The boy paused, blushed.
“I know I shouldn’t have looked, sir, but...she dropped her veil when she saw me staring. But I couldn’t help staring, sir. Then she went. Turned her back and was gone. But I saw it. Her mouth and eye, sir, all stitched up closed, sir, and this one eye, sir, staring. Just one eye, sir—and it was weeping...”
Stephen Volk is the creator/writer of the British TV paranormal drama series Afterlife and the notorious BBCTV “Halloween hoax” Ghostwatch. His latest feature film, The Awakening, stars Rebecca Hall and Dominic West, while his other credits include Ken Russell’s Gothic and The Guardian, which he co-wrote with director William Friedkin. His first collection of short stories, Dark Corners, was published by Gray Friar Press in 2006. More recently his novella Vardoger earned him a nomination for both a Shirley Jackson and a British Fantasy Award.
Another Shift Change
David Dunwoody
It’s cool, not cold, but uncomfortable nonetheless. The A/C’s Freon fingers reach down from the ceiling to tickle the hairs on his arms. They snake up from the floor into his shorts. It’s nice first thing in the afternoon, when his shift starts, but seven hours in he feels sick from it. Against all reason, sweat begins beading along his hairline.
His underarms are already damp. It’s just that he hates it so much. Every second he spends in this chair with its sticky rubber armrests and prickly cushioning, every form he enters into the computer—God, those forms, pages so light and smooth he can barely separate them, and with an ultra-fine layer of some dust or powder or something, probably just paper fiber but it makes him nauseous to feel the invisible stuff coating his fingertips. The sun has gone down and the blinds behind him have been drawn. Now it’s just the fluorescents overhead, which seem to intensify, and the sight of the contrast bleeding out from everything around him, that makes him sick, too.
The others in his row—mostly middle-aged women—somehow don’t notice the hell they’re in. He supposes they’ve been numb to it for a long while. Lifers. Their vacant stares only flicker when they laugh at a cruel comment about someone on the next row. He hears all the comments, despite the sweat-clogged headphones he keeps on his ears at all times. The whispered junior-high gossip and the furtive shifting of seats when a manager walks by—he hears all of it, every day. Because he has made himself a shade, a non-entity, they prattle on shamelessly around him. He hears them sing sweetly to one another’s faces and spit venom once backs are turned. They’re the dead heart of this place.
They must talk about him too, because they talk about everyone. He never says a word. He barely looks at people. Probably thinks he’s better than everybody. Probably lives alone or with his mother. Can you say Psyyyyychooooo? I’ll bet he’s a pervert, bet he thinks about us the way our husbands used to. Or maybe he’s not into women. That would make sense.
The grandmother of seven who sits directly behind him taps his shoulder. He pulls off his headphones and she tells him, “Some of the girls brought cookies for Linda’s birthday. They’re on the table behind Rosie’s cubicle.”
“Oh, cool. Thanks.” He turns back to his monitor. Linda was gone last Friday and this Monday. She took an early birthday trip with her sister to Phoenix. Grandma back there had spent both days telling everyone what she’d heard about Linda and her “miscarriage,” which went in air quotes because everyone apparently knew it had been either a fake pregnancy or an abortion.
His palms are growing sweaty now. His fingers stick to the keys and come away with the feeling of rubbery crud on them. The day-shift person who uses this terminal probably wears those finger things to separate the forms. They probably leave some grotesque residue and now it’s gumming the spaces between the ridges of his fingertips. Sweat gathers in the crease of his neck and shoulder. Between his thighs. He needs to go to the restroom. Just needs to sit in a stall for a few minutes and clear his head. He rolls back from the terminal.
His fingers stick fast to the keyboard. They won’t come away.
He can’t get up.
His elbows are fixed to the armrests now. He looks from them to the keyboard, plants his wrists on his ergonomic gel strip and tries again to pry his fingertips free. Their skin is pulled thin and white. So are the keys. So are the keys. His hands go slack and he watches the keyboard’s surface flush pink. He presses down on the spongy keys and he can feel the threads of bone beneath. He can also feel the pressure of his fingers from within the keyboard.
