Underneath
Mr. Leron was late, and rushing. He wove ungracefully around other pedestrians down the packed sidewalk, dodging elbows and excusing the tastefully understated briefcase that dangled from his lanky arm as it knocked into the backs of knees. He felt out of place among the throng: a good head taller than the average height, he didn't need his tailored suit to further separate him from the casual t-shirts and jeans of the rest. His sensation of alienation made his already fluttering heart pound even harder, and sent a bead of sweat sliding down his temple. He stopped short at a street corner, the cars hardly even waiting for the light to change before jamming on their accelerators and shooting past. He boggled at the motorist's impatience, and checked his watch, hoping against reason that he had merely been reading the time wrong. The hour hand stubbornly refused to budge. The minute hand, however, had traveled considerably, but in the usual direction, worsening Mr. Leron's plight.
He cursed to himself, and regarded the buzzing flow of traffic with an appraising eye. The far lane of cars had halted, gridlocked due to a mass outpouring of selfish hurry. The near lane moved swiftly, but a coming bus brought the flow of automobiles up short at the opposite corner. Mr. Leron's eyes went wide at the unexpected stroke of luck. A quick lurch forward to dash through the gap in the traffic was stopped short by a jabbing pain in the back of his right hand. He forgot all else for a moment to inspect the hand, almost knocking himself in the chin with the briefcase clutched in it. The spot between his pinkie and ring finger knuckles bore a sizable scratch, the scraped up skin dangling in a gross little strip by a ragged edge. The patch was at first a bright pink, and Mr. Leron was hopefully that, despite the pain, the little wound would not bleed, but as he inspected it, the spot seemed to spontaneously turn crimson, blood welling up from below the surface to trickle down the side of his hand and drip on the concrete at his feet.
He fixed his lips on the injury, bringing a fresh sting to the pain it caused. The warm, metallic taste bloomed, seemed to fill his mouth. His eyes swept through the faces around him, to see who could have hurt his hand without even the courtesy of an apology, and found himself staring after a figure moving through the crowd, very pointedly away from him, keeping a pace as near to a run as one could with so many pressing in from every angle. He didn't bother trying to pursue the man, if, indeed, it was a man. It was difficult for Mr. Leron to tell from his view, as the stranger wore a long overcoat, overlarge for his squat frame, so much so that the edge of it fell below his feet to just scrape the ground. His collar was turned up - a distinction that the size of the coat emphasized rather theatrically – to meet the wide brim of the duster hat he wore, completely obscuring the man's features. Mr. Leron took his hand away from his mouth, making the bit of scraped and hanging skin brush his lips. Unnerved by the feeling, he looked to see the patch of dermis barely attached, and, without thinking, quickly caught it between his teeth and tore it completely off.
Revulsion quaked through him at the understanding of what he had just done, and he spat the bit of skin out, trying to will the fleeting impression of it resting on his lips from his mind. He looked up, the feeling of being studied suddenly gripping him, and Mr. Leron found himself looking into the eyes of the stranger, now quite far off and peering at him from the shelter of a doorway perhaps half a block down the street. The man had a grotesque face, beady black eyes set far apart on either side of a flat nose. His mouth was either lip-less and freakishly wide, or bore an extremely self-satisfied grin. Either way, it gave him the appearance of a huge lizard, a toothless T-Rex in a shabby vagabond's coat. Mr. Leron stared at him, fixated. The strange man brought a hand up holding a shiny metal tool, which he rested on the edge of his mouth, sucking at the small, flat blade at the end of the long, narrow shaft.
The traffic lights changed, making the crowd surge forward to cross, and sweeping Mr. Leron across the street with it. As they moved, the stranger was obscured from Mr. Leron's view, and he resigned the unnerving experience to be forgotten in the face of the urgency of his task. He found the plain, white doorway marked simply “101” and went in. A low, gray counter was in front of him, an elevator to either side of it, and a muscular security guard looming behind it with arms crossed. The meager illumination cast off by a single fluorescent bulb refracted through the cut glass of a light fixture overhead, it's elaborate design made out of place by the spartan decoration of the room it lit.
