Between a Rock and a Hard Place

Before being pushed inside, Lenore spun around, she didn't like having Portia behind her, didn't like it at all. She opened her mouth to say something. Anything. About the elevator... about...

But facing Portia turned out worse: she drew a gun from her jacket. And put it in her hands.

Lenore didn't have the time and the background to tell it was a Desert Eagle, one of those absurdly large handguns, silver and ridged, so far from the small, more reasonable matt black Glocks cops use and more fitted to her 5'2 frame, way less heavy whereas all guns were surprisingly heavy to people who never held one before.

Lenore got scared to grip, got scared to throw it back to Portia, she was scared the thing would fire by doing anything. She grabbed the handle with her five fingers as far away as possible from the trigger and all the scary buttons on the barrel.

Meanwhile Portia forcefully turned her back around, pushed her inside the office, closed the door and left, her job done.

"Ah, Eleanor, I was thinking about you, sit down, take some cookies," Eliza said.

Lenore hid the gun under her jacket. It was one of these dreams. Only instead of being naked on a theater stage, she had brought a gun to work. Please be one of these dreams.

She mumbled and sat down and pulled on her clothes to hide the oversized piece of metal twisting her hand and her wrist.

"Come on, have a bite, they're delicious."

"No. I'm good. Really."

"Oh... So how's your little story coming along?"

Lenore didn't reply. Deer eyes caught in headlights.

Her lack of smile failed to be contagious. Eliza was fully focused on her rather than checking on Carl every other second.

Lenore got immediately so consumed by her gun problem that she lost her social filter. She couldn't control where the conversation was going, even if she had already lived it once. All she wanted was for it to end as soon as possible, so she could wonder what the hell was going on, by herself, safe and without a firearm rattling against her ribs. And maybe wake up.

This answer finally came out of her mouth:

"It seems... like... People like to make me gifts apparently."

"Dickpics? You have to tell me if you've got dickpics, you know?"

Eliza could not see her fear, it seemed, and most importantly not her heavy hand bulging her clothes. She couldn't see all the other emotions going through her either. Like anger for example, which was starting to grow, to root on her fight with an object.

"I read Sawn-off Shotgun Romance the other nigh--"

"I didn't write it. Sheila Mason did, for the Valentine's Day supplement two years ago. Before your time."

Lenore grew up in Long Island, she had never even seen a shotgun in her life.

"Oh? right, well, Prudence Fleischer told me she liked it too, so let's keep it our secret." Her lips feigned being sorry.

Lenore started to sweat. Only the armpits, so far.

The gun felt lighter. And not because her hand got used to it.

"Thank you. For...talking to her," she said weakly, bitter, somber, sheepish... While Eliza snapped into the grandiose:

"It's alright, honey! I believe in you! You know it's my role as a manager! To bring you up to the height of your full capacities! And when you're our new Virginia Woolf I'm sure you'll remember with a smile the time when you tackled all the extra hours to get this short story out!"

Lenore almost interrupted: "Y-yes! This. I'm very busy today."

"You'll manage. Oh wait, that's my job."

Lenore gripped the gun at that fucking joke. "So you wanted to see me."

Eliza smiled. "You know." Here came the angering moment. "Your idea of the suggestion box is a legal nightmare, we want to have a look at your work before printing."

"The newsletter is a PDF."

"You know what I mean."

"It changes the deadline."

"You better get to it then, take some time over your real job, who cares?"

"What?"

"I'm joking."

"I'm not gonna use the suggestions, they all suck."

"Fine, we still want to see what you do."

With a clammy hand, Lenore pressed the gun against her moist stomach. She had to look. The gun had turned into a smaller one. The cops one.

As it had lost in weight, her reply lost in suppressed anger:

"Ok. Sure."

"As you did notice, we had to let Carl go."

Lenore waited for the rest of the phrase. It never came.

The gun was shrinking faster and faster.

Eliza put some papers and a pen on the desk. "We need you to sign this."

Lenore had seen forms like these before. By signing them she would give up all her copyright ownership to Deep Green.

"Because we don't want a legal nightmare, now do we?"

She didn't care. Didn't care about some ten-page story, rushed and uninspired and which ultimately no one would really read.

But she needed her two hands to sign.

The gun had shrunk enough that it fitted inside her closed fingers. She could take her hand from under her jacket but still... she had no pockets, no place to hide a two-inch pistol that she was sure could still fire.

