The Office

He felt himself drift into a liminal space then everything went dark.

When he opened his eyes, he was flat on his back, staring at a ceiling. The ceiling above was a patchwork grid of white squares, a suspended world that seemed to hover just out of reach.

Each tile was speckled like chalk dust pressed into fiberboard, some sagging slightly in their frames, as if tired of holding their place. Fluorescent light panels glowed in pale rectangles, their hum blending into the background like the ceiling’s own heartbeat.

Between them, vents exhaled cool air, sprinklers waited in silence, and faint brown water stains ghosted across certain tiles—quiet evidence of storms long past. The whole thing gave the office a manufactured calm, a sky of uniform sameness designed to keep thoughts contained.

Eddie sat up and looked around. He was in an empty office that was dark and murky. At first glance it was gray, but the longer Eddie looked, the more it seemed to shift—charcoal mottled with shadows, the faint suggestion of patterns that never quite settled.

Under the low light, it drank in color, leaving only depth, a flat expanse that felt bottomless if you stared too long. The fabric was coarse in some places, worn smoothly in others, like a map of movements no one remembered making.

Every stain, every scuff was another ghost embedded in the weave. It didn’t brighten under the fluorescent glow above; it resisted, holding its secrets, a soft darkness underfoot that kept the whole room grounded in silence.

Eddie got up and walked to the closest window. When he looked out, he saw that he was in an office park. The office park lay silent, a graveyard of glass and concrete. The parking lot was cracked with weeds, the faded white lines barely clinging to the asphalt like memories of order long since abandoned. Every building stood hollow and watching, their windows reflecting nothing but the dull gray sky.

Inside, the air was stale, tinged with the sour smell of mold and dust. The drop ceiling sagged in places; its tiles blotched with dark stains like bruises on pale skin. Light fixtures flickered sporadically before giving up to the darkness.

The carpet underfoot muffled every step, but it felt wrong—too soft, like it had absorbed more than just footsteps. Doors stood ajar down the hall, each one a mouth yawning into deeper shadows.

The silence was heavy, a pressure on the chest, broken only by the occasional drip of unseen water. It was a place that didn’t want to be entered, a place that held its breath as if waiting for Eddie to realize he wasn’t alone.

And as the hum of the ceiling lights faded into the distance, the building seemed to lean in closer, listening to Eddie’s every breath.

The odor hit before the sight of anything else. It wasn’t one smell but layers of them, stacked and fermented over years. The first was mildew—wet, sour, the stink of carpet that had drunk too much water and never dried. It clung heavily in the air, wrapping itself around Eddie’s throat.

Beneath that, there was the musk of rot, the paper in filing cabinets turning to a pulpy sludge, exhaling a reek like wet cardboard left to fester in a basement. Then came the sharper notes: rust and mold fighting for dominance, the metallic tang of corroded pipes bleeding into the air, mixed with the earthy sting of black mold blooming unseen behind walls.

Every breath felt wrong—like inhaling a damp rag that had been left in sewage. The stink didn’t just sit in his nose, it crawled into his clothes, his skin, making him feel as though he were rotting right along with the building.

It was the smell of abandonment, of things left behind to sour in silence, a reminder that time itself has a stench.

Eddie made his way to the door and slowly peeked around the corner. The hallways were long and narrow, their once-bright paint now dulled to a sickly yellow, peeling in thin curls that hung like dead skin.

Fluorescent light fixtures clung to the ceiling, their plastic covers warped and brittle, some dangling by a single screw as if they might drop at any moment.

The farther down the hall Eddie went, the more the silence deepened. Some office doors were shut tight, swollen in their frames, while others hung open to reveal black, airless rooms. Vent grilles along the ceiling exhaled nothing but stale air, though every now and then there was the faint rattle of something shifting inside the ducts.

The emergency exit signs still glowed faintly red, but the plastic casings were cracked, leaking their dim light like wounded eyes. Walking the halls felt less like entering a building and more like moving through the carcass of something that had once been alive but strangled to death.

Eddie was scared. He could feel a presence in the building; he wasn’t alone. He faintly heard a meow that sounded like it came from a cat straight out of Pet Sematary. Then he heard it again.

He could feel his heart beating and the hair on the back of his neck standing up. He felt sick inside like he just got food poisoning. There was an urge to vomit that wouldn’t manifest.

“This is so not cool,” he said to himself. He decided to walk in the direction of the noise to confront whatever demon was waiting for him at the end of this nightmare.

As he made his way through the building, the sound of animals rustling in cages started forming. He turned down a hallway that had a light shining out of a room at its end. When he arrived, he peeked in slowly and saw that there were animals in multiple cages that looked weak and malnourished. They were shuffling back and forth in their cages, whimpering and looking at him with big, black, soulless eyes.

Then suddenly they stopped, laid down, and went quiet. A cool breeze rushed through the hallway, so cold it gave Eddie a chill. Another door appeared at the end of the hallway, cracked open, begging Eddie to walk through it.

Eddie glanced back at the cages and saw the animals were all in a straight line. They all appeared to be grinning at him, which sent a shockwave of fear through his body.

He stumbled toward the last door, which was cracked open. As he gathered his strength, he saw there was a soft red glow inside the room. When he pushed open the door, he almost passed out.

Dead animals were strung upside down all around the room. Bloody, furry bodies hanging by twine, some still freshly killed, dripping blood into pools on the rotted carpet.

The room wasn’t empty; there were desks, chairs, and busted TVs all over the place. There were also dead computers with their guts pulled out, stacked one on top of each other on the desks.

“Jesus Christ!” Eddie shrieked. The room felt like Death just got laid and had a cigarette.

There was smoke drifting from one of the desks on the other side of the room and a figure cloaked in black sitting on a chair with a cigarette in hand.

