The Third Bear (19 page)

Another Meeting with My Manager

One night, after the manta ray had flown off, my Manager entered my office and sat down. She looked so tired and so thin that for the first time I thought she might be dying. Her eyes were so far back in their sockets that I almost couldn't see them except for the slight reflection, the glint from the whites. She smelled like limes, so I knew she had just visited with the rest of the team.

"I am giving you a raise," my Manager said, but she didn't seem happy about it.

She took an object from her pocket and placed it on my desk. It was an amorphous ball of clear flesh with a small brown frog inside of it.

"This will make everything like it was before. Slumber and I made it together. For you. Just eat it tomorrow morning and you will feel much better."

"Thank you," I said.

My Manager leaned forward, although it was more like a swaying motion from fatigue, and with her elbows on my desk, she whispered, "Do you love me?"

It was the first time, in that moment, looking at my Manager so frail and on the edge of some unknowable catastrophe, that I realized she had once been flesh-and-blood. That she might have had a history from before the company. That she might be as much a victim of circumstances as me.

Because she said it there, in my office, at that moment, and because I was tired and alone and no longer cared, I said, "It's possible," instead of "No."

My Manager's smile destroyed the worry lines radiating from the corners of her eyes. The smile was so unexpected that I smiled back.

Then she stumbled to her feet and was gone, leaving my raise on my desk.

The Nature of My Raise

The next morning, I came to work in a good mood. I had had uninterrupted sleep for the first time in months. I did not notice anything amiss, although Leer and Scarskirt had changed the color of their exoskeletons to black. For Scarskirt this meant that her pale perfect face shone like death from her mask, her red lips a feast of blood. For Leer, it made it seem as if only the exoskeleton held her up. Neither of them would look at me, but I took this in stride since things had been bad for some time. I knew it would take many months to restore normalcy.

I ate my raise right away - it tasted like moist chocolate cake - and started working on my beetles with newfound vigor.

Not twenty minutes later, a member of Human Resources cradling a slug in her arms summoned me to my Manager's office. By then, my stomach was feeling queasy.

As we neared the elevators, my last thought before the slug kicked in was: Why are all of the offices empty?

I woke in a chair in the Human Resources office on the seventh floor. The HR representative who had brought me stood to my left, holding the slug. My Manager sat behind Mord's desk. To her left stood Slumber, looking solemn. To her right stood the Mord, large and terrible, holding the rotting remains of my personnel file, from which he scooped entrails into his mouth with a kind of absent-minded hunger.

My heart began to beat so fast I could feel it thudding. My throat closed a little. My arms became shaky and my legs didn't seem to work. I'm sure they could hear my breathing, shallow and quick.

Looking very solemn, my Manager leaned forward and said, "We have decided to terminate your employment with this company due to a pattern of unprofessional communication. Do you have anything to say in your defense?"

Shocked, anguished, I opened my mouth to speak, and realized I had been poisoned by my raise. For nothing eloquent or even faintly coherent came from between my lips. Instead, frog eggs poured out, falling heavy to the floor, and coating my chin and shirt in green slime. Nothing could be further from the definition of professional.

My Manager gave me a look of sorrow while the Mord growled in his corner and a thin smile animated Slumber's solemn face. I believe that somewhere in the building Scarskirt smiled at that exact moment as well.

But as they led me away, attaching the slug as I struggled, I regained my voice long enough to shout at my Manager as the doors began to close on me, "I love you. I've always loved you."

A sharp intake of breath. The sound of the paper encasing her bursting into flame once more.

The Results

Images of Leer, of Mord, of Scarskirt filled my head as Human Resources threw me out of the front door, the place on my spine where they had just ripped off the slug still stinging. It was a bitterly cold day and no one was walking on the plaza in front of the building. I'm sure people had been told to avoid it until I was gone.

The doors shut on the pragmatic faces of my tormentors. I staggered backwards, looking up at the place that had been my home for so many years - that had, in this incomprehensible world of ours, been all that was left to me of family. Now, I realized, I would have to find my way alone.

But there was one last surprise.

As I stared up at the window of Mord's office, so far away, it opened and there my Manager stood: on fire from head to toe, and no extinguishing it this time. She looked down at me, and although I could not read the expression on her face I would like to think she was happy, for a moment.

Then the Mord rose behind her, roaring as he rose and rose and rose, as if he might never stop growing, to fill the entire window. A slap of a paw and my Manager jerked back out of sight.

The fire spread from window to window, room to room, while the Mord raged, thrashing and fighting. Once, he stopped to stare down at me, paws against the glass. Once, he looked out into the gray sky as if searching for something.

A shadow, tiny and on fire, began to drift down from the burning windows.

Was it a leaf? Who could tell? By the time it reached the ground, it would have fallen away into nothing.

This, then, was the situation at the time I left the company.

PREDECESSOR

The great man's home lay within thick woods, beyond a churning river crossed only by a bridge that looked like it had been falling apart for many years. The woods were dark and loamy and took the sound of our transport like a wolf taking a rabbit. The leaves passed above us in patterns of deep green shot through with glints of old light. There was the smell of something rich yet suspect in the chilled air.

The house rose out of the forest like a cathedral out of a city: unmistakable. It had an antique feel. Two levels, although the second story was gutted and unusable to us, the off-white color stained with the amber-and-green dustings of pollen and pine needles. A steeple of a roof that contained nothing but rotted timbers, descending to a screened-in porch, beyond which lay the horseshoe construction of the interior passageways. The house might have been a hundred years old. It might have been two hundred years old. It might have always been there.

Our tread on the gravel driveway startled me; it was the first true sound I'd heard for many miles.

The screen door was broken - someone had slashed through it, and the two pieces had curled back. We walked onto the porch and found, beside two large wicker chairs like decaying thrones, the mummified remains of two animals the size of dogs but with skulls more like apes. They looked as if they'd fallen asleep attempting to embrace. They looked, in the way their paws had crossed, as if they had been attempting to cross the divide between animal and human.

My partner looked at them with revulsion.

"Corruption," she said.

"Peace," I said.

In answer she took out her keys and moved toward the door that led into the house.

The door had been hacked at with some kind of axe or other crude weapon. The gouges and cuts had turned black against the weathered white. The knob dangled from the door as if it belonged somewhere else.

"Nothing did that," I said. "Nothing that lives here now. Remember that."

"I'll remember," she said, and turned the key in the lock. It made a sound like metal scraping, but also of something released.

She glanced at me before she opened the door. "We don't know what he left."

The iron-gray of her eyes wanted something from me, but all I had was: "The power's gone from it. He hasn't slept for a long time."

I had no weapon. She had no weapon.

Beyond the door, a long, straight corridor waited for us, badly lit by glimmering lamps set into walls that seemed to both jut outward and recede into shadow. It was like the throat of a beast, except at the far end we could see where it curved to enter into the second half of the "U." Where did it come out? There had been no other door on the porch.

From where we stood, the corridor clearly changed as it progressed. What was near to us had a weathered opulence - rosewood panels and graying chandeliers long since gone dark. The burgundy carpet lay flat under our feet, and something had been dragged so violently down its length that the fibers had been flattened in a swerving pattern. But farther down we could see plants or little trees, and there came from the far end a suggestion of an underlying funk, the smell of unnatural decay. There came also a throaty murmur, as of a fading congregation or something ursine.

"Vestiges," I said.

"Of what?"

"Of the man himself."

I walked forward. Her boots scuffed the carpet behind me as if compelled to follow against her will.