Chapter 3 Elijah
Elijah
The tiring man leaves me alone with the woman who I realise now, together in a small space as we are, smells unbearably good. I can smell her blood brimming beneath her smooth, freckled skin, and that smells good too, but it’s something else.
‘Have you just eaten a grapefruit?’ I ask, so overwhelmed by the citrusy sweetness of her. She’s tall for a woman, made taller by her sensible boots, but she still must look up to meet my gaze with her own confused one.
‘No?’ She pauses, looks away from me. ‘I washed my hair this morning. It’s, uh, my shampoo.’
‘Ah,’ I say. We stand quietly together for another moment, me looking at her, her looking elsewhere, vaguely uncomfortable.
I am off-putting to her. Dylan says women sometimes don’t like to be alone with men, but being alone is no longer the ripe breeding ground for scandal it once was.
I attempt to soften my expression and tone. ‘It’s nice. I like grapefruit.’
‘Cool,’ she says, which sounds more positive than her tone denotes. ‘Let’s get started with the onboarding.’
Molly gestures haltingly to the dubious chair I just vacated. Dylan has one similar, the spinning, swivelling thing he swears is comfortable. It’s unnatural, I’m not accustomed to my seat moving beneath me as I try to sit stationary, the wheels bumping into toes or pieces of furniture as it moves.
I swallow and return the gesture. ‘Why don’t you take this one?’ I don’t leave any room for argument as I pick up the smaller, more stable chair from the other side of the desk and place it on the same side, both now facing the door.
She looks like she’s just bitten into a lemon, and I fear that she didn’t want to sit by me and now I’ve forced her hand. Have I inadvertently made myself more off-putting?
Molly shrugs, sits, and starts clicking buttons on the computer before I can fret further.
Maybe we’re all right, then.
I should trust my instincts–I know how to act around humans. I was once mortal. I once wooed several women, and at least two men.
‘Did you set up your login after you got the onboarding information?’ she asks as I slide into the chair next to her.
I don’t have to hesitate; I know for a fact I didn’t do what she speaks of. ‘No.’
She blinks those light brown eyes at me. Along with her refreshing scent, Molly is quite striking, with round pink cheeks and a shapely nose. She has a handsomeness about her that I believe would make her rather desirable if I was in the market of desiring. (I am not.)
‘We can do it now,’ she says. ‘Did you do any of the onboarding?’
‘Some,’ I say, though which part I could not report.
Dylan had some documents forged for me so I could get paid and have a bank account to get paid into.
Apparently, the one line on my ancestral bible notating my birth is not proof enough of my existence; I need to have a birth certificate and a social security card, among other things.
‘None of the tech stuff, though?’
‘Correct.’
Molly’s shoulders sag a little before she types more. She’s much faster than Dylan, who I believed to be very quick. Turns out he is proficient at laptop, whereas Molly is professional.
It’s not that I am incapable of using a computer–I have used them before in my long life–it’s only that computers have become exceptionally complicated in these last decades, and I did believe for a time that if I ignored them they would exit the world’s favour.
Either that or I would meet my end before needing to use one.
Obviously, neither has proven to be the case, and now computers are so complicated I think it would take me a year to learn how to really use them, and by then they will all have changed again.
Even so, I’m determined to pick this up quickly as my other options for employment have dwindled. I can make this work. I will.
Turning the screen so that it’s facing me directly, Molly points at a line that is just a series of nonsensical letters and numbers, no cipher or code so far as I can tell. Beneath it are two empty boxes, both reading password.
I blink at the screen. I do my best, I really do, but when I turn a blank stare at her, she breathes a long and heavy breath out her nose.
‘This is your username. You need it to get into everything, so write it down,’ she says.
I look around the room for something to write on, but other than this desk and the device atop it, the room holds very little. It could use some paintings, a bookshelf, or perhaps a mural.
Molly sighs again–an impressive amount of sighing from her–and stands easily from the rolling chair.
She pulls open one of the drawers in the cabinet behind us.
After rummaging in it for a moment she retrieves a pad of bright orange sticky notes.
I’ve never purchased them myself, but Dylan has plastered them all around the house with general reminders about how the world has changed in my absence.
