The Ministry of SUITs (15 page)

“… I suppose we'd better begin.”

Jack wasn't actually sure how large the Misery's room was, because all he could see was an infinity of darkness. Walls could have been just out of view, or they might not have existed at all. The Misery slouched off into the gloom and returned with six glass bottles filled with water. He put them at Jack's feet.

“These are bottles.” The Misery pointed at the bottles.

“Bottles,” agreed Jack. So far the training was turning out to be easier than he thought it would be.

The Misery picked up one of the bottles and walked ten paces away from Jack. Jack looked over his shoulder—Trudy was smiling. That made Jack nervous.

Still slouching, the Misery stretched one arm out. “Now, Jack Pearse, catch the bottle.”

The Misery let go of the bottle. It fell to the ground and shattered before Jack could take a single step.

The Misery sighed and shook his head in despair. “Too slow. You moron. You absolute moron.”

“How on earth was I meant to…?” But before he could complete his sentence the Misery had pressed his face right into Jack's. The Misery had moved the ten paces in a fraction of a second.

“Jack Pearse doesn't get to talk until he catches a bottle. Jack Pearse is a moron. Jack Pearse has no friends.”

“Now, wait a minute…,” said Jack.

“I could wait a minute; I could wait an hour. But it doesn't really matter, does it? Jack Pearse isn't going to get any smarter, or faster, or better-looking.”

Before Jack could complain further, the Misery picked up another bottle and walked ten paces away. He held the bottle out in front of himself. “Catch the bottle, Jack Pearse.”

The Misery dropped the bottle. Jack almost managed half a step before the bottle shattered on the floor.

The Misery stared at Trudy. “Couldn't you have brought me a monkey instead of Jack Pearse? You can train monkeys. I can't train”—the Misery looked at Jack with disdain—“I can't train whatever this is.”

“I didn't come here to be insulted,” said Jack.

Once more the Misery had moved fast and was leering directly into Jack's face. “No? Where do you normally go to be insulted? I hope you don't pay them too much to insult you. It's very easy to do. I have rarely seen a creature more ugly than you.”

Jack balled up a fist and swung it at the Misery's head, but the Misery ducked under it as if it was moving in slow motion. Before Jack could react, the Misery was standing behind him. As Jack turned around to meet him, the Misery shouted at the top of his voice, “What makes you think you could ever hit me!” Little pieces of saliva flew out of the Misery's mouth as he bellowed.

The Misery picked up another bottle and walked across the room, talking as he went. “You are such a dull person. A slow person. A boring person. A person who can't even
catch a bottle
!”

The Misery dropped the bottle. Jack didn't even manage a half step this time. The bottle shattered and the Misery sighed.

“I'm never going to be able to catch the bottles!” Jack shouted. “So let's get this over with.” He picked up the three remaining bottles that were left at his feet and threw them across the room in different directions. He smiled at the Misery. “Game over.”

The Misery shook his head and then blurred into action. He moved faster than anything Jack had ever seen in his life. He ran toward the bottle that Jack had thrown first and jumped into the air, spinning. A hand snapped out of the black rotating mass and grabbed the bottle. Then, quick as a flash, the Misery landed in a crouching position and sprinted toward the second bottle Jack had thrown. The second bottle was closer to the ground but the Misery caught it with two feet to spare.

There was one bottle left, but it was too close to the ground for the Misery to catch.
Wasn't it?
The Misery launched himself so quickly it looked like he was flying horizontally along the ground. Before he got to the bottle he tucked his head and went into a forward roll. One of the Misery's pale, bony hands shot out and caught the bottle. As the bottle had been falling it had turned on its side and several droplets of water had fallen out. The Misery's hand moved the bottle so expertly and quickly that all the drops of water fell back into the bottle instead of hitting the ground.

Holding all three bottles, the Misery walked back, moving at an ordinary pace. He set two of the bottles down in front of Jack. The third he took ten paces away.

