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The hallways are even more dizzying than the last time Jon had been in the Distortion’s domain. He turned a corner and gravity asserted itself to be at a roughly thirty degree angle from where it had been, making Jon take a tumble. His bad leg twinged as it twisted under him. It was all he could do to not fall on his own rib and snap it. This was the first trouble the leg had given him since he’d woken up, and that made about as much sense as anything else in this realm.
“Helen?” He gasped out, straightening the leg. “This was not the deal.”
All of a sudden, the form of Helen Richardson appeared in front of him, standing at the end of this new hallway. She was perfectly put together, hair curling crisply around her shoulders as she walked up to him. Her clipboard and pressed suit combination that wouldn’t be out of place at any who’s who stood a sharp contrast to the violently shaded optical illusion on the wall behind her. Even Jon couldn’t manage to look at her for long.
So Helen forced it, pressing her clipboard under his chin and pushing his face upwards until he met her tarnished iron eyes. “Isn’t it?” She asked. “I provided you Jared Hopworth. I even let you persuade me to let him leave. But if I let you leave in worse condition than you came into my doors, then I will have done a terrible job as a hostess.”
Jon pushed himself up onto his knee, and Helen brought the clipboard up as he moved. “I’d be leaving in exactly the state I expected to, which would be perfectly adequate, thank you.”
“Then perhaps you shouldn’t have been so rude to me on your way in.” For the first time, her voice was more static than sound. She giggled, just a little bit, and the effect became less jarring, but Jon wouldn’t forget. “I will let you leave of course, eventually. To the rest, it could take you a while to find Jared, or to take his Statement. Or maybe they wouldn’t care if you didn’t come back.” Helen continued on.
“Why would you do this?” He forced the matter. What else could he do, under the circumstances?
But he was weak, and this was Helen’s domain. He very clearly got the sense that she was humoring him when she answered. “One time, I came to you for help and you pushed me away. I haven’t forgiven you, of course, but it’s clear that someone will have to be the bigger—ah,”
“—Person?”
“Yes, well. It’s a figure of speech. It’s not so bad, not being a person—and it’s time you learned that too.”
Helen disappeared, but the corridors only became harder to look at. Jon reached for the Eye in hopes of Knowing a way out, but that only increased his headache. He’d overextended himself with Jared, and his Statement hadn’t been enough to do more than help him heal from the impromptu surgery. He wasn’t getting out until Helen let him.
That was…fine. He could just stay in one place and wait for her to let up. Sure, his assistants all hated him, but surely someone would ask after him at some point? Melanie hated him, sure, but surely Basira wouldn’t want him dead? Or Martin?
“Gah!” Jon shouted as he picked up his hand, which had three needles stuck in it where his fingers had been balancing him. The noise had been more surprise than pain—those needles were fairly thin, he realized. They hadn’t caused him too much damage, but he’d have to pull them out on his own, unless he asked Helen for help. Was that the lesson?
Jon pushed himself up on his other hand as several more embedded themselves into his legs. Pulling them out would make him bleed, but—one pressed into his foot through his shoe—the alternative was worse. He wrapped his hand in his tie and kept moving. He pulled out the needles as he walked. Most of them were a little too corkscrewed to be useful in the fibercrafts arena, but that only made the process more arduous for him. He could feel them caught between the layers of his skin like burrs, and he couldn’t stop long enough to make it easier to take them out. When he stopped again to try, he felt pinpricks in his shoes. He didn’t even need to look before he forced himself to keep moving forwards.
“What’s at the end of the hall, Helen?” Jon called out, and his voice echoed back at him. He forced himself into a light jog, and then a run as he caught sight of a door. Tall, painted robin’s egg blue with a darker blue border, the thing was somewhere between goofy and boring. It was the best thing he’d seen all day. The door even eventually got closer as he went, until that one shining moment when he reached it.
It was one thing to know better than to hope and another to accept that, and just for a moment he had the idea that Helen was messing with him.
On the other side was a teenage boy, sitting and playing video games in a corner. He looked up. “Oh, hey, sorry dude. Is this your setup?”
“Ahh—no, it’s not,” Jon replied, and walked out of the room. Or rather, he tried. The door wouldn’t budge. The kid went back to ignoring him in favor if whatever that was on screen. “Helen!”
“Archivist!” Helen reappeared, sitting on a chair with a game controller in hand. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you hungry?”
“No.”
“Not even if I say that if you don’t eat him, I will? We both know that if you do it, he’ll even get to see the outside again. I can’t promise the same thing~”
“I won’t hurt anyone just because you’ve made hurting myself the alternative.”
“Ah, yes, I should have accounted for that. Well. In that case.”