These are not comprehensive as the apartment is rather small and there wouldn’t be enough room for everything a person needs to know to successfully interact with a digital world.
She tosses the pad in front of me, then pulls open a clever drawer I hadn’t seen beneath the desk and withdraws a plastic pen.
‘Is this your office?’ I ask, though Ryan had explicitly said it was mine. Ryan is a rather wearying sort of man, though, and I did not wish to listen to him speak for long.
‘What?’
‘You know where everything is.’
‘Yeah, I stocked it for you when I brought your computer in. This is your stuff.’
‘Mine?’ I ask, seeing the pad of Post-its in a new light. I pick up the top sheet, and it brings with it the one below, creating a sort of accordion of tangerine-coloured pages. ‘All of this? That too?’ I point at the computer.
‘Yeah, I mean, it comes with the office. And the computer is for your work, so you don’t have to use your personal one.’
‘I can take it?’ If I can take it home, I can practise on it when Dylan sleeps. I just need to make sure it won’t combust if I do something wrong.
Maybe I shouldn’t try to practise on it often alone, after all. Too many unknowns.
‘Home? Of course, if you want. But you probably won’t have to do work out of the office, so you can usually just leave it locked in your desk.’
‘And these?’ I point to the sticky notes. ‘I can take them?’ ‘You’re not supposed to, but sometimes it’s okay. Devi will get mad if we start running out of stuff, though. So don’t make a habit of it.’
Devi, the brunette, spritely creature who greeted me. She is human but looks vaguely like a nymph. Ryan looked at her like she was a prize he coveted instead of a colleague, which made my estimation of him lower still.
‘Thank you, then. For getting all this stuff for me. I appreciate it more than you know,’ I tell her.
She recoils slightly. ‘There’s a supply closet full of it. Did your last office not have a supply closet?’
‘Afraid not.’
‘Were you remote or something?’
I did live rather remotely, my home miles away from the closest town, and even further from the nearest city.
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘Right. Makes sense,’ she mumbles low, but I still hear her.
I’ve got impeccable hearing; I could hear her whole conversation in the hall with Ryan–her attempt to get this buddy duty handed off, his steady assurance not to be nervous.
Her shoulders had been half up to her ears when she returned, a stiffness about her posture that betrayed her discomfort.
I don’t know what to make of her reticence, especially when she’d been so helpful with the door debacle.
Perhaps she’s just busy, or indeed nervous in close quarters with large men.
No matter, I will disarm her with my easy demeanour and easier conversation. To this end, I practise a soft smile in her direction.
She gives me a wary glance before she scrawls in an impressively straight script the letters and numbers that make up my username.
‘It’s easy to remember because it’s just the first three letters of your last name and the day you started, see? THO929.’
So there was a code after all; I was just not astute enough to discover it.
‘Now you need to make a password.’ She slides the keyboard in my direction.
I know ‘password’–that term is not foreign to me.
It’s not uncommon to have to share a word or phrase to gain entrance to vampiric establishments.
Dylan told me I was supposed to have a password on my phone, but having even one more barrier of entry would mean I would likely never use the device, so we forwent the endeavour.
‘Pumpernickel,’ I recite, and she stares blankly at me. ‘The password. I choose pumpernickel.’
‘Oh, I–no, you’re not supposed to tell me. It’s a misconception that IT knows everyone’s passwords.’
‘I keep it to myself? What if I forget?’
Molly clicks her tongue against the roof of her mouth and leans back in the chair. It rocks slightly, but she doesn’t seem discomfited by it.
‘I mean, do you often forget your passwords? You don’t have a password manager on your phone?’
‘I do,’ I lie. I have never met a password manager, much less kept one on retainer in my phone. ‘All right, I’ve got one in mind then.’
I determine mahogany to be my new password, but I do not say it out loud. I sit back in my own chair and await the next instructions.
Molly pinches the top of her nose and squeezes her eyes shut for a moment. ‘You have to type it in.’
‘Ah.’ I sit forward, then survey the keys, clicking each, but when I look to the screen to see if I’ve done it correctly, the letters I’ve typed display only as little circles. ‘Have I done it wrong? I can’t read it.’
