This is a serialized story I’m posting on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter over the next several months. Each 280-character (or fewer) installment will appear there first and then here as a weekly collection later. If you like the story, please post a link to it on your favorite Internet haunt. If you don’t like it, post two links.
Our story begins . . .
Ever wondered where demon-possessed people go to work? Me neither. But I found out entirely by accident when I got a job with a call center that employed them pretty much exclusively.
Coming home on the train late one rainy night, I met this fidgety little guy in need of a smoke who asked me if I believed in Satan. I said no. He said he did because he worked for him.
Satan, according to the guy, paid his workers $66.06 per hour to harass people over the phone. Every worker was given a script tailor-made for each callee that had to be read out verbatim.
Or else.
When the guy said “Or else” he flinched like he’d got an electric shock. I didn’t pay it much attention. In hindsight, I should have. But I was much more interested in that great hourly rate. I mean, sign me up!
The guy ran off into the rain, like he was being chased by God knows what, three stations before mine. He’d left a crumpled sheet of paper on his seat. Something was written on it in smeared blood:
SHOULD OF NEVER SLID THE FUCKEN MOON OPEN!!!
What the hell did that mean? On the flip side of the sheet was a letterhead: Kayn Enterprises. Maybe that was the mob he worked for.
I’d been unemployed awhile. A job that paid close to 70 bucks an hour would keep a roof over my head. But Kayn Enterprises was a mystery. I couldn’t find any mention of it online or off. Did it actually exist?
Then something weird happened.
I was watching the evening news when my cat clawed at a spot on the TV. As I checked the screen for scratches, I noticed a sign on a building, KAYN ENTERPRISES. I recognized the street. It was in one of the don’t-go-there parts of town.
A phlegm-ridden blob in an electric wheelchair manned the reception desk. The second he laid eyes on me, he pissed himself laughing. He reckoned I looked like a total asshole, so I’d fit right in.
I hadn’t spoken a word. How did he know what I was there for?
The blob led me to a windowless room with a red door which he locked behind me. A bunch of scary-eyed freaks glared at me from rows of cubicles.
Shit! What happened to the lights?!
Yaaah! Waaah! Gaaah!
Hands, claws, spit, jagged teeth, sewage breath, and grisly threats came at me like Black Friday shoppers. Then somebody boomed HELL HAS LOST ITS PATIENCE! and hit the lights.
A staring loon with a storm of wiry black hair and skin that hadn’t seen the sun was inches from my face.
In the background a scrawny bloke in a business suit scowled. “Back to work, moyyyt.”
The loon snapped his rough grinders at me, winked, then scooched to a cubicle.
Dazed and disheveled, I found myself in the scrawny bloke’s office. It was all maroon velvet and orange Perspex. I thought he was Indian but later learned he was Mauritian. Serge was his name.
He held his palm out to me like a bellboy expecting a tip. “Gimme flash, moyyyt.”
Our hands met. Something buzzed in my ear. A mosquito? No. Mosquitos don’t go “Wheee!”
The office pirouetted and a maroon velvet chair leaped up to catch my plummeting ass.
Serge guffawed a cartoonish “Haw haw haw.”
A paper form swooped into my hands.
My name was on the cubicle. Serge said to wait for a “fux.” We hadn’t discussed pay, conditions, my work history, anything. I felt woozy. He slapped me on the back, “Good luck, moyyyt.”
As I waited, worrying sounds came from the other cubicles.
A diesel-voiced male babbled in an unknown tongue. Someone who sounded like a baby quoted Shakespeare and gave instructions on how to deposit funds. A female with a tongue like KY Jelly told a “Senator” not to worry about where he’d dumped the SUV.
The fax machine whined.
READ AS WRITTEN. DO NOT REHEARSE.
I skimmed the body of the text. It seemed pretty harmless. There was a number to ring and a lady to ask for.
“Hello. May I speak to Madison, please?”
Madison, who’d answered the phone, shrieked in terror.
I was about to go off-script, then I recalled what the guy on the train had said. Or else.
“The medicine you’ve been given, Madison, is special medicine. With special side-effects. They’re only temporary. Nothing to worry about. Think of them as a spiritual pick me up.”
There was an awful silence at Madison’s end.