“Name!” the guard fairly barked at Mr. Leron, despite being no more than ten feet away.
Mr. Leron cleared his throat. “I'm-”
“Last name!” The ejaculation not only silenced Mr. Leron, but brought him up short as he crossed the room. A sneer exposed a gap between the guard's yellow molars. “Only!”
Mr. Leron's hand froze reaching into the breast pocket of his suit jacket to retrieve his wallet, perplexed at the guard's hostility. He pulled it out, flipped it open to show his identification, and held it before the guard, who seemed to scrutinize it but made no move to unfold his arms.
The guard squinted so intensely his eyes looked tightly closed. Mr. Leron waited several moments for the other's lips to stop silently moving, considerably longer than he would have thought even a very slow person would need to find the pertinent information.
“Leron?” he offered, not really hoping the proffered name would end the guard's study. However, his impatience was rewarded. The guard ceased reading (if, indeed, that was what he had been doing) and fixed his furious gaze back to the tall, thin man's eyes.
“Sign,” he growled, as though issuing a threat. Mr. Leron looked blankly back at the brutish fellow, not comprehending for a moment, before the guard looked down to the counter between them. He followed the guard's gaze and a saw clipboard with a battered red pen attached to it by a long metal chain. A single sheet of paper was held pinned to it, headed simply “Name” at the top, a grid delineating the space below into twenty or so numbered lines.
“Use the pen!” the guard's shout into his ear made Mr. Leron jump. He quickly snatched the implement up and bent to sign the page in the next empty line beneath a list of unintelligible scribbles. Setting the pen back down, he began to rise again to reengage the savage behemoth the building had chosen to employ as a security guard, when the guard's massive paw-like hand landed heavily on his wrist.
Mr. Leron looked up, terrified, to see a mystified expression on the guard's face. His grip was inescapable as the large man brought Mr. Leron's hand – the hand which the strange lizard-man had so recently scratched - up to his face, and, only adding to Mr. Leron's bewilderment, closed his eyes and drew in a deep sniff, his eyes closing, as though wafting a fine wine.
When the guard's eyes opened again Mr. Leron was even more confused by the warm, friendly smile that he offered. After the dour frown of barely-contained rage, the grin seemed strangely wrong, as though the guard's face shouldn't be physically capable of it. It brought out an inordinate number of wrinkles and laugh lines on what had been a smooth, uncreased expanse of cheek and brow. For some reason, the sudden display of fondness was more unnerving to Mr. Leron than the inexplicable anger the guard had first met him with. He wriggled his wrist free from his grip.
“Right this way, Mr. Leron,” the guard tried to sound supplicating, but the gravelly rumble of his voice was only capable of expressing so great a degree of simper. He gently ushered Mr. Leron to one of the elevators, walking with the shuffling gate of an elderly man. The doors slid open of their own accord, and the guard reached inside and pressed a button on the inner panel from a bank of its unmarked fellows with a wrinkled and wizened finger. Mr. Leron looked from the strange clueless panel of buttons within to the face of the guard and was startled. Perhaps the lighting at his counter had been too low to see properly, or maybe the elevator gave luminescence at a different, less flattering angle, but the guard appeared much older than he had originally. At first he had taken him for being in his early thirties, maybe a even a roughshod late twenties. Now, he could cl
early see this was a man in his mid-to-late sixties.
“We'll see you again, Mr. Leron,” the older man said. As the doors began to close, he leaned forward with his words a bit, and light from the elevator fell more starkly on his face. His wrinkles seemed to deepen, took him from his sixties into even more ancient territory. “On the way back down,” he managed to croak out, just before the doors shut.
Mr. Leron felt the tug at his belly that told him he was traveling upwards. A bell-like tone rang out every second or so, he supposed to mark the passing of floors as he rose, but he was confused to notice that the featureless buttons lit and went out again with each ring but not in any sequence he could perceive. First a button at the top would light, then the next would be toward the bottom, the next in the center, then further toward the top again. No pattern asserted itself to Mr. Leron's eyes. Indeed, he was sure several of them had lit more than once.
After several minutes, Mr. Leron's confusion transformed into trepidation. The