Hell Is Other People

by Danielle Bellwood

  Epiphany

  “Where did you get that?” Arlo asked Roger, nodding at the handbook in his hands as they trailed along behind Gillian.

  Roger shrugged. “One of the accountants gave it to me. He said I needed to review the section on insubordinate charges.”

  “One of the accountants…” Arlo said. “You mean Phil?”

  Roger nodded.

  Arlo and Roger paused in the middle of the lobby to observe Gillian. She was hopping up and down in front of the security guard’s station. The guard on duty was motionless behind the counter as the excited woman bounced and shouted random obscenities at him. Arlo and Roger watched curiously as she jumped, heels clacking against the tile floor, a manic giggle bubbling up from her throat.

  “Maybe this handbook is exactly what we need,” Arlo said as if the scene of Gillian having a nervous breakdown was an everyday occurrence. “Like it’s our guide. Maybe we can use it to get out of here.” His eyes locked onto the thin sliver of hope bound in brown leather poking out of Roger’s pocket.

  “Get out of here?” Roger said.

  “Yeah.” Arlo said. “Maybe if we work at it, we can change more stuff. Maybe… maybe if we change enough stuff we can get out of here.”

  “Umm…” Roger said.

  Gillian was slapping the security guard’s face now. The ringing cracks echoed throughout the foyer.

  “Roger, who updates the handbook?” Arlo said.

  “I don’t know. Human Resources, maybe? They’re in the Acquisitions department.”

  “Acquisitions?”

  “Yeah,” Roger said, “I used to work there. It’s a difficult job. They pore through stacks of drone records, using an advanced algorithm to-”

  “When you say drones,” Arlo interrupted. “You mean people, right?”

  Roger nodded.

  “So, the Acquisitions Department… they acquire… people?”

  “Umm…” Roger scratched his head.

  “Never mind,” Arlo said. “We’re getting off topic. These drones all work for the firm, right? So, there must be a person in charge somewhere who oversees everything.”

  Roger nodded again.

  “Then that’s who we need to see.”

  “Why?” Roger asked.

  “Has anyone ever described you as curious, Roger?”

  Roger squinted his eyes in thought, scratching his head slowly as he took a ridiculously long time to ponder the simple question.

  “I didn’t think so,” Arlo said. “Have you ever been to the Obsoleteorium?”

  Roger shook his head.

  “It’s this really wild place in Topeka. An old shopping mall that’s been converted into an exhibit of outdated tech. They have a whole floor devoted to vintage media- LPs, cassette tapes, 8-tracks, you name it. Anyway, there’s a section donated to the first colorized motion picture- The Wizard of Oz.”

  Arlo’s eyes lit up with excitement as he remembered the last time he visited the mall.

  “The whole display is covered with a multi-colored silk canopy so that it’s like you’re inside a hot air balloon. And there’s a huge pipe organ. They project an image of ‘the man behind the curtain’ onto smoke that’s released from a fog machine hidden out of sight. It’s all very dramatic.”

  Gillian had apparently crossed the room while Arlo was talking. He jumped in surprise as her voice said from right beside him, “I think I’ve been there. There’s a midget… I mean a little person who stands outside with a giant lollipop and tells everyone who enters to wipe their slippers on the mat.”

  “Yes!” Arlo shouted. “That’s the place. That’s what we need.”

  “A little person?” Roger said.

  “No,” Arlo said. “We need to see the Wizard. All three of us.”

  “The man behind the curtain,” Gillian said.

  “Exactly,” Arlo said.

  “Phil,” Roger said.

  “What?”

  “Phil. He’s the one you need to see.”

  “I knew it,” Arlo said excitedly. “I told Gillian he was the person in charge. Didn’t I, Gillian? Didn’t I say he was the person in charge?”

  “Yes, Arlo. You’re so clever.”

  “His name just keeps coming up,” Arlo continued, oblivious to Gillian’s biting sarcasm. “He has to be important somehow.”

  Roger nodded. “He’s the head of Accounting.”

