The Flies

None of the blocks that were on my beat were ever really clean. That was one of the things about being a social worker; you got used to being sent to places that no human should ever be forced to live in. But I tell you, Nelson Towers was something special. 

There were many things wrong with it. The smell for one, a singular disgusting putrid odour that seemed to come from the walls and the floors. 

But the worst thing? All the flies.

You’d have thought someone would have tried to do something to change this, I mean other than us lowly welfarers. We all talked about the place. But we also knew that any money would have to come from the top. And the people at the top are only interested in one thing. 

Their own kind.

Nelson Towers was one of many blocks in the area that the council had thrown up quickly and cheaply. The sickly grey monoliths reached into the sky like they were trying to block out the sun, paeans to brutalism that would have been worshipped had they been built seventy years earlier. A closer look shows the cracks that appeared not long after their construction, the result of Britain’s rising temperatures baking the dry concrete skin, which of course received no refurbishment. No budget. Council’s orders.

The people who live in Nelson Towers have no money and no social standing. Some of them complain once in a while, but anyone who tries to rock the boat tends to disappear. I have several clients that live there, and today I’m paying a visit to one of the newest, a gentleman called Mr. Arbogast. He had been in the army for decades, but his latest tour was cut short when he was caught in an ambush. Lost his right leg and had three bullets hit his lungs.

There was no family to speak of, and all of the pittance he got from the government went on treatment. Soon it was all gone, and he found himself here, the poor bastard.

I walk up to the glass door, the obligatory spider-web of cracked glass spreading across the right pane, and I hit the buzzer for his flat. Number five, floor seventeen. 

No answer.

I press it again, harder, and a little bit of translucent goo drips on to my finger. I step back and look up at the block while absentmindedly wiping the slime on my coat. There’s no choice in the matter; I have to check on him. I go back and hit the service button. The door unlocks with a rusty clank, and I know instantly it’s not going to be my day as I step into the hallway. A big out of order sign adorns the faded steel doors of the only lift, so I’m resigned to having to do all seventeen floors on foot.

I catch my breath as I finally reach Arbogast’s floor. As my breathing pattern returns to normal, I step towards the door and rap my knuckles on it, avoiding the large number five. It was brass when it was installed, but is now a grimy and translucent green. 

Like before, there’s no answer. I knock again. Nothing. I call my boss.

“No,” I say patiently, “he’s not answering.” 

“Don’t worry about it,” says the suspiciously kind voice of my manager. She’s normally the bitch from hell. 

“Really? You think I should go?”

“Yes, just leave it. You’ve done all you need to.”

She hangs up, and I stare at the door and the filth that covers it. I’m not entirely sure what’s been splashed against that door, but I’m sure it’s a health hazard. I turn around to leave, but of course my conscience gets the better of me. 

I pull out my wallet as I head back to the door. Another thing about Nelson Towers and its parasitic brethren, the locks haven’t been changed for years. I take out my PayMate card and slide it down the edge of the door and onto the lock. The wood drools something as I shimmy the card around and the door suddenly gives way, sending me stumbling into the lounge. I trip over the brown oval rug, a special from Pickfords before they and everyone else went bust, but as I catch myself and stand up, I can’t help noticing something is wrong.

The rug is clean.

I look up and the room is bare. A bookcase here, a sideboard there, an old lime green comfy chair, and the rug. 

What the fuck is going on?

I walk into the kitchen. It looks like it’s ready for a viewing. I open the cupboards, nothing. Not even teabags. The bedroom and bathroom are the same. What before was dirty and lived-in looks fresh. Almost liveable.

Almost.

I walk back into the lounge and stare at the bookcase. It’s half-full, but they’re still his books. The usual military history tomes, guides to helicopters and infantry weapons, along with a couple of books on jazz. Untouched.

I sit down in the chair, perplexed. I can’t get my head around what might have happened. There’s no indication that his situation has changed, and if he’d been ambulanced, they’d have told me straight away. Well, at least within a week.

I get up to leave and head for the door when my eye suddenly catches something. It’s in the right-hand corner, by the sideboard. There’s a radiator next to it, and there is something behind the off-white metal that isn’t part of it, a brown triangle. I kneel down by the sideboard and put my hand behind the oddly warm radiator, reaching around in the space between it and the wall. I find something flat and push it down, making it fall out onto the cheap vinyl floor.

It’s an envelope. A letter. The ominous drab brown colour means it’s from the government. 

There’s no way I’m not going to open it, so I quickly tear it apart and look at the document inside. I skim, it’s a standard letter about submitting his biometrics and the standard entry fee for the next local election. Then I look at the date.

Two days ago. 

That means it would have arrived yesterday. Or today. 

I look around for anything else that might have fallen down somewhere, my search getting more and more frantic. There was nothing.

I call my boss again.

“A letter, John? From today? Hidden?”

She paused.

“That is strange.”

“Do you want me to come back to the office?”

“No, no. I tell you what, stay there and I’ll come over and meet you and we can look further into this.”

She hangs up. I begin the long trudge downstairs and walk outside into the bracing wind. The sun is setting, I’d been there longer than I thought. 

