Chapter Eight #2
I hugged her back, taking what comfort I could. “Sure,” I said. “Right.” Planting a kiss on her curly hair, I added, “Enough about me. Tell me all the boring things you learned today about neutrinos or whatever.”
The rest of our evening was spent making dinner and watching bad TV, but I couldn’t relax.
Maybe it was the fact that my choices had led to the likely deaths of several colleagues, or maybe it was the possibility that the world was doomed.
Either way, it was starting to feel like the job I’d wanted so badly had come with some pretty serious baggage.
The next two days fell quickly into a familiar pattern.
I brought Ms. Crenshaw her morning coffee, reminded her of upcoming meetings, and otherwise spent a lot of time at my small desk outside her office, responding to emails and trying to figure out that stupid calendar software.
It was worrying, in fact, how much basic clerical work I was asked to do.
Had I traded my spreadsheets and data analysis in Human Resources for the life of a mere gofer, running errands and unjamming the photocopier?
Where were the dark rituals, the visits from abyssal lords, the deals with desperate billionaires?
Though I yearned for more, however, there was no denying that the thirteenth floor was an unsettling place to work.
The hallways were made entirely of obsidian, polished to a dark luster in which murky reflections darted and moved, always just at the very edges of sight.
The effect was oppressively claustrophobic, but also as if I were falling into an endless void every time I stepped off the elevators.
Then there were the screams. Down in Human Resources, the screaming had quickly become white noise, the soothing sound of quotas being met.
On thirteen, though, all that wailing put my teeth on edge.
It echoed down the corridors and reverberated from the black stone until it was impossible to escape.
I wasn’t certain who was screaming, or why—I just knew I didn’t want to join them.
As for Ms. Crenshaw, I found her unbelievably intimidating.
She expected nothing less than absolute perfection, and if you fell short of those expectations, she looked at you until you wanted to crumple to the floor.
On my second day as her assistant, I forgot to request extra dressing for her salad and literally teared up while she stared at me.
Was I about to die or, worse, go back to Human Resources?
In the end, all she did was issue a mild request that I remember the extra dressing next time, but I still spent the afternoon huddled at my desk, drowning in self-recrimination.
While I scrambled to navigate the insanely steep learning curve of my new position, I kept my ears open for news about the five employees who’d disappeared from the elevator in which I may or may not have unbound a world-devouring monster.
They remained missing, though the elevator itself was back in service by the following morning.
If taking the stairs hadn’t been so dangerous, I’d have avoided the elevators altogether.
At least there were no more visits from the Chief of Security, and no more reports of mysterious vanishings. Not that I heard, anyhow.
Things started to get a little more interesting on Thursday morning.
I was on the phone, trying to secure a dinner reservation for Ms. Crenshaw at a very exclusive restaurant, when an older white man came bounding into the waiting room outside her office.
He was short and rotund, with a bushy mustache and an actual monocle resting in front of his right eye.
In fact, he looked a lot like Mr. Monopoly—all he needed was the top hat.
Breezing up to my desk in a cloud of citrusy cologne, he said in a plummy British accent, “Good morning, young man. Is Margaret in?”
“Uh, yes,” I said a little uncertainly, placing a hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. “She’s on a call to Beijing at the moment.”
Giving me a smile and a wink, the man said, “I’ll wait, then, shall I?
” Before I could respond, he plopped himself down in a chair and sorted through the magazines left out for visitors to peruse—Blackbook, Good Hellkeeping, National Review—before selecting one and flipping through it with seeming interest.
Shooting him curious glances from the corner of my eye, I returned to securing my boss’s dinner reservation.
Unfortunately, the ma?tre d’ neither knew nor cared who Ms. Crenshaw was, and I could sense that she was moments away from hanging up on me when Mr. Monopoly materialized in front of my desk once more.
Holding out a hand for the phone, he murmured, “Allow me.”
Taken aback, I relinquished the handset and then watched as he began to speak to the woman on the other end.
“To whom am I speaking? Abby? I’m afraid I don’t know you.
You must be new. Let me speak to Gustav, please.
Yes, that’s right. No, he won’t mind. Tell him it’s Barney Samuels.
Thank you.” He paused and gave me another wink as, presumably, the woman went off to fetch her boss.
“Gustav?” he said a few moments later, before launching into a torrent of German punctuated by amiable chuckles.
