Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Lenore spun around, looked at the indicator of the elevator. Lobby. Moving up.

She ran.

Now was the time for Lenore to take heed of the mechanics of the building. To make the rules her own. It was her real job.

Bursting out of the stairwell into Accounting, she saw Kate and Eliza already at her desk, a fake warm smile, a hand on a shoulder, a face covered in bruises because that's what happens when you can't even sleep in your car because some two-timing bitch smashed a window.

The dolphin on the poster was now a cat, drowning.

HANG IN THERE, BABY!

Lenore kept moving, for the first time unselfconscious running around and shouting in a public space. She looked for faces, not human, not humane, and finally spotted Freya, saw her head, her real head, just as she had imagined the head of a witch-spider would be, the fangs, the palps, the hairs, and locked with her gaze, her real eyes, the six of them.

Her expression, flashing over the plain arachnoid, was ready to say You had to do it, you fucking, which collapsed when Lenore walked into the elevator and called:

"Freya, I need your help! Please!"

"No! GET OUT OF THERE!" The spider bolted, as fast as she could she ran to the elevator. "Lena, get out of here now!"

Lenore had her finger ready on the Close Doors button, all she had to do was to wait for Freya to cross the distance and take her back in time.

Out there at her desk, Kate had found the two keys in her purse.

Horribly heavy legs punched Lenore away from the panel, hurled her to the back of the elevator: Becky and Jill rushed inside, closed the doors: they had beaten Freya. They would take Lenore for their own little trip.

Going down.

She could have started to fight the two creatures, beat their soft disgusting heads, kick until their guts burst out, yellowy guts that looked like eggs, but it was no use.

She kept her distance, held on to the handrail, and watched them...take their clothes off, with only her own screams to keep them away, keep the oozing of the absurd away.

The doors opened again.

Lenore saw Accounting, dashed out, tripped and fell on her knees, in front of Kate.

The damaged, betrayed face and eyes were right on her, grasping at some last glimpses of love. But then they saw what was behind Lenore.

The smolder was crushed into a finality in pain.

MARCO

Lenore looked behind her.

There was no elevator. It was the bathroom. With Becky and Jill in an open stall, half-naked, hair wet, smelling of pussy and ravished of it, kissing, fondling like characters in heat. "Come back, Lena! I haven't cum yet!"

Kate clenched her teeth. "You..."

Kate, it's not what you think

So what is it then? It's magic?

"You fuckin'..." Kate jumped at her, went for her pockets, "Gimme those fucking keys! Give me the keys!" she yelled, clawing and pounding with her fists and maybe not really wanting to do it, so after only so many seconds Kate was not fighting in anymore, she was struggling out, away from those hands which would never hurt her, which were trying to hold her. She wouldn't listen, only rage was moving Kate, she gave a push, insanely hard, and just ran to the desk and ripped the purse open to take the keys for the second (really the first) time.

Everybody let her, flies and Freya, the former glad, the latter powerless.

They were witches of every floor but of no power, waiting for the pieces to fall into place, or the dominos to tumble.

Kate took the gun from the purse. The flies, watching from every cubicle, every window, every hallway corner, gasped in excitement.

"You stay away from me," Kate yelled at Freya who was walking up to her. She was crying. Too much to fathom what she was doing.

Witches and humans stood in place.

Kate ran away. Lenore ran after her, it was the only thing she could do, she was the only one who could do it.

VAN GOGH'S LAST PAINTING

All the way down to the parking lot she chased her. And to P29. She found it open.

Kate was at the end of the corridor, grabbing her stuff, the most valuable of it, which is probably everything when you've lost everything.

Lenore approached. "Kate, listen to me."

"Stay away!"

The gun was raised between them. Kate broke a little further down from doing it, menacing so the woman she had loved.

She couldn't stand it. This everything.

Already people were gathering outside. The flies giggled. The spiders waited.

Kate stood there, stuck, the dreaded door

POLO

to her right, a sleeping bag at her feet, a laptop, empty bottles, empty pizza boxes. The backpack. The gun in her hands. Her hands shaking with every sob. Lenore watched for their slightest movements, she watched for the impulse that would point the gun from herself to Kate's head.

Too quickly perhaps, she wailed out, "Why didn't you tell me? Why didn't you ask me to help you, Kate, for fuck's sake?"

"Shut up!"

"Please... Please don't do this to me." ... "Kate. Please. Not again."

