n the muffled quiet of the early morning, I sit on the floor next to the window, my head leaning against the glass. Outside, the streets are as dark as they ever get, lit by flickering lamps, and neon storefronts. Above them, the sky is a soiled shade of gray. But at least the quiet has lasted for some time now—No sirens wail; no alarm screaming urgently.

This quiet is just a taste of the quiet that is to come. Soon, the day will begin, bringing with it all the noises it contains, but I take comfort in the fact that this is the last day I will have to bear it. Today is the end of my days in this world. For a second I consider the fact, savoring it, almost feeling the sadness I expected. But then, my wife’s alarm goes off, low beeps that punctuate the air with their insistence. She sits up suddenly.

She frowns at me, her blonde hair tangled and messy from the night. One hand reflexively changes the beeps of the alarm to the blaring white noise polluted tones of a radio station announcing traffic conditions, weather and every mundane, pathetic thing that happened in the city last night.

“Good morning,” I mumble but Claudia is already on her feet, pulling a robe around her. She bustles towards the bathroom while I stand up and walk to the bed. A square of yellow falls across it when she turns on the light in the bathroom. The ventilating fan spins, screaming nasally in the ceiling. She glances at me, cold eyes catch mine for a second before her hand closes the door, mercifully blocking out the light and fan. The radio announcer is talking about someone who helped a woman give birth in the back of a taxi. He says the birth was miraculous. I jab a button on the radio and choke his voice to nothing.

 

e get ready for work separately. I enter the bathroom after she finishes, and by the time I get out, she’s already in the kitchen. By the time I put on my shoes, she’s already gone. As I walk around the apartment, I can see the remains of her presence, like a hunter on the trail of an animal might come across its shit, its musk in the air, the remains of its meal.

Her robe hangs damp in the bathroom; her bowl of cereal sits in the kitchen sink filled with water; her perfume lingers in the bedroom. The chair by the shoe rack is still warm with her body heat where she sat to put her boots on. Today, I can appreciate how subtle her presence is and how completely it has permeated me. For the first time in months, I remember that I truly love my wife.

I pull my coat on and put a hand in my pocket to make sure my keys are there. Not the house keys, the office keys. I will not be coming back here. On the front door is a note, reminding me to pick up the groceries tonight. I take the note off the door and crumple it into my pocket.

On the commute to work I find my eyes lingering on couples. I wonder if that’s how Claudia and I look. She still holds my hand sometimes. Sometimes she presses unconsciously against me like the Asian couple down the car from me is doing right now. I tell myself it does not matter anymore; that everything will change in a few hours. But it takes a frown cast my way from the Asian man to make me stop staring.

 

used to drown in Claudia, all those days ago. Now I just float across her life like driftwood.

When I married her four years ago, I was very much in love. At twenty-five, it seemed the reasonable thing to do—joint bank accounts and health insurance. The ability to get a mortgage because of combined income. Getting rid of one of the cars. I lay awake at night until the date of the wedding, wondering if it was the conveniences that marriage brought that made my decision or the way Claudia smiled at me whenever I told her I loved her.

There are only so many ways to hold something close to you but an infinite number of ways to hurt someone, to alienate them. I cataloged a book full of the latter. A voice in my head would scream at me to stop when words spilled out to jab and tear at her. But my lips had a life of their own. The subtle ways I develop to grab her by the neck and duck her head into pools of guilt was almost artistic. By the end of our second year of marriage, I could reduce her to tears with barely two sentences.

What the resentment rose out of is something I can never explain, even to myself. Maybe it was my way to keep her with me. I used to hurt her so much that when I offered her support it meant that much more. She wanted to be loved so much that when the object of her pain offered it, she took it like dry soil takes water. Over the months and years, it became an exercise to continue the relationship.

Five years later, my emotions had dried up. I stopped hurting her and she withdrew into her own shell. Our mutual loneliness became a mirror reflection, each staring at the other in perfectly opposing harmony.

 

ix months ago I started working in the Goldbar building. It’s art deco facade reflected by the other buildings on the block. All of them tall, tapering skyscrapers washed clean and well maintained by the wealthy corporations housed within them. The Goldbar building had just become the home of a computing firm that was dissatisfied with its data pipeline. Old buildings are notoriously difficult to rewire, especially when they want to connect directly on private lines to their main office half way across the island. I was assigned to this building as part of a team to come up with a solution. Our head engineer, Doug O’Brien, had discovered one.

