I realized that I was in hell about a year and a half into my new job. I mean, I guess I brought it upon myself. For some reason I decided to major in film while I was in college, so after I graduated I basically just had to take any job I could get. First I sorted trash, but quit after getting stabbed by a coworker who was convinced that I was dumping some of my trash into his sorting area. Next I ran the register at Arby’s, but quit after getting stabbed by a customer who was really, really angry because I’d apparently gotten his order wrong (to be fair, I did). After that I tried bartending but quit after getting stabbed in the bathroom by the homeless guy my boss insisted on keeping around. By that point I was pretty convinced that I needed to find a job where the chance of running into someone with a knife was as close to zero as possible. I guess that’s why an office job seemed like a good idea. So, I looked online and applied to whatever I could find, and when one of them finally offered to hire me I snapped that shit up like a gator running into someone’s dog.
Well, the job was as boring as I’d expected, but after the stabbings I’d been through I was totally okay with that. Just typical office drone shit, sitting in a cubicle and editing spreadsheets, going to meetings, responding to emails, you get the idea. Most days I’d just shut my brain off and go into autopilot until it was time to go home, and that worked perfectly fine for a while. I suppose you could say that the problems began once I started to meet my coworkers. I’m not good with people, so at first I tried not to interact with them too much, but somehow that gave me this reputation around the office of being the cool, mysterious guy that never gets upset at anything. So then, unfortunately, everybody started trying to talk to me. Maybe they wanted to see if they could get me to crack, maybe they were all just naturally that annoying, I don’t know. But, the autopilot shit didn’t work anymore. I’d be staring at the computer screen, just starting to zone out, and then Betty who sits a few cubicles down from me would show up and start telling me about some real stupid shit, astrological signs and planetary alignments and the like. I’d just sit there, nodding, “Hmm, yes, very interesting.” Eventually she’d leave and I’d get back to work, and then just as I was about to zone out again Ted from the cubicle behind mine would show up and tell me about the cabin he’d been building in the woods behind his house. Real cool Ted, can’t wait for the next progress update.
Lunchtime was the worst if we’re being honest. Everyone was supposed to eat at the company cafeteria as some sort of teambuilding thing, get to know your coworkers blah blah blah. It felt like I was in fucking high school again, and I really would have preferred to leave those memories behind me. The food wasn’t good, just your typical soups and sandwiches and shit (to be honest, I barely even paid attention to what I was ordering), but once I picked up that cute little reputation with the rest of the office I started getting swarmed the instant I sat down to eat. I wanted to scream out to all of them, “Fuck off!”, but I just couldn’t muster the energy to do it.
Then that shit started spilling over into meetings. At first I’d used our company meetings as my designated naptime, but suddenly people started making jabs at me during them as if they were trying to impress me with how funny they were. “Hey big guy, didja catch that?” Hilarious. That shifted all eyes over to me, and if that happened while I was snoozing I’d get into big trouble. So, that was the end of my naps. It truly felt as though all the little joys had been stripped from my workday. It was only in the bathroom that I felt any amount of privacy, but since we were only allowed 10 minutes of bathroom time per day I was kind of fucked there. I started to spend a lot of time walking through the halls of the office building, acting like I was lost. Sometimes I’d stand in front of the vending machine and pretend I was taking a really long time to make a decision. Hmm, Cheetos or Doritos? Ranch or Cool Ranch? I’d say that kind of stuff out loud to make sure that anybody who walked by knew that I was deep in thought and that I shouldn’t be bothered.
Well, I suppose it was more the wandering around that got me into trouble, not the vending machine shit. The office building turned out to be a lot larger than I’d thought and sometimes I actually would get lost. It wasn’t even that I ran into anything strange out there in the hallways. No, the problem was that seeing those hallways got me thinking real hard about things. I *felt* like the office building was a lot larger than it should have been, but why did I feel that way? Probably because I’d seen it from the outside, right? Except, when I tried to think of how the building looked from the outside, nothing came up. Surely I’d seen it from the outside, twice a day, going to work and leaving work, but the harder I thought the more I realized that I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d been outside. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been home. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d interacted with anyone other than my coworkers. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d had some real fucking food.
From there, things started to go downhill fast. Maybe the things I began to notice had always been there and I’d simply been too lazy to notice them. It’s hard to say, really. The emails I was replying to weren’t in English and neither were any of the spreadsheets, it was all gibberish. There were no windows anywhere in the building. The food in the cafeteria started to move around if you stared at it too long. One time, I opened up the utility closet and found a coworker’s dismembered body in there.
Then, there was the door. It was odd, really, it had been sitting there in the middle of the office that whole time and not once had I wondered what was behind it. So, I decided that I was going to open it. As I approached it, though, I could feel an incredible heat and for a moment I considered just giving up and going back to work. I had a sneaking suspicion of what was going on, but I felt that if I opened that door that would be the end of things and any chance I had of remaining blissfully unaware of the truth would vanish. Yeah, I’m a philosophical kind of guy.
Well, I decided to open the door, can’t really give a good reason why. I guess I’m the kind of person that doesn’t like to leave stuff up to speculation. What I saw on the other side was a vast lake of fire, and bathed in the flames were hundreds – maybe thousands – of people, all screaming in agony. The sky, too, was a deep crimson red. Things were floating in the air, large black masses of arms and legs with the heads of goats that swirled around and seemed to be watching the people burning down below. It was clear that that wasn’t the sort of place I wanted to be in for long, but just off to the left, jutting out of a cliff wall, I spotted an elevator that looked exactly like the ones in the office. Elevators that, now that I thought about it, had never actually worked, but somehow I had the feeling that this one would be different.
I made a run for it, through the door and straight across to the elevator, slamming on the button like a gator running into someone’s dog. Above the screams I could hear something else, a high-pitched sort of humming, and when I looked behind me I realized that one of the dark masses above was now drifting towards me. Well, I just kept pressing that button, as if somehow that was going to get the elevator where I needed it to be any faster than before. Then it was there and the door opened, and I didn’t look back until after the elevator had shut its doors. The floors were numbered from zero to nine and I was on the seventh, it seemed. Zero seemed like the right choice.
I’m not really sure how long I was in that elevator, but the moment the bell dinged and the doors started to open I found myself lying in bed at my apartment, totally nude with a bad case of morning wood. A bad dream, I suppose. No, of course not. A dream can never last that long. Rather, I was acutely aware that what I had done was something terrible, something that couldn’t be forgiven, although I couldn’t really put into words why. Well, I had the words, I have them now, but somehow I just can’t bear to speak them. Or type them.
Still, my actions clearly hadn’t gone unnoticed. I went out drinking with my friends – my real friends – the next day, but the whole time I had this weird feeling like I was being watched. When I went outside, I saw it – far away, but definitely there, a speck on the horizon that didn’t seem to move at all. With each passing day it drew closer, and then I began to hear the humming and was certain that it was one of the black goat-things I’d seen down below. No matter where I go, it never gets any farther away, only closer, closer and closer and closer. I guess that’s why I’m writing this. Truth is, I think I’ve only got a day or two left before it finally closes in on me. I’m afraid to think of what’ll happen once it gets here. Nah, I know what’ll happen. I’ll get sent back to where I belong. The only question I have, though, is where exactly that is. Now that I know the alternative, maybe that office job doesn’t seem so bad…