Daria's hands rested on the steering wheel as she looked out to the office of the Foundation for the Promotion of Local Talent. Only the office's size made it stand out from the rest of the industrial park. Two stories high and garbed in a stone façade, the structure gave far more than such an organization should need.

A crumpled business card on Jane's nightstand had led Daria to the place. She'd driven past it a dozen times in the past, never expecting to have reason to visit. Now it filled her vision, impossible to ignore.

Lightheaded and with her heart beating at twice normal speed, Daria stepped out of the SUV and into the soft summer darkness, the night sky blushed with fading light.

You know this is insane. Mrs. Johanssen killing herself doesn't make her story true.

Daria wondered if she'd already made some terrible mistake, that perhaps Jane never even went to the office. Perhaps she lay facedown in a ditch after another episode, her life ebbing away while Daria chased delusions.

Emergency services had explained it was too early to begin a search. She'd nearly screamed into the phone to get them moving, but instead stifled the words and resolved to do it herself.

Daria mentally tried to follow Quinn's example: act calm and confident, as if sure she'd be accepted. The world still seemed to fall out from beneath her as she marched up to the front door. She tried the handle and found it unlocked.

This is either very good, or very bad.

Pat Mayhew sat behind a small wooden desk, his almost monstrous form incongruous amidst the beige carpet and tan walls. Recognition flickered across his flabby visage as he turned his eyes up from a thick blue binder.

"Hello? Oh, I think I remember you: Jane's friend, right?"

"Uh, right," Daria replied, her voice distant in her own ears. "Is she here? Jane said she had some kind of a project with your organization."

"You just missed her, actually."

"She already finished?"

"Jane hasn't started yet; all we did was brainstorm, figure out how to get word out about the Foundation's work. I can't give you all the details, but it's going to be great!"

"She is very talented. Is your office always open this late?"

Pat's brow furrowed, though his face stayed friendly (or as friendly as he could manage).

"Summer's always pretty busy for the Foundation, what with all the art students on break. Is there anything else I can help you with?"

She paused, her mind racing for a reason to stay.

"Before I go, may I use your restroom?" The simplest excuses were usually the best.

Pat took a quick look at the clock on the wall. "Sure. It's down the hall to your right."

"Thanks."

Daria tried to keep her hands from shaking as she walked into the dim-lit corridor. A musty smell hung in the air past the main desk, a scent of cobwebs and mold. She opened the door to the ladies' room and let it fall shut without entering. Thus committed to her lie, she crept on quiet feet to the door at the hall's end. Holding her breath, she pressed down on the handle until she heard the soft click, and pushed.

She slipped through to the darkness on the other side and closed the door behind her. An even worse odor assaulted her senses, one that recalled the rot of the half-eaten food hovering in Jane's empty house earlier that day.

A ghost of the afternoon's heat lingered in the room, bare save for some cardboard boxes piled up beneath a window. The room ran the width of the building. A single door interrupted the otherwise blank wall opposite of Daria. She noticed a sliver of floor beneath the boxes as her eyes adapted to the darkness.

Daria lifted up the nearest box. A straight line split the surface beneath. Pushing aside more boxes revealed a large, hinged square cut into the floor. A rusty handle was set into a depression on one side.

That's not suspicious.

An experimental pull produced the thud of a latch hitting the wood on the other side. Giving up, Daria turned her attention to the door in the wall. Sweat soaked her collar, the aftereffect of fear and noxious heat.

If Pat finds me sneaking around back here… well, there's no way to know. It might be nothing.

As she neared, her ears picked up a low chorus of ragged voices emanating from the other side of the wall. Details lost themselves in the susurration but she still heard the pain in each voice, the wet sound of words torn from throats.

The same kinds of sounds Jane had been making on the roof.

The recognition spurred Daria into action. Light flooded her vision the moment she opened the door, forcing her to shield her eyes with her right hand. Her vision adjusted to take in a great plume of pallid light that writhed like a living thing in the center of the room. Hunched silhouettes crouched before the illumination.

Daria ducked behind a stack of cobwebbed pallets, hoping they'd keep her hidden. Tongues of cold light shimmered up from the cement floor of the warehouse's center. She heard the chant more clearly: a terrestrial facsimile of something utterly alien.

Don't look, just don't look at it.

As her mind screamed in protest, a more logical remnant tried to formulate an explanation. The light probably came from an uncontrolled chemical reaction. Conceivably it might even be some sort of hallucination. She was having a psychotic episode.

A padded room again, but this time for real. No one will expect anything from you, and you'll never have to say anything again. No one will judge what you do, not even you.

The light shone brighter as if to mock her rationalizations. Warbling hymns rose in pitch. Fragments of repeated sound caught in her ear: khlooloo, hrhl, ftach.

This can't be real, she prayed. Bits of what she'd read online the other night surfaced in memory.

Daria's entire body shook. The world blurred at the edges, the distant ceiling seeming to twist and droop, only to pull back up like some viscous strand.

They'll see you if you run! Stay down!

A thin whimper escaped her lips, lost in the deafening groan.

You need to stay calm. No matter how strange the situation, panic never helped anyone. Find Jane and leave.

Daria faced the illumination, squinting as the full force of the light pierced her eyes. The silhouettes raised their arms as if in supplication. Their limbs took on monstrous forms, ridges and fins flaring up from the flesh. Theories and explanations fell to pieces the moment she concocted them, and she shut her weeping eyes to block out the light.

Thick-voiced chants broke into her self-imposed darkness, the inhuman calls shaking the very world.

I can ignore this until it goes away. It's just sound.

Still the light intensified. It illuminated the capillaries in her eyelids so the world turned red. Her heart beat faster and she clenched her teeth to stifle the scream threatening to explode from her mouth.

The light vanished without warning. Alien words transformed into a cacophony of shrill and warbling cries. A foulness like she'd never known bore down upon her: a smell of opened veins and dried amniotic fluids, of intestinal flora and rotting fish. She gagged. Spasms wrenching her body as she tried get up from the floor, the stench crushing all of her senses.

She fell back down and saw the immense form that stood as tall as the ceiling, the tendrils cascading down its bulk of slick green flesh. Her world turned to ash.