It’s in me. I’m in it. I don’t know.
He tries again to pull out of the chair. His back and arms refuse to cooperate in the slightest. After all, one can’t just pry oneself in half like that.
His monitor flickers and goes dark. Everything is flickering. It’s his vision. His periphery is fading and his hearing is muffled. He tries to scream. There’s not a mouth anymore where a mouth should be. Something jostles and tugs in the cavity behind his fused lips.
The activity of the people around him is a dull murmur, but he can feel their tittering. They see. They know. It has to be them doing this, and why? Because he refuses to set roots in this place? Because he doesn’t paste family photos to the sides of his monitor and doesn’t air his bare feet beneath his desk? Because he won’t have any of Linda’s cookies? Because he hates his job like a normal person?
His spine and the chair’s are one now, and they’re moving. It doesn’t hurt, the blocks of bone stretching his flesh and scraping over one another. That only makes it more terrifying. He wants to be in pain, torn and rendered and invaded—not part of the thing. He can’t be! He still has a name. He still has a mind.
The monitor hums to life. His name appears beside the winking cursor. Then:
Favorite color—Green
Favorite movie—Naked Lunch
Favorite drink—Coca-Cola
He stares blankly at it. He has no choice. Meanwhile his stomach has calcified and is beginning to push out from his belly. Flesh recedes in sheets from his torso and slips through the panels in the floor. His sternum softens and pulls apart like taffy.
Favorite band—Post-Gabriel Genesis (says it’s Arcade Fire)
# Books of poetry owned and displayed but never read: 3
Most frequent masturbation material—Kendra Billings (best friend from high school and college—never slept together, was an usher at her wedding. Most recurrent fantasy involves taking her in her wedding dress)
Their laughter shakes his bones. He can’t struggle. There’s nothing to struggle against. He is the chair. He is the terminal.
# Times beat up at school: 21
# Times fought back: 0
Fantasizes about violence against tormentors: Weekly
Listens to while throwing air punches in studio apartment: Post-Gabriel Genesis
His head is vibrating as they howl. Thick spurs of bone, like gear-teeth, have emerged from his front and back and bottom. The chair moves slightly backward with a rumble.
Favorite high: Ambien
Most embarrassing memory: Wet pants during sixth beating by Dan Galli
Most shameful secret: At sister’s twelfth birthday party
His viewpoint is jerked up and away from the monitor at that second, and he’s at least glad for that, though he isn’t spared the gasps and quiet chuckles.
The entire terminal is moving now. The spurs in his back have joined with those of the grandmother behind him, and he is rotated on a pelvic axis until he is parallel with the floor. His head is now just another gear-tooth; it catches between two of hers with a dull clunk. He starts to move again, and the sounds in his head fade as he’s lowered into the floor.
He is alone in Freon-cooled darkness. Once again level with his gaze, the monitor is blank, save for the cursor.
It flashes and tells him, Data entry shift complete.
I don’t clock out for another hour, he thinks.
A mechanical snarl pierces the air. He jostles, and this time there is pain, the pain of separation, and then he’s
falling and then nothing.
***
The next day a warehouse employee pulls a palette stacked high with boxes into the data entry department. Inside each box are five hundred new forms to be entered. Each is coated with a fine dust which sticks to the fingers, just as the forms stick to one another, as if desperately clinging.
No one really pays attention to what they’re entering into the computer. Something like highway hypnosis sets in what with the ceaseless clatter of keys and the same fields over and over again. Most carry on conversations about other things while their fingers fly. The forms’ names and personal information don’t really register with anyone who handles them, not even if it’s the name of an employee from their row who was promoted just the day before.
Work flows. Freon flows. The girls titter. The job sighs contentment.
