Horned dragon face design

The face was a dragon's, or a demon's. The council plans called it decorative and nobody had ever checked. Two horns swept up past the lintel like the arms of a lyre, a crown of spines rose along the brow, and a pair of pale eyes, silver enamel gone dull, watched the landing with terrible patience. Three rounds of tenants had painted over the door around it, and the eyes had outlasted every coat.

Dez had always meant to scrape the rust off. Instead he found himself repeating the story the lift engineer had told him years back, that the block stood on the bones of an old foundry, and the foundrymen had cast the face to keep the furnaces from getting ideas. Marisol laughed, then stopped, because the door was humming, very faintly, the way a fridge hums in an empty flat.

Dez pressed his palm to the cold metal and felt the hum settle, like something turning over in its sleep. He lifted the torch. The beam caught the broad nose and the dark nostrils, and for a moment the eyes seemed to take the light and keep it. He switched the torch off, told Marisol the stairwell could wait until morning, and went down to his boiler with the hum rising quietly behind him.