All his legions
a simple contract, no strings attached…
Alistair shifted uncomfortably on the hard plastic seat in the waiting room, the glossy brochure clutched tightly in one hand. The receptionist sat impassively in front of him, behind a large glass table, and the only sound was the incessant hum of the air conditioning unit.
It was cold in here, Alistair had noticed. Freezing, in fact. He had wanted to ask the receptionist if she could switch off the AC, but her equally frosty demeanor made him wary of making any unnecessary requests. His left leg was slowly cramping from the sadistic edges of the chair he sat in, which seemed like a modernist’s idea of a judas cradle. He passed another glance over the brightly coloured brochure in his hand and its vivid promises:
Satisfaction Guaranteed! No Hidden Costs! Go Home Today With Everything, And More!
He held the brochure a little tighter, and looked at the silver clock above the receptionist’s desk. It seemed to be running slowly, the arms dragging as if through molasses. He checked his own watch, dismayed to see that it too told the same time. He was almost ready to build up the courage to ask the stony-faced receptionist how much longer he’d be waiting, when the door to the meeting room opened. A voice that carried a smile came from inside: “Mr A. Rosen? Alistair Rosen? Do come inside would you, we have been expecting you.”
Alistair stood up, straining a little at the returned feeling in his leg, and attempted a friendly nod to the receptionist, who stared at him blankly from behind her desk. He walked into the meeting room, and looked to see who had called his name.
The room was windowless but bright, illuminated by a series of fluorescent bulbs in the ceiling that gave the room a clinical kind of ambiance. There was a stack of grey filing cabinets in one corner, matched by an equally grey carpet, and a faux-leather couch by the wall that sat across from two high-backed chairs. Sitting in these chairs, were a man and woman: both looking just as clinical as the decor, and both with wide, utterly fixed smiles on their faces as Alistair walked in.
“Hello Mr Rosen! Or may I call you Alistair?” She did not wait for his response, and added: “How lovely for you to have made the time to meet us today!” The woman had stood up to greet Alistair with a handshake that was firm, but noticeably cold to the touch.
He looked down at the name badge pinned to the front of her crisp blue suit-jacket, and saw that her name was ‘Olivier’. A French name, perhaps? The man beside her gave a friendly wave, and also offered his hand to Alistair.
“Glad to meet you, Alistair. We’re very grateful for your time, and glad that we can be of service to you. Please, take a seat.” Alistair planted himself onto the faux-leather couch, feeling it sag under him, like falling into a swampy mire. He tried to return a sheepish grin to the man, who he saw by his name tag was called “Sidonay”. A little odd, Alistair thought. Was it pronounced “Sydney” or “Sy-do-nay?”.
He decided not to ask, fearing it would be rude to do so. There was a small coffee table between him and the man and woman, which had a number of paper files laid neatly across it.
“Can we offer you something while we chat, Alistair? Tea, perhaps? Coffee? Something stronger?” Sidonay winked knowingly at Alistair, who laughed feebly in reply.
“Tea, please. Milk, with two sugars. If it’s not too much trouble.”
“No trouble at all, Alistair.” Olivier pressed a button on the intercom beside her chair, and spoke with a soothing but commanding voice into it: “Sylvester. Three cups of tea, if you would be so kind. Milk and sugar.” She turned back to Alistair, and smiled again with that strange, fixed rictus Alistair had seen when he first walked in.
“Well, Alistair.” She said “We have had a look at your application, and we are delighted to say that we have a number of options available to you.” She gestured to the files on the table. “Given what you have told us, and from the assets you have available, we can offer you a range of different plans, depending on how soon you would like to move forward in this transaction.”
“We really shouldn’t be telling you this, Alistair,” Said Sidonay: “But we’re offering you something really special. Only a select few of our clients get this kind of deal.”
“And what deal is that?” Said Alistair, squirming a little in his chair under the strange, humourless scrutiny he felt from them. “I had seen the adverts on the underground, and filled out an application form, but I wasn’t quite sure…it all seemed a bit...”
“Too good to be true?” Beamed Sidonay. “A once in a lifetime opportunity?”
“It all seemed a bit vague. I mean, some of the questions on the form…which church I lived near, what my nickname at school was…”
Olivier let out a tinkling laugh at this, which sounded like glass falling from a shattered windshield. “Oh, that just helps us to get the whole picture, Alistair.” She said. “We pride ourselves on being personable. We want to get to know the real you, to see what you really want.” She picked up one of the files on the table, and lay it open in front of Alistair.