‘No, it’s–that’s normal.’ Molly props an elbow in the arm rest and her head on top of her fist. She looks tired, like how I feel after too much exposure to the sun. ‘While you get your password sorted, I’ll get us something to drink. Do you want tea, coffee, or lukewarm water?’
She stands, and as she does, I can’t help but notice again how exceptional she smells.
It’s distracting. I think I’d enjoy pressing my nose right into her hair and taking a long breath.
This, of course, would get me removed from the premises which would mean janitorial nights for my foreseeable future.
‘No thank you.’ She looks like I’ve said something incorrect again. I gesture towards the metal bottle. ‘I’ve got my own.’
Tea, coffee, water, blood–they’re not so different in their ways.
They all provide some sort of hydration.
Molly leaves without saying anything else, and I slowly track her progress through the open door as she goes first to Devi’s desk and leans across it to whisper something to the woman.
She’s just far enough away that I can’t make it out, but eavesdropping is a nasty habit anyway.
They both turn to look at me, so I quickly avert my eyes.
I sort out the password after a series of errors.
First, the hidden words don’t match one line to another.
Then, when I repeat the process, they do match, but it’s needful that there be a number.
Then, once I’ve added a four to the end, the system alerts me that there’s no special symbol.
I add a comma and, at last, the computer chimes that it’s accepted my password before the screen moves to another screen, this one with many words and rotating photos.
I decide to wait for Molly before I attempt to progress further.
She returns six minutes later with a black mug, which she sets down on the desk atop a sticky note. It’s the perfect size to sit beneath it, so much so that I wonder if it is one of the sticky note’s intended utilities.
She pulls open the same drawer as before, retrieving a notebook that she hands to me. It’s empty beneath the cover, which reads drummond innovation. Her hands look soft with long fingers and plum-coloured nails. When I shook her hand, it was warm, full of life.
‘Okay, this is going to be a fire hose of information, so you’ll want to take a bunch of notes.’
‘Right.’
She sips from her steaming mug, then sits back down on the moving chair. I am impressed again that she has no issue with keeping the seat stable.
Molly spends the next hour showing me one thing after the next on the computer, typing and talking faster than I can really keep up with, especially when she’s using words like scrum, sprints, support tickets, order fulfilment, and parcel tracking.
I take as detailed notes as I can and circle the words I’d like to ask Dylan about later. There are many of them.
It’s an incredible amount of information, and when she tells me it’s time to stop for lunch, she reports that we’re only about 30 per cent through the topics she thought we’d be able to cover today.
I recognise with a sinking in my stomach that it’s in my best interest if I quit this job.
I cannot imagine ever learning the information enough to be adequate, much less proficient.
I had to compel the hiring manager to let me in, and if I want to stay, I’m going to have to compel everyone in the building to keep believing I’m qualified for this position.
Not for the first time since moving here, I am forced to ask, What have I done?
My days in my estate were quieter, simpler.
No computers, no metal bottles full of tepid blood.
I had a library card for the town over, a DVD player and a box set of all seasons of Sex and the City, among other things.
Now I have no money, no bed to lounge upon, only the lumpy couch in Dylan’s studio apartment and his goodwill.
I need this job, and in this, I need Molly’s help. Desperately.
‘You are very good at all of this. It’s been a long time since I started somewhere new.’ I tap my pen against the pad. ‘It’s difficult, starting over.’
Her lips part, and it’s like I can see her thinking. I admire this, giving thought before speaking. She blinks and looks away from me.
‘Well, you won’t be new forever.’
She stands and stretches by putting her hands on her lower back and leaning side to side. The action draws to attention the curve of her waist to hips in a way I hadn’t noticed before. I look away and take a long pull of blood through the foldable black straw.
‘I’m off for lunch. We pick back up in say an hour?’
‘Splendid.’
‘Splendid,’ she repeats, though her tone speaks otherwise.
As quickly as she’d appeared, she’s gone, leaving the light scent of grapefruit in her wake.
Teams messages between Devi Jain and Molly Mason on 29 September 2026
Devi: now…
Devi: I’m not crazy, right? New guy is insanely hot?
Molly: If I could assign you sexual harassment training I would
Devi: It is not normal to look that hot. What does he smell like? Is that the catch? He doesn’t wear deodorant?
Molly: don’t be weird
Molly: (He smells great, unfortunately.)