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TAKE CARE OF THIS. That was all the post-it said, but Cecil hoped that by staring at it and wishing really hard, he could somehow make the letters change to create some new meaning. Sighing, he sat forward in his swivel chair and thumbed at the folder. His office door was open, allowing him a clear view of the offices beyond. It was 2:35 on a Friday which meant, as always, he was the last one in the office. Cleo, the secretary, left at noon on Tuesdays and Fridays because she was an intern. And Bansky and Johnson always left around two on Fridays to catch a round of golf. They even bailed out when the weather was miserable. Cecil assumed that they spent those days taking up space at one of the local bars. Bansky and Johnson shared Cecil's responsibilities but held seniority and had a bit more power. They didn't make much more money than him but they'd been at this longer. While he loathed them and their casual attitudes regarding Friday afternoons, Cecil didn't blame them; if he ever made it to their level of the Business, he'd be doing the same thing. He looked back to the folder and the post-it note that still stared back up at him with that same message: TAKE CARE OF THIS. Cecil wondered which one of the bastards had thrown this on his desk. Probably Johnson?he had a habit of ditching the more bothersome assignments on other people. But this really wasn't so bad. Cecil already knew what was in the folder and he also knew what he'd have to do in order to take care of it. He spent most of his Friday afternoons like this, taking care of things that either didn't fit into everyone else's shortened Friday afternoons or the really nasty stuff that could eventually bring the shit storm that they were constantly worrying about. Cecil picked up the folder and stood up, looking through the tiny cracks in his drawn blinds. Determined rays of June sunlight peeked into the office like a makeshift sunset. It made Cecil feel tired all of a sudden. He wanted to throw the blinds open, to let the sunlight into his gloomy world. But that was not allowed. One of the many rules of his job was to never leave the blinds open so that any curious eyes couldn't peek in. Other rules included taking the long way home and making all work-related phone calls no longer than thirty seconds. Cecil obeyed these rules by taking the subway home every day and hardly ever using the phone at work. Despite the weight and importance of the folder he held in his hands?and the hundreds of other folders he had either filed away or destroyed during his two year career with the Business?Cecil led a dull life. No wife, no kids, no real ambitions or dreams. He'd once wanted to be a sports journalist, but it seemed to him that he lad left that dream in some other world where people could open the blinds whenever they wanted and weren't always timed when they picked up the telephone. Cecil walked from behind his desk, fighting the urge to peek outside. He held the folder up into the air and announced to his empty office and the cubicles and empty desks beyond, "I will now be taking care of this. While others are playing golf or flirting with a bartender, I will take care of this." There was a brutal mockery to his tone and it made him smile. Too bad no one else was there to hear it. Staring into the empty space of the office beyond his door, Cecil tossed the folder through his doorway. The folder flapped open like a clumsy bird and its contents fluttered to the floor like rebellious feathers. Again, Cecil grinned at his unwitnessed defiance. "Oops," he said with that same mocking tone. "What if someone were to see this? We'd be in some trouble then, wouldn't we?" He walked out of his office and bent over to retrieve the contents of the folder. As he stacked the photographs and documents into a neat pile, he looked at them for the third time and was amazed at how easily something like this could be hidden from the public. There were three photos and seven pages of official government documents to back up the authenticity of the pictures. Two of the photographs were from recent unannounced and very secretive space expedition to Europa, one of Jupiter's more interesting moons. The photographs showed the icy surface and the very faint steam that rose from its surface in ghost-like tendrils. But the third picture was Cecil's favorite and he knew that this was why there was such a to-do about the report in the first place. The image was from the northernmost point of the moon and had been taken from a group of more than eight hundred pictures from a camera that had been drilled into Europa's icy surface and to the oceans beneath. The picture showed something very large, something with discernable eyes and very clearly defined fins along its side. Whatever it was, it dwarfed the blue whale. This was all very confusing to Cecil. Why would the government want to keep these types of things a secret? Wasn't such a thing considered a miraculous discovery? Then again, these same people had also kept recent findings on Mars a secret (several small monitoring devices that had not been placed there by any governments on Earth), as well as evidence of the Hall of Records beneath the Sphinx. It was all amazing, and Cecil had no idea why the public shouldn't be informed of such things. But he supposed that his trusting nature and naivet?as why he had been placed in charge of taking care of this. He smiled as he placed the photo of the strange aquatic creature back into the folder. Behind him, he heard the phone ring, but he didn't answer it. The only calls he ever answered were from Johnson or Bansky, and Cecil guessed that they were on hole nine by now and wouldn't break away from their game just to check in on him. Cecil walked past the desk where Cleo sat during the few hours she was at work and then down the hall towards the elevators. He approached them and pressed the DOWN button. When he stepped inside, he placed his fingers against the sensor along the far wall where a machine that he didn't understand