BEAST OF THE WOODS

Chapter 15

Additional Alterations Used to Isolate Me

At Slumber's urging, perhaps aided by a suggestion from Scarskirt, everyone on the creative team except me had themselves altered so that they shared certain uniform attributes. These attributes included green exoskeletons through which the familiar faces peered as if through a graveyard of excavated crustaceans. A lingering scent of brine became common to their type. The network of worms became mobile so that they remained connected wherever they went. Slumber took them personally to the company's recreational rooms, eschewing Human Resources and slugs alike to show his trust in them. They even began to talk the same. They all began to talk like Scarskirt.

I did not know how I felt about being left out of this phase of entitlements. I did not know how my Manager felt about being left out, either.

In my nightmares I was floating in a sea of cracked-open crab and lobster parts, miles from shore, under a fiery red moon. Beside me the corpse of the fish project floated, its face bobbing beside it, still screaming in death.

My Personnel File: More Attempts at Being Proactive

Despite all of the pressures I have detailed, I did complete several legitimate beetle projects, garnering a grudging praise from Slumber, who otherwise I saw not at all. In this way - through the quality of my work - I hoped to preserve my job.

I also decided to visit my personnel file in the basement. This was one of the perks of working for the company, especially as I did not require the Mord or another member of Human Resources to accompany me. I hoped my file might divulge some clue, some nuance, that would give me a way out of my increasingly perilous situation.

The elevator down was sleek and fast and had not been used for any company experiments, which was a relief. When I got to the records department, an attendant wearing a surgical mask led me to the right room. My large box was stacked amongst thousands of other such boxes, all studded with tiny breathing holes. Yelping and snorting noises came from some of the boxes, bird trills from others.

Although the attendant was at least six feet tall and made of muscle and steel, he grunted with the effort of pulling the box down and putting it on the table in front of me.

It had been eight months since I had visited my personnel file. At that time, I had taken it for a walk on the little hill and fed it some carefully hoarded treats. I had opened up to it and told it things about my father, my mother, and my arduous trek to the city that I had never told anyone. I remembered that moment as a lightening of a burden, a cathartic experience.

I opened up the box.

Inside lay the unrecognizabl

e corpse of my personnel file. Anyone unfamiliar with it would have seen only some kind of large mammal. Rotting. White maggots curling through the masses of intestines, organs, sinew, and soft tissue with the mindless motions of a baby's fingers. My flesh went cold and I think I stopped breathing for a time.

There were many, many knife wounds. I had seen those kinds of marks before.

Even beyond the fear, a feeling of intense sadness came over me. The killing seemed so vindictive, and so unnecessary.

"Do you still want to take it out - or, perhaps, look through it?" the attendant asked, offering me a pair of gloves.

"No," I said. "There's no need."

Everything was very clear.

I no longer had messages from other employees.

I no longer could get Leer or Scarskirt or even Slumber to acknowledge my presence.

I began to live in memory. I would see my father's long, white fingers as he sat at the piano in the old house that I remembered only from the few surviving photographs. Or I would see my mother playing chess with him, hunched over the board with intense concentration. Or conversations with Leer from years back that had made me laugh. Or the look on Mord's face when he saw a glimpse of a sparrow, which widened his features and made him seem almost childlike.

If I just concentrated hard enough on these images, I believe I thought I could survive all of it.

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 mole. 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.