Résumé With Monsters (13 page)

"Dear God thank you," he would shout, falling to his knees in a green square of city park. And by that means, he would never grow jaded or indifferent to his freedom.

The computer screen in front of Philip flickered, and Philip's heart jumped, as it always did at such moments. If the electricity went out, the computer went down and the file was lost if it hadn't been saved. Quickly, Philip saved the job and continued keyboarding. Thunder shook the building.

To Philip's left, Monica typed quickly and angrily. He could observe her blurred, stocky form out of the corner of his eye. As Philip watched, she banged the keys with one last dramatic flourish, saving the file and clearing the screen. Then she got up and marched out of the room.

Philip remembered that he had intended to call Amelia. He punched her number and she answered on the first ring.

Her voice cheered him instantly, and when he told her the good news she shouted with genuine delight.

Philip felt a sense of intense relief. "I thought you might not be happy for me. I mean, I know how you feel about the book."

"No," Amelia said. "I don't think you do. You think I hate it, and I don't. I've just hated the way it
ruled
you. Now, you see, they will be taking it away from you. It will be finished; it won't be so suffocating... so dominating. It will be just a novel in a bookstore."

Philip didn't entirely understand her reasoning, but he was pleased that she was happy for him. "Great news, isn't it?"

"It is."

"Bitch."

"What?"

"Bitch. Cheap little
cunty
bitch..."

Amelia's voice faltered. "Philip. What..."

"Monica! Get off the line!" Philip shouted. "This is a private conversation. Get off."

"Bitch, bitch," Monica muttered. She sounded as though she were speaking through mud.

"Amelia," Philip shouted. "Look, I'll call you back. I'll call you right back, okay?"

"Sleazy cheap dirty slut bitch..."

"Philip?"

"Amelia, I'll call you right back."

"Well, okay."

"Bitch
cunt
..."

Philip heard the click as Amelia hung up. He dropped the receiver and ran out into the hall. He paused, listening. He could hear her voice, rolling on in a guttural litany of invective. He ran toward it.

She sat behind Mrs. Burrell's desk, muttering into the phone.

"Monica," Philip said, standing in the doorway. "What do you think you are doing?"

Monica looked up. She grinned and giggled evilly, the phone poised at her ear. The only light in the room came from a small desk lamp that sent its yellow rays upward into her eyes. Her single eyebrow, in combination with the long, blasted shadows, created a sardonic, ghastly effect.

"I'm giving your bimbo a piece of my mind," Monica said. "I'm telling her to fucking mind her own fucking business."

"There's nobody on the phone," Philip said. "She hung up."

Monica scowled, dropped the receiver. She swept the phone off the desk. It clattered impressively, made a single
jing
sound.

"What do you want with a bitch like that? What can she type? Maybe forty words a minute, max, I bet. Ha! You are not saying different because it's true. I bet she couldn't tell Helvetica from Times. What do you want with a bitch like that?" Monica laughed, leaping an octave in mid- laugh as though goosed by invisible demons of injustice.

"Don't apologize," Monica screamed—a superfluous injunction. "I don't know why I bother. You fucking men are all the same. Probably she's got a bubble ass and tits like headlights on a jeep and that's plenty to make you forget about me. But you couldn't just come right out and tell me there was someone else. I had to find it out. I had to pick up the phone and there she was, breathing and squealing like one of those nine hundred numbers."

"Monica," Philip said. "You are insane. There was never anything between you and me."

"Ha!" Monica said. She yanked the desk drawer open, fumbled through it, looked up. "Ha," she repeated. She looked down again and returned to her search of the desk drawer. A third "ha" brought her head up with a smile of triumph. "We'll see about what's between us."

She waved the brass letter opener in her right hand.

Just then a loud bark of thunder made the window pane hum, and the desk lamp and the hall light faltered and failed. The room dove into darkness except for the small, stuttering square of the window where lightning seemed to jump in sync with Monica's choked laughter.

Philip pushed away from the office door, for he had seen, in the jerky, strobe-parsed images of the storm, Monica's raised hand and unmistakably murderous intent.

He stumbled backward, heard her in front of him, moving fast. He pushed away and ran, as fast as his gimp leg would allow, down the hall.

Slam! His nose flared with pain. What was that? Of course. The
goddam
, monster filing cabinet that reduced the hall to a one-man corridor for about ten feet. The
goddam
, awful—

His shoulder erupted in pain. Monica leaned forward and screamed in his ear.

Again. She jabbed him again, the blade glancing off a rib.

Jesus God
. He flailed wildly. His elbow connected with something, her jaw, he thought. She grunted and lurched backward.

Philip scrambled forward, each file drawer knob banging his injured rib with that petty love of torture that characterizes inanimate objects. He burst into the lobby; vinyl sofas pulsed with the beat of the lightning. It was after office hours. The doors would be locked. He had a key, but it was the fourth or fifth generation, and it required some jiggling and Monica was behind him and filled with insane, scorned fury and strength.