Jon blinked, and the teenager disappeared. The gaming setup was still there, though it quickly blinked off into a blue screen of death. Upon closer inspection, it didn’t plug into anything, the cord just disappeared into the wall. And it wasn’t any model Jon had ever heard of, not that video games were precisely his thing. There was an unopened bottle of water on the table, and Jon took a sip, pleasantly surprised that it just tasted like water. Maybe a little bland for water, honestly. He was sweaty and tired, and his hand had cramped from clutching his rib bone too hard. And he was ravenous. Regular food would do, he decided, if he could find any. He just had to get out of there first. Maybe he’d check local missing children resources too. He’d gotten a good look at the kid’s face.
“Where did you send him?” he demanded.
“Away. Don’t worry, he’s no worse off than before!” The room visibly brightened with Helen’s cheer.
Jon doubted that that was true, and didn’t let it comfort him. It was all too easy to dance around the elephant in the room, that Jon was still stuck in Helen’s halls, and that he had no way out. He comforted himself with the idea that he hadn’t really had the power to save that kid. He was here to entertain her, or something—there wasn’t any real possibility of her setting him free if he had taken a bite first.
He was glad that he hadn’t, but there was that one nagging voice in his brain that wished he had, the same one that hunted down Louisa Kenton and Christian Barber and the others that had never made it to the Institute, that said he was hungry and should eat. That voice sounded like Helen, now. He wanted to turn it off.
Think of the red balloon, and it’s all you can perceive, so Jon tried to find something else to focus on. Escape came to mind. The walls of the room he was in were completely featureless except for the door he came in through. No needles came to hurt him, and nobody else was there. It was a real respite. He had all the time in the world.
And every moment he wasted was another his friends were suffering. Jon pushed himself up from the squashy couch, left the bottle of water in a thoughtfully provided recycling bin, and chose to walk through the door.
On the other side was the most normal hallway Jon had ever been in, a stark change from the one that had brought him there. The carpet was beige and slightly broken, just enough to see that it had been recently vacuumed? It would be softer than the laminate from before if Helen pushed him around again. The walls were white, with just enough texture to not look like the inside of a doctor’s office. The occasional painting peeped out with just enough color to remember where he was, but there was a popcorn ceiling. Why had Helen subjected herself to that? There could be asbestos!
Jon wandered along. The door he had come from disappeared behind him, and no more seemed forthcoming. He was beginning to accept that the only way out of here was to play by Helen’s rules. And, with the way his leg had begun to twinge again, he probably didn’t have much time left before he’d be forced to play at a disadvantage. Even so, Jon wasn’t a big fan of giving in. Showing weakness here would only hurt him, if it didn’t kill him outright.
If he got much hungrier, he wasn’t going to have much of a choice. “Helen?” Jon asked. “Would you give me your Statement?”
The painting on his left began to laugh. The voice came from the statuette on his right. He could barely parse the words through the high pitched tone. “You already have that, Archivist, or don’t you remember? I let you take that right when I took Helen. You were there. Try harder.”
Jon stumbled, gasping as he fell into a wall. It was strangely squishy, closing slowly around his body. He stumbled back and fell to the floor, breathing hard. The floor began to liquefy underneath him as well, even as he crawled a few feet forwards. And then he caved. “Not the kid. I won’t haunt a child. But if I take a Statement, will you let me leave?”
The floor stopped. “If you do a good enough job, I’ll even stop your food from turning back up at the Institute.”
A door appeared on the left, maybe a hundred meters down the hall. A zing went through Jon’s body as he took a step in that direction. And then another, and another, every time he made a move towards the place Helen wanted him to go. It took him far too long to recognize the sensation as pleasure. Every time he stepped towards his next victim, he felt his heart speed up, his hands grow clammy, and his cock try to assert itself through his pants.
He made it barely a dozen steps before he had to stop. He’d never in his life before been so hard it hurt.
“Something wrong, Archivist?” Helen teased.
“I’m doing—ah—what you asked.” Jon gasped, pressing a hand against his mouth to keep from moaning. “Please stop with the—sensation!”
“Oh, but the carrot makes for a much more fun experiment than the stick. It’s better to associate good things with eating, so that it’ll be easier for you to do when you’re out on your own!”
“Helen—”
But Helen was gone, and the door was now visibly further away. He grit his teeth and took another step, reciting the periodic table as he went, and then the entire catalog of Shakespeare in publication order once he ran out of elements. He tasted copper after biting into his tongue when Helen got cheeky and added in stairs. He wanted to stop and be done, shamefully even he wanted to come, but survival instinct won out.
He fell just short of the door, and, unable to get up, crawled the last few steps on hands and knees. His palms were red and sensitive with the start of carpet burn as he used the doorknob as a lever to pull himself up. It took him three tries to open the damned contraption, and even then he wasn’t sure that Helen hadn’t just taken pity on him in the end.
Inside, an elderly woman was sitting against a wall, holding something to her chest and staring into nothingness. For a moment, she didn’t respond to Jon coming in, and he was worried that Helen had brought him to someone who was too far gone to be of any use to him. Then she looked up.
