The beady-eyed, grey-skinned sharks passed by her. Their forms; sleek, uneasy, pacing inside the large water tanks. Two sharks to be exact, which had been the newest pair to join, and they would die like the others, in that claustrophobic tank amongst the disturbed gawks and stares of patrons and workers. It was a violent zoo, Mrs. DeVorne concluded. No tank, let alone one at the top of the Casino Del Rey, could contain these beasts.

Perhaps the same was of Mr. Wolfe, whom at the very saying or thinking of his name, caused her to build a cold sweat. It was a name that made her pace.

"Back to work." The other dozen workers turned, stared, then ushered themselves through the main hall of floor sixty-six. In their tuxedo suits and blue denim overalls, they swept and mopped and dusted every nook and cranny with obscene intensity.

The meeting would be soon and everyone had their role to play, especially hers. She had to make the hall, the rooms and the subsequent floors (five above her, sixty-five below her) presentable. They had all worked hard at cleaning the room, so hard indeed that they had to conjure, delusion blemishes and stains. Mrs. DeVorne saw a new intern, sweating, wiping the same spotless tile for half an hour. He's trying to sand it down, dig a hole right out and away.

Her hair, Mrs. DeVorne’s hair, the head maids hair, was a mess. A bad sight, especially for Mr. Wolfe who wanted nothing but the best. It made her nervous, it made everyone else nervous too. She tasted sweat as it came crawling down her cheeks.

The clock ticked. Twenty minutes left. She took a dust brush out and fiddled with a small statue of a tiger. Her eyes, keen on the giant clock hanging on the ceiling, looking down at her like God’s watchful eye. A clock. Two bold, black hands circling, hitting eleven fifty-five in the morning. Ticking. Reaching, shooting for, striking twelve.

The lights went off.

Everyone gasped, all twelve maids and butlers like synchronized horror. A cuckoo clock gone mad. Doors opened and closed in their dark peripheries, they only felt the wind and the shuffle of footsteps. Then? Solemn silence. Another door, crashing. Voices now. Screaming, muffled, off in the distance. Was she the only one who heard it? No one else seemed to notice or at least made the noises of people who noticed.

Then the lights reappeared. One by one, shooting off the hanging chandeliers, the rectangles of cut and mesmerizing glass. They looked milky, like a cloudy sky. They waddled a bit before settling, their cacophony obnoxious to the disturbed bunch who frowned at the glass and lights. She looked around, everyone spoke to each other but said little more than the cues of frightened people.

What was that? How did it happen? Is it over?

The broom fell from her hands and hit the side of a rising staircase, against the rail guard of small pillars and marble white. A red light flashed from across the room, she didn’t notice it, her vision was still blurred. It was only after approaching that she saw the glare of red from the black telephone line and the small beep, the summons. She put the black phone against her ear. No voice, though the writing on the glass panel told her its location. The conference room, behind the sequels of Roman statues, at the very end of the stretch of this road. A road squeezed at both sides, by the aquarium, by the sharks. She was thankful to know those damn sharks would be dead soon, as the other oceanic leviathans before them.

A great white hovered to her rear as she looked down the hall. The glass lights above rattled as if wind had passed over them, a thin gust that she must have never felt, that might have never existed in this closed off expanse.

She hung up the phone. It beeped red still like an SOS. Though it made no noise. Looking back she could see the supportive waiting-stares of her co-workers. At least, maybe, that's what they must have thought it was, supportive. From her point, at the epicenter of the room, with the myriad wide white eyes, she seemed more of an offered black lamb. She sighed and fixed her hair. Though, why? It would messy again when she would be made to shake and apologize. As it was with the Wolfe family, who were prone to rage, Mr. Wolfe, most of all. She felt the phantom screaming in her body, an imaginary reflex as she approached.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

She went through the glass doors, past floors that transitioned into black and white checkerboard patterned. And her, the clumsy pawn piece, wrapping around towers and statues, past the sweeping jetting of sharks and small fish. She noticed a crab receded back into his shell, she wished she could too. The lights dimmed, they weren’t working well. Then they shut off. Instantly, as she thought it. All she could see, then, was made possible by that blue color of the artificial sea, the LEDs stuck to the bottom of the tank shining through the filtered water.

