The Rain of Terror

My novel, and I use the term advisedly, "The Rain of Terror" has inspired the creative efforts of two of my friends, the painter Christopher Kasch and the, for want of a better word, designer (though a better title would probably be "Last Bastion of Good Taste") Douglas Steel. Here they have mocked up a fabulous cover for the book, a tale of derring-do's and don't in a pre-swinging sixties, where the Greek God of the Forge is a detective, for some reason.

I mean just look at! I'd buy it! I'd buy it just to have it as an object. Even with the pages uncut it would be a handsome, life enhancing addition to any home. Oh publishers you poor, short-sighted fools...

Temp.

Horror short story written for the reason that I like horror short stories (the Pan and Fontana collections from the seventies, M.R. James, Robert Aickman et al.) and I assume I can write them. Not sure that this proves anything conclusively but I quite like this now...



He rubbed the toe of his shoe on the back of his trouser leg as he pressed the button. A stolid security guard, yellow-eyed and wheezing, waddled over to the door, his tight, white shirt clinging to his chest and pinching tightly beneath his arm-pits. The guard swiped a card, a red light winked, and Paul pushed into the fore-court of Walker-Reynolds.

The guard returned to his desk, adjusting himself as he sat down behind the bank of monitors. He glared at he screens like a sullen child in front of the television.

Paul was uncomfortably neat in his new shoes and stiff tie: he clip-clopped on virgin heels across the floor of the lobby. Behind the reception desk a fat woman in a head-set ignored him. Her skin was flushed with the effort of talking and her conversation rippled through the marbled suet of her neck as she hissed into the phone. Paul waited; elbows splayed on the desk-top, his leg shaking in nervous anticipation; he did not want to not be late on his first day on the job.

She caught his eye and tapped a purple nail on a large ledger in front of him. He looked at the other signatures: “Dave Balham…Walker Reynolds…8:48” “Shireen Wenders…Walker Reynolds…8:51”. Each was followed by a signature and an odd little character, almost a smiley-face; though a gaunt and toothy one.

The receptionist tapped on the book again, the impact shuddering up her arm and causing her bangles to shiver.

Paul signed the register and carefully traced the smiley faced character after his name. The receptionist pressed a button and Paul was through a turn-style and into the lift. It was 8:58.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