It wasn’t even hard to take her Statement. Debbie Grapin’s eyesight had gone, and she mistook Jon for her grandson. Her story about an (unintentionally on her part) cannibalistic Christmas dinner would have turned his stomach had he come across it in the Archives, but now every time she took a break, he pressed her for more words. They slid into him, and he could almost taste it now. Liver all sort of tasted the same, didn’t it? And slathered in gravy and potato, who could be surprised at tasting pork? He learned how her nephew had gone missing earlier that week, and how they said a prayer for his safety while eating steaks her daughter in law had made from his legs.
The final point of clarity came about thirty seconds before the end of the Statement, when he felt the touch of a hand that didn’t come from either him or Mrs. Grapin. Helen, he thought—Helen would push a hand into his pants and stroke him to completion just as the Statement ended.
His world whited out and shut down into silence. Jon shut his eyes, processing what was just on the wrong side of too much. When he opened them, the grandmother was gone in her own little world and Jon slipped back out into a hallway. The door disappeared as he did. His only proof to himself that something had happened was the rapidly cooling wet spot in his trousers.
“Good boy, Archivist!” Helen appeared in front of him. She looked smug, looming over him like that.
“I did what you asked. Will you let me go now?” Jon pled.
“Oh, but you’ve barely whetted your appetite! That woman has been here since before Michael, let alone Helen. I think we could get you something fresher. Don’t you want that?”
“I don’t, and you know it.”
“Are you sure about that? I can always go back to the stick,” a tiny spike of pain hit as a needle slid home into the flesh of his ankle, before retracting itself. “Or do you prefer it when feeding feels good? People don’t usually enjoy eating each other. Didn’t that traumatize that Mrs. Grapin?” And a bolt of pleasure welled up in Jon, making him lean up against the wall, knees weak.
“Please,” he begged.
“Please what?”
“Please let me go.”
“Oh, come on Jon. You know that’s not what I’m looking for.” Helen wagged the hallway in a dizzying display of power.
“Please—please let me eat.”
Helen intensified what she was making Jon feel enough that the ends of his hair hurt. He bit his wrist to distract him as Helen’s voice rang out, smug as a bug: “And what do you want to eat?”
“People,” Jon sobbed. “I’ll eat people, just please, let me—”
“Very good, Archivist. I won’t keep you waiting.” Jon collapsed fully against Helen’s wall as he came again. He stayed there for a long minute, coming down off the endorphins. He hated himself. He hated her. He hated Elias, and the Eye, and all the powers. But above all, he was tired, and he was ravenous.
It was too soon for Jon to get hard again, but the next door Helen set for him was far enough down the hallway that his body had made a valiant attempt at it by the time he reached it.
Inside was a man, dressed in the kind of sturdy, mudstained clothes that betrayed his profession. A logger, perhaps?
It didn’t really matter, did it? Jon was barely present as the man relayed his sorry tale of being chased across the country by what he could only call dinosaurs, an account that would have made him laugh if he couldn’t taste just how real it was. He begged Jon not to be made to leave the hallways of the Distortion, because knowing things were bad all the time was easier than waiting for the dinosaurs to finally kill him.
A chill ran down Jon’s spine as he felt another touch, this time a full three minutes before the man stopped talking. He couldn’t say anything about it, not when the man was still talking. Helen mapped his body, pressing against his back and running too-sharp fingers over him. His nipples pebbled, and his belly tightened as she made passes over each. Touching his thigh made his body stiffen and shake and move his hips in little circles, and because she was making him eat he couldn’t tell her to stop. He couldn’t do anything except for listen to a man be hunted and try not to come.
He failed, of course. It was a battle he never really had the tools to win.
The moment he could, he pulled himself away from her. This man was also too absorbed in his fear and trauma to notice Jon’s abnormal reactions. Helen didn’t follow him with a physical form, but she didn’t need to; the laughter echoed inside of his brain as he ran away.
“It wouldn’t be right if you thought the hunt for your meal was the only pleasurable part of the experience, would it?” A voice drifted from the hallway beyond him. He turned to face it, but one of Helen’s forms slipped behind him, from where they’d come. Her voice still pitched from far away as she whispered in his ear. “If I wanted to deliver you to the Hunt, well, that’d be downright simple!”
“So what do you want, Helen?”
This time, her voice whispered into his ear, chilled enough to make him shiver despite “It’s not like these hors d’oeuvres are very filling, are they? They’ve all been here so long they’re stale.”
“I’m not going to hunt. Not anymore. Melanie will kill me, remember?”
“Melanie will never have to know. You can send them to me after. Not as fun as choosing my own targets, but well worth it in this case.”
“Why now?”
“Because. You told me that I was a monster. You were right, of course—but it’s only right that I return the favor. You’re a monster, Jon. And I’m not going to let you out until you accept it. If I let you out now, my friends might get hurt defending poor little Jon from the consequences of his own delusions. So I’m giving you two options: you can decide you’re going to hunt, like a proper little monster, and I’ll even reward you for your skills in due time. Or I’m going to keep you here and make every little morsel you take so pleasurable that you’ll fall apart begging me to let you go off on your own. So, Jon—what kind of monster do you want to be?”