  “Right,” Arlo said. “You said that. You said something about bean counters…”

  “Yes,” Roger nodded. “The accounting department monitors the drones- where they are, what they’re doing, how well they’re performing…”

  “So, if he’s the one monitoring us, then that means he’s the one doing this to us right?” Arlo said. “And if that’s true… then maybe he can help us get out of here. Why didn’t you tell us any of this before?”

  Roger blinked slowly. Arlo could have written a full blog post in the amount of time it took Roger to respond.

  “You never asked.”

  Part V: The Accountant

  The Man Behind the Curtain

  The bald, male-assigned humanoid figure in the polyester blue suit pulled a linen handkerchief from his pocket and swiped it across his sweaty forehead. He tucked the white fabric square back in his pants before pressing the pause button on the keyboard with a little more force than absolutely necessary, freezing the black and white images on the computer monitor.

  “This is an unmitigated disaster,” he said. There was no one else in the room with him, so presumably he just liked talking to himself.

  He stared at the screen, eyes blinking exactly every five seconds. A fresh bead of sweat broke out on his shiny red pate as he ground his teeth together in aggravation.

  The Accountant clicked a button and the image shifted from the firm foyer to the offices of the Accounting and Acquisitions Department. One of his hairy underlings was holding the receiver of his desk phone up to his ear, lips flapping and ears wiggling as he communicated with something on the other end of the line, clearly agitated. On the screen, the chimp stood up on his chair and screeched at the monitor. In his elegant black designer suit, he beat his fists on his antique desk and bared his teeth in a clear sign of displeasure. The angry ape in the monkey suit then slammed a hairy fist down onto his keyboard and the monitor screen went all staticky.

  The Accountant shook his head in disgust. “It’s impossible to get good help these days.”

  ***

  It was easy to get turned around in Downtown. Everything was built to look the same. That was part of the aesthetic, or lack thereof. Gillian and Arlo followed along behind Roger, who they incorrectly assumed was leading them to the Accounting Department building. In fact, Roger had never actually seen the outside of the head office, and wouldn’t have been able to pick it out of a line-up of all the multistoried buildings in Downtown. Back when he was in Acquisitions, he worked remotely. And in his role as Executive Assistant Supervisor in Charge Pro Tem for Data Entry, he only communicated with the other departments via teleconferences and email. But, in an effort to seem useful, he wandered aimlessly through the maze of dark alleys that ran between the high-rise buildings along Main Street, on the off-chance that he’d accidently stumble upon it. If he passed every building in the block, he was bound to come across it eventually.

  Up ahead, the late afternoon sun glinted off the smoked glass windows of an imposing structure that took up one whole city block. Roger decided to check it out. His charges trotted obediently (sort of but not really) along behind him.

  ***

  The Accountant’s computer screen shifted to a custom wallpaper background of a purple cyborg cowboy and a scantily clad woman with vibrant butterfly wings sat astride a shaggy green beast riding off into the triple sunset.

  Once upon a time, the Accountant known as Phil considered himself an author. He wrote in the rather obscure genre of futuristic sci-fi/fantasy alien-abduction cross species reverse harem existentialist romance. Th
e genre was so obscure in fact, that Phil’s debut novel was the only one in its category on Amazon. That made it an instant bestseller (even though it only sold five copies). He tried to reach that state of inspiration again many times, but try as he might he’d never been able to pop out another complete work. His current piece about two star-crossed lovers locked in an endless loop of unrequited love and unending torment was sitting in a desktop folder, unfinished and raw.

  It wasn’t always easy to find romantic inspiration when one was stuck behind a desk 23 out of 24 hours every day. Phil’s job required that he account for every second of every hour of every day for every drone currently employed by the firm. That might sound like an impossible task for any one man to do. And you’d be right. Luckily for the firm, Phil wasn’t a man. Not really, anyway. He was a… well it’s kind of hard to explain in layman’s terms… think of something along the lines of a limitless hyperintelligent being that can shift across dimensions at will and you might get some idea. Put that diffuse cosmic entity into a 5’ 3” skinsuit and clad it in a double-knit polyester three-piece suit and you might begin to comprehend why he was so surly all of the time.

