The Eternity Project

24

NEW YORK COUNTY SUPREME COURTHOUSE, NEW YORK CITY



Maria Coltrane was not used to working alone late at night, but the unusually busy day and the extra workload it had entailed had forced her to stay inside the building long after most of her colleagues had left for home.

The usually busy halls, corridors and court rooms were silent and still, half of the lights extinguished. Those that still burned cast pools of light that glowed like enclaves in a dark universe as she walked down a corridor to a study on the fourth floor.

The footfalls of her heels on the tiles sounded hollow as she strode with a thick set of files clasped against her chest. Paperwork was not Maria’s strong suit, and it had taken her an hour longer than usual to go through every single page of the day’s transcripts and clerks’ notes, scanning them into digital back-up files and storing them in a national database.

Maria pushed open the door of the study and walked inside. A large room with a long, central table, it was most often used by clerks to collate trial case files for attorneys as they prepared to prosecute or defend the legions of convicts churning endlessly through the legal system. The door whispered shut behind her, then clicked as the latch caught.

The windows looked out onto a darkened plaza between the court and Pearl Street, streetlights glowing and traffic lights flowing silently below. Maria watched the traffic for a few moments, feeling slightly more comfortable at the sight of so many people so close by, and then turned away.

She sat down at the table with the files in front of her and opened the first. All that remained for her to do was stamp each file as having been electronically archived, and then she could file them for recycling and leave the building. She methodically began marking each file and was halfway through when out of the corner of her eye she glimpsed somebody peek in through the door’s window as though to wave to her or say goodnight. Maria glanced up and the stamp froze in motion.

The window was empty. Maria frowned, uncertain. Above her head she saw the lights flicker briefly. A splatter of rain hammered on the windows to her left, and she could just make out gusts of wind driving sheets of rain through nearby trees in the plaza.

Suddenly anxious that she might find herself in the building during a power-outage, Maria hurriedly stamped the rest of the files and then piled them up in a stack ready to carry down to the archive. She was busy piling them up when the lights flickered again. Maria hesitated, looking at the stack of files. The archive was in the basement and it would take her several minutes to travel down there, place the files for the archivist, return to the rotunda and exit the building. A long walk, alone through the building.

Rain drummed on the study windows again as though trying to beat its way inside. Maria decided that she would come in early in the morning and take the files downstairs then, when there were other people about. Although the court was not somewhere renowned for being spooky, something was already gnawing away at her nerves as she slipped her coat on and turned for the study door. The atmosphere had changed, as though suddenly charged. She could feel it somewhere on the periphery of her senses, like the feeling of being watched – tangible but somehow ephemeral, too.

Maria reached the door of the study and swung it open.

It wasn’t a noise that caught her attention, more a soft fluttering of air pressure in the room as though somebody had opened a window. The change in pressure caused the small hairs on the back of her neck to stand proud and a tingling sensation to crawl like icy water trickling down her spine.

Maria turned to look back into the room as her chest seemed to suddenly freeze solid within her.

The files were lying open, scattered across the table in disarray, and the thousands of individual pages were fluttering upward toward the ceiling in a swirling vortex as though a tornado had swept into the room from outside. The countless pages spiraled upward and spilled out across the ceiling as Maria felt her legs quiver beneath her. She saw her breath condensing on the suddenly cold air and felt blind, primal terror cripple her limbs.

Maria staggered backwards out of the study and saw the door close in front of her, and then she turned and ran.

She dashed down the corridor, following it as it turned toward a pair of elevators, the doors open and inviting. Maria ran harder as the light around her in the corridor seemed to change. She looked back over her shoulder and saw the ceiling lights going out one after the other, accelerating toward her as though something was draining the power from them as it moved. In the flickering light, she saw air condensing into clouds of vapor that raced toward her, like the shockwave of an aircraft breaking the sound barrier. She felt her hair rise up as a static charge built up around her and the air froze.

Maria shrieked, the sound that came out of her throat sounding alien to her as she plunged into the elevator and hit the button for the ground floor. The doors slid shut as she watched the lights flickering out, the darkness and the demonic cloud racing toward her at impossible speed as the doors finally closed.

Maria stood inside the elevator, holding her face with her hands and listening to the sound of her heart hammering against the walls of her chest and her breath rasping through her throat. The elevator remained silent, the light still glowing in the roof, but it did not move.

‘Come on,’ she whispered, hitting the button again. ‘Come on, move!’

She hit the GROUND FLOOR button hard a third time and suddenly the elevator groaned as it shifted, but the movement was violent and caused Maria to stagger sideways. The lights flickered above her like strobes in a tiny, hellish nightclub as the elevator shrieked, a deafening cacophony of metal on metal. A wall panel beside her head burst inward as though something of unspeakable strength was trying to bludgeon its way in.

Maria screamed and hurled herself to the opposite side of the elevator, only for the panels there to jolt inward. She whirled and saw the rear wall crumple as the entire elevator suddenly began pushing in toward her, the floor beneath her feet crunching as the tiles split. She fell sideways and hit the elevator wall as it smashed inward, and in blind panic she began hitting the walls back.

‘Help me! Somebody please help me!’

The walls crushed inward to the screech of rending metal as the translucent plastic light panel above her head shattered and crashed down upon her. The light sparked violently and shattered, spilling particles of searing-hot phosphor that rained down upon her hair and face and hands, scorching her skin.

In the pitch-black of the writhing elevator, Maria heard the doors buckle and warp as they were crushed inward. A faint glow of light spilled into the elevator from the corridor outside, the ceiling lights flickering wildly.


Maria launched herself toward the light and screamed at the top of her lungs for help, battering the immovable metal doors with her bare hands. Some distant, cowering part of her awareness saw the blood smearing the doors with each blow of her fists as the skin was flayed from her knuckles, smelled the acrid stench of scorched hair and skin that filled the elevator.

The entire elevator car crushed down around her, forcing her to her knees on the uneven floor as it jerked upward, and she cried out with the last of her will as the twisted, warped ceiling pushed down on her head, the jagged metal shards crushing down unbearably hard against her body and forcing her into an awkward crouch.

With her hands she gripped the doors and tried one last time to force them open, and managed to force her head through the gap.

‘Help me!’

A pyramid of warped metal crushed down into her back and pierced the skin, driving her pelvis down onto the jagged elevator floor as shards of torn metal drove down between her ribs. Maria shrieked in agony and then something plunged through her skull with immense force and her world vanished into blackness.