Crisk stared at O’Hara for a brief moment, considering what response he should give. His superior merely stood there smiling with his hands folded behind his back. Crisk remembered the name “Glyphotech”: it had been written on the side of the van of the workers who’d been digging up the crossroads weeks before. But he could not fathom just what they had to do with this other venture. As if picking up on his thoughs, O’Hara interjected.
“Yes, yes,” he said, “Glyphotech is a diverse company. As well as undertaking the reconstruction of buildings and roads, their course of psychological transformation is one of the other aspects of their enterprise. I really would recommend that you take the course, Crisk. Bear in mind that several of your colleagues have already signed up and not to do so might appear, well . . .”
He had to say no more in order to convince Crisk. Here was his office superior telling him that it was best to conform. The idea of falling out of favour was not pleasant to Crisk. He needed the job, even though he was bored by it. He had a duty, after all, to Mare Publishing Company.
“Sir,” he replied, stifling the slight bow he wanted to make by force of habit, “Of course, I agree. Further discussion not necessary. Let me know time and meeting place. Gladly I will take part.”
When Crisk got back to his desk after the meeting with O’Hara, he discreetly asked his office colleagues whether they too had been asked to attend the course run by Glyphotech. All had been requested to do so, some, they said, with the clear implication that not to accept O’Hara’s suggestion would be severely frowned upon. From what Crisk could gather most of his co-workers viewed it as some kind of motivational seminar that would improve efficiency in the workplace and raise staff morale.
Later that same day one of the office juniors came around the various departments to hand out flyers. The heading bore the logo of “Glyphotech Reconstruction Co.”, with the same design that Crisk had seen blazoned across the side of the workmen’s van. In bold capitals, underneath the logo, were the words:
“Do not underestimate the effect our process can have on YOUR life!”
In smaller characters beneath this was the following short text:
“Do you feel drained, hopeless or adrift? At the mercy of what life throws at you instead of in control of events? We guarantee to provide empowerment and a sense of purpose you might never think you could achieve! Using our proven mental technology you will overcome all obstacles without fear, you will enjoy a renewed sense of purpose and success in both your private life and in your workplace environment. Attend our introductory seminar in the spirit of openness and friendship. Your life is too urgent to waste! Join us!”
The flyer provided details of where and when the seminar was to be held; at the Grantham Hall Hotel, only a few minutes walk from the Mare Publishing House’s offices. When Crisk saw the hours involved, however, his spirits sank. It was a two-day affair, lasting from 10 a.m. in the morning until 10pm and repeated the next day. Moreover, it was to take place this coming weekend.
There were stifled groans around the office as each individual got to this part of the text and realised they’d been duped into giving up not company time but their own personal time, and on an ostensibly voluntary basis.
In the days leading up to the weekend a dull sense of resentment permeated the offices of the Mare Publishing House, though nothing was actually said aloud. This was undoubtedly due to the fact that the only one of those duped who had been brave enough to confront O’Hara about the deception was instantly dismissed from his job. The person, called David Hogg, found his desk cleared within five minutes of his speaking to O’Hara. He was forcibly escorted off the premises by the security guards moments before his personal belongings were flung out onto the street after him.
Crisk had been standing beside the doorway from which Hogg was ejected. The company had a strict no-smoking policy and Crisk would, at a quarter past every hour, enjoy a crafty cigarette at that spot. After helping the bewildered ex-employee collect together the various odds and ends not connected with work now strewn around him, they had a brief conversation.
“I am sorry . . .” said Crisk, “but if it is okay for me to ask, why did Mare Publishing so harshly treat with you?”
Hogg groaned.
“I know all about those Glyphotech seminars,” he finally replied, “I told O’Hara there was no way I’d go along with it, I’d warn the others to stay away. We had a hell of a row and he told me to get out. I could tell you things about Glyphotech that . . .”
Crisk trembled inwardly at Hogg’s audacity. To upset O’Hara was to challenge the Mare Publishing Co. itself. He looked around him, horrified at the prospect of being seen even talking with the ex-employee. To give up one weekend in order to curry favour was something Crisk was more than prepared to do. Backing away from Hogg, as if the man were contaminated, Crisk made his apologies, mumbled a word or two of consolation and scurried back inside the building. Crisk knew that O’Hara would find it easy to justify Hogg’s immediate dismissal, for he had only very recently been hired by the company and was often drunk at his workstation.
When Crisk was back and seated at his desk, he again looked over the Glyphotech flyer that had been handed out to everyone. Surely it was a wild over-reaction to make so much of a fuss over what seemed to be nothing more than a motivational seminar.
At 10 a.m. sharp (O’Hara had warned everybody that being late for the seminar would not be looked upon kindly) on Saturday morning Crisk was seated amongst about a hundred other people in a ballroom within the Grantham Hall Hotel. There were the usual murmurings and muted conversations one would expect amongst a crowd of that size. As he looked around he spotted a number of his work colleagues and nodded at them in recognition. Seated right at the front, he noticed, was O’Hara.
At the end of the room was a stage, a raised dais and behind it a screen on which slides could be projected.
