Page 15 of Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World
She glanced up at me. “I’d rather not see our employees murdered by a crazed idealist. It would be bad for our quotas. Now then. I’d like a Cobb salad from Capital Grille. Oh, and my meeting in Client Services is back on at two o’clock, so you’ll have to adjust my calendar again.”
Blinking at the abrupt change of topic, I scurried off to order her lunch and then undo all my hard work on her calendar. For the rest of the afternoon, though, when I wasn’t imagining magic-wielding assassins lurking in Midtown, I couldn’t help wondering if my promotion might have, just possibly, killed several people.
I was still thinking aboutthose employees from Personnel as I walked to the subway at the end of my first day as an executive assistant.Sorry, I offered up silently, in case any of them were listening. Had they been facing early retirement, I told myself, they probablywould have made the same choices I had, but I still felt kind of bad about the way things had gone down.
Working at Dark Enterprises, it’s easy to become blasé about the foibles and peccadillos of the unnatural beings with whom we do business—this one only wants the blood of consecrated virgins in its coffee, that one keeps asking to “borrow” an intern—but it was hard to be blasé about something that tells you it’s going to devour the world. Perhaps, though, things weren’t as bad as they looked. Crammed into a seat on the train, I tried to convince myself that there had been some kind of misunderstanding. When it said, “I’m going to devour your world,” maybe it was really trying to say, “I’m going to take the next five people who get on this elevator and then go away forever, fully satisfied.”
That seemed unlikely, I finally admitted. Far more likely was the possibility that those five people had been nothing more than an amuse-bouche for the coiling, hungry shadows I’d unbound, a little something to whet the appetite before the main course.
Any way you sliced it, this looked bad.
Amira was already home when I entered our apartment and closed the door behind me. “Hey,” she greeted me as she popped her head out of the kitchen. “How was the first day in your new position?”
“Um. Okay, I guess.” Pulling the strap of my messenger bag over my head, I tossed it onto the sofa.
“Are you sure?” she asked shrewdly as she emerged from the kitchen holding a glass of water. “You don’t sound very sure.”
“I think I made a mistake.”
“Uh-oh. Was it bad?”
I’m going to devour your world now.“Yeah,” I mumbled. “Yeah, it was.”
Sliding her arm around my waist, she pressed herself against my side. “Don’t worry about it. There was bound to be a learning curve, right? You’ll get the hang of things soon.”
I hugged her back, taking what comfort I could. “Sure,” I said. “Right.” Planting a kiss on her curly hair, I added, “Enough about me. Tell me all the boring things you learned today about neutrinos or whatever.”
The rest of our evening was spent making dinner and watching bad TV, but I couldn’t relax. Maybe it was the fact that my choices had led to the likely deaths of several colleagues, or maybe it was the possibility that the world was doomed. Either way, it was starting to feel like the job I’d wanted so badly had come with some pretty serious baggage.
The next two days fellquickly into a familiar pattern. I brought Ms.Crenshaw her morning coffee, reminded her of upcoming meetings, and otherwise spent a lot of time at my small desk outside her office, responding to emails and trying to figure out that stupid calendar software. It was worrying, in fact, how much basic clerical work I was asked to do. Had I traded my spreadsheets and data analysis in Human Resources for the life of a mere gofer, running errands and unjamming the photocopier? Where were the dark rituals, the visits from abyssal lords, the deals with desperate billionaires?
Though I yearned for more, however, there was no denying that the thirteenth floor was an unsettling place to work. The hallways were made entirely of obsidian, polished to a dark luster in which murky reflections darted and moved, always just at the very edges of sight. The effect was oppressively claustrophobic, but also as if Iwere falling into an endless void every time I stepped off the elevators. Then there were the screams. Down in Human Resources, the screaming had quickly become white noise, the soothing sound of quotas being met. On thirteen, though, all that wailing put my teeth on edge. It echoed down the corridors and reverberated from the black stone until it was impossible to escape. I wasn’t certain who was screaming, or why—I just knew I didn’t want to join them.
As for Ms.Crenshaw, I found her unbelievably intimidating. She expected nothing less than absolute perfection, and if you fell short of those expectations, she looked at you until you wanted to crumple to the floor. On my second day as her assistant, I forgot to request extra dressing for her salad and literally teared up while she stared at me. Was I about to die or, worse, go back to Human Resources? In the end, all she did was issue a mild request that I remember the extra dressing next time, but I still spent the afternoon huddled at my desk, drowning in self-recrimination.
While I scrambled to navigate the insanely steep learning curve of my new position, I kept my ears open for news about the five employees who’d disappeared from the elevator in which I may or may not have unbound a world-devouring monster. They remained missing, though the elevator itself was back in service by the following morning. If taking the stairs hadn’t been so dangerous, I’d have avoided the elevators altogether. At least there were no more visits from the Chief of Security, and no more reports of mysterious vanishings. Not that I heard, anyhow.
Things started to get a little more interesting on Thursday morning. I was on the phone, trying to secure a dinner reservation for Ms.Crenshaw at a very exclusive restaurant, when an older white man came bounding into the waiting room outside her office. He was short and rotund, with a bushy mustache and an actual monocleresting in front of his right eye. In fact, he looked a lot like Mr.Monopoly—all he needed was the top hat. Breezing up to my desk in a cloud of citrusy cologne, he said in a plummy British accent, “Good morning, young man. Is Margaret in?”
“Uh, yes,” I said a little uncertainly, placing a hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. “She’s on a call to Beijing at the moment.”
Giving me a smile and a wink, the man said, “I’ll wait, then, shall I?” Before I could respond, he plopped himself down in a chair and sorted through the magazines left out for visitors to peruse—Blackbook,Good Hellkeeping,National Review—before selecting one and flipping through it with seeming interest.
Shooting him curious glances from the corner of my eye, I returned to securing my boss’s dinner reservation. Unfortunately, the maître d’ neither knew nor cared who Ms.Crenshaw was, and I could sense that she was moments away from hanging up on me when Mr.Monopoly materialized in front of my desk once more. Holding out a hand for the phone, he murmured, “Allow me.”
Taken aback, I relinquished the handset and then watched as he began to speak to the woman on the other end. “To whom am I speaking? Abby? I’m afraid I don’t know you. You must be new. Let me speak to Gustav, please. Yes, that’s right. No, he won’t mind. Tell him it’s Barney Samuels. Thank you.” He paused and gave me another wink as, presumably, the woman went off to fetch her boss. “Gustav?” he said a few moments later, before launching into a torrent of German punctuated by amiable chuckles. Eventually switching back to English, he said, “Yes, your best table for”—he gave me an inquiring look and I flashed seven fingers—“seven o’clock tonight. No, for Margaret. I’m lending a hand to her assistant. Wonderful! Thank you, Gustav.” Then he added, with a note of steel in his voice, “Do make sure Abby knows who we are. We don’t wantthis sort of embarrassing lapse to happen again. There’s a good fellow. Cheerio.”
Moving slowly, I accepted the phone back from him and then dropped it into its cradle on my desk. “Wow, thank you,” I stammered.
“Think nothing of it, my boy.” He patted the rounded contours of his paisley waistcoat in satisfied fashion. “It wasn’t your fault. Gustav should have made sure his people were up to speed.”
I nodded. “Okay. Um, would you like me to see if Ms.Crenshaw is free now?”
Before he could respond, the door to her office opened and the woman herself appeared. “Barney, good morning,” she said.
“Margaret! Good morning.” He beamed at her and then tilted his head back in my direction. “I was speaking with your new assistant here.”
“This is Colin Harris.”