“Now, we think that the silver package plan is perfectly suited to you, although truth be told, the results take a little longer, and you will be expected to pay a little more up front.”
“But,” interjected Sidonay: “If you were to take the platinum package.” He let out a whistle at this. “You’d be guaranteed instant results, and repayment only in incremental deposits over a much longer timescale.” He prodded at a file that had an inlaid platinum band around its corners as he spoke: “Remember, this is only for a select number of customers. But we feel, given what you have told us in your application, you qualify for the platinum plan.”
Alistair leaned out from the couch, and turned a page in the file. There were a lot of buzzwords written inside in bold typefaces, and numbers and graphs of statistics he couldn’t quite understand, but it seemed to be offering a promise of complete satisfaction in all facets of his grey, tedious life.
He looked back up at Sidonay and Olivier, who smiled expectantly at him, their smiles wide but without a trace of warmth. He also saw that their eyes held no distinct pigments, only deep black pupils sunk into the whites of the sclera.
He didn’t quite know why he had come, and agreed to the meeting in the first place. There was something about the promise of more in the advertisement he had first seen, while sitting on the underground platform waiting for his train. A richer life, a more vivid existence. He didn’t want much, he had admitted to himself. Just a little change of pace to his very ordinary life. Something to give him a little get-up-and-go. Something to cut through the grey.
The door to the meeting room opened behind them. A man dressed in strangely thread-bare clothes, given the precise tidiness of the office, walked in carrying a silver tray. He stood before them, and Alistair was alarmed to see the man’s feet were bare, and that he seemed to be visibly shaking, if not from the cold air of the AC, than from something far more insidious. Was it fear?
“Ah, Sylvester.” Said Sidonay, who beckoned the man forward with a quick gesture of his hand. “Serve us some tea, there’s a good fellow.”
The man laid the tray on the table, which held three china cups, a metal teapot, and a small jug of milk. “Sugar, Sylvester?” Said Olivier, looking with annoyance at the contents of the tray.
“We..we..we’re all out of sugar, Miss Olivier.” Said the trembling man, his eyes fixed on the tray. “I could..go out to get some..if you would permit me to..leave, if only for a little while.”
Olivier frowned at the man, with the look of a disapproving teacher assessing a fumbling student at her desk. “No, Sylvester.” She said. “You know I can’t do that. We shall just have to do without.” Olivier looked at Alistair. “I am terribly sorry. You just can’t get the staff these days.” She began to pour tea into one of the three cups, and offered it over to Alistair. He accepted it, glad of the warmth of the cup in his hands.
“May I..I mean..” Said the man they called Sylvester: “Do you need me to do anything else for you, my masters? May I return to…” Both Olivier and Sidonay shook their head at this.
“No, stay Sylvester. You may stand in the corner, until we have use for you.” The frightened man scuttled over to one of the filing cabinets, and huddled into the corner beside it, still shaking as if in terror of the unseen consequences that his mistake would incur.
“Now then.” Said Sidonay to Alistair, the fixed, vacant smile returned to his face. “What do you say to our proposal? Not that we want to rush you.” He looked over his shoulder then back again to Alistair, in a mock gesture of conspiracy between them. “But we rarely offer something like this to the usual sorts who come in here off the street. And time is a bit of a factor here…”
Alistair took a sip of his tea as Sidonay spoke, finding it was scalding hot even with the milk he had added, and smelling vaguely of sulphur.
“Look, I appreciate that you are being…generous here, but I still don’t really understand.” He put the china tea-cup down now, as if to signal that he was taking command of the conversation. “You said life satisfaction. The brochure promised a complete overhaul of my life, my fortunes, my career, my marriage. But it didn’t say how.”
He tried to read the expressions of the two sitting in front of them, but they still had a bemused, python-like expression of neutrality across both their faces. “It also didn’t say what it would cost. You spoke of assets, but the form didn’t ask for specifics. Not even the type of car I drive.”
Alistair tried to recall the image of the advertisement he had seen on the underground. It came to him as a whirl of shifting, lurid colours, with words that had seemed incomprehensible yet enticing. He remembered that looking at it had made his head hurt, but that he could not turn away. Trapping him as if in a kaleidoscope of sensory bliss, and the promise that he could have everything he ever wanted. He looked again at the folders in front of him.
Olivier picked up one of the china cups, and gingerly took a sip of her tea. He could swear, as she did so her tongue quickly forked out from between her lips, bright red and pointed to form an arrow-head-like tip. Sidonay shook his head in dismay at Alistair’s protest.
