Chapter Text
It wasn't a bad job, working security for the Lukas building. Sure, personality wise, Martin wasn't exactly what one might expect for a security guard. (Melanie had found the whole thing hilarious when he'd told her he'd gotten the job, and he couldn't really blame her.) But he was big and tall and could cut an imposing silhouette when he needed to, and apparently that was all the job required.
He wasn't sure what he'd actually do if he did catch someone trying to break in. All he had to defend himself was a torch that was bright enough to rival the sun. But in the six months he'd been working there, he'd never seen anyone on his rounds. Not any would be criminals or even janitorial staff or office workers burning the midnight oil.
Sometimes he wondered if he was the only person in the building.
The odds of that were slim to none obviously, he'd just had a knack for avoiding people. Not that he minded, after the endless string of temp jobs he'd had, a job where he had virtually no one to deal with was a blessing. Not to mention the significant pay upgrade.
Really, it wasn't a bad job at all.
At least until the worms started showing up. Horrible little inch long silver and black things, that made an audible popping sound and oozed a dark fluid that smelled like sweet rot and damp earth when he squished them.
It was only one or two he saw on a shift at first, but he kept seeing more and more of the things and in spite of how many notes he left, e-mails he sent and phone calls he made, nothing seemed to be done about them.
"One of them bit me, Melanie!" Martin cried, slapping his wounded hand on the café table for emphasis, and regretting it as a twinge of pain made its way up his arm.
Melanie winced in sympathy.
"How did it bite you? I'm pretty sure worms don't have teeth." she replied, taking a sip of her coffee.
"Well these ones do! It was crawling across my desk and it- it leaped at my face! I tried to swat it away but somehow the damn thing latched onto the back of my hand! I think it was trying to burrow under my skin or something, but I pulled it off before it could get very far."
He shuddered, saying it out loud. He really, really, hoped he would never find out what would happen if one of them did manage to get inside him.
"I'm telling you, these aren't normal worms, Melanie."
"Obviously not. They don't seem like anything supernatural either though. At least not anything I ever came across. I'll ask Georgie if she knows anything when I get home."
"Thanks." Martin sighed, resting his elbows on the table. "Who knows, maybe they're just some genetically modified worms that got loose and the reason they haven't called an exterminator is because they don't want it getting out to the public that they've been developing bio weapons or something."
Melanie laughed. "Maybe you'll get superpowers from the one that bit you."
"Eurgh. What sort of superpowers would I get from a worm? Why couldn't my job be infested with spiders, I like spiders. Besides, there's already precedent for cool spider based superpowers." he sighed and scrubbed at his face.
"If this keeps up, I think I might quit. Ridiculously good salary be damned."
Melanie hummed sympathetically. "I told you it was too good to be true, but did you listen to your best friend, disgraced youtuber and co-producer of the best rated ghost podcast three years in a row, Melanie Barker-King? Obviously not."
Martin rolled his eyes. "I mean you're kind of my only friend sooo-"
"So I'm your best friend by default." She said, grinning and tapping his shin with her cane. "Look. If shit's getting weird I'd say it's time to get out of there. Me and Georgie could probably give you a hand til you found something else."
Martin shook his head, the idea made his skin crawl almost as much as the worms did. It wasn't because he had anything against Melanie, quite the opposite. He'd just been so used to doing things on his own for so long that even the idea of someone offering him any kind of help didn't sit well with him.
"The podcast money can't be that good."
"You'd be surprised. I mean every time one of us has to do an ad it feels like a little bit of our souls are being destroyed, but that's capitalism for you."
Martin laughed. "Yeah. Look, we'll see. Like I said, if this keeps up I'm out, but I'd still like to collect this month's pay first."
Melanie signed.
"Just be careful, yeah?" she said, fidgeting with her heart shaped sunglasses.
"Always am."
Martin set his bag and travel mug on the desk and dropped into the chair with a heavy sigh, his many notes cluttered around the computers remained just as ignored and untouched as they had when he'd left that morning.
He didn't bother taking his jumper off, no matter what time of year it was it felt like they always had the aircon running. Martin always ran warm, even more so in the few years since he'd started testosterone, so he didn't usually mind the cold, but the building was chilly, even for him. He hadn't heard anything from anyone about dress codes or not covering his uniform yet, so until someone said something he'd be keeping his jumper on, thank you very much.
He hadn't slept much when he'd gotten home, he couldn't shake the feeling of something crawling just beneath his skin even though he knew he's gotten the worm out and he'd checked and double checked every single inch of his skin just to make sure any other ones hadn't gotten him while he was distracted.
After logging into the system he took a sip of his tea, pulled a notebook out of his bag and settled in for another night of well paid tedium.
Martin checked the clock a few hours later, and knew he should have made his rounds already, but after his experience last night, he was less than keen on venturing out of the safety of the office. Unfortunately for him, his hand was forced.
For the briefest moment he saw a flicker of red and grey move across one of the cameras. He made the view fullscreen, and of course he couldn't scrub through the footage to see what it was.
It was probably nothing. The corridor the camera looked down led toward the building's basement. The same corridor that had the most worms as far as he'd noticed.
He absently scratched at the plaster covering his worm bite.
It could just be nothing and he could ignore it and pretend he hadn't seen anything.
But if it was something and something happened, or someone got hurt, then it would be his arse on the line.
He was about to get up and get it over with, when he saw something else move across the camera's field of view. A shadow, distinct only by the fact that it was so much darker than the surrounding gloom. It was only a split second before the footage corrupted and Martin could hear static and had the distinct feeling he was being watched by whatever was on the other end of the camera.
