by Gafford, Sam
“Perry! Perry knows where I am. He’ll tell the police.”
“There are no police around here—or haven’t you noticed that? Private security firm. Owned by me. As for Perry . . . well, hard for him to talk without a head.”
Kelly started shaking. “What the fuck do you mean? What did you do?”
“When Bob came to Innsmouth in ’27 (and, yes, he is that old), do you know what he saw? Monsters! That’s how he thought of the people here. He was afraid of them, so he brought the government here to wipe them out. But once he started to change, he realized that they weren’t ‘monsters’ at all because he was one of them. What he forgot to ask was: ‘What are the monsters afraid of?’”
The phone chirped.
“Hmm. Your dinner’s gotten 83 ‘likes’ already.”
From far down the tunnels came the sound of something rising out of the water.
“What came out from beneath Y’ha-nthlei was as far beyond the Deep Ones and Dagon as they are above us. Below that chasm lies a nightmare made flesh which came to us, and we served it. In response it gave us all we wanted and desired, for the affairs of man are a trifle to it. All it required was the sacrifice of the Deep Ones, which we gave gladly.
“But,” Gilman sighed sadly, “we were greedy. We ‘overfished,’ so to speak. The number of Deep Ones diminished to new lows, but the hunger and demand never left. So we had to attract more people to come here and settle. Hence the ‘revitalization’ of Innsmouth. Many of those with the old blood came willingly and, when they cooperated, their fortunes blossomed. And if they’re sacrificing the lives of their future children and grandchildren, what of it? They get to live well, and that’s all that’s really important.”
The sound of something wet, like flippers, slapping on bricks came out of the tunnels and grew louder.
Kelly cried, “Please . . . please . . .”
“There’s always a minority to exploit, always. At first it was the degenerate townsfolk, then the Deep Ones and later it’ll be something else. We have to replenish, you see? We need to ‘re-seed.’”
Slowly, Kelly was beginning to understand.
Watery, lidless eyes caught the light and reflected back from the darkness of the tunnel.
“What does a farmer do when the herd fails to reproduce? He brings in new cows from outside. He brings in new blood and then steps away and let’s nature take its course.
“You’re young and healthy. You’re got a lot of productive, or reproductive, years ahead of you.”
Kelly watched what was coming out of the tunnels. Some of them walked, some crawled by the use of rudimentary flippers. Skin had been replaced by scales and fins jutted out at anatomically impossible angles. Only a semblance of humanity was suggested.
Gilman walked back to the door. “And after all, anything’s better than morning TV, right?”
He flicked off the lights and walked out the door while Kelly screamed.
Weltschmerz
I woke up alive again today.
Looking up at the bedroom ceiling, I silently cursed the fact that I hadn’t died in my sleep. I awoke to another day in the same hell as always; facing a lifetime of days to come exactly like this one. Scratching my head, I swung my feet out of bed onto that tan carpet I hated so much. I shut off my alarm, and the sound of Ann snoring filled the room. I looked over at my wife. As usual, the covers were over her head and she was just an amorphous blob.
It was the same as every morning had been for the last twenty years: I got up, shaved, took a shower (being careful not to use all the hot water). Gulped down a few bites of something; didn’t matter what it was. All done as quietly as possible. After I got dressed, I looked back at Ann. She was still asleep and snoring. Twenty years ago, I would have woken her up to kiss her goodbye. Now there didn’t seem to be much point.
It was a cold October morning and neither the car nor I liked it very much. The engine struggled while it turned over, but it was an old car and that was just to be expected. We couldn’t afford to buy a new car, so I was stuck with one that was outdated ten years ago. I shifted it into gear and it started moving slowly. The cassette player had been broken for a while now, and I had to make do with the inane chatter of morning radio. From there, I parked at the usual commuter lot and took the bus into Providence.