She came to the end of the room, a collection of ferns laid at even intervals, two doors presented themselves. Her face was blue, the cool ocean water-tight was to her back. There was no secretary. She touched the door handle and reeled back, they offered no resistance. Surprised. As if the lack of a lock invoked in her a kind of fear.

Opening it, the first thing that hit her was the smell of coffee and nicotine. Further, a flicker of fake fire attracted her eyes. It was to her rear, near a leaned-back leather chair, facing out the window, out to the desert and the mountains and the long stretch of desert earth of Nevada. The chair. You can watch the whole world turn, from that chair. Watch the lazy sun carry itself. Watch it drag.

This was a throne room. She concluded. At least, when there was no one here. Like there was now, which was strange.

The curtains went half-way down, from top to mid-way point. She saw Mr. Thomas Wolfe behind them, seemingly staring at the half-covered vista, at the very end of a rectangle glass table.

"Yes, did you want me?" She asked, as gentle as she could say it.

Silence.

Small statues sat out in the corners of the room. Lions, tigers, panthers, predators with their mouths agape and their fangs a dilapidated brown and crumbling size. One of the lions was missing a fang, the wound dripped rubble and sand. Her footsteps were loud in the tall room. Made even louder by the silence and loneliness. Three chairs spun slowly.

"Hello, sir?" She walked forward. He was always quiet when he was mad and always mad when he was quiet. A talker, him, Mr. Thomas Wolfe. He, who needed company, who needed to shoot his wisdoms and truisms because perhaps, he believed, had he no audience to speak to, they might not be true at all. Maybe that's all truth is, the guesswork of a man, agreed by a crowd whose size and ferocity determines the weight of the truth itself. She was convinced there was no truth, after all. Ever since she found Casino Del Rey here as a teenager, with disgusted eyes at the giant golden pointy tower in the middle of the desert. It hadn't made sense then and still hadn't now, this aberration. But it sure as hell was true, all the gambling suckers said so at least.

She stared at Thomas Wolfe. He looked angry, still, his back turned to her. She prepared herself for the long-winded speech. Her stomach had dropped long ago. Her blood, weightless and her limbs, weak.

"Mr. Thomas!" She said, desperate for her punishment, hoping to get it over with. She shouted right behind him, his ear did not so much as even twitch.

She started to move in place and skid about. Her throat was clogged and her face was sweaty. She clung to her blue one-piece cleaner outfit, pulled on the belt and all the tools and bottles that hung off them.

"Hello?" She put her arm on his shoulder. He turned. His inertia suddenly disturbed, his whole presence disturbed. His chair creaked. Stopped. Whined and plopped itself forward.

And she screamed.

She screamed. She ran. She tripped, knocked over a statue and hurt her thigh. And she screamed. The door cracked as it hit the wall with her strong push. The hinges snapped. And she screamed. Through the halls, past the sharks and the tanks and the other workers and all the gaudy things of the Casino El Rey. She screamed down those wealthy, lonely halls, down the elevator shaft.

And Thomas Wolfe Jr, watched her leave. With cold grey eyes, with his tongue out and blue. With his neck bleeding, wrangled, like a well-worn red tie. With the gaping hole staring back at her, like a bottomless pit. Blinking. With the last beats of strength in his missing heart, moving, compelling his muscles to twitch. That was all the protest he could summon. It didn't last long.

A final streak of blood fell from his wound. Down, right through the center, past his corpse bloated belly.

His mouth slacked. His tongue fell. His head succumbed. His whole body slumped, his feet rested on their heels and his arm extended out on that glass table, a proper Wolfe, with his clawed paw out, one finger on the dial of the phone. The button pressed, the red light flashing desperately.

He was tired. Leaning back, almost as if enjoying his death. Perhaps he had, it was a long day, an even longer life. Perhaps his last resolution, one of stern authority, was to die in happy-exhaustion. To die knowing that his short time on the stage was worth its efforts, and most certainly worth its mistakes.