“Pneumatic tubes,” he said, the self-satisfied grin on his face that spoke of a successful youth. When a flat silence returned his grin he slapped his hand against one of the old tubes next to him, creating a hollow sound that filled the cramped office. At the moment, the tube was cleverly disguised to appear as part of the room’s streamlined corporate appearance. But the masquerade was easily dispelled once it was pointed out.

“The Goldbar has these things crawling around everywhere. Now, they’ve been blocked off for about sixty years, but that doesn’t mean they’re not useable.” The complete confidence he exuded was tangible, palpable. He was the kind of man that seemed successful no matter what. He was the kind of man who made you feel as if your life were missing something very specific in it, even if it was just a really great tie or a solid suit.

“What we need to do is split up into smaller teams and start mapping the network. Once we have a full schematic, we can move on to figuring out how to run the wires through them. Now, in the intervening years, things may have gotten a bit...” he hesitated casting about for a word but the smile never faltered. He managed to make it all seem playful. “Cluttered insides the pipes. One of the primary exit points was the former mailroom, which is in the third sub basement. It’s been empty for over forty years. That’s going to be our check spot. Building management wants that area locked at all times so each team will have a set of keys.”

Doug never went down into the Mail Room. He was instead set up in a spare office on the thirtieth floor with a sliver of the park visible between two buildings across the street from his window. After my first visit down to the Mail Room, I never called it that again. Maybe it had been a Mail Room once, but it was something else, now.

 

e began by opening ports that had been locked for decades. A pair of teamsters followed us with bolt cutters and wrenches. It seemed funny to block off these thin little pipes with so much security, as if the management was afraid of whatever would replace the capsules full of memos and bills and checks racing through the tubes. My team was comprised of me, my assistant Chris, and two big men named Pat and Richey, who hated the pencil-neck button-pushers they had to follow around all day. They seldom spoke and always glared with a malevolence that was palpable.

Despite that, I always tried to be near them when the pipes were unsealed. I wanted to know what sixty-year-old air would be like - in my mind, it had a humid, musky odor of rodents and insects collecting for years, their excrement and food left over for decades, generations of them having left their mark scuttling around inside the pipes. Maybe they had delineated whole neighborhoods and territories; lines of control among different nests over generations of feudalism that was all about to be swept clean by an invader.

Every pipe opened and released under the brutal twists of Pat and Richey’s arms exhaled a dry cloud of dust that plumed out and left a small pile of powdered debris. To me, every pipe was an opportunity to watch the years reduced to ash. Ground under the heel of time, years were nothing more than motes of dust.

 

nce all the ports were opened and we marked their spots on our blueprints, the mapping started. The pipes had electromagnetic leads that traveled through them, dragging the cable behind them. When we started running tests, some of them just vanished. They would be released into the tubes and not appear where they were supposed to. Mostly, things went where they should but now and again, the building seemed to swallow them. That morning, I stood by the wire coil and watched the tube swallow it, loop after loop, faster and faster.

“Where’s the cable?” The cell phone on my hip crackled with Chris’ voice. When it took the last of the cable, I could hear the plastic head of the wire clanging against the tube once and the sound lingered in the air before fading. This had happened to other teams too. I would read e-mail claiming unsecured wires gone missing in the pipes. Most of the teams just blamed themselves. Doug would remind people to be careful and to check the Mail Room. But nobody ever went down there.

When the system was being started, a couple of technicians had to go to the Mail Room, so they tried to find the original workers who had shut the system down. The only guy they found was over eighty years old and living somewhere in Long Island. He wanted nothing to do with it. So the team went down to get the system up and running again - or at least to get the suction going (which was all we really needed to send cables around the building through the tubes). But they all quit. None of them wanted the contract anymore. Doug figured out we could use the electromagnetic leads to turn the wires into dumb snakes and that’s what we used but the system was never turned on.

Or that’s the story that circulated, anyway. It made a visit down there pretty intimidating. As far as I knew nobody had bothered with it yet and we were four days in at the time. When you work in old buildings long enough, you start paying attention to stories. When friends walk into basement cellars never to appear again, when people enter boarded up floors and vanish into thin air, when their tracks stop in the dust of decades mid stride never to appear again, when perfectly sane people go flying out of windows for no reason at all—all these stories add up—paranoia and superstition settle in and every hint of the weird and strange is enough to send a warning to keep away.

“Hello?” Chris crackled again, sounding irritated.