“Oh, Specifics, specifics. Alistair, as we said, we look at the whole picture here. What a man has in his bank account is not as valuable as what is contained in his heart. His soul. We are more than just the flotsam of life we assemble around us. You, my dear fellow, are unique.” Sidonay leaned back in his chair at this, which creaked with a sharp whine of metal upon metal.
“You told us in your application that you don’t smoke. You drink maybe once a month, if at all. You do not gamble, take no drugs stronger than an aspirin. You have a wife, to whom you have been married since you were both eighteen, and have remained faithful to for all your forty years spent together.”
Sidonay seemed to be checking off a mental list as he spoke. “No other sexual partners besides your spouse, … no vices, no skeletons in the closet, no bastard offspring…” Sidonay gave a cunning grin at this. “You don’t even indulge in the act of self-pleasuring, if I am not mistaken?”
Alistair blushed a little at this. “I really don’t see what that has to do with…”
“It has everything to do with this.” Said Olvier, her voice now a little sterner, with a hint of goading to it. “And the cherry on top of it all, the big gold star to your name, is that you don’t believe in god. Are we correct in this understanding?”
Alistair froze at this. It had seemed such a trifling question on the form, he thought. It seemed compulsory, like asking for his nationality, or his Mother’s maiden name. “Well, yes. I mean, I consider myself agnostic-atheist, to be precise…but I went to Sunday school, so I suppose you could say…” Sidonay waved away this meandering protest from Alistair.
“Yes, yes, specifics. What I and my colleague are trying to say is that you maintain what could be considered an absolute moral compass, yet you follow no faith?”
“Yes. Is that not normal?” Said Alistair, a little dismayed.
“Oh, do not worry, it is a very normal phenomenon.” Said Olvier, who was now leaning intently from her chair towards Alistair. “It is simply that, in our line of work, and the offer we are hoping to make, it is rare for one such as yourself to…approach us.”
“I don’t follow.” Said Alistair. The foul tea had now turned stone-cold in his cup, though he gripped it tightly as if for warmth.
“Oh, don’t be coy, Alistair. I think you have gathered by now what it is we’re offering.” Said Olivier. She patted at her jacket pocket, and pulled out a thin packet of cigarettes. Almost instinctively, Sidonay leant over to her, a lit match somehow having appeared in his hand.
She lit a cigarette, and took a long drag from it, the tip glowing angrily as she did. She exhaled a perfect smoke ring, which drifted over to Alistair before hanging momentarily above his head. Alistair felt the cold prick of sweat under his collar, and with it a sudden urge to flee. He tried to push a surge of adrenaline into his numb body, but felt fixed to the spot, like an animal tethered to the ground in front of a hungry predator.
Olivier turned her attention to the man named Sylvester, who sat rocking in the corner of the room. “Slyvester, here. Now.” She curled a finger toward him, and he shuffled over to her. “Down.” She ordered, and the man dropped to his knees. “Ashtray, Sylvester. Open wide, now.” The man grimaced, and slowly opened his mouth, revealing a scabbed and greying tongue.
Olivier took her cigarette, and with a light flick of her wrist, dropped the ashes of her cigarette into the man’s open mouth. Alistair saw the man flinch at this, his eyes rolled back in primal terror. “Close your mouth. And, swallow.” Olivier said, and the man obeyed. Alistair saw the man’s eyes tear up as he swallowed the ashes.
“Now, Alistair.” Said Sidonay, with a strange sing-song lilt to his voice. “Let’s not beat about the bush. The writing is on the wall, so to speak. We are offering you a new life. All that you could ever wish for. All you must do is give us a small part of you. A sliver of what makes you human. A fraction of your immortal soul.” Olivier cackled at this, and with her other hand she tilted open the mouth of the man called Sylvester, and tapped another cloud of ashes onto his burnt tongue.
“You’re insane, the pair of you. That poor man… I should never have come here…” Alistair stood up, but found he could not move. It was as if he was pinned down by some immense weight. Olvier sighed at this, and took another long drag of her cigarette. Seeing that she had gotten up to the filter, she took the cigarette, and stubbed it out roughly onto the tongue of the man called Sylvester.
He let out a guttural cry, but still he kept his mouth open, his arms and legs trembling in pain as the burning tip of the cigarette sizzled with a dry hiss on his tongue. Tears ran down the man’s cheek, and the faint reek of charred meat made Alastair want to gag. He felt urged to help the poor man, but he too seemed unable to move from where he sat, whether through fear or obedience.
“Alistair, you just aren’t getting the message.” Said Olivier, taking another cigarette from the packet and lighting it.
