Between a Bear and a Hard Place(7)

“Jesus,” Claire sighed, throwing the old, crackly-covered paperback she was reading onto her desk. It was after hours – four hours after hours, to be exact – and she was getting pretty sick of Eckert, with his egg-shaped head that always seemed to sprout droplets of sweat, keeping her up all night for seemingly no reason.

She’d come in, she’d walk around locked up laboratories, none of which she could enter, and copied down whatever was on the clipboards on the doors. It was awful, it was boring, but what the hell.

It’s a job, she thought. A job I can do, and not think. A job I can walk straight into, sit around, get paid, and walk straight out of without taking one single shred of it home. Not like I have much to do outside of this place except worry about work, but... what the hell. Someday I’ll get all ambitious again and go out to change the world of science. Or... maybe not.

She sighed again as the voice on the PA called her again. She’d never actually met the person to whom the voice belonged, but it seemed to her that it didn’t matter very much. No one at GlasCorp had ever much paid attention to her. Then again, no one at GlasCorp headquarters – the seat of power for the country’s most wealthy pharmaceutical company – seemed to pay much attention to anyone else.

She began the long, slow, tedious trek to lab B-3.

The walk took about fourteen minutes, all told, including elevator and security check time. It took about eighteen if she stopped off at the food machine, which she was planning to do on this trip.

“I’m always one for a Honey Bun,” she said, in a strangely zen-like, meditative way as she strolled past lab H-10. These labs she could enter, and often did, to talk to the cute scientist named Beale. They’d go back and forth, he’d make some vaguely lewd joke, she’d pretend to be embarrassed, and then he’d go back to work and she’d go back to reading one of the many, many conspiracy theorist paperbacks she whiled away her free hours collecting. “Always up for a...”

She trailed off as something in H-3 screeched rather loudly. These were mouse labs, and nothing particularly strange happened in any of them. Cognitive experiments mostly – think mice running around in mazes for food prizes – certainly nothing that caused screeching like that.

Claire skidded to a halt, imagining all kinds of horrific things playing out in front of her as she went to her tiptoes and peered through the reinforced window, crisscrossed with a wire grid. She squinted, adjusted her glasses, and peered deep into the darkened office.

There it is again. Another noise reached her ears. She pressed her nose flat against the glass, unable to see anything, but absolutely certain that at any second, some horror from another dimension was going to splat against the glass and then suck her brains out through her nose.

I need to stop reading those books, she thought, chuckling as she kept staring. If I can imagine things like that?

The screech sounded again – more of a squeal this time – but more distant.

Fog streaked the glass beneath her nostrils, and just as she had shaken her head and decided there was nothing to see, something glittered in the darkness

“What in the fu—”

Two eyes.

Two golden, shimmering eyes. “Eyes?” she asked no one at all. “What in the world?”

The sight was as unmistakable as it was impossible. Two golden eyes stared at her through the darkness for just a moment, then, as though they were blinking, they went dark, and vanished.

No more squeals, no more squeaking.

“No more eyes,” Claire intoned, shaking her head, stunned and confused. “I’m just gonna... you know what? I’m tired. I drink too much coffee. I probably just imagined that.”

As she turned and shambled the rest of the way to lab B-3, via the food machine, where she did get herself a Honey Bun, Claire just told herself over, and over, and over, that she’d imagined those eyes.

But in her heart? She knew they were as real as the delicious treat crinkling in the wrapper that she stuffed in her pocket, because she forgot to eat it before the elevator dumped her out in the depths of the building, right in front of lab B-3. The first thing she noticed was that the cold, sterile, pulsing white of the florescent lamps wasn’t present.

Nothing, she noticed, was present. The whole area was pitch black, and as the elevator’s door slid open, her first instinct was to recoil and mash the button to go right the hell back to her office.

Both sides of the security check were open, and no guard was standing sentinel. Something is very, very wrong.

This door? This had never been open. The problem about a curious mind is that it just never can quite force itself to not be curious. No amount of reason was going to stop Claire from at least trying to understand the strange sitaution.