The cameras didn't have audio.
These were all signs that Martin should just get the hell out of there and never look back. Sure his salary was more than generous, but he still did not get paid nearly enough to deal with whatever spooky bullshit he was dealing with. At least Melanie would get to say she told him so.
And yet, once the distortion cleared and the static faded, Martin found himself grabbing his torch and a small fire extinguisher to use as an improvised weapon just in case.
He made his way to the corridor in question and while for once he couldn't see the worms in question, he could hear them and their awful, horrible, squelchy, wiggling sounds.
The door down to the basement was open and of course the stairwell was pitch dark.
He could still turn back, still run away and find something else.
Martin switched his torch on and despite the blinding brightness of it, it barely cut through the dark.
Down the steps he went, and as he did so, it seemed to get warmer, almost humid. A stark contrast to the rest of the chilly office building. The worm smell became more overpowering the further he got, he could almost taste it and had to cover his nose and mouth with his jumper to stop himself from retching. The noise they made grew louder.
At the bottom of the stairs he caught sight of something moving out of the corner of his eye.
He shone his torch in the direction and caught sight of a pale woman in a ratty grey overcoat and a red dress.
"H- Hello? This is security, you- you really shouldn't be down here. If you come upstairs and leave now I won't call the police." He hated how shaky his voice sounded.
The woman… twitched. That wasn't quite the right word for how she moved, but Martin couldn't compare it to anything else. She turned to face him, letting her overcoat fall as she did.
He screamed.
Every inch of her flesh was pitted with dark holes, her teeth were black and rotted.
He couldn't tell if there was anything left of her eyes.
Worms crawled in and out and across her body, some dropping to the floor in a writhing mass at her feet.
'Can you hear their song?' a thousand tiny voices speaking as one asked him.
Martin couldn't hear anything except for the squelching of the worms as the pile surrounding her grew larger. But he could feel a draw, some nagging voice in the back of his head that was tired of being lonely, tired of being everything his mum ever said he was, that was desperate for some form of love and companionship, that would willingly let that love consume him.
"I-"
The worms surged forward, he stumbled back feeling sick dread pool in the pit of his stomach, certain he was going to die.
Martin tripped over his own feet and fell. By some. Miracle he managed to keep his grip on the extinguisher, but his torch went flying, a pinprick of light that sailed into the distance and landed hard with a sick crack, going dark.
His skull made a similar noise when it hit the concrete. He might've blacked out for the briefest moment, but it was too dark to tell. His head swam as he tried to sit up, fumbling with the extinguisher. He wasn't sure what he was trying to do, maybe he just wanted to have the illusion of going down fighting.
He managed to pull the pin out and squeezed the trigger, pointing the hose in the direction the worms sounded loudest from.
He didn't know what to expect, but it certainly wasn't to hear the worms shrivel when they came in contact with the gas, or for the woman to scream in too many tiny voices.
The extinguisher was not as full as he thought, not that he really knew how full it was supposed to be or how long he expected the gas to last, but all too soon it sputtered out and Martin lost the little defence he had.
It was then that a shadow, darker than the surrounding black, flowed between him and presumably where the woman was. And then eyes started to appear one by one, with colours ranging from the mundane blue, brown, green and hazel to jewel bright purples, reds and golds and every color in between, and not all of them looked human either.
He was terrified and in too much pain to question why he could see the eyes when everything else was pitch black, but the eyes could see him too, down to the very core of his being, peeling away his carefully kept walls to see the shivering pile of insecurities that hid beneath.
He thought the mass of eyes might be speaking, but it wasn't to him and he couldn't hear them over the ringing in his ears anyway. Whatever they were saying reached some kind of peak and the basement was flooded in a vibrant, otherworldly green light, and that was about the time Martin blacked out.
He came to on the floor of his office, his head throbbing in time with his heartbeat. If it wasn't for that he might have been able to convince himself it was all a bad dream.
The smell of ink was overwhelming, and he had no idea why until he forced himself to sit up and caught sight of a dark stain on his shoulder. He pulled his jumper off to examine it more closely. The smear of pitch black stood out stark against the pale blue wool.
"What the..?"
He grabbed the edge of his desk and hauled himself to his feet.
Sitting atop the keyboard was a note with a smear of the same substance and scratchy handwriting.
'You won't have to worry about the worms anymore. Or her. Sorry about your jumper.'
Martin dropped into his chair before his legs gave out on him and grabbed the bottle of paracetamol he kept there and took a couple, washing them down with his now cold tea.
He should fill out an incident report. But what the hell would he put? Basement haunted by a woman made of worms, but it's actually fine now because a person who might actually just be a monster made of ink and eyes stared at her really hard and then was kind enough to carry him back upstairs rather than leave him in the basement.
Which surprised him the most out of everything that had happened. He wasn't exactly light.
God, even he didn't believe it when he put it like that.
But it wasn't like anyone ever read anything around here anyway. But knowing his luck, he'd get written up for not filling one out, so with a grumbling sigh he grabbed the form he needed.
He left it on the desk for whomever the day shift person was, sent Melanie a voice message asking her to meet him at their usual cafe when she got up, or as soon as she was able. She'd said her circadian rhythm had been nearly nonexistent since she'd lost her sight and as a result, the hours she kept were nearly as odd as the ones Martin did. So the odds of her being awake at almost four in the morning were pretty likely.
Then he left.
Sure he had nearly two hours left of his shift, but after everything he'd been through tonight, he deserved a break.
.