Page 17 of Colin Gets Promoted and Dooms the World
“The Four Hundred,” I repeated slowly. “From…the Gilded Age? Wasn’t that, like, more than a hundred years ago?”
Ms.Crenshaw showed her teeth in something approximating a smile. “My ancestors were still enslaved when Barney Samuels first arrived in this country.”
I stared at her, mouth open.
“Take my advice and listen carefully to whatever Barney has to say. If he asks you to rip the heart out of that sacrifice with your bare hands, do it. Learn what you can from him, and someday you might possess a fraction of the power he enjoys.”
My head nodded automatically.
“Now,” she added, “remind Transportation that we’re expecting a delegation from the Stygian Maw this afternoon, which means that people need to be on their guard. I want to see a drop in employee abductions this quarter. Then you can have an early lunch. You’ll need your strength for the bloodletting, in case today’s sacrifice decides to thrash around.”
As she retreated into her office, I reached for the phone, determined to sacrifice theheckout of whomever we had waiting in the basement.
“Please don’t do this!” theyoung woman whimpered. “Please!”
She struggled as she pleaded for her life, but the leather straps securing her to the huge block of basalt had been fastened with expert care. As she stared up at the robed and hooded figure looming over her, I could see that her pupils were enormous, blown wide with fear or some other emotion. I was standing at her feet, an iron bowl clutched in my hands, shivering in the cold air of the subterraneanchamber. So far, sacrificing someone wasn’t as fun as I’d imagined. In fact, I felt a little queasy. It was too late to back out now, though.
Rhythmic chanting rose and fell behind me, coming from the thirteen black-robed figures gathered in a semicircle in front of the sacrificial altar. The celebrant standing over the victim raised a wicked-looking knife into the air, its blade gleaming in the flickering light of a hundred candles, and as they did so the chanting rose to a hoarse crescendo. The woman tied to the altar writhed and gasped, her gaze now fixed on the blade hovering overhead. With a convulsive movement, the celebrant plunged the knife downward and the woman let out a bloodcurdling scream of primal terror that rang against the dark stone of the chamber’s walls. Then the scream died along with the chanting, both cut off with brutal finality. The celebrant held out a hand to me and I hurriedly passed them the bowl. In the tense silence that followed I heard the thick patter of blood dripping into the ceremonial vessel.
For the space of several heartbeats, no one moved. The celebrant laid aside the blood-tipped knife and I heard a sound like tape ripping. Then the overhead lights came on and I blinked in momentary confusion as everything receded to banal normalcy. The cantors relaxed into murmured conversations, throwing back their hoods and reaching into hidden pockets for their phones. The celebrant pushed back their cowl as well to reveal the plump features of Mr.Samuels, and as he stepped back from the altar the young woman sat up, her bonds untied, a cotton ball taped to the inside of her elbow. A bright sticker on her T-shirt announcedI Gave Blood Today!
Clumsily, I wrestled with the straps at her feet until I was able to free her, at which point she beamed a smile at me and nimbly hopped down from the jagged piece of black rock. She gave Mr.Samuels ahug before traipsing down several rough-hewn steps to the chamber floor.
“I noticed that you didn’t, uh, kill her,” I murmured as I drifted closer to Mr.Samuels.
He shook his head as he fished his monocle from a pocket under his robes and perched it in front of his right eye. “No, no. Too much trouble. It’s terribly difficult for people to go missing these days. They leave traces everywhere and then we have the police knocking at our door, asking inconvenient questions about ‘cell towers’ and ‘triangulated signals’ and ‘social media posts.’ ” His pudgy fingers shaped air quotes around these phrases as if they were incomprehensible technobabble. “It’s not like the old days, when you could sacrifice someone in an abandoned building and quietly dispose of the body with no one the wiser.” He sounded wistful as he said this, his gaze turned inward as if recalling better times.
Remembering what Ms.Crenshaw had told me, I wondered how many people Mr.Samuels had murdered back in the day to secure the shallow ambitions of Gilded Age socialites. “So who is she?” I asked, glancing at the sacrificial “victim.”
“Hmm? Oh, Leslie. Lovely girl. She’s doing this for college credit, you know. Wants to be an actress and thought this would be a good way to ‘tap into her instrument,’ whatever that means.” Samuels smiled with genial fondness as he watched Leslie chat with some of the cantors, a sugar cookie in one hand and a plastic cup of orange juice in the other. “She does an awfully good job of pretending it’s real, doesn’t she? So many sacrifices just lie there and wait for it to be over, or worse. Last week I had a young man check his phone in the middle of the ritual.” He shook his head. “Really spoiled the moment. Very disheartening. No respect for the work we do here.”