In her confusion she put it in her mouth, when Eliza was looking away, at Carl.

The taste of metal poured into her mouth.

She signed without reading.

"I can't wait to read what you came up with," Eliza said. Then as Lenore got up, "Close the door behind you."

Lenore didn't leave, she fled. She didn't close the door, she let it slam shut.

Again Portia was waiting in the corner of the break area. She didn't say anything. She just stared. Stark.

Lenore went for the sink and spat the tiny gun into it with a brittle glare at her. It thumped like a half-sucked candy.

"What is happening?" she asked, trembling.

"You're a disappointment, that's what is happening."

"Who are you?"

"Your best friend."

"No you're not!"

Again Carl and the guard passed them.

Again Eliza burst out of her office. "Is there a problem here?"

"I was asking my friend about the Halloween story," Portia replied without turning her eyes away from Lenore. "Just fuck off, Eliza."

"Don't put pressure on her like that, it's not like she'll get fired if she fails to deliver, speaking of which, don't you have work to do, Portia?"

"Eat shit."

"We'll see."

Lenore ran away as slowly, as casually as her floppy legs could let her. She went straight for the stairwell and down to Accounting.

*****

The suspension of disbelief collapsed sometime after Lenore sat back at her workstation.

But at a lack of words to confront the reality of what happened, she took her phone and texted Kate. Only to never get a response.

Tristyn--another friend, a childhood friend--was apparently just as busy.

Her parents didn't like texts and would call her on the spot if they felt anything was wrong with her. So this was out of the question.

Her doctor would just give her more antidepressants. Or a straightjacket.

Unable to communicate, the only thing her brain started to articulate was a block of images that stuck out and roiled the usual flux of the straight tight timeline of existence. No thoughts, no questions that could have led to answers, even partial, even irrational.

The world, changed, was too present around for her to be able to sink enough and think, to close down enough and pay her sleep debt. She could never concentrate ever again for the rest of her life. It was over. Irreversibly awake. Irreversible fatigue. Eternal evil twin of ADHD.

The vanishing point of this state was insanity. This she was still alert enough to foretell. But it would be a more socially acceptable nature of insanity compared to the one brought along with the answers she couldn't access.

What do people do when they're facing a supernatural event? was the meta-question of all the questions Lenore was too stupefied to ask herself.

They recognize the supernatural.

That was unacceptable.

Something not normal happened, just stare at your computer screen.

She went along with the dream, as dreams impose, in hope she would awake out of sleepwalking before anyone noticed. It meant the continuation of a taste of gun oil in her mouth and two memories of a same event already fading into indistinctiveness and words isolating themselves into symbolic value; a door; a gun; a stale cookie given for free.

"Hey Lena, how's your story going?"

It was Jill, with less makeup.

Lenore got up way too fast and almost threw herself at the girl with a hug way too out of line. Her co-worker wouldn't have it and gently pushed her back, looking around like it was still the fifties.

"Save it for Saturday," she whispered.

Yes. Lenore said yes immediately. In six days they would go out together again. Anything that set a future put sense to her present. And she didn't notice that Jill did not ask her if everything was all right. The girl had already left, back to her own day.

Lenore still had no idea what her job was.

She, on the other hand, knew she had a job to do.

She tried to focus on whatever that meant.

It seemed it had divided into two parallel works. The Halloween story felt important now. It had something to do with not getting fired. An edge of the heavy block of images. It made her see herself throw the dildo down the garbage chute first thing back home, maybe break it beforehand, stomp it. So they would see her self-righteous self-disgust, her determination.

Who's 'they'? she typed in one Excel cell.

It's the only thing she did all morning. The numbers on paper and screen could not be added up. So nothing productive. She could not wake up.

At 1pm, when the floor had gone for lunchbreak, she locked herself in a toilet cubicle, set up an alarm on her phone and tried to fall asleep, even if it was sitting on a toilet lid, scalp against a wooden panel. She needed to fall asleep to wake up twice from her dream of guns and time loops and getting fired.

The phone chimed ten minutes later and the eyes of Lenore if they did close, had only brought a few tears now lost on the tiled floor.

People started to come back after she ate an energy bar from the vending machine. No one expressed concern that she didn't go eat out, but that's not what made her take the stairs to HR.

*****

Up there, it looked pretty much like Management.

She had to ask for Mrs. Keller.

"Who?"

"Portia."

"Second door on your left."