I have no idea what my boss is going to do. Realistically, there’s not much I can do but wait, given that she’s on her way. I hope she won’t fire me for breaking and entering, but I think she’ll understand I only did it because I thought it was an emer-

My thoughts are cut off as I hear a blistering scream from somewhere. And another. 

I look up at the tower, no one even opens a curtain. Maybe they’re used to hearing them. Kids, I guess. But as much as I try to ignore it, something eats away at my brain, telling me I should investigate. I don’t know where to start, though. It sounded almost like it came from the building itself.

Just as I’m about to go back, a pair of headlights suddenly pierce the now black night. My boss. I could tell by the fancy new Range Rover with a personalised number plate. But as the vehicle pulls up and the engine stops, I see she isn’t alone. 

A balding white man with an awful moustache steps out of the passenger side. His suit looks cheap but it’s at least clean and ironed, which means he isn’t one of us. My boss adjusts her thick-rimmed glasses as they walk towards me, or rather past me.

“This is Assistant Commissioner Crosby,” she says as he offers a quick nod before walking towards the main door. “I told him about your letter and he wanted to investigate personally.”

“Let’s get to it,” Crosby says, his flat accent making it difficult to work out where he’s from. He enters the building and walks straight towards the lift.

“Don’t bother, I said, it’s out-”

He grabs one end of the sign and rips it off the doors.

“Of order.”

There’s a smirk on my boss’ face as we walk into the lift, and I try to stay to the back, away from a disgusting brown stain that smells like a mix of copper and shit. Crosby uses a key to open a small door underneath the scratched control panel. Inside is another button, and as he presses it, I catch a glimpse of the label. It says “Lower Basement.” 

“I didn’t know there was a lower level,” I say as our descent slowly begins.

“Not many do,” Crosby replies, staring at me before he turns back to the doors. “Although those that come down here for the first time always end up saying one thing.”

“What’s that?” I say as the lift comes to a shuddering halt. I put my hand over my nose and mouth immediately, as I can smell the stench before the doors even have a chance to open. The doors slowly split apart.

“Mind the smell.”

Crosby leads us into a huge abattoir, with table upon table of meat being hacked up by nondescript men. Carcasses hang around the walls, and after a moment of dizziness and trying not to vomit, I finally deduce what’s wrong with the whole thing.

The meat is human.

And I’m fucked.

I hear a voice behind me, my boss. I turn around and see her grinning and gesturing to one of the carcasses, like a child with a piñata at their birthday party.

“Well John, you wanted to know what happened to Mr. Arbogast. Won’t you say hello?”

I’m in shock. The head and legs have been removed, but the arms are still attached. I can see his army tattoos. She pushes the torso and it swings back and forth, the arms almost reaching out towards me. I notice an inscription on one of the tattoos. Astra inclinant, sed non obligant. 

The stars incline us, they do not bind us. 

As it swings back, I see the open wound where his neck used to be. I can’t even open my mouth to scream. I just want to throw up.

“Oh come now John,” she says. “Don’t be like that, they’re just filth. Arbogast and the others, the undesirables, they have no place in our society.”

“Except as food,” Crosby adds. “For us.”

“But you don’t have to worry, John. That’s not going to happen to you.”

I’m led down a blood-spattered corridor and to a set of plastic curtains. They too are stained with blood, but from the inside, along with a strange green substance.

“No,” says Crosby as he pulls one of the curtains back, “you’re going to be involved in something much more fulfilling. Magical, even.”

My jaw drops. Inside the room is a rusted post with chains wrapped around it. That’s normal, but in front of the post is, well, I have no real idea how to comprehend it, let alone name it. It’s a column of water whipping around like a tornado, but it’s coming out of the back wall. 

Horizontally. 

As I’m pushed towards the post, I decide it has to be a vortex. But to where? And for what?

Crosby pulls the chains around me, but I’m not going anywhere. I‘m frozen to the spot, and I can vaguely hear my boss lamenting my lack of cooperation. 

“It’s disappointing, really. I thought you had potential. But you have done us a favour, in a manner of speaking. They get awfully temperamental when they haven’t had their sacrifice.”

Suddenly my ears are in awful pain, filled with guttural violent chants coming from my captors. 

“AGLAH GRAH’N NGOOI VULTAGLN! AGLAH GRAH’N NGOOI VULTAGLN! AGLAH GRAH’N NGOOI VULTAGLN!”

I’ve accepted my fate. I thought that nothing that could ever come out of that vortex that would make me any more shocked than I already am.

I’m wrong. Dead wrong.

Between the tentacles, the limbs, and the ghastly chattering mouths full of razor-sharp teeth, I can vaguely make out some kind of overall shape, but I don’t know how much of it is still in the vortex. 

It doesn’t matter.

As I’m absorbed and dissected, my mind already torn apart by the realisation that time and space have no meaning here, a buzzing cloud around the creature makes a fragment of me recall the one constant in my universe.

Not politics. 

Not love. 

Not hate.

The flies. 

A postscript on this story - it was originally written for a UK horror fest programme that didn’t go through for whatever reasons. I’ve shipped it around here and there but I thought I’d put it up here. Happy Halloween.