Résumé With Monsters (31 page)

Bingham made a disgusted noise. "Noble Philip." He stood up. "I'm going myself. I got to get to work. I'll see you later."

After Bingham left, Philip lay on the bed feeling exhausted. Everyone wanted something from him. Doing the right thing was not easy when your mind was untrustworthy.

Philip looked at the mail on his lap. Several of the envelopes clearly contained bills. The other stuff was junk mail, advertisements. Not a personal letter in the batch. Philip felt self-pity rising up in his chest like methane gas in a swamp.

Watch it.

He shuffled the advertisements for life insurance, carpet cleaning, cheap pizza. He stopped. This wasn't an ad. He plucked the staple from the folded, clay-coated paper and opened up the newsletter, Personality Bytes.
Pelidyne
had put his address in their computer. They had sent him their newsletter.

Don't look at it. Drop it on the floor.

He looked at it, of course, and it was harmless enough. There were the usual fuzzy halftones of suited men and women giving and accepting plaques. There was a photo of a new computer to be launched by one of
Pelidyne's
subsidiaries. Opening the newsletter, there was a photo of
Pelidyne's
Softball team and a photo of an aging woman in horn-rimmed glasses who was retiring. This woman was quoted at interminable length in an interview of almost supernatural tedium. Philip felt gratefully drowsy at the end of the article and thought he might sleep some. Absently, he closed the newsletter.

Amelia's photo was on the back. She looked even more
mimelike
than usual, staring point- blank into the camera, her shadow stark behind her, her glasses
headlighted
by the flash.

EMPLOYEE OF THE MONTH
the caption read. Twelve point, Times bold. Dear God.

Philip went to the phone in the hall. He dialed Amelia's number. A male voice answered.

"Is Amelia there?" Philip asked.

"No, she is out of town for a few days. Who's calling?"

"Out of town?"

"Yes. A spur-of-the-moment business trip. She called from the office, didn't even have time to come home. Are you a friend of hers?"

"Look, when she called did she sound different? Did her voice sound, well, mechanical in any way? Did it have... did it have an
insect¬like
quality?"

Silence.

"Hello?" Philip shouted.

"Who is this?" The man's voice was wary now. "Is this Philip
Kenan
?"

"Yes it is. I'm trying to get
ahold
of Amelia."

"She doesn't want to talk to you,
Kenan
. I think you know that."

"Yes, I know that. That's unimportant. That's—"

"You may think it is unimportant," the man interrupted, "since you seem to have no interest in anyone else's feelings, but I think it is important, and I will do everything in my power to see to it that you don't cause her any more suffering than you already have."

Obviously Amelia had vented her feelings to her
fiance
.

"I don't blame you for feeling that way," Philip said. "But—"

The man hung up. Philip started to redial the number and then stopped. Amelia's
fiance
was not going to be an ally in the present situation; the possibility of convincing the man that his girlfriend was being shipped to
Yuggoth
was slim.

Philip dialed his house. Sissy answered.

"I need your help," he said.

#

He had to escape. There was very little time. Possibly it was already too late. But that thought had no utility; he let it go.

He slipped past the nurse and down the hall. There was a small laundry room next to the
rec
room. White uniforms were spinning like dancing ghosts in the industrial-size dryer. Philip opened the door and fished through the clothing until he found an orderly's shirt. It was a little too large and still damp, but it would have to do. He donned it and stepped back into the hall.

If he kept his head down as he walked toward the double doors perhaps they would not recognize him. If he made it through the doors, he would hit the lawn running. He had told Sissy to pick him up at the Seven-Eleven on the corner.

"Hey Philip," the ward clerk said, waving. "How's it going?"

"Okay," Philip said as he walked through the doors and out into the night air.

He remembered now that they didn't lock the doors until nine, and that he was free to go outside until then. They didn't expect him to run; he wasn't on the high security floor.

He felt a momentary sense of anticlimax accompanied by a gust of depression, but he shook the mood off. The real trials lay ahead. All his cunning and courage would be required soon enough.

9.

Sissy was the only woman Philip had ever met who did not ask him to explain his actions. He loved her for this and found it especially gratifying on this night, when an explanation would have been complicated and time-consuming.

Sissy kissed him passionately, and he returned the kiss. He pulled away from her, and she shook her red hair and smiled.

"We've got to rescue Amelia," Philip said.

Her smiled faltered.

Philip spoke quickly. "It's okay. I'm not in love with Amelia. I'm in love with you. But I can't let Amelia become the pawn of the Old Ones simply because my affections lie elsewhere. I've got to do what I can to save her, common humanity demands it. And tomorrow we are leaving Texas, Sissy. We might visit your folks, if you'd like."

Sissy's smile returned. "All right!" she shouted.

He gave her directions to Ralph’s One-Day Résumés and leaned back in the car's passenger seat, closing his eyes.

When they got to Ralph's, it was ten in the evening. Philip would have preferred to wait until two in the morning, when the last of the printers would be gone, but he had a long night ahead of him. He still had to go to
Pelidyne
.

