Puke
They say you have to watch out for the quiet ones, but Roger Wendle was not quiet. In and around the office he was known as a loudmouth and something of a braggart. He was a pseudo-intellectual of the first water, an autodidact that, having skipped college, had instead fed his mind on the easy reading popular science and history books that real intellectuals shun. The women around the office whispered in hushed circles that Wendle’s need to demonstrate his vast store of trivial information several times a day was likely overcompensation for an unfortunate physical deficiency. The men largely ignored him. Wendle was also an inveterate complainer. He despised the company, his job, and particularly loathed Saundra Jackson-Mathers, his immediate supervisor. Wendle’s only friend around the office was the building maintenance man, an elderly Mexican named Santiago, who listened with rapt attention when Wendle propounded the possibilities of the string theory of quantum physics. A secretary making coffee nearby noted the vacant expression on Santiago’s face and thought he probably understood less than half of what was being said to him.
It was precisely because he had so few friends in the office that no one, not even the faithful Santiago, noted the peculiar change that Wendle began to undergo. At first it was nothing more than a forced aspect to his smile and bags under the eyes, but a keen observer, had there been one that cared enough to notice, would have also seen the furtive way Wendle watched his fellow workers and the naked hatred in those darting, bloodshot eyes.
After they had searched his apartment, the police speculated fruitlessly as to how a man like Wendle had come by the ancient and blasphemous grimoire they found open on his desk. One of the investigators made the dreadful error of reading a passage on one of the pages and subsequently went mad. After that the book was treated with the utmost care, and an expert, flown in from Romania at the taxpayers’ expense, was able to identify the book as one of the most insidious and potent books of black magic ritual that had ever come out of the old world.
The details of the event itself are few, as the only surviving eyewitness is old Santiago himself, who has since returned to Mexico and undertaken residence in a monastery. He speaks of the incident rarely, and only under the influence of tequila.
Based upon his words, and the security video recovered from the ill-fated office, it appears that Roger Wendle came into work an hour and a half late on that dark day. The receptionist noticed Wendle came up to the door with a pronounced stagger, and this, combined with his uncharacteristic lateness, made her suspect that perhaps Wendle was drunk. She reached over and pulled her ornamental letter opener closer.
With a bizarre mixture of pain and elation on his face, Wendle grabbed at a pen on the counter, and before the receptionist’s horrified eyes, thrust it into the deepest part of his throat. He began to gag at once, so powerfully that he dropped the pen and placed both hands flat on the counter. The receptionist was frozen to the spot by this odd and disgusting display, and it was this curiosity that made her the first victim. Wendle pulled back and drawing in a great, ragged breath, lurched forward and vomited on the receptionist. Having accomplished this feat, and with a smile on his face, Wendle collapsed, dead.
Her mind broken by the insanity of the last thirty seconds of her life, the receptionist began to shriek hysterically. Writhing in her lap in a spreading pool of amniotic fluid was a creature that had no place in a rational universe. It was gray and many-tentacled, and in the end it took the full might of the military and a team of Vatican exorcists to send it back to the abyss.