registered his fingerprints. A small panel slid open in the wall when his prints were read and accepted, revealing a number pad. Cecil punched in the nine digit passcode and then felt the elevator begin to drop. When the doors opened twenty seconds later, Cecil was hit with the smell of faint dust and grime. It was like a basement down here and every single time he had ever stepped out of the elevator, he was always very aware of the fact that he was almost a mile underground. With the folder still in his hand, he walked to the right and then turned left, right, left and then right again. When he had first started working here, this trip had always been torturous. There were marvels behind every door that he passed, innumerable things that the public didn't know about. For instance, the cure for AIDS had been discovered in 1996 and upon this discovery, the doctor and his crew had been kidnapped. The crew had been killed and the doctor had been paid seven hundred million dollars for the formula. That formula now sat behind a locked door in several vials, waiting for the right time to be given to the public. When that right time would be, Cecil did not know. Behind another door there was a hallway that led to an apartment-like domicile. Two families lived there, in separate quarters; they were the last surviving Mayans and they were currently in the process of trying to reconnect with the alien civilization that had given them the knowledge to build their calendar. There was a drug in pill form that could cause telepathy, the mathematical equation (and, until he died, its theorist) that gave proof that time travel could very easily be achieved. There was also an entire chunk of the engine that had helped with the lopsided success of the Philadelphia Experiment and hundreds of other treasures that Cecil couldn't even begin to understand. He had once been asked to check on a woman who was locked away in one of the many domiciles. She was supposed to be able to stare at you for five seconds and know how you would die. Several months ago, as Cecil had been administering tests on her, Johnson had told him to not look her into her eyes. But she was an attractive woman and her supposed talent made her all the more alluring. Cecil had caught her looking at him, smiling. He had stared back at her and in the end, as Cecil and Johnson had left her quarters, she had stopped them as they opened the door. "Would you like to know how you die?" she had asked. Both Cecil and Johnson had turned back to her and knew that she was talking about Cecil. She was staring directly at him with something like respect in her eyes. "C'mon, Cecil," Johnson had urged, pulling him by the sleeve. "Don't let her mess with your head." But it was too late. The woman had seen Cecil's intense interest and had asked once more. And there was something in her look, something in the peculiar way that she asked her question that halted Johnson's argument. In that moment, even he wanted to hear what she had to say. "Would you like to know how you die?" she asked Cecil again. "Yes," Cecil said, nodding slowly. The woman had looked to him solemnly and remained quiet for a moment as a single tear trailed down her pale cheek. "You don't," she answered with a shaking voice. "My God, it's so beautiful." That had been the most significant moment in Cecil's life. It hadn't been when he had lost his virginity in the back of a car to a prostitute that had easily been twenty years older than him; it had not been the first time a woman had willingly put her mouth on him; it had not been when he had thought he had found God while sitting in the silent stillness of his father's funeral; it had not even been when, after having worked for the Business for eight months, he had checked in on the extraterrestrial being that lived down here?the only real surviving "little green man"?and it had gently touched his hand and Cecil had seen the universe in its entirety from one ever-expanding edge to the other. None of that had come close. It had been seeing the prophetic woman weeping at a beauty that Cecil would possibly never see. He didn't know if it had stuck with him because of her joy or because she had essentially promised him immortality. But he sometimes saw her face when he drifted off to sleep and he wondered how she would die and, in her last moments, if she would envy him. Sadly, he liked to think that she would. No one had ever envied him before, nor had they coveted anything he had. That was why he sometimes wanted to go public with all that he knew. If the kids that had bullied him in high school knew about his job, surely they would be envious. If all of those women who had shrugged him off in college were aware of the life altering things that he knew, perhaps they would be awed by his ability to keep his cool under pressure. As he came to the door that would lead him into a filing system full of artifacts similar to the photos and documents he now carried, he suddenly found himself wondering how he had kept his wits together in the presence of all of this knowledge. He knew things that only a dozen people across the world knew and had seen things that would cause God Himself to tremble. And as for God, Cecil knew that there was no definitive proof of its existence, but he could remember seeing the universe in one sweeping motion when his hands had connected with those of the little green man (he was actually more of a beige color, to be truthful) and there had definitely been some sense of an architectural design to everything. Cecil unlocked the door in front of him and stepped in. He found it amazing that with all of the secrets and possessions that they had tucked away from the world, the Business couldn't dish out the money to buy new filing cabinets. There were only two of them in the room, standing against the rear wall like fossils from another time. They were emptied twice a month, their contents taken somewhere else within the building where they were reviewed by an unseen boss-type that Cecil, Johnson or Bansky had never seen. From there, no