The Look by Lee Coates

Author:Lee Coates [Coates, Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Thriller
Published: 2023-05-28T00:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

It was a Thursday afternoon and we had crossed the threshold into the latter half of September. The heating was cranked up to the maximum temperature. I was really struggling with the cold. My dad would be appalled. Growing up, we had an unwritten rule that the central heating in the house wouldn’t be allowed on until Halloween decorations were seen in neighbouring houses. It was only in recent years that I looked back and realised our estate consisted of either first-time buyers or the elderly. So, kids were either just twinkles in their parents’ five-year plan or were grown up and living elsewhere. Consequently, stray pumpkins were going to be thin on the ground. You had to hand it to him, it was a fiendish way to keep the gas bills in check.

Today, I had a cerebral ‘Do not disturb’ in place. No matter how traumatic my life had been lately, I couldn’t let the aftertastes distract me. I had precious few days left until I needed to pitch the business idea to my Parisian friends. The way I pitched it was going to be key. Fortunately, the idea hit me during the death hour this morning. I awoke, startled, after my usual nightmare about malevolent beings masquerading as my parents. The dream was like a director’s-cut version of previous night terrors by also featuring a new deleted scene where I am in a catatonic state, unable to do anything but scream inwardly as a worm slowly crawls across the surface of my eyeball. It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to figure out that the image of the worm was triggered by that loose bit of sealant hanging from my dad’s front door. And the dream is signposting me to visit that door again very soon if I am going to find any kind of closure, no matter how scary it will be. But I think about that ‘Do not disturb’ sign again and add the extra words with an indelible marker: ‘At all costs.’

There was no chance of returning to sleep after that ordeal, so I turned my attention to work while Ffi silently slumbered next to me. And I remembered an acquaintance from my Web Monkey days called Pete Ennis. He was probably the closest thing I had to a friend in my job, and he ran the marketing department. More accurately, he was the marketing department. Maybe one of the contributing factors of our friendship was that I never kowtowed to peer pressure and adopted any of the nicknames he accumulated over the years. You see, the ICT department had a policy in place when assigning email addresses. It would use the first letter of your forename followed by the whole of your surname. For example, ‘[email protected]’. It highlighted how young the majority of employees were, or at least their mental age when, spelling errors aside, Pete’s email address would forever cause juvenile giggling among the recipients.

As well as sharing an equal disinterest in socialising with the rest of the company, our dispositions were very similar.

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