It disappeared, and another machine, this one tall and made of what looked like black, shiny plastic, leaned forward and pressed some filmy, rubberlike material against Philip's face. He screamed, certain he was being suffocated.
As he screamed, the thin membrane spun away, and Philip saw it, in the shape of his own howling face, spin toward the illuminated ceiling, dwindling like a kite whipped into autumn skies.
The machines backed away, leaving Philip on his knees, sick with terror.
"Your identity has been verified," the voice said. "You are, however, unauthorized. I am only a second generation servant of Yog-Sothoth. I will summon your own kind."
A siren began to wail.
A man in a uniform immediately burst through a door.
"What's going on here?" he shouted.
Philip found himself staring into the cold eyes of Hal Ketch, MicroMeg's security guard.
Ketch nodded his head slowly. "It's like the Disney dolls say." He flashed a cold grin and drew his pistol. "It's a small fucking world."
Ketch led Philip from the room at gunpoint. As they passed the green, bubbling tanks, Philip recognized Gladys Fenninger. Her hair miraculously retained its bird-winged shape even while immersed in green fluid.
Philip was surprised to discover that Gladys had a pretty good body: firm breasts, perky nipples, a flat, trim tummy and soft, rounded hips.
"Move it," Ketch snapped. "Don't gawk at the prizes."
"That's Gladys Fenninger," Philip said. "She's my supervisor."
"Not anymore. She won a ticket to Yuggoth. Employee of the Month. E.O.M.'s automatically go. She's history at Pelidyne."
"Jesus."
Ketch turned. "That's sharp, Kenan. Matter of fact, Jesus was taken to Yuggoth, although the Elder Ones are embarrassed about the whole thing. He got away from them briefly. You want to see an Elder One oscillate and turn purple, just mention Jesus."
The door in front of Philip swung open and he entered a dark corridor.
"Don't try to run," Ketch said. "I'll shoot out your spine, and you'll spend the next couple of millennia as a smart switch in a temporal gate."
"Huh?"
"Trust me, you wouldn't like it."
The corridor was dank, the fishy smell powerful—although not, Philip noted, incapacitating—and the walls were covered with gray fungi that writhed unpleasantly, that seemed, indeed, to sense the passing of Ketch and Philip and stretch to touch them.
"You don't want to brush against these walls," Ketch said, as though reading Philip's thought.
Ketch indicated a corridor to the left, and Philip ascended three stone steps and entered a darker passageway. They came to a rusty, metal door. Philip pushed it open at Ketch's urging, and a din of voices and machinery poured out.
They entered a vast, cold room and proceeded quickly along a raised catwalk. Philip clung to the shaky metal railing and peered down into what he later came to identify in his mind as Office Hell.
Here was where the little man had come from. The floor of the room was filled with desks and computers and laboring ghoul-workers. Some wore shreds of old office clothing; some were naked. All had dead-white, leprous flesh. The floor of the room was strewn with paper, printouts, and bones. Philip saw a pile of skulls next to a broken water cooler. Screams, cries, shouts, and hideous laughter filled Philip's head. A thin, tinny radio played, something with violins and flutes, yes, Yesterday. As Philip watched, a fight broke out between two men. One of them, thin and stooped, wore nothing but a hat. The other wore a ragged coat. The hat man pushed the other against a desk, and a computer monitor toppled off, smashing with an explosive sound that ignited a chorus of human whoops. A fat woman in a red dress rushed to the defense of the pushed man and other workers quickly joined the fray.
Ketch and Philip came to the end of the catwalk, and Philip pushed another metal door open, and when it closed behind them silence immediately descended.
This hall was carpeted and lighted and elegantly wallpapered. As they moved down the hall Philip heard the sound of girlish laughter, a phone ringing with a discreet, lilting note, and soft music, strings: Yesterday.
The outer office was decorated in muted blues and greens, and a large section of one wall consisted of an aquarium in which brightly colored fish moved sedately. Two secretaries, both of them dressed as though for a fashion shoot, looked up as Philip and Ketch entered the room.
The secretary who had been perched on the edge of the desk jumped down, adjusted her short orange skirt and smiled at Philip.
"Hey," she said.
"Is Mr. Melrose in?" Ketch asked.
The secretary behind the desk, who had high cheekbones and unfriendly gray eyes, studied Ketch. "Maybe he is, maybe he isn't."
Ketch shot her through the forehead. The other secretary screamed and fled the room.
"This is a security matter, sister," Ketch said, frowning at the empty chair (she had tumbled down behind the desk, disappearing instantly, and Philip questioned the reality of the wild, startled eyes and the black hole between them).
Ketch reached down and pushed a button on the phone and spoke into the speaker. "Mr. Melrose?"
"Yes."
"This is Hal Ketch. We've had a security breach. A temp. I know this guy. He blew up MicroMeg right before the Big Leap. He doesn't look like much, but he's trouble. Could be he's with the Mi-Go or a Renegade faction. I thought you might want to talk to him."
"Good work, Hal. Come on in."