David Dunwoody is the author of the zombie novels Empire and Empire’s End (Permuted Press) as well as the collections Dark Entities (Dark Regions) and Unbound & Other Tales (Library of Horror). Dave lives in Utah and can be visited on the Web at daviddunwoody.com.
Face Out
Lisa Morton
“There should be no difference between selling a book and a bar of soap, and if you’re in this because you love books, then get out.”
Megan Barlow snapped the point on her official FinnBooks pencil.
She’d already bristled at the first two hours of the FinnBooks management seminar. She’d endured everything from rah-rah motivational speeches to sales pitches on the company’s new Fook e-book reader (version 2.0 included built-in text-to-speech, full-color graphics, and five free downloads of current bestsellers) to dressing-downs on how sales had slumped over the last quarter (because, of course, that had to be the managers’ fault). But the bar of soap comparison was finally too much. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was not a bar of soap. The Shining was not a kitchen appliance. Dune was not a can of soda. The pencil point left an angry black hole torn in the FinnBooks notepad, and Megan almost rose right then. It would have been so easy to walk out, to tell the smug, blandly-handsome District Manager to stuff it, that she thought books were more than toiletry items, that she’d go off and start her own independent bookstore and show them how it was done…
Except the economy was tight, unemployment was over 10%, she was hardly paid enough to have accrued savings, and she needed the health insurance. So she forced herself to sit, and endure, and nod, and pretend to take notes. And when it was over (God, when would it ever be over?), she’d shake the District Manager’s hand and tell him she looked forward to his next visit to her store and she knew the re-tooled Fook reader would turn things around, yes, sir.
And that night, she’d crawl through traffic to head home, where she’d promptly get just as stinking drunk as her salary would allow.
***
“That bad, huh?”
Megan looked up from her tumbler of cheap rum and coke as her roommate Delilah walked into the living room of the tiny two-bedroom house they shared. Megan nodded, then took another swallow before speaking. “Did you know books were exactly the same as bars of soap?”
“They really said that?”
“They did.”
Megan gazed at the bookcases lining the living room wall. She and Delilah had traded off: Megan got three bookcases, and Delilah got an entertainment unit with a large-screen TV. The cases were already filled, though, and Megan had begun stacking them up in her bedroom on the floor until she could get a new case in there. She gazed at her books fondly, at her novels and Celtic history books and movie star biographies and graphic novels, then giggled. “I’ve sure got a lot of soap.”
Delilah laughed as well, then went into the kitchen and came back with her own glass full of fizzing cocktail. “Hope you don’t mind if I join you.”
“Misery loves company.”
Delilah plunked herself down on the far end of their slightly tattered couch, then pulled out her smart-phone. “Hey, remember my cousin Ralph? The one down in Louisiana?”
Megan was sure she’d heard her roomie mention the name, but right now her brain was too clogged with alcohol and irritation to bring the data up. She settled for a lie. “Yeah.”
“He sent me the craziest shit today. Y’know, he’s into voodoo, magic, all that stuff. Look at what he sent me.”
She brought up her email, scanned messages until she found the right one, then opened the attachment and held the phone up to Megan. Megan squinted through her drunken haze and made out a complicated symbol of some sort. “What the heck is that supposed to be?”
“He says it’s called a ‘veve,’ and that it calls down some spirit or something. This one is a big secret or some crap. It’s supposed to be a…” Delilah scanned the email, then smiled, “…a ‘loa’ of vengeance. He claims it really works. He set it loose on a girlfriend he broke up with and he says she was just killed in a car accident.”
Normally Megan would have laughed and asked Delilah how the rest of her day had gone, but tonight she was drunk and not normal and found the notion of revenge against FinnBooks very appealing. “Really?”
***
An hour later they stood beneath a print-out of the veve, finished reciting the words Ralph had sent with the drawing, and then waited.
After a few seconds, Megan reeled away. “I think I’m going to be sick.”
She fled to the bathroom, the spell already forgotten.