Jack gulped. “Okay, we'll do these last three bottles. You can shout at me all you want. But after we've done three bottles that's it, right?”

For the first time there was a hint of a smile playing around the Misery's lips. The smile lingered briefly before it realized that there had to be a better place for it to be. “Trudy?”

“Yes, Misery?”

“There's another crate of bottles in the back there.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, indicating a direction in the darkness. “Go and fetch it for me.”

Trudy wandered off into the darkness. Although he couldn't see her, Jack heard her huffing and straining with effort as she picked something up that rattled annoyingly.

The Misery's hand snapped out. The single word “catch” escaped his lips and another bottle dropped to the ground.

Jack felt like crying. Was he going to be stuck in a dark room with this maniac forever?

MINISTRY
OF
S.U.I.T.S
HANDBOOK

THE MISERY

W
HAT
M
AKES
H
IM
S
O
M
ISERABLE

SECTION DELETED BY NERVOUS EDITOR
43

 

23

CATCHING A BOTTLE

 

Time passed. The Misery had gone through an entire milk crate's worth of bottles, and Jack had yet to take more than a single step before the bottle hit the ground and shattered. The Misery had started on a second crate. Each time Jack failed the impossible task the Misery shouted at him and called him horrible names. The names fell into one of three categories. There were (i) names that were unfair, (ii) names that might have been unfair as Jack had not known what they meant, and (iii) names that Jack was fairly sure were medically incorrect and used out of context.

Jack had pleaded to be allowed to leave the room. He'd said he would give up working for the Ministry. He'd said that he wouldn't mention any of this to anyone. And yet the Misery ignored everything he said and kept dropping bottles.

“I hate this. I hate you,” said Jack. “This is the worst day of my life.”

The minute he said those words the Misery looked at him with his head tilted to one side. “Let's see just how bad,” he sneered. As usual, the Misery's hand snapped out and he dropped a bottle. Jack couldn't have felt worse. He took a step toward the bottle. Then another step. He'd taken two steps and yet he hadn't heard the bottle shatter. Jack took a third step, then a fourth. He looked up. The bottle seemed to be hanging in midair, moving down perhaps, but incredibly slowly. Jack sprinted the final six steps and managed to catch the bottle before it hit the ground. He had stopped it a
bare inch
before it hit the ground. But he had caught it.

“I caught the bottle!” Jack yelled.

Trudy clapped her hands together with excitement.

For an instant there was a smile on the Misery's face, but it was quickly replaced with a scowl. “Big deal.”

Jack realized what had been happening. The Misery had made him so unhappy that time seemed to drag, which in turn allowed him to move faster than lightning.

“So I can do what Trudy can do now?” Jack asked.

The Misery snorted with laughter. “Not yet—not even close. You need to practice.”

“Practice what?”

“Well, every time you need The Speed, you can't rely on me being there to make you miserable. You need to be able to conjure up that feeling of unhappiness instantly.”

“And how do I do that?”

The Misery shrugged. “Think of something sad. Something that makes you unhappy.”

“And…”

“And I've had enough stupid questions for one night,” the Misery said, putting up a hand to silence Jack. “Now get out of here; I've got a lot of sweeping up to do.”

“But…” Before Jack could say anything more Trudy put a finger to her lips to keep him silent. As she was leading Jack out of the room he looked back and saw the Misery reach into the darkness and grab a broom.

*   *   *

Jack and Trudy stood outside the Misery's room. “Well, that was intense.”

“Yeah, the first training session's always like that,” said Trudy. “It gets easier from here on in.”

“Well, it couldn't get any harder, could it? I don't imagine the Misery has many friends.”

“He doesn't have any. He's kind of tragic, really. I feel sorry for him.”

Jack found it difficult to feel sorry for someone who had spent so many hours making him feel deeply unhappy. “I'd better be getting home now. We were in there for ages. My parents will be…” Jack looked at his watch and was shocked to see that only half an hour had passed. He looked at Trudy. “We were only in there thirty minutes! How is that possible?”

