Chapter Four #2
As the doors slid shut, I studied Ms. Crenshaw surreptitiously.
Her sleeveless blouse matched her bright red lipstick and she held an expensive-looking briefcase at her side, but what I noticed more than anything else was her sheer presence.
Simply standing there, she radiated poise and confidence.
I wanted to be just like her—not a Black woman rocking a sweet pencil skirt, but powerful, assured.
No one had ever gotten into an elevator with me and thought, Now there’s someone important.
There’s someone who matters. Most people never noticed me at all.
But what if I worked up on the thirteenth floor, like she did?
Everyone knew the company’s executives wielded dark magicks and communed with forgotten gods.
They were the secret masters of the world, pulling strings and exchanging favors from their branch offices around the globe, shaping society to Management’s specifications.
Standing next to Ms. Crenshaw, I wanted what she had with a sudden, fierce desperation that felt like pain.
If I could gain a foothold on the thirteenth floor, no one would laugh at me or ignore me ever again. And if they did—
“Isn’t this your floor?”
Her question jolted me out of my reverie.
I blinked at her and then at the open elevator doors, beyond which lay the beige environs of Human Resources.
“Sorry,” I mumbled before hurrying past her.
As the elevator carried on to the exalted heights of the executive suites, I touched the business card in my pocket.
My talisman. I still had qualms about asking that Thing for help, but as the walls closed in around me, at least now I could see a sliver of light off in the distance, a chance for something I’d always craved.
All I had to do was take that final leap.
Wednesday and Thursday both passed in a haze of trepidation and uncertainty.
I carried that business card everywhere, even slept with it under my pillow, but though my time was running out, I couldn’t bring myself to use it.
I kept waiting for some miracle to save me, even as Ms. Kettering prowled the edges of the cubicle farm like a polyester-clad predator scenting the air for weakness.
Thursday evening, I had the apartment to myself.
Amira was out with some of her fellow grad students, talking about particles or whatever.
I was no longer invited to these gatherings after I’d made some salacious remarks about top and bottom quarks.
(“It’s not what you said,” Amira told me later.
“It’s that you waggled your eyebrows when you said it.
People felt unsafe.”) Everything was dark and still, noise from the street below drifting in through an open window.
Having consumed several episodes of instantly forgettable feel-good TV nonsense, I shuffled off to bed, pausing first to close the window.
Glancing down at the street, I noticed that someone was standing opposite our building, cloaked in shadow.
Ordinarily, there would be nothing unusual about that, but the way this person stood, the tilt to their head, almost made it look like they were staring right at me.
Then they shifted, and the harsh yellow glow of a nearby streetlight played across a pair of steel-rimmed glasses. Retro, maybe. Or German.
I knew those glasses.
The guy from the subway was standing outside.
Stepping away from the window, heart racing, I turned off the lights in the living room.
What was going on? His loitering outside couldn’t be a coincidence.
Had he followed me home from work? Sidling up to the window again, I peeked outside.
He was still there, glasses gleaming in the dark, gaze pointed right at me.
As I stared down at him, I experienced a terrifying epiphany.
He had to be part of the Firing Squad, the remediation team that handled employee terminations at Dark Enterprises.
That was why he knew my address, why he’d followed me that morning.
Ms. Kettering had placed my name on a list of soon-to-be-fired employees, and he was waiting for the clock to run out.
I sagged against the wall next to the window as my body broke out into a cold sweat.
This was really happening. I had, what—four more days?
Unless Ms. Kettering decided before then that I was a liability.
Sunil was still doctoring my reports, after all.
What if the company decided to terminate me early so they could have someone new in place by the weekend?
That made sense, actually. Get them up to speed so they could hit the ground running first thing Monday morning.
Minimize disruption, maximize workflow. Remove inefficiencies sooner rather than later.
Ensure a smooth ramp-up in productivity so quarterly targets remained within reach.
Oh god. He was there to kill me.
Panic welled up inside me as I stumbled on rubbery legs into the bathroom.