Philip fled toward the back of the building, banging through swinging doors in the dark, bouncing off more cabinets. There were people back in printing. Charlie and that new guy Owen,
Mowen
, whatever. And Bingham, of course.

Strength in numbers.
Put that
goddam
shiv
down Ms. Gibson. As you can plainly see, you are outnumbered. You are
— This hope, bright and energizing, lived for perhaps two seconds. Lights rolled across the far wall, twin orbs, headlights, and Philip followed their course to the window as the car rolled by through the rain. There went the printers. They would be doing what they always did when the electricity went off. Taking a break. Flying down to the local Seven-Eleven for a couple of cold ones.

Down time in the storm.

Philip heard something crash behind him. "Hey!" Monica screamed. "Philip."

Philip banged through swinging doors and into the back storeroom. He collided immediately with stacked boxes of paper, toppled forward, righted himself. It was before-god dark here, no windows, and there was an overpowering burnt-
sulphur
reek.

The acrid scent of the Old Ones, the smell of Time itself.

No. This was not a good time for exercising the imagination. The dirty lung-clogging smoke came from the
thermography
presses, overheated again.

He heard the doors bang behind him, felt a gust of cooler air.

He needed a weapon, something to hit with. He felt the shelves behind him. Something shifted, tipped, and it seemed then like a hundred, a thousand cockroaches tumbled over him, danced across his face, his neck... "Ugh-"

He brushed them from his face. Business cards Surprise.

What a mess you are, he thought. What an inept, dismal buffoon. What—

Monica embraced him.

He fell back against the shelf and more boxes shifted, a rain of small, cardboard appeals.

Monica pushed her face toward him. Her breath was coated with the licorice cough drops she ate like candy.

She kissed his cheek.

There were hissing things in the dark now, things possessed of alien teeth and talons, and although the darkness was absolute, Philip could sense their writhing, feel the darkness folding and looping upon itself and hear a sound that was not the wind or the rain or any of the scuffling sounds he made as he struggled on the concrete floor, and he
had to get out of there
.

Monica sought his lips.

He was no longer afraid of her. He was not afraid of her deranged passion or the possibility that she still had the letter opener and meant to thrust it into his heart. The fear of Monica had been trumped, effortlessly, by the hideous things that floated over her, the minions of
Yog-Sothoth
, the outcast, star-headed creatures, the
Shub-Niggurath
,
Yig
, the Mi-Go,
Tsathoggua
.

He had to get away.

He struggled to his feet in the dark. She clung to him. He clutched her shoulders, shook her savagely, and hurled her from him. He ran, colliding with more boxes, sprawling forward. He could almost see the cold, lidless eyes, the size and shape of dinner plates.

Someone was shouting; not Monica, a man's voice.

Boxes slid under him as he crawled forward. His palm touched the dirty concrete floor; he pulled himself forward and stood up again.

Just then the lights went on. Machines, alert again, fidgeted mechanically, hummed.

"Philip! Monica!"

A figure strode toward Philip.

"Ralph," Philip said.

"Philip—My God!"

Ralph darted past Philip. Philip turned. Monica was flat on her back between two metal shelves. Ralph clutched her ankles and dragged her forward.

Philip ran to help.

"What the hell happened?" Ralph asked.

Monica was unconscious and she did not appear to be breathing. There was blood on her forehead. Several quarter-sized, red bruises decorated her cheek.

Ralph was shaking his head and muttering. Philip leaned forward and sought a pulse.

She's dead
, he thought, reaching to touch her throat. The carotid artery was silent. Something flickered under the corner of one of the metal cabinets, a last segmented tentacle withdrawing. Of course. The symmetry of those welts on

Monica's cheek could be one thing only, the mark of biting suckers, the track of a monster's caress.

"Let's get her down to my office," Ralph said.

They staggered and dragged her down the hall to the office, cleared a space on Ralph's desk, and laid her out on her back.

Ralph wiped sweat from his forehead. "I don't need this," he said. "I
goddam
don't need this. We are already behind schedule."

Philip picked up the phone, punched 911.

Ralph grabbed the phone away from Philip. "What the fuck do you think you are doing?" he asked. He slammed the receiver down.

"I was calling an ambulance," Philip said. "She's—"
She's dead
. "She's really hurt."

"She's fine," Ralph said, absently patting her head. "She just fainted or something. She'll come around."

"No."

Ralph leaned forward across Monica's still form and shouted in Philip's face, propelling flecks of spittle. "Look, I can't spare her! I
goddam
can't spare her. This is a
goddam
business, and it can't have everybody lying around in bed recuperating from one thing or another—pleasant as that might be."

Philip shouted back, "She's dead!" There. He had said it.

Ralph shook his head. He shook his head like a dog shaking off water. "No
no
no
no
no
no
no
no
." He came around the desk in a flurry of arms. "Go home," he shouted, shoving Philip toward the door. "I'll handle this."