Peyton sat in a jungle of empty cubicles on the top floor of one of the tallest buildings in New York, in her new red dress and designer pumps, carefully studying a plethora of photos of mangled bodies. She heard a sharp and loud CRACK of thunder and looked up from her desk, out the sprawling glass windows overlooking Manhattan and saw massive bolts of lightning rip apart the black sky. She averted her attention back to her desk and checked her phone for new messages, she was expecting a call back from the police chief on the latest report on the city’s latest serial killer; five dead in three weeks, and the police still had no leads. Ignoring the five messages from her roommate, Janine, asking her when she would be home, Peyton set the phone back on her desk and continued on in her research. Thunder and lightning clamored and flashed a second time, demanding her attention, but she was deep in thought. Peyton reviewed the information she had gathered so far about the five people who had died in these suspiciously similar murders, all of them were found hours after their death in a small, confined space, and all of their bodies had been unrecognizably mutilated. Judy Glacier, Dan Donaldson, Penelope Grimes, Peter Jose, and Laura Frannie were all victims of these grotesque murder cases. All five were young, ambitious career-driven people who had recently come to the city, and were doing very well in their endeavors. That was the only part that frightened Peyton, not the endless amount of pictures of people with their chests ripped open, or the details about their blood soaked clothing, but the fact that any one of those people could have easily been one of her friends.
Overwrought at not having unearthed any new information for her story, the newspaper reporter decided to leave the desolate office building and get a few hours of sleep before returning again in the morning. She walked out of the office and closed the door behind her. It seemed that she was the last person in the whole building, silence rang around her. Her heels clacked down to the end of the long, dark hallway, where there were four elevators patiently waiting for her. She took the second one from the left, because it conveniently opened just as she reached out to press the button, and she was surprised to find there was an implausibly tall man already inside. He had dark bags under his eyes, and a black baseball cap hung gloomily atop his head, casting a shadow over his face. When she walked through the elevator doors, the man glanced up at her quickly, and then stared back down at his feet awkwardly, avoiding eye contact. The elevator rattled and shook as it moved down to the next floor, and just before the doors opened Peyton heard people screaming, petrified, just a few feet away on the other side of the sleek, streamlined elevator doors. Once again, she found herself glancing over at the maladroit man to the right of her, whose eyes were still fixed upon his big, brown, clown-like shoes.
The whole elevator shaft seemed to quiver in fear as the door opened, and another monstrous man stalked through the doors, suddenly making the elevator seem much less capacious. The second man nodded to the first man and went to stand next to him. The doors had begun to close elegantly when five, transparent, amorphous figures, each vaguely resembling one of the five murder victims, glided into the elevator shaft. Peyton’s head snapped over to the two other men to make sure that she wasn’t the only one seeing this, when suddenly the second man snapped his fingers, the lights went out, and the elevator shot forty floors down to the lobby in a split second.
Six o’clock on Wednesday morning, the first employees of Harrold Publications were trickling into the vast Manhattan offices. One short, plump man dressed in a beige overcoat was going about his daily routine; he had walked the dog, taken his usual ice-cold shower, and purchased his coffee and Danish from the corner bakery, and now he was going to take the same elevator he used everyday, the second from the left, pressed the button to go up, and expected to hear the usual rumble of the elevator descending down the shaft. He did not hear that usual rumble, but instead heard a cell phone ringing on the other side of the door. He assumed that someone was in the elevator and that the doors would open in a moment and he would step in and proceed on with his day. However, the phone did not stop ringing, the doors did not open, and he did not proceed on with his day. The portly man went over to the security guard near the front of the lobby, and told him that something appeared to be wrong with elevator. The security guard nodded his head and advised the man to use on of the other elevators. He took the guard’s advice and strode back over to the line of elevators, pressed the button next to the first elevator on left to go “up,” and was happy to hear the usual rumble of the elevator descending down the shaft. As this was happening, he looked over to his right and noticed the security guard’s perplexed expression.
The guard was pressing the button and banging on the door as the cell phone continued to ring from inside the elevator. Soon, other security guards, janitors, and maintenance men of the building had gathered around and were making a significant effort to pry the elevator doors open. By this time, the round man had stopped to watch the scene unfold and forgotten about taking his first elevator from the left up to the highest floor. Just as a heavy flow of Harrold Publications employees began to surge into the office building, and a crowd was forming around the unusual scene, the men were beginning to have some luck opening the elevator.
At last, the men had forced the doors open, and discovered the mutilated body of a young woman. Her long brown hair sprawled across the floor, smattered with blood, her arm almost appeared to have been gnawed on, and her legs, which were going in two different, very unnatural positions, appeared to be broken. Lying next to her open palm was a cell phone, which had been ringing all along, and the words “Call from Janine” were flashing frantically across the front.