“Somewhere in the pipe,” I answered. “I’ll go check the mail room.” I waited for an acknowledgement but the phone only released a small amount of white noise and then fell silent. I stood there for another moment and then I walked to the elevators.

 

took the main elevator down to security in the first basement and then the service stairs. The marble columns and the glass walls, the subtle lighting and the murmur of the city—all gave way to hollow metal stairs that creaked under me, dim naked bulbs that offered weak, jaundice-tinted light and a quiet that grew deeper the further I went.

At the fourth landing, I found the rest of the stairs blocked off, a metal door surrounded by brick, roughly mortared. The rest of the bricks and cement still littered the area, abandoned by workmen too old to remember this building. The door had a padlock across its handles that looked rusty. I pressed my hand against the door and felt the cool surface pressing back. I imagined the dark and the quiet behind this door and it loomed in my imagination like a living entity.

I turned away from it and flicked on my flashlight. Playing it over the landing revealed a large double set of padlocked doors with blank windows that swallowed the light without showing anything through them. The words “Mail Room” were stenciled across the doors on the top, one word on each wing.

When compared to all my fantasies about the air inside of aging pipes, the idea of entering the Mail Room excited and terrified me at once. If the pipes were hungry for cables, what must be inside this room, where the engines chugged? With trembling fingers, I unlocked the door and pulled them open. The dark inside gave way reluctantly to my flashlight, the shadows crowding around the yellow pool before me as if to claim the border of their territories.

Abandoned mail carts littered the pathway, their fabric fallen apart and eaten, nests of spiders scuttling away from my light threw huge writhing shadows through the remaining thin fabric. Pieces of paper littered everywhere, mostly fused together from decades in the basement, mail that was never delivered. I wondered if the office was closed unexpectedly, the workers dropping their stacks where they stood and walking out, never giving a second look to the corpse of their vocation.

I walked through the aisle, where I could see marks of boots before me in the damp dust. The deeper I went, the sharper the smell of decayed paper sitting too long in open air. The room had a coldness that went further than just a chill. This was a place that had not been warm in so long that it had forgotten how to nurture that energy.

I swung my light up and exposed pipes ran in every direction, condensation of decades had left tiny stalactites of salts and dirt along the wire mesh behind the pipes that stretched in all directions. Behind the mesh was only darkness. Shadows so thick there was no roof to see. Irrationally, I imagined the roof stretching for dozens of feet behind the pipes when I knew for sure that it could not be more than a foot or two.

At the end of the aisle, I saw the disturbance of the dust continue towards the left and I followed, leaving my own trail. I wondered if I vanished, would someone follow me down this same path? Past desks littered with paper and ancient stationary, past walls covered in mailboxes, past whispering voices of vermin and rodents around me, past the soft scuttling of spiders above me, I heard the gibbering of the Engine.

 

illions of dust motes and cobwebs strands hung still in the air between us, frozen in the beam of white cast from my flashlight. All around the station, debris spilled for dozens of feet. Papers, piles of it, were matted down and congealed with the humidity and moisture but also personal artifacts of all sorts—expensive pens, monogrammed gifts, plaques, molding business cards, rotting magazines. All of it ruined and fractured from the bouncing, rattling journey down the pipes. Scattered throughout the pile were bones—small, delicate and white. Some were still wet with the organs that were still slowly rotting off and slipping into the cracks of the pile to collect in a bed. Crawling out of through those tiny gaps all over the station were small tendrils of some blind vegetation, groping like pale fingers with too many joints, some light-starved life nourished on organ fertilizer. And perhaps most recently, over the top of the whole thing like a web or some sort of nest of snakes, were coils and lines written by our cables that had found their way here.

I could not imagine what else might be buried among these things. I could see perhaps the last decade’s worth of material on top, but perhaps there were antique rejections of past workers pressed under the weight of the pile. I do not know how long I stood there, fascinated by this altar of rejection stained and coated in the digestive juices of the Goldbar and collected into this entity that sat before me. I knew there was no way to withdraw anything from here.

Somehow, I gathered the courage to take a step closer and then another. The sweet smell of decay rolled over my tongue and into the back of my throat, making me gag for a second and I stopped while my stomach pumped dry once, twice. Gulping the air, I forced myself to take another step. Somehow it became bearable. I imagined the wires rustling, shivering, snaking their coils around to get a better look at me. I imagined the tiny bones collecting together into scuttling patchwork skeletal things. I imagined the congealing organic matter below the altar reaching up to draw my flesh into the pile.