one knew where the documents went. Bansky thought that they were probably burned or shredded. Johnson thought that they were sold to the highest bidder and then integrated into some sort of Secrets of the Universe Society. While Cecil agreed with Bansky's view, this was another matter in which Cecil really had no interest. Cecil flipped through the appropriate drawer and found the section titled "Space Anomalies Within the Solar System" and filed the Europa photos behind the evidence of pyramids on Mars. He shut the drawer softly, left the room and trekked back down the hallway. He reached the end of the hall and came to a very slow and uncertain stop where two halls intersected. To head back to the elevator, he needed to turn left. But instead, he hesitated and looked to the right. Seven doors down, beneath the flickering fluorescent lights overhead, was a door that he had hoped to one day walk through again. He wondered why he didn't walk down there now?just knock on the door and hope to be invited in. He felt certain that she would remember him. The way she had let that one stray tear out that day, it was as if she had never wept before in her life. And whatever she had seen?whatever the cause of his apparent immortality?it had apparently been beautiful. Of course she would remember him. He took a step in that direction but then stopped again. What if she saw something different this time? What if whatever cosmic force that held things in place had altered some miniscule path that had set a different chain of events in place since he had spoken to her? What if she saw something different now, not something beautiful and awe inspiring, but something dark and brutal? He felt that way sometimes, as if there were a shadow lurking not behind him in the throes of sunlight, but above him, waiting to be thrown down like a discarded moon onto his head by a god that he had not yet chosen to believe in or deny. What if she saw something new this time, some concrete end to his days? Turning away from that enticing door, Cecil wondered why she was even here in the first place. He knew that there was validity to her claims; she had given one hundred and eighty-nine predictions before being confined here and had only missed one. And in that case, she had only been wrong because it wasn't the shotgun blast that had killed the victim, but the fall down the stairs that resulted in the shotgun blast. He pushed her predictions to the side, even her prediction for him, as he came to the elevator. He thought that the woman could make a killing at state fairs and small freak show circuits. He couldn't really see how she fit in with the detrimental secrets that the Business kept hidden here. How was it dangerous for the public to know how they would die? For that matter, who was to say that anyone would really take her word for it? But he thought about her voice and how it often trailed behind his dreams as he slept: "My God, it's so beautiful." Cecil stepped into the elevator and punched in the code again. As the elevator began its gradual rise, he wondered if Johnson or Bansky had ever visited the woman and discovered how their lives would end. And if so, how could they spend their time playing golf, strategically thinking out a shot from the rough as their minds were burdened with the secrets behind the locked doors they had left at work?back at work, where Cecil was all by himself. All by myself, Cecil suddenly thought. When the elevator came to a stop and the doors slid open in front him, Cecil did not move. He stood there, motionless, staring out into the empty offices. He saw the plant on Cleo's desk, its neglected brittle leaves barely spilling out of the ceramic pot. He saw the vacant offices where Johnson and Bansky worked. He saw telephones and coffee machines and boxes of printer paper that had the capability to hold either the drawings of a three year old or the secrets of the world. He then heard a voice in his head, one that he knew well. It's so beautiful. When the elevator doors inched shut once more, Cecil reached out and pressed the code in again. He closed his eyes as the elevator hummed around him and descended. He kept them closed until the elevator stopped and the doors opened onto the maze of hallways. Cecil walked immediately towards the woman's door. He knew that there were cameras currently filming his actions, but he didn't care. According to the woman, he would never die. So what harm could possibly befall him when the Business found out that he was paying her an unassigned visit? "I'm taking care of this," Cecil said defiantly as he neared the door. He slowed his pace a bit as he approached the woman's room. It seemed as if time had jumped somehow, as if he had been propelled forward by some invisible hand from the elevator to the door within the matter of a split second. He looked to the unmarked door and listened for any noises on the other side. He thought of enormous aquatic creatures on one of Jupiter's moons; he thought of dying plants on office desks; he thought of sentient beings that could conjure up images of the universe with a simple touch. He thought of a life unlived, spent covering up secrets and filing them away in small metal drawers. Cecil raised his hand and knocked. END
Story by Barry Napier, Copyright 2009 |
| Last updated on 1/10/2010 2:36:26 PM by Jennifer Brozek |
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The yellow post-it note on Cecil's desk stood out like the sun in the dusk-like gloom of his office. He'd been staring at it for almost fifteen minutes; it was stuck to a tan colored folder, positioned delicately in the center with its simple message just as neatly placed.
Barry Napier has a BS in Professional Writing and has been published in several online and print publications, most recently Northern Haunts, Sand and The New Bedlam Project. Additionally, his poetry has appeared in Every Day Weirdness and will be featured in the inaugural issue of Paper Crow and the horror poetry anthology Death In Common. To learn more about his ramblings, visit him at