Buses are unusual places. People thrown together for a short period of time tend to show their differences. Some, like myself, sit in stony silence, anxious for the trip to end. Others become loud and boisterous, insistent upon being noticed and heard. On any given day, I can learn about any number of private lives through one-sided cell phone conversations. Love, sex, hate—all through a phone. And the homeless are either frighteningly silent or willing to debate politics with anyone who dares to disagree with them. I close my eyes and try to decipher where the bus is by the turns and movements. I’ve gotten fairly good at it. I can pretty much tell where I am at any point on the ride from Warren to Providence. Sadly, this is often the highlight of my day.
Once the bus arrives at Kennedy Plaza, I avoid the traffic on my way to the Fleet Bank building. Once it was the Hospital Trust building. Before that, it used to be the Old Stone Bank building. I’ve come to realize that my life is marked by remembering how things used to be. Once inside, I sign in, take the elevator to the third floor, and punch my code into the keypad to open the door to the Dividends and Securities Department. I sit down at my desk, four rows down and two chairs to the left, and log into the computer. I nod a silent ‘good morning’ to my fellow prisoners and open up my work for the day.
My cubicle in hell is a clean one. All the files and printouts are in order in plastic holders on my desk. The desk drawers hold only what is needed. A few historical reports in cardboard covers take the bottom drawer. The second holds my employee handbook. Updated every year and never opened otherwise. The small top drawer holds the few stationery items I use: pens, paper clips, tape, scissors, staples, and a few candy bars for the afternoon lag. On the top of my desk is only my computer monitor, keyboard, mouse, a phone, and the plastic file holder. No photos. No doodads. No mementos. There’s no rule against them. Flexman, who sits in the desk behind me, has framed pictures of his wife, his kids, a “world’s greatest dad” award, a rock that he brought back from a beach in Hawaii, and a little plastic square that says “Jesus loves you, but I’m not Jesus.” I used to have a picture of Ann on my desk, but that was a long time ago.
I suppose ‘cubicle’ is the wrong way to describe our situation. A ‘cubicle’ suggests walls that separate every work station. We have no walls. There are rows of desks, set in pairs. From where I sat, I could see across the room in every direction. There were maybe twenty rows and six columns of desks. I never bothered to count them all. To the right, near the front of the room, were the two manager’s offices. They were the normal type of office one sees in a bank. Nothing particularly special, but they were made that way so that the inhabitants could be interchangeable. In the fifteen years since I’d been in that department, there had been five different people in those offices. It would take quite an effort for me to recall all their names.
The current manager was Tim Sympkof, who clearly saw the department as only a quick stop onto something better. He rarely bothered to talk to any of us and spent most of his days in his office, listening to one of those digital radios. The only time Sympkof came out of his office was if any of the executives came into the room, and that almost never happened. Most of the time, Sympkof left the running of the department to his assistant manager, Harry Helger, who’d probably been with the bank since the first account was opened. Harry was nice but essentially useless. He’d managed to keep his job by not making anyone mad and, basically, no one wanted his job anyway.
Through the years, the number of the people in the department varied. When I first started, nearly every desk was full. Now, with the economic ‘downturn,’ only about half the desks were being used. The work hadn’t decreased, only the numbe
r of people to do it.
My job was handling dividends. I tracked securities and verified who was holding what and how much they were due. It was tedious and laborious and mind-numbing. If anyone ever says that they love accounting, then you know you are dealing with a madman. No one loves accounting any more than anyone loves cleaning out toilets, but it’s something that needs to be done and it drives every aspect of the economy. Still, you’ll never see a television commercial bragging about how exciting it is to be an accountant. There are no television shows about accountants solving crimes. Even truck driver school commercials look more exciting.
When I started, we still did everything by hand. Slowly, everything changed over to computers with new programs and e-mail and the like. I’d always been good with such things, so I picked them up pretty easily, which is probably how I managed to hold onto my job. All our computers were connected to the mainframe and we had access to e-mail and Internet, but we were constantly monitored. I could get around the spyware the bank put in but never bothered to. There wasn’t much I wanted to spend my time looking at anyway. Flexman was different, though; so one afternoon I set up his computer so he could surf the Web as much as he wanted without anyone knowing. I mainly did it so he’d stop talking to me so much. But after I did that, he came to me with any computer problems . . . and he always seemed to be having problems.
