Rig had been right.

When Lauren walked back into the office, it was almost as if the last hour and a half had never happened. Her colleagues were sitting at their desks, staring at their screens and typing furiously on their keyboards. All the furniture the dragon had knocked over had been put back in its place. Only the workmen busying themselves around the area where Eva the Terrible and her desk should have been hinted at something unusual.

“What happened to the carpet there?”, Lauren asked one of them, pointing at the charred bit of fabric below him.

“Cable fire”, the man mumbled. Before she could ask anything else, he turned his back on her.

Lauren mustered all her courage and walked over to Eva’s secretary’s desk. The woman was one of those corporate fossils who had been with the company for longer than anyone could remember. She might have been there since the age of the dinosaurs, sitting at her desk in a pre-historic jungle and glaring at any velociraptor who dared to interrupt.

Lauren cleared her throat. “Excuse me, Sharon, where – where is Eva today?”

Sharon ignored her for a full five seconds. Only her deepening frown indicated that she had heard Lauren at all. “She’s taken the day off”, she grunted at last. “Personal reasons.”

Lauren didn’t know how long she stood there, rooted to the spot. Eventually, Sharon threw her a withering stare and she walked back to her desk.

There was only one thing left to do. She stepped around the workmen and sat down at her desk. She was about to turn on her computer when a glint caught her eye. Bending down, she picked up a paper clip. It had been blackened and twisted by the fire. She turned it around in her fingers, then placed it on the base of the screen.

Had Rig been right about everything? Had she just imagined the dragon, the tunnel, Rig himself?

She opened her latest research memo and started to read what she had written the day before. It was no good. The words kept blurring on the screen. Why had she let Rig lead her back into the tunnel? What would have happened if she had refused to leave? She stared down at her hands, at the brown dirt beneath her fingernails. The world on the other side had been strange and terrifying, but…

She got up and went back to the bathroom. The last cubicle on the left looked the same as the other three. The sign on the door had gone, and when she opened the door, it revealed nothing but an ordinary toilet. She put her hands on the back wall, feeling for some sort of crack, an opening… But the plaster was solid. She thought she could smell fresh paint, but then that was probably just her imagination.

All of this is just a product of your imagination. Rig’s words bounced in her head as she returned to the office. The place was deserted. How long had she been in the bathroom? Or had the others already been gone when she went there?

She shivered. So many evenings she had spent like this, hunched over her screen all alone. And yet, tonight felt different. There was a strange humming sound in the air. Some computer somewhere, left on to update to the latest version of the operating system. Or a colossal dragon, breathing in and out through its saucer-sized nostrils… She shook her head, trying to dispel the monster from her mind. Maybe she should call that therapist after all, the one her mother kept casually weaving into their conversations.

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

It was no good. She wasn’t going to get any more work done today. She went back to her desk, gathered her things and turned to go.

The abandoned desks gave the place a strange, weightless atmosphere, as though the building had detached from the ground and was floating in space. She told herself that the buzzing was all in her head, or rather that the computers must all be going through software updates. That was it. That was all there was to it, and it was not remarkable at all that every single one of them sprang into action just as she walked past it.

She stopped. The computers behind her sank back into silence, but the one in front of her grew - not louder exactly, but more insistent, more eager. Every cell in her body was screaming at her to run, to get out of here and go straight home. But she didn’t move. She had left a scary place once already and regretted it ever since.

She stared at the screen. It looked odd somehow, hazy and blurred, like the glimmer above tarmac on a blazing day. She reached out to touch it, cautiously, half-expecting it to – what, shoot laser beams at her? burst into flames? But nothing happened. No flames or lasers touched her skin, but no glass barrier, either. Her hand went right through where the glass should be.

Her chest tightened, but she felt a small surge of triumph, too. So she hadn’t imagined the events of the afternoon. Unless… unless she was imagining this, too. Well, screw it. If she was going mad, she might as well enjoy the ride.

She stretched out her other hand and stuck it through the screen. Moving her hands apart as though she were swimming, she found that she could move the sides of the screen apart like water. She climbed up on the desk and squeezed head-first through the hole, prying the gap wider with her fingers. Suddenly, the desk fell away and her knees hit the floor some two feet below.

“Ouch!” She rubbed her legs and hissed through her teeth. After hitting her head earlier, she really wasn’t in the mood for more pain. But when she got up and looked around, all thought of physical discomfort was forgotten.

“Whoa. What is this place?” She was in – what? A hall? Or a cave? In the dim light, she couldn’t tell. But the way her words echoed off the invisible walls suggested a huge open space, certainly much bigger than the office she had just left. She whirled around, scared that she might have alerted someone, or something, to her presence. But all she could hear was that humming sound, louder now.

She stepped forward, searching for the source of the noise – and almost stumbled over something. A long, thin something. She bent down and looked at it. It was some sort of cable, and it emitted a soft golden light like the tunnel in the bathroom. She carefully touched it with one finger. It vibrated under her skin. She held it to her ear: An unbroken buzzing sound, as though a swarm of angry bees was trapped inside it.

What was this? Where did it lead? She traced the golden glow until it ended in a window that seemed to be hovering in mid-air. Sidling up to it, she stared at the grey shapes beyond. A keyboard, a desk, a swivel chair… she gasped as she realised that she was looking into the very office she had just come from. The windows were screens – the computer screens of her colleagues. She walked to the next one, watching her step carefully as she went. There was a cable here, too, and it connected to the window-screen just like the last one.

She was standing in a giant hall filled with the computer screens that were somehow also in the open plan office on the other side of the screens. Her head started throbbing. How on Earth was this possible? Could this be real or was her mental state for worse than even her neurotic mother realised?

Breathing far too quickly, she grasped one of the cables and followed it into the darkness beyond.