  He hated his job. He hated being stuck in the skin suit. He hated having to oversee all of his charges from JJ at the coffee shop, to the chronically absent billing crew grrr, and the apes in that cosmic joke of an Acquisitions Department.

  The fact that JJ and the apes (wow that sounded like the world’s worst pop band) usually managed to stay on schedule and not interfere with his “side project” was the only reason he ever had a free moment to himself when he could write his magnum opus.

  When Phil wrote, he would close his eyes and disconnect from everything but the roiling inner turmoil of his thoughts and dreams. Unfortunately, his carefully thought-out characters tended to have a life of their own, so to speak, and would often escape his rigorous outline to run rampant around the subplots they created, unlikely dialogue flying willy nilly.

  His current WIP, or work in progress, centered around the erotic adventures of a multi-tentacled galactic knight and a Venutian fox princess. The two main characters were supposed to be falling madly in love with each other and cavorting in all sorts of semi-disheveled situations but the damn characters just refused to go along with the program. What he really needed was inspiration- that elusive element that every great writer needs to create a literary work of art. Unfortunately, his day job had a nasty habit of interfering with his creative process.

  He sighed and changed the video feed. The Three Musketeers, as Phil privately referred to Arlo, Gillian and Roger, marched angrily through Downtown to the Hades Corp building. Phil felt a faint satisfaction from the idea that they were about to make someone else’s life hell for a few minutes. God only knows they’d been doing it to him. Why not let the apes get an earful, for once? Sure, he had to corral the loose herd, but would it really matter, in the grand scheme of things, if he waited five more minutes?

  A wisp of an almost-there smile ghosted his surly features. Pressing the off button on the monitor, he slowly rolled his chair back and propped his feet up on his desk. Leaning back, he folded his arms behind his head and closed his eyes in bliss. He hadn’t taken a real break in millennia. He was due for a fiver.

  The Bean Counters

  The Accounting Department of HADES International took up the entire second basement floor of the imposing black marble edifice that Roger had led them into. Directly above Accounting, on B1, stood the Acquisitions and Human Resources division. And on the first floor, was the lobby. Everything above the lobby, all thirty-nine floors, was nothing but storage for the endless rows of humming computer servers and six-foot tall cabinets filled with overstuffed file folders.

  Arlo and Gillian followed Roger through the lobby, across the blindingly reflective red glass tile floor to the elevator doors on the back wall. Arlo felt a brief moment of panic when Roger hit the call button for the elevator, convinced that a portal would open up to reveal the mouth of madness and they’d all be swallowed whole for their cheek. But when the doors slid silently open, there was no maniacally moaning maw or gullet to Gehenna. Just a carpeted box with universally calming soft jazz pumping from invisible speakers and a row of little round glowing buttons. An elevator. No more. No less.

  They rode the elevator down into the bowels of the building. The basement levels were not what you might imagine. No concrete pillars or particle board walls. No sputtering halogens and industrial grade flooring. The basements of Hades Corp were completely coated in butter yellow Italian granite with elaborately carved brass fixtures. Very neoclassical. The whole affair gave off a Tuscan vibe, complete with what appeared to be arched picture windows on the walls, overlooking fields of blood red poppies and sunflowers. But that would be impossible, because they were now two floors underground.

  Arlo was only slightly curious of the fact that there didn’t seem to be any supporting columns for the massive building above them. Quite the feat of engineering. The whole floor seemed to be one long, wide hall with a single arched door at the very end. As they got closer, he could see a sign beside the door with words printed in ornate gold letters:

  The Bean Room

  “This is it,” Roger said.

  The trio stood silently before the sign for a long moment before Roger mustered the nerve to turn the knob. As the ornate wooden door opened on well-oiled hinges, the quiet of the hall around them was obliterated by a confusing mix of shrieks and thumps coming from the room beyond the door.

