got faster. His bone wore as he worked and left a chalky residue.
SCRITCH! SCRATCH!
SCRITCH! SCRATCH!
SCRITCH! SCRATCH!
There was a hole in the plaster now. She remembered the article she’d read, about the doors of chaos that civilized men had no business opening. The thing in her stomach slopped. The hole the man had made was black and deep. If she looked hard enough, she thought she could see something on the other side of it, peering back at her.
Above the hole, he began to scribble with his chalk bone. His body bent and jerked as he wrote, and he worked inhumanly fast, like time moved differently for him than for everyone else in the room. SCRITCH! SCRATCH! SCRITCH! SCRATCH! SCRITCH! SCRATCH!
His hair had gone gray, and his sharp teeth fell out one by one. Not a dandy, anymore. His three-piece suit was worn to threads. When he was done, he stepped aside to let her see his message. In blood and bone above the black hole, he’d written:
Build the Door
As she read, the hole underneath the letters expanded like a breath, and the void inside it widened. And then, oh, no. Out from the hole, a swarm of red ants crawled.
“Stop it!” she cried.
The entire room jolted. She turned back to the boardroom table, where shocked faces peered back at her. She faced the man in the corner again, but he was gone. So was the hole.
Ragged breathing, she closed her eyes. Opened them. Nothing there. Not even a crack in the plaster. A bead of sweat rolled over her brow and into her eye. The salt burned.
Scritch! Scritch!
This time, the sound was Mortimer, scratching his manicured fingernails against the wooden table. She realized he’d been doing that for a while now. The blood rushed to her face. She looked in the corner again. Nothing there. Could she really have imagined such a thing?
“Are you ill, Miss Loomis?” Randolph asked.
Audrey blinked. The room was bright. A sunny fall day. Twenty rich people with good jobs sat at a long teak table, politely observing Audrey Lucas have her first psychotic break.
Mortimer glared, like he wished his eyes would burn holes through her skull so she’d keel over, and he could kick her dead body. Jill was up and heading in her direction. There were tears in her eyes, and Audrey wasn’t sure whether they contained self-pity or sympathy. Randolph pushed out his chair as if to stand, excuse her from the podium, then insist Jill continue. Do the honorable thing and put her out of her misery. She’d be fired if that happened. Maybe not immediately, but eventually, because screwing up a major meeting wasn’t something anybody was going to forget. She couldn’t let that happen. Not without a fight.
“I should explain. I had light surgery over the weekend. Nothing serious, just a polyp, but the doctor gave me Vicodin. I think I might be allergic because—I’m dizzy, and a little confused. But I’ll stop wasting your time and get going now. Okay?” The lie came out in such a nervous rush it sounded natural.
Nobody moved any closer, and she seized the opportunity to continue. “Now…Where was I?” she asked while unrolling the plans. The lines on the page were a jumble. She fixed her eyes on them and shut everything else out. The shuffling papers. The eyes, watching. The sound of her own rapid pulse. The thing in the corner. Was it invisible, and still watching her even now?
She counted backward quickly from ten. Imagined the shapes of the numbers as she thought them. Moved her gaze from left to right, small to large, and willed herself to see. After a few seconds, the plans coalesced. Right angles and arcs, beautiful straight lines. They intersected, and spoke.
“It’s a maze,” she said. Mortimer narrowed his eyes. Randolph shrugged. The middle men shuffled their feet. She realized they thought she’d said amazed.
She looked at each person in the room, one by one, so that they knew she was back in control. She started with her team. Realized that they hadn’t been hostile before, just concerned. If this went badly, Audrey wasn’t the only architect facing an unemployment line. Then she nodded at Jill to reassure her. The underarms of her frilly blouse were wet with sweat. Then the department heads. Finally, Randolph, then Mortimer. Dead in the eyes. She’d be damned, after all she’d done to get here, if this was the way she was going out.