This door was ajar. As she approached, she prepared for the awkwardness of the impromptu talk. It was the last place to have a breakdown.

"Yes?" Portia of HR said, interrupted in her work at her large desk, Lenore standing across from her.

"I don't understand what's happening," she tried, as not hysterically as possible.

The woman tilted her head in an animalistic question mark.

"What did you do to me?"

"What do you mean?"

"I... I can't wake up."

"Have you listened to the wall yet?"

So it was still going, the insanity. But now they were both insane, not just Lenore. It was the strange comforting she had come for.

Portia cut short the nonsense. "You can come and talk to me anytime. Now if you'll excuse me..."

Lenore backed off. The dialog tree was depleted.

"And close the door, please."

She did and staggered to her own floor.

The stairwell door conveniently opened to the poster with the dolphin and the water cooler.

Lenore drank a cup of icy water.

And she leaned near the drywall. The one Portia told her would be special.

She expected it to take concentration--impossible effort--to hear anything, to filter out the sound of Accounting, but voices immediately found their way to her ear.

Reverbless voices of a room shut for confidentiality. Two women. Maybe three. A fourth over the phone on speaker.

Lenore found the best angle, the right spot, where two distant rooms would impossibly intersect.

They were reviewing employees. She could hear them as clearly as if she was there.

She straightened back up. Accounting came back over the voices. She looked around. It was just Johnson's office on the left and on the right beyond that wall it was the street three stories below.

Again, she was too bluntly awake to question this acoustic anomaly. Her writer instincts automatically recalled that haunted houses are often just bad plumbing but Lenore lowered her head back in and listened to the litany of names.

Sean. Michelle. John. Rob. Ken. Rosemary. Sean. Laurie. Danielle. Laura. Swen. Cameron. Misha. John. Rosie. Ruby. Portia. Alex. Rick. Jon. They were going on and on. They were going since this morning, they hadn't waited for her to start. Cheryl. Charlotte. Victor. Helen or Ellen. Irina. John. John. Jonathan. Reggie. Jenn. Clarke. Lena.

The voices were not saying anything, not deciding anything. Just names. And contempt.

And Lenore was in there.

She went for her purse, her vest, the suggestion box, her car. It wasn't even 2pm. She just left, escaped, without a moment of doubt.

Only a short slowing-down on her drive out of the parking lot:

She passed a large group of employees on a cigarette break, gathered near a service door. Jill and Becky were there, suckling on their stick of outdoor boredom. And when Lenore tepidly waved at them, everybody, them included, scattered like a swarm, without as much as a nod, leaving in her sight the door she vaguely knew had always been barred.

Close enough to see the padlock hanging down a chain had 'P29' sharpied on it.

She saw it so well she almost hit a car, transfixed on her rear-view mirror, and the sound of the horn was the sign she should flee this workday once and for all.

*****

Leaving work without a reason was admitting that her career now depended on whether she finished the horror story or not. It was still less absurd than magic elevators.

Yet she did nothing she had wanted to once home. The sun was shining at such an angle her apartment looked like Sunday. When she would take a sick day from school, young Lenore used to watch The Price is Right, eat, nap and waste the rest of the hours.

Nothing ever changed.

So the dildo wasn't thrown away. The short story didn't gain one word.

And Lenore still couldn't think. Or wake up. Or fall asleep.

But she could read. She needed to.

The box was full again. Full of:

WOT IF YER MUM WAS A SKELETON? MENTAL, INNIT?

Nothing.

THERE WAS THIS GIRL ON YOUTUBE, SHE DID VLOGS AND STUFF. SHE HAD LIKE A MILLION FOLLOWERS AND PEOPLE DISCOVERD WHEN THEY TURNED ON THE SUBTITLES ON HER VIDEOS IT WAS JUST LINES OF AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA OVER AND OVER.

SO EVERYBODY THOUGHT IT WAS A BUG AND THE GIRL NEVER ADRESSED IT AND PEOPLE CONCLUDED IT WAS REALLY JUST YOUTUBE GLITCHING.

BUT THEN SOMEONE SAW ON ONE VIDEO, AMONGST THE WALL OF AAAAAA IT SAID 'HELP' AND 'HELP ME PLEASE'. AND THE RUMOR STARTED TO SPRED THAT THE AAAAA WERE ACTUALLY THE GIRL'S SCREAMS OF PAIN.