I nodded along. “Sure, right. But if you’re only taking a littleblood, why not set up a blood drive or something? You know, comfy chairs, IV bags, that sort of thing. Why do you need”—I gestured at the altar with its ancient stains, the candles that still flickered from every surface—“this?”
Folding his hands together over his ample middle, Mr.Samuels looked up at me from beneath his bushy eyebrows. “The trappings of ritual are not forourbenefit, Colin. We do this to propitiate the Old Ones, the dark gods that sleep restlessly beneath this reality. They are sticklers for tradition, for the rites and practices that They taught to the first practitioners thousands of years ago.” He paused and then sighed faintly. “We’ve done what we can to modernize things, but it’s slow going. I mean, some of the Oldest Ones have only just come around to the idea that virgin’s blood can come from males as well as females. We’ve started introducing Them to the concepts of nonbinary and intersex blood, but I think that’s going to take a while.”
I considered this as Leslie finished her cookie and was escorted from the Lower Sanctum by one of the cantors, a guy I’d seen around the building who worked for Investor Relations. His department dealt with the horrifying entities who backed our company in return for Management carrying out their insidious schemes. By all accounts, IR had one of the highest turnover rates in Dark Enterprises, what with people inevitably catching glimpses of things that humans were never meant to see. The hazard pay was good, though, and their generous compensation package guaranteed a place in some of the most prestigious psychiatric hospitals in the country, so at least you’d be well taken care of when your mind snapped.
“What does propitiating the Old Ones actually do?” I finally asked Mr.Samuels. “I mean, why do we need to propitiate Them?”
He smiled and wagged a finger at me. “Excellent questions, Colin. The Old Ones were the first to offer real power in exchange for veneration at the dawn of human civilization. Our forebears were the courageous few who heard Their promises and turned away from the false gods of their peoples. In return for their fealty, they were granted access to the dark mysteries and became the first practitioners. When they later established this company, they called themselves Management.”
Goose bumps rippled across my skin as I listened.
“In the millennia since our first contact with the Old Ones,” he went on, “we have discovered other realms of existence, flung open the Hells and struck bargains with the ancient beings who dwell there, reached into distant dimensions in search of lost secrets and forbidden knowledge. We can do things today that our ancestors never imagined, but we’ve never forgotten where we came from and to Whom we owe our deepest fealty. And neither have They.” Mr.Samuels gestured to the iron bowl resting on the altar, filled with congealing blood. “So we pay Them Their due, and in return They do not rise from the Utter Depths and annihilate us with the very power They granted us long ago.”
It took a moment for his final words to sink in. When they did, I stared at him, blinking.
“Oh yes,” Mr.Samuels assured me with another cheerful smile, “we walk the razor’s edge every day. What is given can be taken away, and what empowers can also destroy.” He gave my arm a friendly pat. “Consider that your first lesson on the path to true power.”
After snuffing out the black candles and tidying the altar, I followed Mr.Samuels into the elevator, the bowl of Leslie’s blood cradled in my hands. I had an uncomfortable flash of holdinganother bowl of blood in this very elevator three days ago. Perhaps it was that brief, visceral memory that made me say, “You mentioned an incursion to Ms.Crenshaw, sir. Do you have any idea what it was?”
He glanced over at me. “Not yet, no. There are hundreds of possibilities to consider. The oracles in Analysis and Logistics will figure it out, though. They always do.”
My chest tightened. I hadn’t considered the possibility that the company’s oracles might be able to perceive what I’d done, but of course they could, if they went looking.
“Between you and me,” Mr.Samuels went on, leaning closer in a confiding fashion, “I suspect an employee may be involved. And if we find that one of our own is responsible, well…” He shook his head, clearly disappointed. “I’m afraid there will have to be some terminations.”
I couldn’t speak for the rest of the elevator ride, thanks to the massive lump lodged in my throat. I mumbled something inarticulate when we reached the thirteenth floor, handed the bowl of blood to Mr.Samuels, and walked slowly to Ms.Crenshaw’s office. What was I going to do? Even now, some hardworking oracle might be screaming my name as they forced their consciousness back through time to perceive my transgression. For all I knew, the Firing Squad was already on its way to find me.