Don't think about it. One step at a time.

"I'll walk from here," Philip said. They had parked at the far end of the parking lot near the exit. "Keep the motor running. If I'm not back in half an hour, leave."

Sissy stared at Philip. "I'm not leaving, so I guess you better come back."

Philip kissed her and got out of the car. He walked across the darkened, empty parking lot. The absence of cars meant nothing. The remaining employees would be parked in back, behind the building.

Philip tried the door. It was locked.

He had anticipated that. He was prepared to break a window if the lock had been changed. It hadn't. The key on his key ring fit, and the bolt slid back.

The reception area was dark. The hallway exhaled feeble light that outlined the long counter. Philip stood in the darkness, listening. Barely audible music reached his ears: violins and horns. He leaned forward on the balls of his feet, straining for a trace of human industry beneath the radio's hum. Nothing. He recognized the tune:
Yesterday
.

He moved slowly across the lobby and down the hall. To his right the corridor led to Ralph's office, Philip's ultimate destination. For now, he needed to reconnoiter. He needed to see who was in this part of the building. The printers, lodged in their ear-splitting, backroom ghetto, were not likely to come up front.

He moved quickly now, vulnerable in the corridor. Anyone coming out of typesetting or graphics would see him. No hiding here.

Bright light fell from the door to typesetting, and Philip flattened against the wall and eased his head around the door frame.

Monica.

She was hunched over her computer, typing rapidly, her shoulders rocking as though to lively music—not the case, though; Yesterday still played. She was wearing a shaggy shawl of some green material, and her hair stuck out in curious tufts, as though she had been pulling on it.

Next to her, a large, thickset woman leaned over a drafting table.

Who?

The woman turned to thrust a piece of paper through the
waxer
, and Philip recognized the flat, stolid countenance. Helga. Sworn enemies laboring side by side.

Philip felt cold, muddy dread. Helga and Monica, working in tandem, seemed to herald Armageddon. How had Ralph accomplished this? The answer came to Philip immediately: Zombies harbor no grudges.

Philip backed away from the door. He turned and ran back down the hall and around the corner toward Ralph Pederson's office. Fear had overthrown caution, and he was no longer interested in discovering just who was in the building. Philip paused at the closed door to Ralph's office. Was Ralph inside? Philip leaned his ear against the door and listened. He heard nothing. He pushed the door open. The room was dark. He breathed a sigh of relief and fumbled for the light switch.

The stark fluorescent light bathed Philip in a moment of bright terror. Irrationally, he expected to see shattered window glass on the carpet, and, looking toward the ceiling, encounter the sanity-searing visage of
Yog-Sothoth
.

But there were no signs of that day's violence. The carpet, indeed, appeared to be new, a thick gray pelt.

Philip moved across the room and behind the desk. He tugged open drawers. One was locked.

He found scissors on the desk and pried at the wood. The lip of the drawer splintered, but the drawer remained locked.

Philip was frantic. This wasn't any high security safe. This was just a
goddam
wooden desk, a flimsy, cheaply constructed, mahogany- veneered desk with a locked drawer that any secretary worth her steno pad could open with a hairpin.

The room was having an effect on Philip. The horror that had hurled him back to MicroMeg had come through this very ceiling, and he couldn't shake the notion that it lay, flattened like a truck-sized scorpion, in the overhead crawlspace.

Panic seized him. He squatted on his heels, clutched the base of the desk with both hands and heaved.

The desk rose up and crashed forward and Philip stood and kicked violently at the exposed underbelly of the locked drawer. The slats splintered and he reached down and jerked them away, a sharp fragment of wood sliding brightly into his thumb. The large, dark, ancient book fell halfway out and he grasped a corner and hauled it the rest of the way, dropping it on the carpet when its icy chill surprised his touch and the dead-flesh feel of its leather binding conjured loathsome images.

Philip stared at the
Necronomicon
as it lay on the carpet. This unholy map of black space and time, mad Alhazred's accursed book of spells and portents, appeared to pulse, as though breathing. Philip looked wildly around the room. Had anyone heard the desk overturn? He had to get out of here. He couldn't bring himself to touch the book. He would have to, soon enough, but not now, not in this room with its violent assault on his memory.

A printer's apron hung on the coat rack, and Philip grabbed it, tossing it over the book. He reached down then, and clutched the hefty volume through the apron. It seemed to expand and contract, a hideous sensation, but at least no vile vision of other worlds leapt to his mind.

Philip hugged the swaddled book to his chest and turned to the door.

Ralph Pederson stood in the doorway. He held a revolver in his hand.

"Philip," Ralph said. "This will all come out of your pay, you know."

"I don't work for you anymore," Philip said.

Ralph shook his head sadly. "You've never had an ounce of loyalty," Ralph said. "Things get a little rough, you don't get a raise every six months, and you are out the door. And always complaining. You don't know what hard work is. Your whole generation doesn't know spit about hard work. It is all you can do to wipe your own ass. When I was fourteen years old, I was holding down three jobs. And ask me how many hours a day I work now."