Nothing happened, of course. Because I know that the altar felt my devotion and awe. And it accepted me.

 

he place is crawling with busy people when I walk out of the subways and enter the Goldbar. Their eyes hardly linger on me as I walk past them. I go up to Doug’s office, where the rest of the team is waiting for our final day’s work. Everybody has smiles on their faces, because ever since I started tinkering with the machine downstairs, things have gone much better. We have not lost anything in the pipes, and the wires seem to almost find their own way around. Somebody jokes about how I spent too much time down there and Doug claps my shoulder and keeps calling me, “The Man.”

Apparently the Network Administrators turned on the wires and everything is going great. Doug reminds us to do a final check up and sweep around the building and we can be out of here by four or five. As people filter out, he asks me to stay.

“I really appreciate you taking the time to do all the dirty work.” He smiles at me with pearly white teeth and a shave so neat I can not tell he ever had facial hair. “I’ve put in a good word with the Talbots and there’s going to be a bonus for you next pay check.”

This might have impressed me when I started working here, but today I just grin back at him and I shake his hand. “Thanks, Doug. I appreciate your support.” He claps me on the shoulder again and heads out of his office.

I linger for a second, looking at the monogrammed mahogany pen stand and clock standing on his desk. His neat piles of paper with tasteful and modern weights sitting on them even though there’s never a breeze or a draft in this office. I look at the cable snaking out of the tube in his office, attached to his laptop, the screen dark and matte yet still reflective.

I wonder if the Goldbar is seeping through the wires running in its innards now. Maybe it is going through the wires and leaking into the building itself. Maybe its hunger is walking the corridors, spilling out of all the open pipes. The idea thrills me, so much so that it makes me want to laugh nervously, throw myself on my knees to glance up into the dark portal, maybe slide a shivering, exalted finger in—any way, some way to release these feelings.

Somehow, I swallow the impulse and walk away. The banal processes of the work are enough to distract me through the rest of the day. The building hums around me, and I imagine it calling my name every now and again, purring for me to finish what I started. I work straight through the morning. At 12:30, I call Claudia.

 

get the secretary and she transfers me to Claudia. I hear the rustle of papers and the receiver bumping into something before she starts talking, “Is something wrong?”

“No,” I reply calmly, maintaining my voice at the neutral tone I take with her. By this point, I am sure she can detect any change in my mannerisms and it will not do to answer too many questions. “Everything is fine, but I need you to stop by my office tonight.”

“Is this about picking up the groceries?”

“I want to take you out to dinner.” She is silent. The background hum of her office bleeds through the receiver. “I can’t remember the last time we went out and I want us to have a good time for once.”

“Why now?”

“Because I want to,” my answer comes a little too soon, I’m getting irritated. I thought she would leap at this chance. I take a breath to calm down. “Please. I want to do the right thing.”

“Okay,” she says. “I’ll be there at six.”

“Seven,” I correct her. I cannot take a chance with the last of the technicians still being around.

She sighs, “Okay, seven then.”

“I’ll see you then.” I smile into the phone, hoping she can hear it. If she does, she gives no sign of it. She hangs up without saying anything.

 

he next several hours seem to drag on as my co-workers sit about making idle conversation and congratulating me on the bonus. I keep my smile plastered across my lips and check my watch too often. At half past three, we all go in for our final meeting. Everybody has already cleared out the building and Doug pops open a couple of bottles of champagne. We toast each other and I savor the wine perhaps a little too much. It all goes to my head and makes me feel afloat, the room seems to spin and everybody sounds like they’re talking from too far away. I leave the room and sit in Doug’s old office—now devoid of all his items, what shred of personality clung to it seems to have vanished completely. I sit in his chair and lean my head against the open tube. The vibrations flowing through it flood into my body through the contact and sooth my jumbled mind. The Goldbar whispers to me and draws away the confusion and fog till all I can see is my goal lying a few hours in front of me.

At five, the last of my co-workers leave. Doug wants to walk me out but I tell him I need to clean up downstairs and lock up.

“You sure?” He grins at me, “Just tell security—they’ll do it—come on, we’re done here. What are you doing with the next couple of days off? Any plans? Let’s get some drinks.”

“I’m sure, Doug. Don’t worry about it—I’ll just get the door, you go ahead.”

“Come on, buddy. You don’t need to finish up,” he puts a hand on my back and I resist the urge to punch him in the chest and feel the hollow space within his ribs reverberate with the sound of the injury. Instead, I smile and nod.