Philip heard the electronic locks unbolt. Ketch motioned him to push the door open, and they entered.
7.
Mr. Melrose, wearing a brown suit and a dark blue tie, sat behind a large silver desk. He was a broad-shouldered man with a worn, prizefighter's face.
He regarded Philip with cold, black eyes.
"What they paying you?" he asked.
"Seven-fifty," Philip said.
"Seven hundred and fifty thousand?"
"No, seven dollars and fifty cents an hour," Philip said.
"Don't jerk me around."
Ketch hit Philip in the stomach and Philip sank to his knees, pain radiating from a center of nausea.
Melrose waved Ketch away. "Okay. Wait outside, Hal. I want to have a conversation with this guy without you gut punching him every other sentence."
"Mr. Melrose," Ketch said. "This guy is dangerous."
Melrose's eyes narrowed. "I know that, Hal. I appreciate your concern. Wait in the other room please."
Ketch left.
"Have a seat." Melrose pointed to a large gray armchair.
Philip sat.
Philip looked around the room in an effort to collect his thoughts. The room was decorated sedately in metallic silver and gray, enlivened by large green plants in blue vases. A large, multipaned window showed a grid of blue sky. Cumulus clouds moved slowly over a landscape of rolling hills and green trees. It would have been an idyllic scene were it not for several winged creatures that disported amid the clouds, creatures somewhat like barn-sized lizards but with something suggesting a marine existence, perhaps the satiny, black sheen of their skins or the hundred-yard strands of ribbonlike flesh that trailed behind them through the air and filled Philip with the instant conviction that these fleshy kite-tails were lined with stinging nettles, and that they were trolling the air and land for living organisms. How he knew this he could not say, but he seemed to have seen the creatures before, perhaps in a dream that was not a dream at all but a momentary disruption in the space/ time continuum. With an effort, he looked away from the window.
"Well mister—What's your name?"
Philip told him.
"Okay. Kenan. K-E-N-A-N?"
"Yes."
Melrose leaned back in his chair. "You aren't with a Renegade. You ain't the Mi-Go either." Melrose laughed. "You are a fucking temp!" He laughed, slapped his hands on the desk-top. Spittle flew from his mouth, his face turned red. He stopped abruptly. "That's right, isn't it?"
"Yes,"
Philip said.
Melrose looked down, opened a drawer. "I should have just stuck with my old man's grocery store. He wanted me to have it. But I wanted to be a hotshot, went into big business so I could fuck secretaries, eat lunch on someone else's dime, the whole deal. Shit." He took a wallet- sized object from the drawer and slapped it in front of him. He looked up at Philip. “I got ulcers on top of my ulcers. You're working for that asshole Baker, aren't you? He wants to make me look bad, wants to fuck me over. Baker, right?"
"No."
Melrose chuckled. "You got that wimpy temp look down, Kenan. I mean, you are some kind of professional. You got plausibility. That's worth a fortune in a mercenary. So maybe you are working for Malzberg. He couldn't find his ass in the dark, but he thinks I stole his promotion. Okay, Malzberg?"
"I'm a temp," Philip said.
Melrose shook his head, laughed. He opened the checkbook, picked a pen off the desk. "Right. And you are making seven-fifty an hour." Melrose began to write. "Okay. I'll give you ten to do your temping somewhere else. I could have Ketch shoot your head off. He wants to. I know my boy, and he has a hard-on for you, Kenan. Or I could feed you to some lawyers that regressed, got a taste for human flesh, would scarf you down in the blink of a billable hour. It's just I'm a businessman. I know a good employee when I see one. You got talent, I can see. You got plausibility. I'm asking you to give your old employer notice, Kenan. You send me his head in a box, FedEx it, and I write you another one of these suckers."
Melrose tore the check out and handed it to
Philip. Philip stared at the one followed by six zeroes.
"A million dollars," Philip said.
"And another million when you send me your boss' head." Melrose scowled. "But don't try to squeeze an extra penny from me. Don't get greedy."
Philip just blinked at the check.
Melrose got up from behind the desk and came around to Philip. He put an arm around Philip's shoulder. "I got a soft spot for guys like you. Just doing a job, just trying to get by. I'm a foot soldier myself. I'm not running the show. I'm just an advance man for the carnival. Come on, let me show you something. We'll go out the back way here, let Hal cool off in the waiting room."
Philip followed Melrose through the door, into a dimly lit corridor. The dank, suffocating fishy smell asserted itself and the temperature fell, the air suddenly chill.
They descended a flight of metal stairs, their footsteps booming. The wheeze of pistoning machines rose up from beneath them.
"Here." Melrose pushed open a door.
#
"I think it was Azathoth himself," Philip told Lily. "Melrose called it The Committee."
Philip was back in the hospital. He was lying in bed. Lily looked at her notes. She read, "A sort of blue octopus the size of a football field with human heads on the ends of its tentacles. Parts of the creature appeared to be semi-liquid, like blue Jell-O, and human sexual organs, a stew of vaginas and penises, floated in the liquid—like rats." Lily looked up, raised a quizzical eyebrow. "Rats?" Lily stared blankly at her notebook and the words she had committed to it. "You don't want to go near a Freudian interpretation of this," she muttered, as much to herself as to Philip.