“Hey, Doug,” he whispered to me, “my computer’s doing it again.”
I turned and looked at him and he pointed at his monitor.
Sighing, I stood up and went and looked. The screen had several pornographic sites open. “I told you to be careful what you looked at.”
Flexman laughed. He was a big man and his smile could take up half his face. The fact that he was black never made much difference to me. Black, white, Asian, whatever. We’re all just as pointless.
The computer was locked. Somewhere there was a virus trying to get through.
“I’m going to have to shut this down. You’re going to lose any work you had.”
He moved aside and I pressed the right buttons in the right order and the screen went black. Five seconds later, the Microsoft Windows logo came up. I bypassed the log-in and opened the programs. “There,” I said, “you should be all right now.”
“You da man, Doug! You got, like, a gift with computers. Why don’t you go into programming or something?”
“Oh, yeah, right. Go into the only other field that’s as boring as accounting? No, thanks!”
As I looked up from Flexman’s monitor, I could see there was a girl pushing a cart in the middle of the room. She was one of the ‘runners’: people who ‘run’ things from department to department that can’t be sent via e-mail. There aren’t as many of them as there used to be. She was thin, and young. Maybe twenty-two at the most. Her hair was straight, shoulder-length, dark with a streak of bright red dyed in the front. Her lips, and breasts, were full and I could have sworn she was looking at me. She threw a package in her cart and left the room.
“Who’s that?” Flexman said.
I went back to my seat. “Just some runner,” I said, “she’ll probably quit by the end of the month like they all do.” Punching my keyboard, I got back to work looking at the endless series of numbers.
At lunchtime, I logged off my computer and headed to the cafeteria. Fleet was one of the few places I knew that still had a cafeteria for their employees, and almost everyone used it. Situated on the fourth floor, it took up a large area and was designed with large windows that looked out over Kennedy Plaza. The place was always crowded and table space was usually at a premium. I sat down in my usual place: table for two, near the back wall, in a corner away from the windows. Around me, the tables filled and people came and went. It was like high school all over again. The tellers ate with the tellers, the managers ate with the managers, departments grouped together, and there was not an executive in sight. They ate in their private dining room upstairs on the tenth floor with their own kitchen staff. I’d heard that the food there was much better than what we were given here.
I took out my lunch and started to eat. It was plain turkey on white bread. No lettuce, tomato, or mayo. A small bag of chips with a bottle of water and some baby carrots finished the meal. I never brought anything to read. I’d never be able to concentrate with all the noise around me, and I hated to start reading something knowing that I was on a time limit. Never was one for reading newspapers either.
“This seat taken?”
It took a second before I realized that someone was speaking to me. That never happened.
I looked up and it was the ‘runner’ from before. She had a tray with something that pretended to be a hamburger but was probably more akin to a circle of cardboard. It was covered in cheese, lettuce, onions, pickles, and some oddly colored sauce. A tray of nachos was the side order and looked to have just about everything on it possible.
She was smiling, and I could see that her nose had been pierced.
“Hello? Can I sit here? There’s no other seat available.”
I could see several seats empty behind her.
“Um . . . sure. If you like.”
“Thanks! Been a fucking long day already.”
She sat down and immediately began to eat. There was a certain amount of animalistic joy in the way she attacked her hamburger. “I’m Maya, by the way.”
I nodded. “I’m Doug. Doug Marsden.”
She was wearing a thin shirt with mid-length sleeves. It was warm out, so they had the air conditioning on full-blast. I could tell that she wasn’t wearing a bra, as two points started to rise up under her shirt. There was a hint of tattoos on her arm.
“So what do you do here, Doug?”
“Me? I . . . I work in Dividends and Securities.”
She smiled. Her top lip turned up slightly. “Crap, that must be boring. How do you stand it?”
I nodded. “Well, you know, it’s a job.”
She scoffed. “I think I’d put a needle through my eye if I had to do that all day long.”
