The Sleeping Dead

by Richard Farren Barber

  “I just wanted to wish you good luck in person, so to speak,” Donna said.

  “Thanks.”

  “Are you nervous?”

  Jackson shrugged, and then realized she wouldn’t be able to see him. “A little,” he confessed.

  “You’ll be fine. They’d be mad not to hire you.”

  “That’s going to be my opening gambit,” Jackson said and smiled at the bravado. “I’ll explain to them that this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for them to acquire a staff member that can make a difference to their company. A chance for them to get in on the ground floor of something new and exciting.”

  Donna laughed. “Good luck,” she whispered, soft and slow.

  “Thanks.” He smiled as he spoke.

  “Café Reynauld?” Donna asked. “As soon as you get out.”

  “Okay,” Jackson agreed, and even after he hung up he could feel the smile stretching his cheeks. Donna had that effect on him. Hell, she had that effect on everyone she met.

  He knocked lightly on the door and pushed it open without waiting for an answer. Inside, the small reception was crowded with a desk and a line of chairs. There was a magazine rack hanging from the wall behind the chairs, stuffed with newspapers and glossies.

  “Can I help you?” The boy behind the counter grinned at Jackson. He seemed genuinely happy to see him, as if he had been waiting all day for him to walk through the door.

  I want to work here, Jackson thought, the idea hard and urgent. I want to work for a company where even the guy on reception looks like he’s having a good time.

  “I’m Jackson Smith, I’m—”

  “Here for the interviews,” the boy finished for him. He looked down at something on his desk and made a mark that Jackson thought was probably a tick upon a list. Jackson felt a flare of panic—How many other names are on that list? How many am I up against for the job?—and willed himself to remain calm.

  “If you’d like to take a seat, someone will be out to collect you in a little while.”

  Jackson settled himself on one of the plastic chairs and plucked a magazine from the rack. He’d heard that some companies started their assessment as soon as the candidate walked through the door—they would take into account everything you said and did from the moment you turned up at their desk.

  He wiped his hands dry against his trouser leg again and stared at the magazine. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt this nervous. He turned a page, but even if someone had held a gun to his head, he wouldn’t have been able to tell them what the article was about.

  “Mr. Smith, if you’d like to follow me?”

  Jackson jerked his head up. He hadn’t heard anyone enter. The man was standing in front of him, smiling. He wore a light gray suit and a deep blue tie. There was a small golden pin on his lapel. Jackson stared at it for a moment but couldn’t decide what it might represent.

  Smiling is good, Jackson thought to himself. He stood quickly, still holding the magazine. He turned to drop it onto the chair and then changed his mind and wedged it back into the magazine rack.

  They passed a series of open offices sectioned off by glass walls. Jackson followed until they came to a large room. Four men sat in a row on the other side of a polished oak desk. As Jackson entered, they stood in a single fluid movement.

  “Mr. Smith, thank you for joining us,” the man on the far right of the group said. He held out his hand and Jackson shook it briskly.

  “John Fairls, chief exec of MedWay.”

  The next man held out his hand. “Peter Walker.”

  Jackson shook his hand and moved on to be introduced to Michael Handford and Malcolm Laine. The last man was a small, nervous type. When he shook Jackson’s hand, he looked away, as if afraid to make eye contact.

  Jackson sat in the chair. There was a glass of water on the table in front of him, beads of condensation forming on the outside.

  “So, Mr. Smith, I wonder if you could start by telling us what inspired you to apply for a job at MedWay?”

  Jackson nodded and tried to avoid smiling too widely. He’d been over the question with Donna. Together they had covered every question he could imagine about the job.

  It was ten minutes into the interview before he noticed there was something wrong with the man seated at the far left of the table—Malcolm Laine. Jackson was answering a question on teamwork and looking at Peter Walker at the time, but from the edge of his vision he saw the steady rhythmic movement of Malcolm Laine moving back and forth. Jackson stared at the top of Walker’s glasses and focused his attention on discussing the attributes he brought to a team dynamic.

  “I’m, err, I work well in a team, but I can also use my own initiative when a problem arises that, err…”

  It was impossible to concentrate. He could hear the gentle creaking of the chair beneath Laine. Jackson wanted to ask him to stop but it occurred to him that Laine’s behavior might be part of the interview.

  “I think it depends on the situation. There will be some tasks where my skills and previous experience mean that I would be able to perform as the leader of a team and others…”

  Laine was still rocking back and forth. Jackson stared at Walker and tried to remember the question he was answering. A moment later, Fairls leaned forward and glared down the table.

  “Malcolm, do you need to take a moment?”

  Malcolm Laine shook his head. He sat at the far end of the table with his hands tucked into his armpits. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead and his face wore a red sheen, as if the room was twenty degrees hotter than it was.

  “Malcolm, I think you need to step out.”

  Malcolm Laine brought the two front legs of his chair back down to the floor with a loud thump. He sat still, but somehow that was even worse, as if, even though he was no longer moving, the motion within him had not stopped. He rammed his hands even tighter into his own armpits. His body trembled with the effort to sit still, like a length of wire carrying a high electrical load.