“Hello, Paul is it? You should have a badge. Reception should have issued you with a badge.”
“Sorry,” said Paul, “She was on the phone.”
“You are pacifically required to have a badge otherwise you can’t get in and out. She’s made you a bit of a prisoner here. ”
The slim young woman laughed at this, an abrupt laugh that Paul didn’t feel obliged to share. She beckoned him toward a bank of desks: six cubicles divided like an egg-box with an egg missing. The woman indicated that Paul was the missing egg and he sat down.
“Did the agency say anything to you about the work at all?”
“Not really,”
“Well don’t worry. It’s nothing too taxing. You’re all temps on this desk, so matey-boy next to you will get you up to speed. Won’t you…” she scanned the boy’s desk and found a name-badge, “Won’t you, Owen?”
The boy, pale and pinched with a large red nose and acne trailing from the corner of his mouth, nodded weakly. His eyes were large and glassy, the glare of his computer screen lending them a phosphorescent glow.
“Excellent,” said the slim young woman, “Well, that’s it. Any questions don’t be afraid to arks me. That’s if you can find me.” She gave her quick laugh again and walked over to the coffee machine.
Paul turned to his new teacher. The boy’s nose was perched on the cubicle’s partition wall.
“Alright mate, I’m Paul. What are we doing then? The agency didn’t even tell me what Walker-Reynolds do. I thought I’d be photocopying or something.”
Owen said nothing. He continued to stare over the wall. Paul’s too tight tie squeezed like a garrotte and he wedged a finger into his collar.
“Which agency did you come through?” he said, “I’m with Office Head.”
“We’re all with Office Head” said Owen.
After a couple of seconds Paul realised that this was going to be Owen’s only contribution to the conversation and decided on a new tack.
“This is my first job; just for the summer, like. I’m off to Uni. in September.”
Owen giggled at this.
“So what do we do?” said Paul, annoyed, “The girl said you’d tell me what to do.”
“We don’t do nothing,” said Owen.
“What do you mean?”
“We turn our computers on and put our head-sets on but we don’t do nothing.”
“The company pays you to do nothing?”
“I don’t do nothing. And I haven’t done nothing since I come here.” Owen pulled his nose back over the partition and stared into his monitor.
Paul sat, agitated in his tie. He had wanted to make the most of his work experience but more than that he had a healthy terror of authority and he didn’t want to be told off by the slim girl, should she return. He stood up and addressed the rest of the temps; three girls and a boy.
“Excuse me,” he said, “do any of you know what we’re supposed to be doing? Owen here doesn’t seem to have a clue!”
They each ignored him, continuing to stare into their anonymous blue boxes.
“I’m the last,” said Owen flatly, “they wont answer you.”
Paul felt a wave of dry heat prickle over him. He looked around the office. Gangs of people trailed up and down the corridors looking for meeting rooms, clutching lattes and talking animatedly about their weekends. Hairy I.T. guys wandered around, tumble-weed in t-shirts, pointing to banks of computers and mumbling into their mobiles. Slim Polish girls wheeled hostess trolleys laden with sandwiches, mineral water and, excitingly, mints, to and from the lifts. This was the office life he was expecting: the office life that was going to look good on his C.V: the office life that was going to provide him with valuable transferable skills.
Then he looked around at the temps there seemed to be a change in the quality of the light. A pall was cast over this corner of the office; the silence, the lifelessness of these five wasters, the dull hum of their computer fans unbroken by the chattering of fingers on keys. They really were doing nothing.
There was a tap on his shoulder: it was the slim woman, smiling on full-beam. Behind her, at some distance, was the receptionist, Christmas-tree shaped away from her desk and clutching the ledger that he had signed.
“Paul, what are you doing here? You’re in the wrong seat. What are you like? Come and meet Steve. He’s going to be your daddy.”
She lifted Paul by the shoulders and escorted him over to a sunnier part of the room. As he walked he looked back over his shoulder at the temps. Owen’s nose dripped over the partition like melting wax. His eyes were large and shining as he watched Paul being escorted away; nevertheless they seemed utterly unreadable.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The next couple of weeks were a corporate dream. Paul was immersed in the every day hustle of bustling office life. He attended meetings, made notes, made coffee; ran errands and, with his aptness and adaptability, began to gather responsibilities to him like pollen on a bee’s fur.
Matey silver-haired men asked him his name, in an “I’m noting this for the future” and “Hmnn. Managerial material” sort of way and Paul went home each evening smiling and each weekend with money in his pocket. Even his shoes had relaxed, tamed and hollowed by his feet; the blisters shrinking to circles of blanched skin, like the imprint of a condom on wallet leather. Life was good and the notion of University seemed increasingly abstract and unlikely. Why should he go to school to learn about business when this was the real deal? He was learning the mechanics of the industry and earning money while he was doing it! He was confident that he would be asked to stay on after the summer with a proper contract and a proper job description and he could start earning some proper money.

He found out what Walker Reynolds actually did. They ran, managed and published opinion polls and were widely regarded as the most accurate pollsters in the business. There’s was an uncanny grasp on the zeitgeist, a bone-deep understanding of the popular unconscious: time and again they chimed with the under-tow of public opinion, though Paul was at a loss to work out how they did it. The Walker-Reynolds eco-system seemed to be a self-contained exercise in perpetual motion: paper shifted from desk to desk, e-mails pinged from in-box to in-box and court-shoed blondes strode up and down the corridors in an eternal quest for free meeting-rooms. But Paul couldn’t really see where the company’s statistics were coming from. The sales team brought in sales, marketing schmoozed big name clients and the chummy silver haired men in their bevelled-glass offices did whatever it was that company directors did. But Paul never saw anybody collating any information at all. It was most perplexing. Perhaps it was out-sourced to India. Any way, it didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he had the bit of business between his teeth and he was not about to let go. It was just…one thing still bothered him: that bank of desks where the temps sat. The other temps. They were still there; fish-eyed, mouth-breathing, gawping into space. And yet … Paul wasn’t absolutely sure that they were the same ones he had seen before. Owen was still there, his bird-like profile just visible over the blue partition wall. He seemed subtly changed, somehow paler, more ghostly; eroded. The rest of temps didn’t ever look up; their phones never rang. They sat there hunch-shouldered and staring into space. Paul wondered briefly why he was different; why he had been plucked for stardom. But he was not much given to idle speculation, except, potentially, on the stock-exchange.