  Arlo wasn’t sure that he should trust his eyes. They’d fooled him before, and the scene before them didn’t look like it could possibly be real.

  An angry ape jumped up and down on an office chair, smashing the buttons on his adding machine. A seemingly endless stream of NCR paper fell to the floor in a reel, hundreds of feet long. Beside him, a baboon in a baseball hat and baby blue leisure suit shoveled piles of dried pinto beans into his mouth and spit them across the room to land in an enormous slimy pile. Half a dozen apes sat in a semi-circle around the pile, sorting the beans into buckets that were carried god only knew where by monkeys that scurried from the room as Arlo, Roger and Gillian watched in frozen fascination.

  “What the…” Arlo trailed off.

  Roger pointed at the ape in the office chair behind a beautiful antique desk.

  “That’s Clancy. He’s got a real knack for numbers.”

  “Clearly,” Gillian said sarcastically.

  “I used to work with him in Acquisitions,” Roger said.

  Gillian just stared at Roger. He could have grown an extra head out of the side of his neck and this whole situation wouldn’t have seemed any stranger than it did right now.

  “It’s a Mad House!” Arlo shouted in a decent impression of Charlton Heston.

  “Clancy!” Roger called cheerfully to the screaming simian hopping up and down on his chair. “Hey, Clancy! It’s me. Roger. Remember me, pal?”

  Gillian and Arlo exchanged a look.

  “We just had some questions we’d like to ask you.”

  “Umm, Roger…” Arlo said.

  The ape was baring his teeth angrily, fists pounding and head shaking in an obvious sign of anger.

  “Now, Clancy,” Roger said, “Is that any way to greet an old friend?”

  Gillian nudged Arlo’s side. He turned to see her nodding her head in the direction of a stack of filing cabinets along the wall behind them.

  As Roger stepped forward with arms spread, appealing to Clancy’s sense of friendship, Arlo and Gillian used the distraction to sneak over to the cabinets.

  “What are we looking for?” Arlo whispered.

  “Our files,” she said. “Look for anything with your last name.”

  One tall multi-drawer cabinet labeled with gilded ‘F’s stood right in front of them. Gillian pulled out a drawer and scanned the tiny white labels on the hundreds of manila folders inside. Flip… Flira… Flisk… She shoved the drawer closed and pulled out anoth
er one closer to the floor. Franklin… That looked more promising. Arlo crowded close beside her as she searched for Frost.

  They didn’t turn around to look when the screeching increased and Roger’s quiet words of friendship changed to concerned pleas.

  “Check the Bs,” Gillian hissed at Arlo when his head leaning over the open drawer bumped against her forehead.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said with a nervous laugh.

  Gillian ground her teeth and dug faster through the folders.

  “Here it is,” she whispered triumphantly. Pulling the folder from the drawer, she opened it and quickly scanned the first page.

  “Ooh, mine too,” Arlo said from a few feet away.

  Gillian barely registered the sound of Arlo snapping photos with his smartphone. The first page in the folder had a faded color photograph of her stapled to the top left corner. It looked like one of her old high school photos. The first paragraph read:

  “Gillian Frost, 35, was born in Bleaksville, MS to John and Mary Frost. At the age of six, her parents enrolled her in a Calamityville community center art class. On the first day, one of the other children pressed acrylic paint covered hands against her pink flower overalls because he thought she was pretty. She would never attend another session. At the age of eight, her uncle took her to see Santa Clause at Macy’s, inadvertently triggering her life-long fear of crushed red velvet. At the age of ten…”

  “What the hell?” Gillian whispered.

  “Hey,” she hissed, when Arlo’s hand snatched the file from her fingers before she had a chance to read any further.

  He shook his head and looked over his shoulder as he shoved the lot back in the drawer, closing it with a snap. Gillian turned around just as the noise behind them reached a new high.

  Roger was no longer alone in a sea of surly simians. Another mostly hairless bi-pedal life form stood before him.