The next day his apartment was still cold. Thin veils of frost began to slowly creep up along the glass, obscuring the slithers of daylight that began to emerge from the horizon. It was not that the heating for his apartment had suddenly cut off, for the pipes still gave out their everlasting melancholy ballad above his head as he stared down at the sink, washing his hands…

…They had been looking for someone with an open mind. Someone who is susceptible to stimuli. His job was not to make decisions as such, but rather to simply assess what was sent to him and intuit what was being demanded. Sometimes, however, what was sent to him was not a task, but rather a reward, or an explanation of the impact of what he is doing. Sometimes they provided entertainment or even erotic material. Furthermore, apparently - they had notified him of this - they also continually watched over him, monitored his actions, studied his interpretations of their… stimuli. Not once, however, had he caught a glimpse of any possible indication of their surveillance, other than a queer feeling that it was building inside him, a feeling that he was never quite alone. Alas, that was his contract. It indeed paid well, however his desire to spend his earnings had recently, unexplainably, evaporated, as if some idle depression had seized him.

They had paid him only in cash, thus great wads of slender green notes amassed in some rotten clump in the corner of his apartment. He rarely set his eyes upon them. He could leave if he wanted. But, like the icy water that monotonously plunged down from the rusting metal tap and down into the deep chasms of the pipes below, his trajectory to him felt inevitable, as if guided by an external pull. But not one that forced him, but rather, entranced him. The city, for all its gaping shadows, nurtured a promise. And so, he spent his days wishing to stumble upon it, whatever it was.

But there was another reason for remaining in his current situation. He had a wish not to draw attention to himself. Ironic, considering his contract. But they were private employers. What he was wary of, was the public. They had a potent eye, capable of dissecting every expression, devouring every blemish, absorbing every drop of sweat. He sought to avoid that mighty gaze, and so he stuck on what he felt was the straight and narrow, hoping for joy, and cowering from attention.

Nevertheless, a blankness to his reasoning was now evident to him. It was as if he drifted under these neon lights no different than if he were some discarded plastic bag. The dances he made in the cluttered urban wind were hardly ones he pre-meditated on. This was, after all, why he had been sought out for the contract. They had not been looking for a thinker, some logical analyst, some wistful mediator. They were looking for a compulsive, someone who would leap up at a suggestion with the instincts of a bruised dog.

Enclosed in rumination, he now found himself frowning down at shivering hands that were turning blue beneath the trickles of water. The sunlight was finally climbing up past the great metal giants that were lined up beneath his window, and vast rectangles of the orange light swept over his apartment, caressing the groaning pipes and dancing among every crack and dampened stain. He glanced over his abode in self-pity, clueless of precisely how he would invest his money in refurbishing it.

Just as he did so, a door to a far-off room creaked open. The room resided in what was currently, and usually, the darkest corner of his apartment. It was his bathroom. Suddenly the chill of the room now pierced straight into his bones. With rattling teeth and twitching muscles, he slowly approached the door, which now leaned eerily ajar. As he peered inward, he blocked out most of the sunlight into the room. However, he saw enough, and suddenly he was reminded of it all again. He leaned, one arm clutching the door, and stared downward, relieved, yet still maintaining a sensation of uneasiness. Uneasiness, more than anything, for why he had felt at all frightened. Below him, illuminated by the faintest slither of sunlight, was a pair of red, swollen, stiffened bare feet, pointing sharply up at the ceiling, and riddled with bulging greenish veins.

She hasn’t moved. But of course not, how could she?

Meanwhile, out in some damp, obscure part of the city, a simple black briefcase sat atop a bench as if a lonely spirit, brooding on the life that once was. It had been left there for some time now. In the night a harsh, bitter gale had stabbed through the city and a tree had fallen, cutting off the flow of traffic. Thus, the recipient of the briefcase had not yet arrived. It continued to sit, by its lonesome, squatting idly as hurried salarymen sprinted past without so much as a glance at the ominous, abandoned object. Despite all this, however, the latches of the case blew gently in a trickle of cold air, and before long, the case lay open. A pale, withered hand scuttled along the edge of the bench, and pincered itself into the clammy black gorge of the briefcase, dissecting it of its original contents and penetrating its warm black insides with a new object, not dissimilar from the first. With another howl of wind, the hand was gone, and with it the case was shut once more, left awaiting its recipient.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

He finally arrived, pulling up his lapels on his coat as to conceal his face from onlookers, and without a thought lifted the briefcase and held it close to his side, hurrying his way back through the rainy streets. He could not take the bus back due to the road blockage, and he frowned as a midday thunder was rumbling and roaring above him as lashes of lightning lit up the sky.