***
Three nights later, Megan was preparing to close her store. It was five minutes until 9, the parking lot outside was largely empty, and she was very ready to go home. The District Manager had just sent around some new guidelines, and FinnBooks was emphasizing faced-out stock more than ever, since they believed that covers (not content) sold books. On one of his visits last year, the D.M. had written her up for not facing out enough books (“but our customers like that we have more stock, and that doesn’t leave room to face every title out,” she’d complained to deaf ears), but with the new rules she’d be forced to pull a lot of books for return. Last time, just before the D.M.’s bi-monthly visit, she’d actually pulled books, boxed them, and hidden them in the basement until the D.M. had left; the store had an inexplicable, huge, unused basement—someone told Megan it’d been built in the ‘40s and was intended to serve as the neighborhood bunker in the event of air attacks—and no one ever looked down there.
Megan knew some of her regular customers would be disappointed by the diminished selection. She and her staff were on a first-name basis with a lot of their clientele, and she knew what they liked. Megan prided herself on her store’s customer service, and thought it was the reason her FinnBooks routinely placed in the top sales figures for the chain. None of which seemed to matter to Mr. By-the-Numbers District Manager, who only cared that she met all of the chain’s carefully-defined standards for the perfect FinnBooks store.
FinnSoap was more like it.
At 8:55, Megan heard the door open. She’d sent her part-timers home early tonight, and was closing alone with her assistant manager, a rangy kid with funky hair (and interesting literary tastes—he liked Kathy Acker and Chuck Palahniuk) named Damon. When she heard the door, she looked up, about to tell the new arrival they were closing—and her gut clenched when she saw who it was.
Eric. Her least favorite regular.
Eric was a fat bully who never bought a book, but liked to gloat about the latest technological gizmo he’d acquired. When FinnBooks had introduced their first Fook e-reader, he’d been positively ecstatic at having something new to complain about. He liked to grin as he told Megan she worked for a loser company, and that she’d be better off as a secretary; oh, and by the way—why didn’t they go out some time?
“Eric, you know we’re closing,” Megan told him, trying to sound firm instead of merely weary.
“So, have you got the Fook 2.0 in stock yet?”
“They came in yesterday.”
He laughed and gestured. “That’s it, then. All this
paper shit will be gone in six months. You know that, right? Soon you’re gonna be managing e-book downloads out of some office, ‘cause paper books are dead.”
Megan sighed. “We’ll see, Eric. A lot of our customers still love a real book.”
“And a lot more don’t care—they’ll read their bestsellers in whatever form’s cheapest, right?”
She hated to admit he was right. “Maybe.”
“So can I see this Fook 2.0?”
“Eric…”
He held up his hands, talking fast. “Look, you can close out while I look at, okay?”
She knew it was against company policy, and she knew he would never buy anything, but she didn’t care tonight and was too tired to fight him. “Okay, but five minutes is all, got it?”
“You’re a good girl.”
She ground her teeth at the patronizing comment, but waved him to the kiosk at the side of the store where the Fook Readers were displayed. Then she locked the doors, walked over to join Damon behind the front counter, and began the close-out. It took them less than ten minutes to count out the registers and run the credit card settlement, then they stashed the receipts in the safe and looked up. Eric was nowhere to be found.
“Eric,” Megan called out, now well and truly pissed off. “C’mon, time to go.”
There was no answer.
Megan and Damon exchanged a look. “Freak,” Damon muttered.
“I’ll get him. You double-check the back door.”
“You sure?”
Despite his odd tastes in authors, Damon was a sweet guy. Sometimes Megan thought it was almost too bad he already had a girlfriend. “I’m fine. Eric’s just a dick, not a crazy.”
Damon nodded, then walked away from the front counter.
Megan made her way over toward the e-reader kiosk. “Eric, let’s go, c’mon…”
Still no response.
Then she saw the shoes sticking out from the end of an aisle. What the hell was he doing on the floor? “Eric…?”
HELP! WANTED: Tales of On-the-Job Terror Page 3