Fear and shame welled inside me. What had I done?
Madison began to sob.
I wanted to apologize to her, then get the hell out of there, when an overpowering calmness came over me like I’d been pumped full of morphine.
“Madison, once this course of treatment is over, you’ll feel like a new woman. You WILL be a new woman. Everything that’s happened to you this past year will fade from memory. FOREVER.”
“You promise?” Madison sobbed.
I’d reached the end of the script.
The connection died.
I made several more calls, each as troublingly bizarre as the last.
Suddenly a black-shrouded figure appeared in my cubicle, zapping me with fright. In an absurdly girlish voice it said, “Smoko.”
“Smoko” was right. The tea room was fugged with cigarette and cannabis smoke. My co-workers ranged from one or two almost normal-looking people to The Hills Have Eyes.
The black shroud floated into the chair next to mine and flicked back her hood.
WHAT A BABE!
“You’ll like working here,” she said. “The people are so nice.”
She looked like a Victoria’s Secret model to the power of 10 but sounded like an English-dubbed waifu.
“Have you worked here long?” I asked.
“Ever since I shot my mother.”
I slept as soundly as a corpse. No dreams. Just nothingness. My eyes snapped open at 8:00 am. I’d never felt so alert, so clear-headed, so up-and-at-em in all my life. The day had laid out a delicious spread of endless possibilities for me and I was going to devour the lot.
My wallet weighed more than 500 bucks. Serge paid daily in cash. The events of the previous evening, the things I’d seen, heard, and said, didn’t seem to matter now that my financial woes were history and I felt so damned good.
I strode through Coles like I owned the world, basket full of eye fillets. Nothing but the best for me.
I told an old bugger off for selecting pork chops. “Live a little,” I said. “This time tomorrow you’ll be lying dead on your kitchen floor with a machete in your skull.”
For the first time in my 27 years I couldn’t wait to get to work. I was in such a hurry I ran two red lights. The cops got on my tail. Try as I did, I couldn’t shake them. Siren screaming, blue light flashing, they hounded me all the way to the call center carpark.
I got out of my hatchback and reached for the sky. Were the cops gonna shoot me? Taser me? Curb stomp me?
Slowly the driver’s-side door of the cop car swung open, and out slithered the staring loon.
“What were you doing in there?” I said. “Where are the cops?”
He grinned like a medieval pimp.
From the cop car’s boot came thumping and muffled cries of “Let us out!”
I don’t know how Serge did it, but in between all his moronic guffaws and moyyyts he managed to transform a pair of ropable cops into simpering suck-ups. They calmed right down and stared at him, gobsmacked, as he made a bunch of wacko hand gestures.
Waiting for the evening’s first fax, I worried about the crazy stuff I’d done that day, especially what I’d said to that poor old bugger. Why did I say it? What had gotten into me?
“Don’t worry,” the stunning matricidal waifu said, “it’s not as weird here as you think.”
“It’s not?”
We were in the tea room, eating.
“Most of us are actors. I didn’t really shoot my mother and . . .” Her voice deepened. “I don’t really speak like a little girl.”
She whispered, “This is a psychiatric project. Its purpose is to help newly released mental patients.”
“So the people here are nut jobs?” I said.
“No, the ones we call. Each script is designed to help them. Although some of the people who work here are a bit on the odd side.”
Actors? Psychiatric project? Why hadn’t Serge said anything?
Hours later I read my last fax for the night.
“Hello, Tom?”
“I’m glad you called. I’ve been depressed.”
He sounded like it.
“Oh that’s no good,” I said.
Oops. That wasn’t in the script.
Nothing happened. The sky didn’t crash to Earth and I still drew breath.
This young guy needed a bit of cheering up and I didn’t need some stupid-looking script to do that.
“How come you’re depressed?” I said.
“I gotta do somethin important. Really important. But I just can’t bring meself to do it.”
“You know, I used to have terrible trouble motivating myself at times.”
“You did?”
“But I found a way around it. Know what I do now?”
“What?”
“I imagine how good it’ll feel to have done the job, then I go and do it.”
“Wow, that’s so simple it’s brilliant. Could you hold on a sec?”
Tom walked off into another room. From the room came a feeble, croaking voice, “No! No! Please don’t!”
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