Seven by Shea by Michael Shea

Author:Michael Shea [Shea, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Horror, SFF
Published: 2017-04-04T22:00:00+00:00

The Growlimb

IN THE OFFICES OF HUMANITY INCORPORATED, Marjorie, Program Director of Different Path, had her own cubicle. From her desk she could look across the floor directly into the corner nook – not a cubicle really, with only a standing screen to half partition it off – where Carl Larken had his desk.

Larken was on the phone, his chair tilted back, his outthrust feet toed under his desktop, his body poised almost horizontal to the floor. In cut-offs and worn Nikes, a brambly grey beard and rakedback grey locks tendrilled on his neck, the man’s toughness showed. A lean and sunburned man in his fifties.

Marjorie tried to decide why Larken stood out so. It wasn’t his dress. Humanity Inc. was a sizeable human services non-profit, and didn’t insist on office drag – most of its program managers had social activist backgrounds (and liberal views). What nagged at her was the man’s... tautness. He was a very personable, articulate guy, sociable on demand, but he had an agenda, an undistracted inwardness. He could be talking to you about your program, deep in the details of a write up with you, showing perfect grasp and sensitive awareness, and you would suddenly know he wasn’t really there, was working his tongue and his face like a puppet, flawlessly managing his half of the exchange, lightyears away in his mind. Over the months, she had formed the whimsical but persistent notion that Carl Larken was insane.

She recognised that this secret alienation she saw in him could be a reflection of her own lack of real involvement in her work. She was rich. Her parents owned a flourishing winery.

After her B.A. in Fine Arts, a sense of aimlessness had overtaken her. This job was her Term of Involvement with Reality, an immersion in the hard and hurting strata of the world. Different Path was a criminal-justice diversionary program, counselling and community services for the drug-riddled, the sick and the desperate. She worked it, pulled her Beemer into the lot at eight sharp, waded into her case files, made her house calls, networked with the D.A.’s office – the whole 9 yards.

But ultimately, she didn’t believe it made any difference. Didn’t believe counselling and community service did a thing for the already-damaged, the already-damned. And her own underlying contempt for her work made her sure of Larken’s. It was a felt thing, a sympathetic vibration between them.

Being indifferent, though, was a far cry from being insane. What was there about him, when she studied him from a distance like this, that always ended by sending that cold thrill of suspicion up her spine? This conviction that the man was not really here, was deeply, utterly somewhere else?

She had to go meet with a counselling group. On impulse, she went over and leaned into Larken’s nook on her way out.

“Hi Carl.”

“Hey, Marjorie. The Press Republican says they’ll run a feature for us.”

“Super! Just put the copy on my desk.”

“It’s done. Take it with you. I’m going for a run soon.

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