“How many times do I have to explain? You were unhappy. When you're unhappy time slows down.”

“The Misery called it ‘The Speed.'”

“Yeah, I don't think there's actually a proper name for it. But that's what the Misery calls it. And no one wants to argue with him.”

“Shouldn't we tell people about The Speed? I mean, think how useful it would be to businesses. Think about how productive they could be.”

Trudy laughed. “You think businesses don't know about this?”

“They do?”

“Of course they do. But no one ever talks about it because it's immoral to make people miserable to get more work out of them. Think about it, Jack. Think of restaurants. Which ones serve food the fastest?”

Jack wondered if this was a trick question. “The fast-food ones?”

“Exactly. How do you think the food gets served so much more quickly in fast-food restaurants? In an ordinary restaurant it can take twenty minutes to get a burger. Yet in fast-food places it'll be there in two minutes. How do you think they do that?”

“I'd always just assumed it was because they were really well organized and used some kind of assembly line.”

“Jack, they're building a burger, not a laptop. How much of an assembly line would you need? Burger-bun bottom. Meat patty, throw some salad at it. Mayonnaise. Burger-bun top. That's it. How would an assembly line speed that up?”

“So how do they do it?”

“The Speed, Jack.
The Speed
. The staff they employ are high schoolers. You know that all high schoolers are desperate to be cool. So the fast-food restaurants make them dress up in ridiculous costumes, often with cardboard hats, they put them in garish-looking plastic restaurants, and then they make them look after groups of screaming six-year-olds. The high schoolers who work in those places are miserable. So time around them slows down to the extent that when they're making a burger it takes two minutes instead of twenty to cook it.”

“Should we do something about it?”

“Meh,” said Trudy. “I don't really like sixth formers.”

“Me neither … So if I make myself unhappy now, I could run really fast like you. Could I do the backflips and things?”

“I've been training for longer than you, Jack, and the gymnastics helps a lot. But if you keep practicing it is possible to outrun gravity. Have you ever noticed that when you knock something off a table it seems to hang in the air for a few seconds before it falls? That's just gravity taking a second to catch up. So if you run really, really, really fast you can defy gravity.”

Jack had an idea. He started focusing on his time with the Misery and how unhappy he had been. He could feel himself becoming sadder. And as that happened the world around him started to slow down. He started running down the corridor at an incredible rate. Then he put one foot followed by a second on the wall. He was running sideways along the wall, moving slowly toward the ceiling. Instead of stepping onto the ceiling he made a leap and landed with both feet on the ceiling at the same time. His legs were frantically pumping as he ran along the ceiling. It felt like nothing he had ever experienced before. He let out a yell of happiness and exhilaration. A huge smile spread across his face.

And that was when he fell off the ceiling and landed on the floor.

Jack had learned an important lesson. No matter how happy you felt about running on the ceiling, it still hurt a lot when you fell off the ceiling and landed on the floor.

He was a crumpled mess and in quite a lot of pain. He started untangling himself and noticed that Trudy was standing above him.

“Did you hurt yourself?”

“I fell off the ceiling. Of course I hurt myself.” Jack had never thought that this was the kind of sentence that he would ever find himself saying. “What went wrong?”

“What do you think? You have to keep the unhappy frame of mind to move faster than normal. You got excited about being able to run on the ceiling and forgot to keep the unhappy feelings in the front of your mind. You became happy and time started moving at the proper speed. And that was when gravity caught up with you and beat you down.”

Jack rubbed an elbow and thought about how mean gravity was. “That's an important lesson.”

Trudy held out a hand and helped Jack up. “Don't worry about it. We all do it the first time. Now I'll see if I can get the Ministry car to give us a lift home.”

MINISTRY
OF
S.U.I.T.S
HANDBOOK