  Fairls stared at him for a moment longer, and Jackson thought he recognized anger or even disgust in the chief executive’s expression. He turned to Jackson. “I’m sorry, Mr. Smith, please continue. You were explaining your role within a team.”

  Jackson nodded. He could feel his skin warming under the interrogation and for a moment the desire to ram his fists into his own armpits and copy Laine was almost overwhelming. He bit down on his lip and dragged a breath of cool air into his lungs.

  “Thank you, Mr. Fairls,” he said. “As I was explaining…”

  It felt like he had been in the room for only a few minutes when John Fairls stood up to conclude the interview. Jackson took the hint and stood himself, pushing his chair back. Walker stood, Handford stood. Laine sat in his chair. The rhythmic motion had crept back and now he was rocking vehemently, slamming the front legs of the chair down on the floor with each cycle.

  “I’m sorry,” Fairls said to Jackson. “I can’t explain…”

  “Thank you for the opportunity,” Jackson said quickly, and hoped he’d earned himself brownie points by engineering it so that the chief exec didn’t have to apologize about the performance of one of his staff. He shook Fairls’s hand, and then Walker’s and Handford’s. He looked at Laine for a moment, but the man no longer seemed aware that he was in the room. His lips were moving slightly and Jackson realized the man was arguing with himself. Jackson wanted to reach across the table and grab the man by the shoulders. He wanted to scream into his face that he needed to get a hold of himself, pull himself together. He wanted to slap him. He wanted to…

  Jackson clasped his hands together. He nodded to the stricken figure of Laine. As he walked to the door, he heard the fevered whisperings of the man and the creak-stomp as he slammed the chair back down onto the wooden floor.

  Laine stood up.

  “Malcolm?” Fairls asked.

  Malcolm Laine rushed around the edge of the table and almost pushed between Jackson and Fairls
as he made for the door. Walker took a step to follow, but Fairls held up his hand. “Leave him.”

  When Jackson left the room a moment later, the corridor outside was empty.

  Fairls took his hand again and shook it twice with the vigor of a man pump-priming a well. “I want to apologize again…”

  “There really is no need,” Jackson said.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” Fairls said, his tone softer now, anger replaced by astonishment.

  Jackson shrugged, mindful that it was possible he could be speaking to his future boss. He shook his hand again and allowed himself to be directed back to the reception, where a woman sat in the chair he had vacated. She looked as nervous as he had felt and he gave her a weak smile. Good luck, he thought, but not too much.

  And then he was back in the hallway, feeling as if he had just escaped from some tremendous pressure bubble. Through the translucent window behind him he could see shapes moving and he knew that John Fairls was offering his hand to the next interview candidate. Jackson felt a brief flare of hot anger at the woman, even though he knew it was misplaced—it was not her that he was angry at, it was fucking Malcolm Laine. Why did he chose the middle of his interview to have a nervous breakdown?

  He walked the hallway back toward the elevators, taking his phone from his pocket to send Donna a quick text. He turned the corner at the end of the hallway. The bank of closed elevator doors was on the right. At the end of the corridor, silhouetted against the bright sky and the tall windows, was a man. It took Jackson a fraction of a second to recognize the figure.

  3

  “Mr. Laine?”

  Jackson took a step closer to the man. Laine didn’t seem to know he was there. He was standing at the window with his hands pressed against the glass, fingers spread wide.

  “Mr. Laine, can I help? Do you want me to get someone?”

  Jackson looked down the corridor. He could be back at MedWay’s offices in seconds, but he imagined himself bursting into the reception and saying to the boy behind the desk, “Mr. Laine is…”

  Mr. Laine is going to throw himself out the window.

  Jackson stared at the man. Was that what he really thought was going to happen? He shook his head. The guy was just having a bad day, that was all. Maybe he’d heard his divorce had become final or one of his kids had been picked up for smoking dope. That was all, just a bad day.

  “Mr. Laine?” Jackson raised his voice, but the man didn’t turn round. He reached out and touched Laine’s shoulder. He felt the tremors flushing through Laine’s body. Jackson jerked his hand away.

  “Jesus. What’s wrong with you?”

  Laine’s breathing reflected back from the window—rough and jagged. Jackson stood next to him, careful not to touch him. It occurred to him that whatever Laine had might be contagious.

  “Wait there, I’ll get someone,” Jackson told him.

  “Dshfgfd.”

  Jackson turned back. “I’m sorry?”

  Laine spoke again, his voice too low for Jackson to understand. He probably wasn’t saying anything sensible anyway. Jackson had an idea that whatever was wrong with Laine, he had passed beyond sensible a little while ago.

  Jackson leaned in close. The man was whispering rapidly. Words churned from him like water boiling in a pan.

  Laine tucked his hands back into his armpits and began to sway. His utterances became more fevered. He began to grind his head against the window, as if he wanted to burrow through the glass.

  “Let me help you,” Jackson said.

  Laine did not seem to hear the offer. He pulled his head back, the muscles in his neck straining with the effort, and then slammed his forehead against the glass.

  “Jesus. Fuck.”