I let myself be steered out of the building. The last thing I want to do is arouse any suspicion. We go someplace downtown and order beers. Doug keeps talking and laughing and I echo pieces of his conversation back at him in a semblance of participation. He barely notices. He tells me that if I were really ambitious, I should continue to take the kind of initiative I did at the Goldbar. He says there are plenty of opportunities for guys like us who just reach up and take what is right in front of everyone but few people have the courage to grip.

I look at my watch—it’s almost half past six—and widen my eyes in surprise. Doug gives me a weird look as I tell him I need to meet my wife. He shrugs, seemingly disappointed, and shakes my hand. “I’ll see you Monday, man,” he says.

I grin at him, genuine joy flooding me with the knowledge that I will never need to deal with him again. “Goodbye, Doug.”

 

y the time I get back to the Goldbar, it’s five minutes past seven. Claudia is standing in front of the building, arms folded over her breasts and hands clenching her elbows. She looks around with quick motions every few seconds as if expecting an attack, tossing her blonde curls in shimmering cascades. Her skirt and blouse cling to her figure and my heart aches for her beauty. For a moment I consider just letting her get tired of waiting and leave, letting her go. What if she does not want what I want? But then, the rest of my life is many long years and we will have all of that time for me to truly show her how much I do love her. I step out of the shadows behind the subway station and walk up to her, smiling.

“Hi,” I say and she turns towards me, going even stiffer if that was possible. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“I didn’t see you come out of the building,” she frowns. I see under the light of the street lamp and the glow from the buildings around us that she’s wearing more makeup than just her usual, functional mask including the pink lipstick that she hasn’t worn in years. I give her my warmest smile.

“I came out the side entrance—I had to finish something. Actually, we’re wrapping up today,” I lean forward and kiss the corner of her mouth. It’s the most intimate contact we have had in months. She does not kiss me back. I start back up the stairs into the Goldbar while keeping my eyes on her, “I need to go get all my stuff out of the office. It’ll only take a few minutes. Is there any place you want to go in particular?”

She looks at me for a second, confusion showing on her face before she lets her arms fall and walks up the stairs behind me. “I don’t care—it’s late and I’m getting hungry. Remember we need to finish up by ten because they’ll reshelf our groceries if we don’t pick them up by then.”

I turn around at the top of the stairs and take her hand. “Screw the groceries, I want to spend a night with my wife. I want to make up for what we have been through lately.”

She blinks at me and for the first time in months, I see the flat, stiff dull look in her eyes slowly give way to something else, even if just for a second.

“Come on,” I open the door into the building for her, “Lets get my stuff and get out of here.”

When the doors close behind us, the noise of the city is reduced to a dull rushing sound that already sounds miles away. I offer Claudia a genuine smile and take her hand. The security guard gives me a nod as we walk by him, recognizing me from my long nights in the basement. “You are dedicated, man.” he says, “I thought you guys were done”.

“Just getting the last of my things, Bill.” I smile, opening the door into the stairwell. “We’ll leave from the stair well entrance.”

“Alright, I’ll lock it back up in an hour or so. Have a good life,” he lifts a hand in greeting then turns his chair away from me, going back to his newspaper.

 

he stays quiet while we take the steps all the way down until we get to the mailroom. “How do you work here?” There is a note of unease in her voice; the warmth in her eyes is gone. “It’s against the law to put you in places like this.”

“Well, I’m getting a five thousand dollar bonus for it,” I chuckle, trying to turn the conversation around, “And I have the next couple of days off.”

I push open one of the doors into the inky darkness of the mailroom. Claudia looks at me and sighs. “Come on,” I gesture towards the room. The smell of mildew and decay is much stronger than when I first came here but it’s familiar to me now. “Let’s get it done with.”

“I’ll just wait here, go get your stuff. It stinks in there.”

I let the door close and take a step towards her. My cheer giving way to a flash of irritated rage that I struggle to suppress. I do not know if it shows on my face. She looks at me with that flat, dead look in her eyes. “I’m trying to make this okay for us,” I tell her, almost whispering. “I’m trying to reconnect with you and save our marriage. And I would appreciate a bit of cooperation from you. This is for us. Okay?”