Pawing through my shelf in our tiny medicine cabinet with shaking hands, I grabbed my disposable razor.
Then I hurried into my bedroom and fished the business card out of my work khakis, placing it on my cheap particleboard desk.
I didn’t hesitate before carefully slicing the razor across the pad of my index finger, watching as blood welled up, darkly red.
Dropping the razor, I picked up the card and smeared my blood across one side, then turned it over.
Slowly, a series of white letters swam up out of the blackness, shifting and twisting until there were two lines of text printed across the card.
My voice sounded thin and small as I read them aloud.
“ ‘Shadow-Made-Flesh, I call to you. Hear me and attend. A promise for a promise, a gift for a gift—so is our bargain made, sealed with blood and desire.’ ”
Holding my breath, I waited. Nothing happened. I looked around my bedroom, half expecting to see the Thing standing in the corner, but I was alone.
With a mixture of disappointment and relief, I let the card fall back onto my desk.
I knew it had sounded too good to be true.
Maybe I was being punked, and somewhere out there, that creature was sitting around with its faceless friends, all of them laughing at me while they drank beer and high-fived one another.
Deflated, I took a step toward the living room.
I needed to know if that man was still standing outside.
There was a rustling sound behind me, like dead leaves skittering across the ground or the dry rasp of a snake’s coils as it unwound its body. It was coming from the bed. Slowly, I turned.
Nothing.
Maybe I’d imagined it.
A long arm shot out from under the bed with nightmarish suddenness, spindly fingers splayed out like a pale, malformed spider as they latched on to the carpeted floor.
I jumped back, my throat closing around an involuntary scream, as another arm appeared.
Both wore sleeves the color of dried blood, red and rusted and dark.
The hands flexed as, with agonizing slowness, the Thing pulled itself into view, the featureless darkness where its head should have been pulsing and swirling against that web of silver chains.
Moving with an unnatural grace, it lifted its body from the floor until its wingtips slid out from under the bed.
Hovering before me, it tugged its suit into place with precise little movements of its hands, shoulders stooped in deference to the low ceiling.
You called me, it said in that cold voice. I’m pleased.
I was still pressed back against the door, frightened and repulsed in equal measure. I didn’t know how I would ever sleep in this room again. “Y-you said you can give me whatever I want,” I whispered, my tongue stumbling over the words. “Is that still true?”
Yes.
I licked my lips. “I want a promotion at Dark Enterprises,” I said carefully. “To the thirteenth floor. And I want it to happen now.”
The Thing studied me—that was what it looked like, anyhow—while my knees shook. You will have what you desire, it finally said. And once you do, I will return to claim my part of our bargain.
I cleared my throat. “Look, I don’t want to be difficult, but I’d really like to avoid a fate worse than death.” I paused before adding judiciously, “Or a fate that is death.”
It hovered silently.
“Okay?” I hazarded.
It turned away. I’ll see you again soon. Smoothly, the Thing bent down and started to contort itself back under my bed. It could have looked ridiculous, but instead it was deeply disturbing. The last glimpse I had was the soles of its shoes sliding into the shadows.
Shuddering, I flung open the door and hastened into the living room.
It was done. I’d seized the reins of my own destiny and carved a new path for myself.
It sounded quite cool when I thought of it like that, actually, and for a while my body hummed with a quiet sense of satisfaction.
Sunil wouldn’t have had the guts to do what I’d done, I told myself.
When I finally got this promotion, I’d have the respect I deserved.
No more snide whispers or cruel pranks. No more death squads lurking around every corner.
Pausing by the window, I glanced outside. The man was gone. Good.
The heart-pounding terror of striking a bargain with the Thing, combined with more than an hour of restless pacing, finally wore me out.
There was no question of sleeping in my own bed tonight, or possibly ever again, so I was lying on the sofa, half-asleep, when Amira finally came home.
She didn’t blink when I asked if I could sleep in her bedroom, just tucked me into her own bed and then curled up next to me, and for a little while I forgot about faceless horrors and lurking assassins and the looming, unknown price I would have to pay for my survival.