YOUTUBE WAS CONTACTED BUT THE CHANNEL AND HER TWITTER ACCOUNT CLOSED DOWN OVERNIGHT. NO ONE KNOWS WHAT HAPPENED TO HER.

This one was all right. Not a story, though.

She read a whole bunch of creepypastas of the same caliber. They almost made her forget she shouldn't be here. She found a story of a co-worker detained for five hours by the Canadian customs because he filmed a UFO through the window of his plane and they wanted him to delete it. She learned that if you google 'circadian parallel desecrate' you die instantly. She found two keyboard keys, Esc and Ctrl. Old bulky keys from the eighties.

As she dug further down, the suggestions were getting shorter and the sheets smaller.

From weird stanzas:

whatdoyoustandtoloose

whatdoyoustandtogain

theboxleftunopened

holdsnoprize

butleavesnoscar

To weird blurbs:

PUBLIC RECORD CRYPTID FILES ARE NOT TO BE TRUSTED

To weird rumors:

VICTOR IS ALEX

To plain weird shit:

DECOMPILED STROLL_LAKE.WMV CULT FOLLOWING

She found one that said, THERE'S A COVEN OF WITCHES AT DEEP GREEN. It joined the other crumpled papers covering the floor. Every one of them had felt like a defeat. A tick closer to her disgrace.

Reaching the bottom, from the way she was lying, she had to extend her arm in too much of a painful angle to pick the notes. So instead, she decided to empty the box on the bed.

One, two, three impulses of the wrists. A ream's worth of paper piled up.

As she put the box aside, she saw it was still half-full.

What the hell

She tilted it and fed the already huge pile with her hand.

The papers were still coming.

She stood up, turned the box upside down and fresh folded sheets rained down over the old crumpled ones.

The puddle became pyramid and Lenore stopped shaking up and down when the top of it reached waist level.

And still, the box was almost full.

She took a post-it note folded in four from the top:

MY HUSBAND SAYS SOMETIMES I SPEAK LATIN IN MY SLEEP.

She turned the box to look at the bottom--paper cascading down her legs--she reached for the strip of duct tape and stopped herself because it could be a very, very bad idea to tear it off.

Last chance. The post-it still sticking to her middle finger, she put it back into the box. She shut the lids, wriggled just a little, re-opened. The yellow paper was nowhere to be found.

It took her several more tries to convince herself she was still asleep, that the supernatural had not followed her home, concluding with the Mary Poppins test: Lenore took an umbrella and pushed it down past where the bottom of the box was supposed to be. Three feet in and she had found no taped cardboard, only more paper.

Even if it wasn't her hand down there the feel of it scared her. Like cold water full of unseen sharks. She dropped the box.

Suggestions spilled around.

The box was bottomless.

The ideas supply was endless. She was knee-deep in them.

And there, thinking finally came back to Lenore and she remembered how to react toward supernatural events. She started crying. Not just tears, she bawled fully.

It was one of these dreams. Where the storyline gave her the idea. The one that would create the perfect novel, that would blow people's mind and last for centuries, that would make her the queen of Hollywood, of anything, the paradigm shift in literature, a style of the future, jazz records brought to Beethoven, and a best-seller. Oprah. Ellen. Larry. Joe. Nobel.

In the morning, the history-making idea rarely made sense, when she remembered it at all. But today she would never wake up. And what's one idea when you can rake thousands? See? the questions were coming back. She could reverse the dull insanity. She could be in control. A new woman.

The box, now the most fragile object in the world, never left her side from then on.

And she read. And read. And drank coffee. And the best ones she read out loud so she would remember herself reading them out loud. There were drawings too. Schematics. Lab reports. Pathologic ramblings. Equations. Transcripts. Storylines in foreign languages. Ancient manuscripts. Doctored photographs. The craziest stuff she could never have imagined. A copy of Frankenstein full of typos. Twelve pages of just the letter A. Mediocre stories. Off-topic anecdotes. Stories that scared her to her core, changed her vision of life, her approach to writing, to art--reasons why most people, her included, had shrugged off the horror genre as trash for teenagers. Not anymore.

I HAD A DREAM OF ME AND MY DAUGHTER, WE WERE WALKING DOWN THE STREET AND SHE FELL TO THE GROUND AND STARTED TO VOMIT THE WATER FROM THE POND WE HAVE IN OUR BACKYARD. GALLONS OF IT. AND WHEN I WOULD TRY TO HELP HER SHE WOULD SCREAM AT ME TO STAY AWAY FROM HER.