The Children In The Office

The office was in a barren strip mall, its windows hazy with a gray dusty film, zero transparency to see within. But the rent was cheap, and my business partner and I decided to take the risk. But we had not anticipated this…upon entering the space, what we found was filthy. Every inch of the place was covered in dust, the emptiness filled only with gray carpet and an overwhelmingly heavy stench that hung in the air like rot.

As we walked through each empty room littered only with a few broken chairs and a caved in desk, my business partner and I looked at each other with unease as the scent got stronger the deeper into the office we got. He seemed unnerved, even for someone who was a former police officer. We found a cobwebbed filled staircase leading to an upstairs room. The upstairs long ago had been an apartment, belonging to the previous owner of this office space. As we ascended the stairs, the odor only intensified. The room was the only one not empty. The floor was a mess, filled with blankets, cardboard, children's toys and unidentifiable objects.

At first glance I thought that this must be a crackhouse. But as we moved through the room stepping over the trash, a sickening realization hit us both. There were limbs…human limbs, all over the room. And underneath the blankets, were mutilated bodies. Realizing the stench was one of rotting flesh and decay, I fled the room while my business partner chose to explore the scene further. We left the bodies there not knowing what to do. This was bad publicity. It wasn’t until later that I would discover that my business partner was the one who murdered them. I never said a word about it, even after I found trinkets that belonged to the children in his desk. So we continued our business, never speaking of what lay upstairs, and never again entering into the room of dead little girls. It was nothing that a few air fresheners couldn't fix, right?