength and all she wanted to do was collapse, let it take her as it had taken that man.

She took a small step towards it…surely it would be easier to fall into its embrace than resist it.

Then she felt a hand clasp her own and squeeze, and remembrance shone through her. This creature, this bleakness, with its heavy breath and songs of weary, it could not take that light that twinkled within her. It could not seize that which she had fostered from the moment she’d realised she’d not woken up to its presence alone.

How could they kill something that wasn’t alive? How could they destroy something incorporeal? She didn’t know. But even if, as Morwenna had said, they weren’t very clever people, they were going to try.

About the Author

Victoria is a young lesbian currently residing in London, doing her level best to have adventures and explore the world while also trying to fend off that little daily dose of existential dread!

She holds a Bachelor of Communications, Journalism from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and was awarded Penguin Australia’s Write It Fellowship for my novel ‘ESTHER’, which gave her the opportunity to work with Penguin’s editors on ESTHER over the course of 2024.

She has two novellas, ROSE (fiction drama) and CEMENT COCOON (murder mystery), published by the Story Factory, a not-for-profit creative writing centre. She has also had a collection of poetry published by UTS’s online magazine ‘The Comma’ in 2021, and in 2022, she was nominated for JERAA Ossie Awards Best Text-based story (over 750 words) for her article on sex work.

More Fiction from Mindfork