As she ate, I looked at her more closely. Her hair was dyed black except for the streak of red in front. I couldn’t tell if the red was her real hair color or not. Her ears were each pierced several times, and I unexpectedly caught myself wondering what else was pierced. Her eyes were green and her skin was soft and pink. Although not unhealthy, I doubted that she spent a lot of time in the sun. I think she caught me staring but didn’t say anything.
“And what do you do, Maya?”
“I just started in the mail department. I’m a runner, you know. It keeps me busy. But I’m really a musician!”
“Oh?” I asked.
“Yeah, got a few things up on YouTube, y’know? All my own songs and everything. Look me up under ‘Mayakeyes.’ I’m looking to get something going.”
I made a mental note for later and finished eating my sandwich.
Maya polished off her burger and started on her nachos.
“You don’t talk much, do you, Doug?” she asked.
I looked up, startled at the question.
“Uh, no, not too much.”
“That’s all right. I like the strong, silent type.”
She put her hand on mine. There was still cheese sauce on her fingers and I could feel it oozing between mine.
Near the windows, I could see a bunch of people from the mail room eating their lunch. There were several empty chairs.
“Are you sure you don’t want to sit with your friends from your department?”
Maya looked over. “What? Them?” She scoffed and turned back to me. “Nah, they’re boring. Insignificant assholes, the bunch of them. They’re just too fucking stupid to realize it. But I’ve got a feeling about you, Doug, I think you get it. I can see it in your eyes.”
She lifted her hand up, tracing her finger along the edge of my hand, and stood up. Maya stuck her finger in her mouth and sucked off the cheese. “Gotta run. Same time tomorrow, Doug?”
Witho
ut waiting for an answer, she turned and walked over to the trash and emptied her tray. She looked back at me and waved as she walked out of the room.
I sat there, feeling vaguely unsatisfied with the remainder of my lunch.
For the rest of the day, I struggled to concentrate on my work. I found myself looking up every time someone came into the room.
On the bus home, I miscalculated my position three times.
As I walked through the door, my phone beeped at me annoyingly. Ann had sent a text saying that she had to go to a church meeting tonight and I’d be on my own for dinner. I threw a frozen pizza in the microwave and ate it in front of a television that I wasn’t watching anyway.
I sat down at the computer and tried to remember what Maya had said. I went to YouTube and typed in “Mayakeys,” but nothing came up. I was sure that I’d remembered it correctly, but maybe my spelling was off. Tentatively, I typed in “Mayakeyes” and waited.
Four videos came up. Two just had the words “Maya Keyes,” which told me virtually nothing. The other two looked to be homemade videos. One, I think, was in someone’s basement somewhere, while the other one looked to be filmed outside.
I clicked on the basement one and sound exploded out of the computer speakers—loud, screeching sounds that could only be described as music by someone who had never heard any music before. I remembered punk music from when I was a kid, but this was beyond even that. Maya—I think it was Maya—was screaming and yelling and chanting, and I couldn’t make out any words she said. It didn’t even sound like English. I heard words like “Ktooloo” and “Daygon,” but I couldn’t say that they were even words. Maya, for her part, just jumped around the basement, screeching and gyrating as if she was having a seizure. I wondered if Fleet Human Resources knew about this. Maya was the only one in the video, and I couldn’t tell if she was the one who filmed it as well.
The outside video looked as if it had been shot in a forest somewhere. There was a fire that Maya was dancing around, and it was apparently shot through one of those night goggles, because everything was in green as on those fake ‘ghost-hunting’ shows. The song started a little slower. I could hear an electric guitar, and then some synthesized drums came in. It was a strong, driving beat that gained in intensity as the song went on. I still couldn’t tell a lot of what she was singing, but at least she wasn’t screaming. I thought it was a love song, but then the beat got harder and more insistent and her voice got harsher and raspier. When she got to the chorus, she began singing about having sex with something called “my Deep One,” which I couldn’t figure out. Then she started thrashing back and forth, growling and howling and even, I thought, foaming at the mouth. I shut the computer off.