Kate turned the muzzle and pressed it against her forehead and screamed, eyes straight on Lenore. A proud and demented scream that screamed she had this power. At least she still had this left. Selfish and two-edged, but still.

And this was it. All her life Lenore had searched for the right word, she considered it her fate, her purpose, and now this was it, she had to find it.

Only there was no such thing. Even as an amateur writer she had perceived it. There was no such phrase so strong. No inspirational quote to put on a dolphin poster. The perfect meaning to convince someone to keep on living was not a bunch of words, it was a lifelong dialog and Lenore was too late. Don't do it was too late. There's a coven of witches at Deep Green was too late. I love you was not enough.

The scream out of her lungs, Kate wept, pressed the gun harder with her sweaty hands, took deep breaths of air. "I'm tired, Lena... I'm tired..."

Freya who was behind them in the doorway, watching, simply said, "Let her do it. Problem solved."

Whether it was the wisdom of a spider or the failure of Lenore that made Kate lower the gun, they would never know.

She threw it like a stone and pulled the Upper Floors door to run away from all this.

The door violently flew open only to be instantly sucked back in, splintered and ripped off its hinges by a shockwave of hellish winds of incommensurable force swirling into the hole supposed to be raw concrete. And Kate went with it, snatched from the ground by the gusts, blown through the ruptured doorway by the explosive decompression.

It was so loud Lenore didn't even hear her own scream, didn't hear the sole of her shoes screeching, slipping on the ground, pulled by the sudden aspiration which decreased and stopped just as suddenly.

She did hear the shriek of the flies, calling for each other in one voice. Calling for more. But Lenore was looking at what was beyond the threshold. The shattered door and Kate, who would never understand what happened to her, frozen in the moment she had been caught in, were floating in a void of complete vivid blue.

Her body was too far from the doorway for Lenore to catch it. Probably a bad idea to try anyway. Cold water full of unseen sharks.

And the flies were about to burst into the corridor. Complete flies as big as us, no clothes, no job titles, no talking anymore, no laughing or smiling, just acid for spit.

They crushed Freya, jammed themselves into the frame of the service door, pushing, popping inside, unconcerned of each other, they only wanted the door behind Lenore. If they reached it, something worse would happen. System crash. The end of the world. How original.

Lenore picked the gun and without hesitation, without much hope, fired for the first time of her life.

The bangs destroyed her eardrums, the muzzle flash blinded her, but she emptied the entire magazine on the crawling horror.

After that it was only her fists.

She spread her limbs, thinking it would hold them back at least for a time. She got overwhelmed, thrown to the concrete ground, but suddenly the flies started to shriek differently. Lenore felt the pressure over her change. In the whirlwind of beady eyes and legs and abdomens and greasy thick hairs, and the grin of Eliza and the voice of Melissa and the hateful claws of Jill or Becky, she glimpsed the fangs of spiders, as long as her forearms.

The brawl shifted from her to all around her.

MORE WEIGHT

She could only see, yet she still was hurt. She saw Ariadne eating Melissa's face. Corpses collapsed on her and broke her right ankle. She saw a leg as thick as a tree trunk punch Becky's head through a cinderblock. The tides and ripples of the battle twisted her body in several opposite and painful directions at the same time.

It wasn't a fair fight. Flies got torn apart, goo splattered the walls. They outnumbered spiders. A handful of spiders for a tidal wave of flies. But a wave with no strategy, they only wanted one step farther.

Lenore was crushed underneath. From everywhere violence struck her, cut her clothes and her skin, a blow hit her stomach so hard she felt a snap inside, venom spread on her skin, a sharp leg chopped one of her fingers off and maimed another. Yet still she resisted, pushed back, punched and kicked and struggled out of the mass, and above all she screamed, howled all she got in her lungs, which was mostly madness now.

The spiders killed as many times as necessary. The flies fought back only when necessary, although it was useless. Their heads rolled, their guts spilled out under the rapid attacks, the blows, the sheer brute force of eight-legged killing machines shaped by 400 million years of evolution and war.

Their number decreased, their carcasses piled up. Lenore crawled back on her hands and buttocks, kicking with her left leg.

She turned her torso and neck to spit broken teeth out of her mouth and in this position she could see Kate.

Coming from her left, she caught a limping fly by the wings, one that got away. A roaring spider shoved her aside and impaled her catch.