Summer wore on and Paul found lunching companions and, on Friday nights, drinking buddies at The Queens Arms. There he thrilled to raffish male companionship, hearty types with their ties askew, rosy cheeks and artfully puttied hair. They drank bottled beer under a fug of Hugo Boss and called themselves “The Laughing Boys”. They drank till their eyes swam and the corners of their mouths were flecked with foam so they seemed not only full of beer but starting to spill. At the end of an evening they sat, cheeks sticking to table tops, un-tucked shirts hanging limply from their waistbands like pale, wrinkled cocks.

It was a Friday night hat Paul broached the subject of the temps with Steve, his line manager. Steve was a great bloke, a giant red-faced party guy. His eyes were like wet cloves in the gammon of his face and he had been shouting for hours. Paul felt himself lucky to have such a man as, not just a boss, but a mate.
“So what’s the story with them oddballs?” he said.
Steve wobbled his giant head around the room, his eyes struggling to keep up with it.
“Where?”
“No, you muppet,” said Paul, “Them lot at work: the temps.”
There was a sudden change in Steve’s demeanour. His face, flushed from drink, seemed suddenly to drain of colour; the flesh around his eyes a green-grey. His sweaty skin became uncomfortably gluey.
“What?” he said.
“Those weirdoes in the head-sets over by Karen’s office.”
“What do you mean?” said Steve. Other members of staff were looking at Paul as the first pin-pricks of unease started to penetrate his drunken well-being. He looked anxiously from face to face around the table.
“The temps: I mean what’s that all about?” These last words fell out of his mouth, his tongue curling like a dried leaf.
“Who did your orientation?” said Steve.
“My what?” said Paul.
“When you joined the company, after you signed the contract: who did your orientation?”
“I don’t know,” said Paul, desperation edging in his voice, “I don’t think I signed a contract here. I did it with the agency.”
Steve lurched forward grabbing Paul by the arm and tugging his shirt sleeve back from the wrist. As soon as the hairless arm had been exposed it was dropped to the table, while a palpable shiver ran through the crowd.
“What was that? A Chinese burn? Listen, have I said something? Because…”
“I’d better be going,” said Steve, grabbing his jacket from the back of the chair. There was a sound of more chairs scraping, pint pots being slammed against table tops and Paul was left alone with the music of Billy Ocean and a twitchy bar-man calling time.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

On Monday morning Paul was called into an emergency H.R. meeting. Steve and Paul took the lift down to the basement. Paul had no idea what expect. His stomach lurched and his throat tightened. What had he said? He had been expecting something to happen following Friday night’s strangeness, but a H.R. meeting? Was it disciplinary? Could he actually be fired?
“Steve!” he said.
“Don’t worry about it, mate,” said Steve, rather too quickly, “It’s just something about your contract, something they missed when you joined. It’ll only take five minutes.”
“Right,” said Paul, “and it’s got nothing to do with Friday; in the pub?”
“Dunno what you’re talking about, mate. I was arseholed.”
The doors pinged open and Paul was escorted to Meeting Room B. It was a large, blandly functional room containing a table, six chairs and an unlabelled filing cabinet with a dusty aspidistra squatting on it. At the table was a woman whom Paul had never seen before. She was small and thin with close-cropped red hair. Her nostrils were arched and curlicued with crimson veins, as were her hairless eye-lids. She stared at Paul and Steve with liquid blue eyes; no pupil.