The streets had become empty, and he soon found himself alone, hurrying along the littered pavements on foot, dashing past puddles and stumbling over disregarded cans and tangled packaging and swatting away billows of stinging smoke, holding his nose to fight off a lingering putrid tendril of gas that seemed to stalk his every move. Trudging through the muck and grime proved a tedious effort, and before long he was crouching over, attending to his laces. As he did so, he saw a tall, gaunt figure, clad in much the same formal black attire as himself, rise up in the murky reflection of a puddle beside him; a faint, ghostly silhouette, seemingly floating in the air, watching him. He stood up and turned to the figure, to see that it was heavily bandaged, but unlike the man on the bus, this man was not sick. Upon meeting his eyes, it made no effort to run or hide, but simply turned and walked away again, its gaze lingering upon him for as long as its movement allowed. As it did so, the stench equally made its departure. Despite the oddity of this encounter and the confirmation that he was indeed being spied on, he merely shook his head and kept on walking. After all, he had suffered stranger interactions with his employers.

His shortcut finally brought him to the edge of the city, overlooking old, wizened woodland that, for all the thunderous gales battered against it, still stood strong. Beside it however there was erected a great maze of ladders and pipes, surrounded by rusting machinery and pools of sticky clay, and puffs of steam whisking out from the ground like the dying breaths of some spectral creature. It was a construction site, and the metallic clangs of moaning machinery and bristling pipes echoed and harmonised across the increasingly cold air like a death rattle. Metal beams stood up like trees and the tendrils of steam navigated them like fish, great shoals coming together to form a nauseating haze that wrapped around him as he continued hurrying through, caking his boots in wet clay, and he grimaced, eager to get home and out of sight. But then, within an instant, he stopped.

Through the haze, a bright, circular light beamed out at him, as if like an arm reaching out to touch him through the shimmers of rain. For a brief moment, he felt his body freeze, becoming rooted firmly into the ground. He could taste rust in his mouth and smell the odour of rotting bark. Suddenly and without reason he was worried that the muddy pool beneath him with all its sharp chips of metal would swarm up his limbs and consume him, but he could not look down to see as his eyes were fixed on the light, and were beginning to sting, tearing up in the mist. His muscles began to ache, his arms began to shiver as if he was succumbing to an epileptic seizure. His jaw began to chatter, and his fingers squirmed, still clutching the briefcase, but he refused to let it drop. And then instantly, mere seconds after it had started, the sensation vanished.

He jolted back into a sprint and hurried on through the construction site. All the while, however, the light remained. It seemed to follow him through his journey and, somehow, seemed to grow brighter, blinking like an eye as he rushed past each trunk of metal. The clanging had now given way to a hollow breeze of those ancient, wrinkled trees. As he emerged from the haze, they were all that could be seen.

The light had once been piercing through from where he now stood. Swiveling around to search the haze now behind him, there was no light there either. He turned back to the woodland that stood before him with a quiet menace, seemingly both towering immediately in front of him but also residing far out of reach, trundling away into the horizon as if the ground around him was expanding. He strained his eyes, staring straight into the blackness between the tangled tree trunks. For one brief moment, he sensed a pale pair of watering eyes, gazing back at his own. There was a slight squeal. It was as quick and high-pitched as a sudden squeak of gas, yet possessing the elongated breathiness of a faint, anguished sigh. He could not tell if that was him, in his abstract terror, or a noise from the construction site. Or indeed, something out there, in that forest. But whatever it was, it too, just like the forest itself, felt as if it were both right beside him, and echoing from far out in space.