Eventually switching back to English, he said, “Yes, your best table for”—he gave me an inquiring look and I flashed seven fingers—“seven o’clock tonight.
No, for Margaret. I’m lending a hand to her assistant.
Wonderful! Thank you, Gustav.” Then he added, with a note of steel in his voice, “Do make sure Abby knows who we are. We don’t want this sort of embarrassing lapse to happen again. There’s a good fellow. Cheerio.”
Moving slowly, I accepted the phone back from him and then dropped it into its cradle on my desk. “Wow, thank you,” I stammered.
“Think nothing of it, my boy.” He patted the rounded contours of his paisley waistcoat in satisfied fashion. “It wasn’t your fault. Gustav should have made sure his people were up to speed.”
I nodded. “Okay. Um, would you like me to see if Ms. Crenshaw is free now?”
Before he could respond, the door to her office opened and the woman herself appeared. “Barney, good morning,” she said.
“Margaret! Good morning.” He beamed at her and then tilted his head back in my direction. “I was speaking with your new assistant here.”
“This is Colin Harris.”
The little man grasped my hand in his and pumped my arm up and down enthusiastically while I remained seated behind my desk. “Lovely to meet you. Barney Samuels.”
“Uh, hello, sir. Good to meet you.”
Mr. Samuels turned back to Ms. Crenshaw. “I’ve had some news, Margaret. Those poor souls who disappeared from the elevator on Monday? It’s clear now that the building suffered an incursion.”
Struggling to keep my expression blank, I pretended to type something as I listened.
Ms. Crenshaw’s voice was coolly skeptical. “Something got through our defenses?”
“So it seems. Something powerful.”
“Do we know what it was?”
“I’ve asked Analysis and Logistics to take a look. Tomas is putting his best people on it.”
“Very well. Thank you for letting me know, Barney.”
“Of course, Margaret, of course!” Turning away, he then paused and swiveled back to look at me. “By the way, I don’t suppose you could spare Mr. Harris here for an hour or so this afternoon? It’s Blood Sacrifice Thursday and I can’t find Deborah anywhere.”
Blood Sacrifice Thursdays were kind of a big deal around the office.
This was when Dark Enterprises paid its dues to the ancient gods that slumbered behind the world, thus ensuring our survival for another week.
Plus, the cafeteria served grilled cheese sandwiches, the greatest of all lunch options.
“Oh dear,” Ms. Crenshaw murmured. “Where do you suppose Deborah might be?”
He waved a hand carelessly. “Oh, I sent her to the Repository yesterday to fetch the Cursed Periapt of Anhk-Magon.”
“Perhaps she was flung into the Abyss. The Periapt can be finicky.”
“Yes, perhaps. Terribly inconvenient if that’s the case.”
I added “being flung into the Abyss” to my mental list of occupational hazards, which was now terrifyingly long.
“Colin will assist you this afternoon, then,” Ms. Crenshaw told him with a glance at me. “He should see how we perform sacrifices here.”
Mr. Samuels’s lips curved into a delighted smile beneath his mustache as he leaned over my desk and gave me a nudge in the shoulder. “Maybe you’ll be wielding the knife someday, eh?”
“That would be wonderful,” I told him with an enthusiastic nod.
“Well then, splendid,” he said. “We’re starting at noon in the Lower Sanctum. See you then, dear boy. Goodbye, Margaret!” Then he bounded out of the waiting room with a last cheerful wave.
“He seems nice,” I noted cautiously.
Ms. Crenshaw’s lips quirked. “Don’t let the avuncular act fool you. Barney Samuels was a founding partner here in our New York office. He’s done things that would give you nightmares for the rest of your life.”
“Huh.” I paused before asking, “How does someone become a founding partner in a company like this?”
“Ambition,” she responded crisply.
“You mean, like…a desire for world domination?”
“Oh, we have our share of megalomaniacs”—she shook her head as if to say Don’t even get me started on those guys—“but most of us here at Dark Enterprises just want to make a difference.”
I nodded as if every multinational corporation had its megalomaniacs. I mean, they probably did. “But someone like Mr. Samuels,” I persisted. “He wanted to make a difference so hard that he…became a founding partner?”
Ms. Crenshaw looked at me in silence.
“Just curious,” I mumbled.