The battle had reached the doorway. But it was under dirty, messy control. Ending. Everywhere cadavers of flies were suffering their dying throes. Only one spider was curled up in a pool of its own thick black blood. One of her legs was lying and writhing on its own over a heap of dead flies a few feet away.

Freya killed the last one, out of breath, raving with bloodlust.

She rose to her feet (and her legs) and walked toward Lenore, the mottling of her abdomen going back to skin, her fangs shrinking back to a usable mouth, at least partially.

Her eyes of millenary survival never left Lenore.

Lenore was still screaming--over broken vocal cords, making it hissy grunts.

SO, WHAT DID WE LEARN?

"You put us in so much trouble," Freya said, looking as if she might somehow enjoy the trouble a little.

She hit Lenore in the ribs; the fractures cut off her breath, shut her up. She grabbed her by the neck.

"But since you're here," she went on, "you could make yourself useful."

Freya--the still arachnoid side of her body--spawned a layer of silk over the wall and ceiling opposite the spoiled doorway.

Then she easily lifted Lenore and hung her onto it.

Lenore didn't even try to wiggle herself out. Her whole body hurt too much. Her last shreds of clothes were soaked in her own blood. And her mind ached.

Her only reaction, her only startle was when Freya lightly stung her in the jugular and she felt a cold poison dissolve down her veins.

"Don't be scared, I just gave you time. You should be dead right now, Lena. Consider this a bonus. So, here's what you're gonna do. It will take a long time for us to close this door. Years... So in the meantime you stay on the watch. You look out for scary monsters."

She pointed at the blue void, inside and beyond the frame, around Kate.

"When you see one floating out there, when it spots the doorway and rushes for it--and believe me it will--just scream. You don't have to worry because time runs differently in there and it will take it weeks to cross the distance. But warn us, please. Unless you want to see your girlfriend being eaten alive, then you, then...our whole fucking world as we know it."

During her monologue, the other spiders had crammed all the dead bodies inside the corridor.

One of them sucked a dead fly dry before taking back woman form, sweating, exhausted, her naked body covered in dirt and open wounds.

"We have to go, Freya," she panted.

"I know. Just one more thing."

She turned back to Lenore.

Sighed deeply.

Shook her head.

Looked at her with eyes a spider would have trying to understand humans.

She said flatly, "Time, time, every where. Nor any second to live. See? I too can "borrow" from others and call myself an artist."

Glimmers pearled out of Lenore's tear ducts. It's the only thing she could do anymore. Even her breathing had waned to simply letting the breeze enter her nostrils.

"I'm not judging you, I'm incapable of it. I'm just giving you some things to think about. It never served you well but... heh."

Freya shrugged.

She left with the others, closed the service door, lock and padlock.

The only neon tube that hadn't been crushed turned off.

Only remained for Lenore what was before her: darkness framing an immense blazing abyss, deeper than a universe, no up and down, no point to rest her eyes on. A blue hell contained behind a threshold, waiting to step in and shake hands with reality. And shining on her.

Obscuring a little bit of it was the silhouette of Kate, a few feet away from her.

Lenore would have to stare at this until her eventual mercy kill.

Stare at her.

And choose.

Choose because as days went by, and months, and years, Lenore started to notice the effects her own imperceptible respiration was having on the image of her love out there.

With every breath in, every breath out, as morbidly slow as they were, every movement her body did just by existing, any slight shift in perspective within her unblinking eyesight, the blue was gnawing at Kate. Kate was not floating, the blue was jumbling her into its unreadable snow. Blending, bleeding over her like passes of immaterial error.

Inhaling, a line would detach, repeat itself, mask itself, or a chunk of shaded pixels, in turn erased in blue by a new necessary exhale.

Soon Kate would have disappeared. In a thousand years perhaps.

Or sooner if Lenore had to scream. Such an ample movement would disrupt the line of her hair, flatten her facial features, distort the edges of her clothes, corrupt the logic, compress and compress and compress and compress and

So Lenore had to choose.

Decide the kind of regret she would prefer.

She had a lot of time to think, marked by the regular rituals of the spiders who were trying to close the gate and save everything that wasn't Lenore and Kate.

In the end, she did. Long before she died but it didn't matter anymore then, she had become a new woman, sadder and wiser.

She thought her goodbyes into the bottomless in front of her, where monsters could hear and ghosts would listen.