  Jackson reached out to pull Laine away from the window. For a moment Laine looked at Jackson, but he seemed to stare right through him. A large red welt sprung up in the center of his forehead where he had hit the glass. Jackson tugged on his arm, but Laine wrenched himself free.

  He hit the window again. Harder. The sound reminded Jackson of a bird slamming into a glass door.

  Laine hit the window again.

  “Jesus.” Jackson turned around, but the corridor was empty. “Help!” he screamed. His voice drifted down the corridor, all urgency lost. “Hey, I need some help here.” He grabbed for Laine. The guy was going to hurt himself if he carried on.

  Laine hit the window. When he pulled back this time, there was a smear of blood on the glass.

  Jackson wrapped his arms around the man, but it was like trying to hold on to a bag of snakes. Laine shifted and wriggled and flexed beneath him, but still Jackson hung on. The little man was stronger than Jackson had appreciated. He had no muscle on him—just a pipe-cleaner thin body on which someone had hung a gray suit—but Jackson struggled to contain the man.

  Laine bowed his head, and bit Jackson’s hand.

  Jackson screamed, more in surprise than pain. The bastard had actually bitten him. He looked at his hand and the tooth marks were bright white within a red ring.

  Laine ran at the window and hit it with a heavy, ominous crack. A drop of blood rolled down the glass. He backed up a couple of steps, and before Jackson could respond, he threw himself at the window once again.

  This time the impact drew a jagged line down the center of the glass. Laine backed up once more, shaking his head like a prizefighter in the fifteenth round.

  When he hit the window the next time, it exploded. Shards of glass fell inside the corridor but more fell outward, down to the ground eight stories below. Laine teetered for a moment, halfway out the window.

  Jackson ran toward him but Laine removed his hands from under his armpits and placed them on the jagged bottom of the window. Immediately a flood of fresh blood washed down the broken mountain range of glass below him. He pushed down and, in a single graceful movement, pulled himself over the window ledge. For a moment he seemed finally balanced, teetering on the edge, and then Laine fell.

  The sound of the man landing on the concrete reached up the eight floors—hard and wet. A moment later the screaming began.

  Jackson stared at the broken window, unable to accept what he had just witnessed, and then turned and fled down the corridor, back in the direction of MedWay.

  4

  The whey-faced boy from MedWay’s reception placed a cup of black tea on the table in front of Jackson and took a step backward.

  “Thanks,” Jackson whispered. The boy nodded and then fled the room.

  Jackson took a sip from the cup. The harsh taste of black tea was underlined by an intense sweetness—the boy must have dumped at least five spoons of sugar into the cup.

  A figure passed the door. It had happened regularly since he had staggered into MedWay screaming about Laine’s suicide, as if word had got round the company and they were taking it in turns to get a look at the man who had seen it happen.

  But this time the figure didn’t pass by. The door opened and Fairls came in.

  “How are you feeling?”

  Jackson shrugged. He didn’t have any words to explain what emotions were running through him. He didn’t know Laine, not really. His overall feeling toward him had been annoyance that his antics had been screwing up his interview, but that was replaced by…shock? Horror?

  “I couldn’t stop him,” Jackson said, aware that he had said the same thing to everyone who entered the room.

  “I know.”

  “He was so determined.” He stared at Fairls. It was strange to see the face that had seemed so hard on the other side of the interview table, now appear so brittle.

  “The police will be here shortly. To interview you, I assume. But they say they’re held up with other incidents. Although I don’t know what’s more important than a man throwing himself off the eighth floor of an office block.”

  Well, he can’t hurt anyone else, Jackson thought, and tried to bat away the idea.

  “And we’ve spoken to…Donna.” Fairls he
sitated over the name, as if he was checking to make sure he had got it right. “She said she’ll be over as quickly as she can.” Fairls smiled. “She asked how you were doing.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “That you were shaken up, probably in shock. I suspect that when the paramedics have finished with Laine’s body, they’ll want to come and check you out. I’ll want them to come and check you out.”

  “Thanks,” Jackson said. He took another sip of the tea and grimaced. Fairls peered at him and it occurred to Jackson that this would have been a good place to work. He kept the thought to himself—it felt a little like dancing on Laine’s grave to be thinking about the interview at the moment.

  “I need to go and sort out some things,” Fairls said. “We’re going to send everyone home and I need to get in contact with Malcolm’s wife.”

  “He was married?” Jackson asked, not sure why he was so surprised.

  “And they had a ten-year-old girl.” Fairls’s voice broke.

  Jackson nodded, although the idea of ringing up Mrs. Laine and telling her that her husband had thrown himself out of a window was too terrible to consider.

  “I thought he was happy,” Fairls said.

  Jackson didn’t answer, there was nothing he could say.

  Fairls shuddered, and as Jackson watched him he seemed to draw himself together, to stand straighter and become stronger. The transformation was incredible to watch. He put a hand on Jackson’s shoulder and the contact felt reassuring.

  “Hang in there.”

  Jackson nodded, not sure he had any alternative unless he planned to follow Laine’s example.

  Fairls closed the door behind him and Jackson was left alone with the syrupy cup of tea and the image replayed in his mind of Laine battering his forehead against the glass. What could have been so terrible about his life that he felt suicide was the only way to escape?