She looks at me for a minute, not saying anything. I touch her elbow with my fingertips and tug gently. “Please.” She wrinkles her nose and pulls out a handkerchief, pressing it against her nose. I take it as agreement and turn around walking back through the door. Claudia follows me and looks around, obviously confused and irritated at the same time. I pick up one of the flashlights I had been stashing here and turn it on, handing it to Claudia. She takes it and walks past me, playing the light over the filthy floor, the ceiling with a cage of rust under it. She flinches away from the shadows our lights make from the scattered machinery, sorting desks and abandoned mail carts. She sees all this but she does not see me walk up behind her. I doubt she sees me take off my belt, sliding it out of my buckles until I pull it around her throat.

She goes stiff in my arms, struggling, trying to make some noise as I choke the breath from her body. She stomps my foot and it hurts. I cry out in pain but hang on. The next time she stomps I pull my foot away. She stumbles forward when her heel breaks and I fall on top of her. She tries to twist her arms around, one of her hands clenches my forearm, and her short nails dig in, drawing blood. A low nasal whine comes out of her breathless mouth and I tighten my grip. “I’m doing this for us,” I hiss at her. “I love you.”

 

few seconds later, I feel her feet drumming the floor furiously and then she goes still. My foot hurts like crazy—I think she might have broken it. I try to ignore it for now, not putting too much weight on it. My forearm is bleeding from five small cuts, but none of them look too deep. I stare down at her body—she looks like a police photograph from a crime scene. I put the belt back around my waist and shuffle to the door. I slip the second set of padlocks around the handles from the inside and lock it, just in case somebody decides to come in from in the outside.

Then I clear out one of the mail carts, tearing away the rotten fabric and using a long, ancient piece of limp cardboard to clean out the cobwebs. I roll it to Claudia’s body and pull her on top of it. I might have been able to carry her myself, but not with my foot. She lies on her back and my light plays against her throat—the marks of the belt are clear against her pale skin. I stroke it gently, not wanting to cause her more hurt. I lean down and kiss her lips and feel the more gentle breath on my face. I whisper my love to her and then I hobble and roll the cart inside the mailroom where the Goldbar waits for me.

I know that within the pile of devotional offerings the inhabitants of this building—whether they realize it or not—have been giving to the Goldbar. It has grown it’s own form of life. From the bodies of the rodents consumed within it’s pipes, from the petty jealous treachery of corporate lifestyle trickles down the floor and into the basement, from the ambition and hope of every life that has passed through the halls of this building, the Goldbar drew something and saturated it all in the physical pile beneath its pipes, within its refuse and shit. And there in the darkness, grew fungus that had no color, no shape.

When I first discovered the fungus while arranging the shrine and adding to the offerings, I was compelled to consume some of it. It was nothing in my mouth, like breathing sterile air or touching a smooth surface. But even that has a texture and sensation of contact. This was nothing but pure essence, whatever the congealed mass of humanity had left in this building. I felt it shift in approval around me, and so I kneel beside Claudia and I press pieces of this same fungus between her lips. The thin stuff dissolves in her mouth and I watch it slip down her tongue. Her throat worries it for a minute before letting it slide down her esophagus. I rub her neck to help it along.

When she wakes, I know that she will understand what we have here. People live their lives surrounded by sounds and light yet they see and hear nothing, just running busy from job to home, chore to chore. Yet we will have so much more—to eat nothing but the essence of our peers distilled in this pure form. We will serve a new god born from the age of commerce and commercialism. A god that has killed and been sacrificed to for decades without anybody even realizing it. We will be the first priests to the first god of a new pantheon.

And deeper in the shadows of the mail room, I have seen new tunnels—impossible tunnels dug by the Goldbar itself that lead, I do not doubt, to other buildings, perhaps the Torque Tower, the Blackrock Building. We will be the Goldbar’s evangelists, planting his fungus in the roots of all these other god-like architectures and Goldbar will occupy them, bring them under his rule. He will be the Zeus of this urban Olympus. And we will be the vessels of his power.

 

little while later, I hear steps outside—in the quiet of this place, even the smallest sound carries far. It must be the night watchman, locking up from the outside. I see the light he carries turn the two windows in the door into glowing squares for a few seconds as he installs the padlock, locking us in, and then the glow dims as he walks back up the stairs. I turn off my lights as well and the subtle glow of the fungus—so dim that it would be invisible even under my weak flashlights—begins to leak from within the pile. I sit in front of it, beside the mail cart, where my wife—the Priestess of Goldbar—rests.

My eyes adjust to the dimness quickly and when Claudia stirs, regaining consciousness, I smile and reach out to welcome her.

 

[END]

© 2005 Saif Ansari - Contributor's Bio

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