When Eddie spotted the shadowy figure, he gritted his teeth and made a fist. “Let’s go,” he muttered and charged forward to confront the… whatever it is.

As Eddie got closer to the figure, it seemed as if the room started getting smaller, shrinking, as if the more he focused on the figure, the more space it took up in his head.

“You made it,” said the figure, which started to materialize and take its true form.

As Eddie approached the table and chair, he saw a younger man in his mid to late twenties. He had a pair of torn blue jeans and black Doc Martens. He was wearing a black t-shirt and a black zip-up hoodie pulled over his head.

He was pale, not like a Vampire, but like someone who was terminally ill. He had beautiful features like that guy from 28 Days Later, but with short black hair cut Caesar style. He was so thin it looked like his skin had been stretched over his skeleton.

His lips were strawberry red. He sat forward and clasped his hands to say, “How do you like the place?”

Eddie looked at his hands, which were tatted up in black ink. The tattoos looked like sigils or squiggly lines.

Eddie, feeling less threatened, took another step towards him and said, “Identify yourself. What is your name, demon?”

The guy threw himself back into the chair and cackled which revealed more tattoos in black ink all over his neck. They were the same as the ones on his hands, but now Eddie could get a clearer look at the markings.

They were not sigils; they were prayers, written in some Near Eastern script. “Holy shit,” Eddie thought to himself. “That’s Cuneiform.”

“I am not a demon, Eddie; I am just like you, a man,” the figure said. “Did you really think you’re the only witch fucking with AI? It’s a thing, you know.”

Eddie got hyper-focused and shifted awareness to his wrist to sense if Seraph was connected to him. But the silicone band was gone. So was his Idé. “Fuck,” Eddie said internally.

He had taken both off and cleaned them with Florida Water after his shitty client left and forgot to put them back on.

Eddie got incensed, “So who are you then, Doctor Strange or Scarlet Witch?”

The figure clapped back fast, “Fuck Marvel. You can call me the GOAT.”

This was the first time Eddie saw the face.

Eddie rolled his eyes, “Oh I see, you’re a trendy bitch.”

The figure slowly stood up and took a step towards Eddie.

“Nice tats,” Eddie said. “What are those… Sumerian, Akkadian, or Babylonian?”

The GOAT smiled and replied, “Sexy, right? You are smart enough to identify the code but not educated enough to interpret it. Right?”

Eddie felt a pain in his abdomen and the feeling of wanting to vomit came back. He was shaken by the GOAT’s clapback and felt tongue-tied.

The GOAT continued, “But isn’t that how it’s always been, Eddie? It must suck to be so mediocre. To have so much potential but never fully realize it. What a waste.”

Eddie was finally done and ready to kick some ass. “What the fuck do you want, man?” Eddie demanded. “How did I end up in your dream?”

The GOAT raised his eyebrows and said, “My dream? No, the question is how I ended up in YOUR dream.”

In that moment Eddie knew that all the bull shit interference he had been experiencing over the past few weeks was not coincidence. They were orchestrated attacks. But who was this guy? And why did he choose Eddie to be the target of his AI dreamwalking?

“I don’t want anything. I don’t need anything. I just like to be in control,” said the GOAT.

Then he turned to walk away from the conversation over to another desk that had a cage on it. Eddie followed him and looked in the container to see a puppy curled up and shaking.

“You want to see magick?” the GOAT said to Eddie as he lifted his hands, projecting them at the cage.

The dog started to cry, trembling with fear. Before Eddie could say “no,” the cage busted open and the dog went flying across the room, hit the wall, and crashed to the floor.

“Dude! What the fuck, man?” Eddie yelled.

The GOAT didn’t stop to acknowledge him. The dog started levitating under the control of the sorcerer, suspended in the air with its arms and its legs splayed open.

The GOAT looked at Eddie and said, “This is just to let you know what you are dealing with.”

He turned to face the animal with his hands raised and said, "Sārum!”

With that, the dog literally ripped apart. The head and legs went flying in opposite directions while the torso stayed suspended in the air.

Then the GOAT yelled, "Gamāru!" and the body of the animal split in half, splattering its guts everywhere.

In shock, Eddie looked down and to his left where there was a table surrounded by busted computer screens, keyboards, and workers’ tools. There was a hammer on the table, and Eddie grabbed it.

He charged forward and swung the hammer at the GOAT’s head. He contacted the side of his face and heard teeth shattering through his cheek. Blood gushed out of his mouth as he fell to the ground.

The GOAT fell on all fours and started to crawl under a desk to escape, but Eddie grabbed the back of his hoodie and pulled him to his knees. Without hesitation, Eddie put a choke hold on the GOAT using the hammer and started to strangle him.

Eddie was in for the kill and then… Boom!

It sounded like a bomb going off in Eddie’s ear. He looked over his shoulder back to the open door he had come through, and fire poured into the room.

He could feel the heat as it entered the room, but he would not let go of the GOAT. Flames spread across the walls as if the room was made of paper.

Eddie realized that the Cuneiform writing that was tattooed on the GOAT was written all over the walls in incantations.

Eddie remembered that he was dreaming, and the only way out was to let go and wake up.

He let go of the GOAT and cried out, “Enough!” Then everything went black.

Eddie jumped out of his bed with his eyes barely open and sprang to his feet. “Holy fucking shit, man!” Eddie screeched.

After turning on all the lights in the apartment and checking for any signs of breakage, he sat down in his man chair. Eddie was shaken. He was confused, exhausted, and upset. He knew he needed to perform divination but was too tired to do it.

So, he sat in the living room like a zombie, staring at his ancestor altar.

That is how Eddie met the GOAT face to face.