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Short Fat Stubby Finger Stories PRESENTS:

Episode 9

Location: London   (Johnson’s Import and Export)

Time:  11:59:30

As Mary stepped out of the elevator and began to head towards the office her phone rang and she stopped in her tracks to take the call.  Joseph, in the meantime, had returned his attention to the task at hand, pressing the key to open the third order.

However, once he had the form itself open, Joseph found himself looking not at a standard application, but a high level diplomatic request.   He knew of their existence; he had been trained on how to action one, but he had never seen a real one before: a request for diplomatic clearance for a private item into England.   His training told him to presume that the request would possibly induce ramifications with the country from which it came should they become aware of its movements.   A clearance such as this would require somebody with very skillful experience, and extremely diplomatic skills.  This was certainly not what the internal message heading had indicated, however it did indicate that he was to process it and he wondered if perhaps it was a test.   Maybe another promotion or a department change.

Joseph stared at the request knowing full well he had his hands full with this task: it certainly wouldn’t be finished before midday.

He sighed, shrugged his shoulders … and went to work.    But as he began to read the form, he shook his head in confusion: the form itself was in English, but the details were in a foreign language, perhaps Italian he thought.   But regardless of which language it was it should have been sent to the languages department, not to him.   It wasn’t that he couldn’t complete the task – he just couldn’t read it.  All he could make out was something about a statue, ‘statua’ being one of the few Italian words he understood beside ‘gracias’ and ‘pizza’.

A smile began to form on Joseph’s face at the realisation that he would be able to make his reservation at the restaurant after all, or least he would salvage most of it.   A minute to locate the internal e-mail address, send it, then head off to the restaurant which was only five minutes away.   Joseph would not usually have been objectionable to sacrificing his lunch break for his job, it was not like the chef was preparing a gourmet Lobster dinner with Rothschild vintage wine for him.   Joseph’s midday meal was a rather more mundane offering that barely rated in the lower echelons of the healthy food guide for office workers.   But it meant that order was restored to his day.

Joseph had a set routine, which, left unsullied, made the day more than acceptable.  However, on the odd occasion that his routine had been disrupted the remainder of the day had always been reduced to chaos.   Computer glitches somehow took over the day; customers and shipping clerks were equally uncooperative on every occasion and on his way home the train had been late, or cancelled; it had been teeming with rain on the only day he had forgotten his umbrella; upon arrival at his unit he was confronted with power failure in the area which meant no evening meal … and other similarly obnoxious influences on his life that remained in place until order was restored the following day.

Still smiling at the unexpected luck that had come his way Joseph opened his desk

********

Location: London   (Johnson’s Import and Export)

Time:11:59:57

As Joseph skimmed through the pages of the company’s address book to find the internal e-mail location for the foreign language department he sought he became distracted by a spluttering noise and turned his attention to the monitor just as a brilliant white light exploded in his face.   And as his eyes took the full attention of the blast, Joseph’s mind went into overdrive as it tried to comprehend how, instead of going blind from the brightness of the blast, his brain was now being stretched to breaking point taking in the hundreds and hundreds of strange, distorted, unrelated images that were pouring out from the flashing screen.   Things that made no sense to him whatsoever, but they kept coming and coming and coming at him.  Faces: beautiful: ugly: distorted; three legged horses, creatures of the night, men, women … nearly everything imaginable in the world and many things that weren’t … imaginable … or of this world.

Joseph had absolutely no idea what was going on in his brain, but it was hurting him; frightening him.  He began to feel shaky; sweaty.   And then he began to feel extremely, uncontrollably dizzy.   Unexpectedly the room before him began to darken; to change dramatically.   Suddenly he was in a street somewhere familiar, but a mystery to his memory at the same time.   It was not raining, but it was extremely dark for the middle of the day – darkness caused by the thick, black clouds that covered the sky above him.   A bolt of lightening violently exploded so close to him that it made him physically jump in his high-back leather chair, and as his beating heart tried valiantly to calm itself down a huge face; an ugly, distorted, evil face, flew at him from within the storm clouds that now surrounded him – setting into play a fear like Joseph had never known could exist.

Joseph’s world began to totter out of control.   His vision began to waver, his eyes began to wander aimlessly across the room, but he understood nothing of what he saw.   The restaurant where he intended eating unexpectedly surfaced in his mind.   Someone was at his table … a blurry, indistinguishable figure that somehow sent a warm blanket of comfort and safety over his entire body – a figure there for but a second, then gone – nowhere to be seen.    The scene changed again.   A clock began appearing on the monitor … its face becoming bigger and bigger until the time dominated his vision: twelve noon … on the dot.   In the background he could hear the chimes of Big Ben confirming it was midday.   His watch began to beep, its alarms superfluously repeating the verification.   The roar of his fellow workers loudly advising their co-workers it was time to stop work quickly joined in the pandemonium.    Then the darkness began to arrive, all around him.   The monitor was the first to disappear, then the desk, then the room.   The darkness was everywhere and Joseph’s mind was ready to accept its offer to join it.

But, as his mind began to close off and meld with the total darkness that now began to engulf him, he had one more apparition: in the apparition he fell downwards towards the waiting gutter on the street his memories had failed to recognise, his eyes completely fixated on the blob of something indescribable smouldering in the gutter and although his mind would not admit to itself what it thought the thing to be, Joseph’s instincts did … and the fear and revulsion it invoked helped with the quickness of the process that rendered him unconscious.

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