You open the door a crack and peer in. The office is dim, just the mellow light of a lamp off to the side. You open the door wider and step in, quietly closing the door behind you.
“OMG. You’re so right!” you hear a woman voice say. You realize her chair is turned away from you and she is on the phone.
“Hashtag squee!” she says then giggles. You start to back out of the office when she turns and sees you.
She covers the bottom of the phone and says, “Hold on, sweetie, I’ll be right with you.” She’s a pretty Latina with Powerpuff Girl diction.
“I couldn’t hit like, I just couldn’t. You can’t give that clicks!’ she says.
You notice strange music playing. Flutes? It is far-off and indistinct, but hypnotic. You feel tired.
“Oh, I know!” she says and emits a braying cackle. “And then I told what Illy said and you know what she said to that? She said…”
Her voice seems to be receding into the distance. You want to close your eyes, you want to sleep. You reach out a hand to the wall to steady yourself and you sink into it up to your wrist.
“Al na ba ka na lo en eh en eh,” she says. Gibberish. She smiles, flashing large white teeth. There is something wrong with her eyes. Her eyes are not human.
Freeing your hand from the wall, you reach for the doorknob to escape. It stretches and pulls away from the door like warm taffy, strings of itself drooping down. The flutes, the mad flutes, are getting louder. Color leeches from every surface until the walls and ceiling and floor are the flat black of the infinite void.
“Hu ba la so ko han le e…“ she continues to gabber.
Sourceless laughter. What’s left of the room falls away and it is just you in the void. The nothingness all the center of all thought and being. You scream and make no sound. There is a drum under the flutes now. One beat hit over and over again with metronomic precision. THUM THUM THUM. And suddenly it stops.
Before you, a single eye opens in the void and you cease to be.
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