The Well of Mimir

The smell in the bathroom was hideous, as though someone or something had died in there. Well, perhaps not quite that bad. The stench was certainly unpleasant though not enough to gag…yet. Unfortunately, the janitor only came in once a week, and there was no one else I could complain to; this was the evening shift, the seven-to-midnight drag, so I would be alone in the building until sometime just prior to midnight. Hours to go.

I was just glad I couldn’t smell it in the studio yet.

My guess was that someone had probably failed to flush at some point earlier in the day…though it did not quite smell right for that, it didn’t smell quite like human waste. More like…like the one time our basement freezer had failed and I’d had to clean it. And since the basement freezer never saw much use, I only discovered the failure a couple of weeks after the fact. It smelled like that.

I faced the small bathroom on the second story between the studio, the office hallway, and the break room. The bathroom held a toilet, a sink above a supporting cabinet, and a wastebasket, and that was all. Only enough room to open and shut the door and turn around. Some hit from the mid-80’s wafted through the malodorous air, letting me know we were still broadcasting, though the sound was muffled by paneling.

My natural urges overrode my distaste for the smell; I could hold my breath or breathe through my mouth long enough to take care of things and get back to work. Grimacing, I closed the bathroom door behind me and opened the toilet.

Clean.

The grimace became a frown and I wondered where the heck smell could be coming from. Thoughts of the fridge in the break room briefly wandered through my mind, and I wondered if it 1had finally gone the way of my old freezer, sending the smells of its numerous ancient inhabitants creeping through the building. Or maybe something in the fridge had just finally broken containment – there were things stored in there from well before I had ever began working here, marked by the names of people I had never met nor even heard of. It was not a pleasant thought.

There would be a nasty-gram left for the boss about this; get someone to clean that thing out or just take it out somewhere in the woods and burn it (just to be safe – no sense opening the thing and unleashing some gods-know-what fungal plague upon the world).

I finished, zipped, flushed and side-stepped to the sink.

It was then I noticed the cabinet door at my feet was slightly ajar. Heck, it had never really registered that the washbasin cabinet had a door until just now. I had never been sure it was anything more than a rough facade to make the bathroom a little more homey than a bare sink and pipes mounted to the wall would have.

I honestly do not know what possessed me to bend down and open the cabinet, to peek inside. I was not generally very curious about the shadowy and forgotten places of my workplace; the place was dingy and every spare inch of space was crowded with junk: useless or unattached computer monitors, disorganized piles of dusty broadcasting equipment from the last decade, chaotic stacks of yellowing paper that hadn’t been touched since the seventies, rusty filing cabinets lying on their sides or facing the walls, unopened for a decade or more, and wooden racks full of useless vinyl from such bygone luminaries as “Bread” and “the Beatles”.

I didn’t touch anything I didn’t need to touch – tetanus was a possibility I couldn’t quite disavow. But I reached down and cracked open the cabinet door a little bit more, curious.

I wish I hadn’t.

The badly-painted white door swung open quietly and slightly crookedly, and in the dark recesses under the sink I saw the first dead body I have ever laid eyes upon. A gray form stripped naked and crammed into the tiny space in a crowded, sickening fetal position, ribs and spine hideously visible beneath the thin, ashen flesh, face thankfully turned away from me.

Gagging, I stumbled back, the right arm slipped and fell out, keeping the cabinet door from shutting as the crooked thing swung back to its natural position.

The stench was even worse now. My hand had unconsciously clasped itself over my mouth and nose, though I don’t know whether it was to block the horrible smell or keep myself from retching. My thoughts turned immediately to what I should do, who I should call. My manager? The police? What the hell was a body doing stuffed into a cabinet in the washroom?

I groped behind me for the doorknob to let myself out, eyes fixated in dull horror upon the gruesome corpse tucked away beneath the sink.

…to be continued…