‘Where is the damn place?’ muttered Kelly to herself. She was walking along Oxford Street, looking for the building where she had an appointment to register at an employment agency, but for ten minutes, had been searching and hadn’t found it.
‘Excuse me? Do you know where this place is?’ she asked a stranger.
‘Yeah, it’s over there.’ He pointed at a discreet white door, with an intercom, and labels for the different businesses in the building.
‘Thank you,’ she said, feeling relieved.
Walking towards it, she pressed the buzzer, announced herself, and pushed open the door.
Ascending the stairs, Kelly tried to remember what floor the Agency was on, and failed, but continued regardless. Reaching the second floor, she noticed an old chipped sign indicating the ‘Benign Employment Agency’.
A flickering light bulb barely illuminated the dark corridor, and not another soul could be seen or heard anywhere in the building. Just a total, eerie silence, accompanied by shadows at the corner of her eye. When she looked properly, there was nothing there.
A slow shiver crept up her spine, and for a moment, she considered leaving, but stopped herself because finding a job was that important.
Ella Roberts She knocked on the door of ‘Benign Employment Agency’, but no one answered, paused, knocked again, and still no answer. Disappointed, and beginning to walk away, Kelly remembered that she actually had an appointment to attend, and decided to knock one more time in case nobody had heard her the first two times.
Still no answer.
She tried the door knob – and it opened. Casting a glance along the deserted corridor, Kelly then peered into the room; a spacious office suit, with windows that were painted black from the inside, allowing no natural light into the barely furnished space. It was illuminated only by candles at the far end.
Leaving the door ajar, Kelly took a cautious step into the room and slowly crept towards the light. As she got closer and noticed that in between each candle were wads of cash labelled £5,000, stacked neatly in piles of five, alarm bells went off in her head. But something kept urging her forward, like someone under a spell, she was transfixed.
Closer still, Kelly took notice of what was actually inside the circle, and gasped.
A dead body.
Naked, and in an awkward position on the floor. It’s knees had been bent unnaturally away from each other, creating a ‘W’. The bizarreness continued; a giant pin, engraved with a ‘W’ symbol, had been plunged deep into the corpse’s chest, and underneath the pin, on the stomach, was another ‘W’, that had been etched with something sharp enough to draw blood.
A satanic ritual, thought Kelly, and the spell was broken, she had to get out!
Grabbing a few wads of cash and throwing them into her bag, she ran towards the door and checked that nobody had suddenly appeared, closed it behind her, and ran down the flight of stairs, careful not to trip and fall.
Pressing the exit button and letting herself out, Kelly stopped running, but kept walking briskly towards a bus with it’s doors open. Producing her ticket, she found a seat and tried to slow her breathing.
Because Kelly hadn’t seen anyone, anywhere on the second floor, she had no reason to suspect that somebody was following her.