Philip sat propped up in the bed, his hands folded in his lap. He didn't say anything. He hadn't expected this session to go well.
"Well," Lily continued. "It's all a blur to you. This creature dragged you down and enfolded you in its frigid embrace. Dreadful, once-human voices spoke to you of hideous rituals that took place on the shores of alien seas on worlds mankind was never meant to visit."
Lily had captured Philip's rhetoric. Philip had to admit that it did sound a little overblown and melodramatic. But any bald statement of the facts was going to seem outlandish. The truth was too loathsome and ghastly to rest sedately in the limited, cloistered realm of human reason.
"I blacked out," Philip said. "It's the mind's defense mechanism."
"Hmmmmm," Lily said. She closed her notebook. "What Mr. Melrose at Pelidyne tells me is that you were in an employee orientation meeting, and you suddenly began screaming and speaking incoherently. Speaking 'in tongues' is how he put it. When they tried to calm you, you bit the man giving the presentation and tried to break the television monitor used for the video. Security was called, and you were restrained until the police arrived. Dr. Beasley was notified when they found her card in your wallet."
Philip was surprised at how calm he remained while listening to this fabrication. "Did you ask Mr. Melrose if it is customary at Pelidyne to have employee orientation classes in the dead of the night?"
"Well no. The police were called at eight- thirty in the morning."
Philip knew there would be no convincing Lily. He spoke to collect his own thoughts, to clarify the horror. "I think Melrose just wanted me to have a look at his boss," Philip said. "Melrose didn't anticipate Azathoth's snatching me up and dragging me into the pit. Naturally I blacked out, and when Azathoth tossed me back, my derangement presented a problem. I'm surprised they didn't just kill me or send me to Yuggoth for parts." Philip paused, puzzled, groping for some clue to Melrose's motivation.
"Maybe he thought I could still be helpful. He was confused about just who I was. Maybe—"
"I don't think," Lily said, "that you want to trouble yourself overly about any of this, Philip. I'm going to send a nurse in and she is going to give you a shot. It's just something to calm you. I want you to sleep for awhile. We'll sort this out later, all right?"
Philip did feel tired.
"Okay."
#
After the prick of the needle, his body filled with golden honey. Just before he slept, he thought he saw Sissy leaning toward him. But perhaps it was a dream, for this was a solemn and bleary-eyed Sissy, not at all like his smiling companion and ardent fan.
When he woke again, Sissy was in the room, so she was not a dream. She did look tired and her smile, when she saw he was awake, didn't erase the worry lines in the corners of her eyes.
"Philip, are you okay?"
"I'm fine," Philip said. "Wow." He touched his forehead where the pain crackled like cellophane. "I dreamed I was in this orientation class," Philip said. "I dreamed that Pelidyne was going to hire me full-time, and I had to go to this miserable, boring orientation."
"You did," Sissy said. "And you had an epileptic fit or something."
Philip was silent. The dream was very realistic. But if they thought that it would mask the truth—or even confuse him—they were wrong. No doubt the golden honey drug had contained the lie. The opposite of a truth serum: a falsehood serum.
They were powerful. They had substituted this drug without Lily's knowledge, certainly. They had gotten to the nurse or a doctor. They had sent him this phony memory, detailed and reasonably convincing. But did they honestly think it would fool him? Probably not. Certainly not. They just wanted to flaunt their power, their dreadful ubiquity.
Sissy said she couldn't stay long; she had to go to work at Dan's. Philip reassured her that he was fine now and would call her at work later.
After she left, Philip conjured up the spurious memory of orientation at Pelidyne.
The potential new employees—there were five of them besides Philip, three men and two women—were ushered into a conference room with a long, mahogany table and a television and video tape player at one end. Mr. Melrose was there to greet them, smiling and blander than the man Philip remembered.
Melrose's assistant, an extremely round, extremely bald man who ducked his head, smiled even more relentlessly, and reminded Philip of a dog that has been beaten into fawning servility, passed out a variety of forms that required filling out. Everyone bent to this task with stoic energy.
Philip logged his tax status and employment history and education. He puzzled over what sort of benefits package he would prefer. Did he want an HMO or Blue Shield? Did he wish to apply to the credit union? In the event of death on the job, who was his beneficiary? Was he willing to hav
e his urine searched for mind-altering substances?
Melrose's assistant, Bob, explained each form and fielded questions. Philip's mind drifted, as it always did when confronted with a form, and he came back to an awareness of his surroundings just as one of the women was asking what would happen if she got pregnant.
The question hung in the air. Philip reflected that women were forever asking this question and that Bob looked as uncomfortable as most men do on hearing it. Philip hoped that Bob would say the right thing, would say that he would marry her, but the question actually concerned health insurance and maternity leave and Bob answered it appropriately.
Résumé With Monsters Page 20