“Hi Paul,” she said, squeezing the corners of her mouth into what was not exactly a smile. “First of all, I don’t want you to worry: this is a formal meeting but not a disciplinary one, okay? We just want to get to know you a bit better, okay? My name, for instance, is Jacqueline.”
“Paul,” said Paul.
“Yes, well I do know that much at least,” she said, “though not much more. This is, in effect, the “orientation” session that you should have had when you first joined us. Obviously some sort of oversight there, so I apologise for that.”
Paul began to relax. It was just an H.R. meeting! All weekend anxiety had squatted in the pit of his stomach, stealing further up his body as he lay awake at night. Sunday night’s sleep, when it came, had been fitful. He lay coiled in a non specific dread that pressed on his chest and bound his limbs like swaddling; which papered over his mouth so it crackled when he breathed. Even now in this grey subterranean room and he felt that fibrous patina again; his skin taut, his bones hollow as a bird’s.
“How long have you been with us Paul?” said Jacqueline, breaking eye contact for the first time, to look at her notes. Paul noticed the receptionist’s ledger on the table in front of her.
“About three weeks,” he said.
“You started on seventh of July,” she said, “look; I can show you in fact. Here!”
She spun the ledger around, a colourless nail indicating his signature.
Paul shrugged. “Okay,” he said.
“Do you notice anything about your signature, Paul; anything unusual?”
Paul stared at his hand-writing, the familiar loops and dots. Possibly a little more erratic than usual, but he had been nervous. Had they consulted a graphologist? Jacqueline’s finger, pressing hard on the coarse paper shifted to the left, stopping at the little doodle he had copied from the signatures above. It resembled, he saw now, a rudimentary skull; light-bulb shaped with thick flat teeth beneath the black cavities of the nose and eyes.
“What’s this supposed to be, Paul?” she said, her fluid eyes training upon him again. This was the problem, he thought: a doodle in the margins of the signing-in book?
“Everyone else did one,” he said, “I don’t know. I just thought it was something you did!”
“Just something you did,” repeated Jacqueline, spinning the book away from him and slamming it shut. Paul felt Steve’s hand drop onto his shoulder, heavy as a stone. He turned but Steve stared fixedly ahead: he was looking at the H.R. consultant who was unfastening her cuff and rolling her sleeve up. She showed Paul her fore-arm, palm side up and fish-belly white; fat blue veins streaking the pale flesh. And there, just above the wrist, was a delicate rust-red tattoo of a bulbous skull, identical to the one Paul had scribbled into the ledger.
“I don’t get it,” said Paul. He tried to get up but Steve’s hand kept him in his seat. “What’s going on?” he said.
“Walker-Reynolds is a very old company, Paul: a very old company. In a sense there has always been a Walker-Reynolds, for ours is truly the oldest profession. Wherever there is money or power; a paranoid king or wealthy despot, there were we: an advisor, a worm-tongue, a whisperer. We’ve been predicting the future for countless millennia, Paul, but today’s market demands something more: today it’s more effective to predict the present. The future is too far off, too abstract: by the time you get there everything has changed. It’s a wasted resource, Paul – no one is buying the future now – you can’t give it away! So we’ve changed tack. We’ve transferred our skills. We tell our customers the present. It makes sound commercial sense – the future only happens once, but the present happens again and again!”

She paused and Paul made a sudden break for it, pushing his chair back and catching Steve in the stomach. Steve bent double and Paul lurched for the door but the big man’s hand never left his shoulder and his other arm grabbed Paul by the neck, his heavy thumb pressing under the parabola of the boy’s skull, pushing his forehead forward onto the desk. Paul lashed out with his left arm, his elbow aimed at Steve’s groin. But he was caught by the wrist and his arm pressed flat onto the desk, his skin goose-fat yellow under the pressure. Paul noticed the mark on Steve’s arm, identical to Jacqueline’s. He noticed as well that it was not a tattoo at all; it had been burned into the skin.
“I don’t understand!” said Paul, his cheek pushed flat against the desk, his voice a muffled squeak. A darkening tee-pee of piss worked its way down his thigh; developing against the grey cloth of his slacks like a photograph.
“Of course you don’t understand,” said Jacqueline, her voice lilting, “how could you? You were destined not to understand. You were processed through our agency as perfect modern material: greedy, arrogant, shallow, needy, aspirational and woefully unimaginative. Your role models are defined by what they wear, what they drive, who they fuck and how much of their tawdry existence they are prepared to act out in front of the cameras. For you success is saturation; the grotesque pressing of your own facile image into every field of human endeavour: the perfume, the ghost-written novel, the stilted cameo. The reality T.V. series and the sponsored wedding: you snuffle it up like the little piggy you are and now we can pick it from your brains.”
“The temps” said Paul.
“The temps, exactly. We’ve come a long way in divination from chicken guts and thrown bones; though you might say that we haven’t strayed too far from human sacrifice.”
Steve pulled Paul back into his chair, a burly arm circling his neck, but the fight had left Paul with the urine and he sat back, his eyes half closed, white foam bubbling on his lips.
“Our methods have changed,” said Jacqueline, “but the effect is much the same. We strip the brain of every impulse, every desire, anything that excites your little lizardy brains, that gets your pupils expanding. It gives us a perfect photograph of a moment; a cultural snapshot, if you like. Of course it sears the brain tissue like flash-fried steak and the subjects become unusable after a couple of weeks. The attrition rates are really quite high – but that’s business: the mediocre go to the wall. We may be an old company, Paul, but we are progressive – we do recycle for instance.”
“Recycle?” said Paul, moments before passing out.
Jacqueline smiled.
“Well if you haven’t the stomach for it I wouldn’t go to the canteen anytime soon. Actually Paul I’m being slightly disingenuous – you’ll be heading there very soon.”