“It’s a deal as old as time itself. You give us just the bare essence to your existence, and we give you all you could ever dream of. What’s more, your soul is unclaimed by anyone. You are a free agent. Once the deal is done, you suffer no consequence. Unlike Sylvester here.” She pinched the cheek of the now weeping man at her feet.
“Sylvester here was a man of the cloth once, weren’t you? Until you took to whoring, and drinking, and spending money that belonged in the collection plates. It was only a matter of time before he came to seek our assistance.” The man dropped down to the floor, his face touching her black, pointed shoes, whimpering like a whipped dog.
“However, his soul took a great deal more time and trouble to negotiate away from the other side. But we all benefited greatly from it, didn’t we Sylvester?”
She dug the heel of her shoe into the back of the man’s neck, which made him shake even more in fear. “He’s had his fun, and now he has to pay the price. He’ll be here till the end of days, though maybe we’ll give him a little time off for good behaviour. Maybe in a few thousand years or so.” The man named Sylvester mewled softly at this promise of freedom, his meek hands pawing at her shoes in subjugation.
Sidonay rose from his chair, and stepping around the coffee table, planted himself daintily next to Alistair on the couch. He placed an arm around Alistair’s shoulder, which felt icy cold to the touch, even through Alistair’s jacket.
“You see, Alistair.” Said Sidonay. “The offer is simple. Think of it as a sort of investment. One where there are no losses, no hidden terms. You simply give us the smallest, most infinitesimal molecule of your soul, leaving the rest intact. When you die, that part belongs to us, but the remainder is yours to do with as you see fit.”
“If you have a change of heart, and suddenly choose heaven, well all the better for it. If you don’t, you sleep for an eternity, in the inky blackness of the grave. You’re in no risk of ending up like Sylvester over here.” He gestured to the man nuzzling at Olivier’s shoes.
“You would barely notice it was gone. You would feel no suffering, no torment. This small, insignificant piece of your soul would be simply….an asset to us. We have quotas to fill, and people higher up the ladder than us who want results fast. And people like you help us meet those targets. So it’s a win-win for both of us! So, how about we seal the deal, make everything ship-shape?”
Alistair looked at this man with dead, black eyes, and the woman sitting beside him, who was digging her shoe heel viciously into the nape of a sobbing, emaciated prisoner. This must be a nightmare, he thought. If he were to close his eyes, he would wake up in bed, next to his loving wife, and he would laugh with her at the strange dream he just had. One where he was asked to sell his soul, for riches beyond the dreams of avarice.
Sidonay now had a pen in his hand. One of the folders slowly opened on the coffee table, and Alistair saw his name on the first page in bold, red lettering. Maybe if he signed the damn thing, it would all be over? He would wake up? The man sitting at Olvier’s feet would stop weeping in great, shaking sobs. The room would stop growing colder and colder, so that his breath would no longer hang in the air like mist?
The room seemed to be growing darker, and yet larger. As if they were in an immense cavern, deep below the earth. He could hear other voices now, low moans and the crying of babies, shrill and desperate in the cold and the inky blackness.
Both Olivier and Sidonay seemed to have become emaciated and pale, their skin death-white. The blue suits they had been wearing now looked like the dark carapaces of immense beetles, which rustled under great folds of grey, shivering skin.
“Alistair.” hissed Olvier, her eyes seeming darker and more reptilian as the room around him grew colder. “It’s do or die time. Sign it, and this can all be over. That is unless…” Grinning, she leant over the intercom, her hand poised over the call button. “You’d like to speak to the man downstairs?”
Alistair would have this same recurring nightmare, every night of his life. His wife would shake him awake, and every time he would sob into her shoulder, before succumbing to sleep once more. She was perplexed by this behaviour, as he seemed to be doing so well recently.
Not that they were well off, but things were certainly more comfortable. A new car. A promotion to senior manager at the firm for Alistair. They were even renting a cottage in the South Downs for their anniversary this year. It was not quite la dolce vita, but they were content. She cuddled up to her husband, reassuring him as he slowly fell back into a deep sleep.
Alistair felt the strangest sensation, these days. Not something he could put into words, but as if something was missing. Nothing big, but like someone had carved out a single piece of his shadow. As if he was not quite whole, though he felt no discomfort from it. His life was reassuringly ordinary, and perhaps a little more fulfilled than before. So there was nothing he could see, that contributed to this nagging feeling of loss.
He tried his best to suppress it, but still it persisted. And when he tried in earnest to think what could be missing, all he felt was a cold sensation, as if the room he was standing in was suddenly freezing. and the tingling of an icy arm, resting lightly against his shirt-collar.