Someone at the front of the room made a signal to a person at the back and the heavy panelled doors opened to admit a figure. The man, immaculately dressed in an expensive tailored suit, walked confidently down the aisle between the rows of seats towards the dais. His bearing was impressive; he seemed to exude an aura of unshakeable confidence. And yet, at least to Crisk, there was also something of the arrogant mixed in with it.
The man mounted the platform behind the dais and smiled dazzlingly. He was in his mid-forties and his well-groomed black hair was swept back high over his forehead.
“Welcome to all you strangers, soon to be friends!” He said in a voice that rang out across the hall with clarity and purpose. Here was a man well used to public speaking.
“I want,” he continued, “to congratulate each and every one of you for deciding to come along to the seminar. You’ve made a decision that I know none of you will ever have cause to regret. Let me introduce myself. I’m Hastane Ebbon. Now I know . . .”
Again he flashed that dazzling smile, looking around the room with a mock-comical expression.
“. . . that some of you may be wondering just what you’ve signed up for. I want to say one thing right now. You’re free to leave. Really. But if you do you’re going to miss out on the rest of your life. What will happen to you over the next few days is that you’ll experience a personal revolution.”
Someone in a row towards the back tittered. Crisk looked over his shoulder and saw that it was a very overweight woman in her early thirties, wearing glasses and dressed all in black.
“Hey, that lady out there is only expressing what a lot of you are thinking. I mean, come on, these things are simply a moneymaking exercise, right? Wrong, my friends. If you take what we can offer, I mean, if you’re really open to it: believe me, things will never be the same for you again.”
He paused.
“Anybody want to leave?”
Ebbon was staring and smiling at the overweight lady. She lowered her head, and looked a little sheepish.
“NO?”
There was a ripp
le of tension in the ballroom. At that moment, thought Crisk, it would have taken someone with a degree of self-assurance equal to Ebbon’s to have stood up and walked out. And no one did so.
Crisk was suddenly very uncomfortable. This wasn’t like any motivational seminar he’d been to before. And he’d been forced to attend a number whilst employed by agencies over in Japan. This was something quite different. For perhaps the first time, he began to wonder whether his sense of company loyalty was not misplaced.
Ebbon grinned.
“Well this is unusual, let me tell you. You’re obviously a lot more intelligent than the last crowd of seminar attendees we had. But then they came from the south of the city . . .”
A number of people in the audience laughed and the tension dissipated.
What Crisk realised after a couple of hours was that a significant number of persons attending the seminar had actually done the course previously. They were there to guide the newcomers and instruct them in the correct protocols that Glyphotech wished them to follow. For example, asking questions without permission was just not done. Daydreaming was not allowed. And in what few breaks there were, for meals or coffee, newcomers were encouraged only to mingle with those who were there for their guidance. Talk centred around discussions and explanations of Glyphotech’s “technology” and a series of terms such as “eureka moments” and “routines” were frequently employed. The first referred to, apparently, a juncture in one’s life where the possibility of happiness was within grasp. Whilst the second referred to an individual’s habits; the displacement activities he would use to justify avoiding doing something he knew he had to do.
There were many more such terms, but Crisk lost interest in hearing about them. It seemed to him that this was simply some junk mixture of psychology, counselling, with elements of Zen-Buddhism tagged on to give it an ethereal sheen.
What came next turned his stomach. Back in the ballroom persons were encouraged to come up to the microphone on the dais and expose their weaknesses, traumas and failings before the rest of the attendees. By the time the tenth had gone up (she seemed to be well versed in this form of communal confession) Crisk actually suspected that many welcomed the opportunity to bare their souls again in public. He wondered whether they had not become addicted to the experience. For what it brought in its wake, after the tears and sobbing, was a round of thunderous clapping from the audience. The first one or two confessions had been greeted with hesitant applause, but once things really got going tears dribbled down the cheeks of most participants. Such was the wave of warmth and mass acceptance generated it was with great difficulty that Crisk restrained himself from joining in with the process, and advancing up to the dais himself.
He could not help noticing throughout this part of the seminar that O’Hara kept glancing back at him from the front of the hall. Crisk was the only one of the Mare Publishing employees who had not yet succumbed to the hysterical atmosphere in the room.
Ebbon returned to make periodic appearances on the stage, one of which was to explain the concept of “monologues” Glyphotech had developed.
“Monologues,” Ebbon said cheerfully, his teeth flashing with that fake smile, “are the way we come to interpret what’s happening to us, and of dealing with things that make us uncomfortable. Now let’s take an example. Say your boss shouts at you because you’re late for work. What’s your reaction? You’re angry, you’re annoyed, YOU MAKE EXCUSES TO YOURSELF! And then you convince yourself he’s a bad person, just because he’s made you upset. You’re using your monologue to avoid dealing with the real issue. Now here’s the deal: don’t get upset. He’s not the problem. YOU’RE THE PROBLEM. Yes, get that and get it good. You see what I mean now? A monologue is when someone is talking to himself and not listening to someone else because he’s angry or afraid. Aren’t some of you doing that right now – EVEN WHEN I’M TALKING?”
Crisk squirmed uncomfortably in his seat. All the people around him were now nodding enthusiastically as if light bulbs had been turned on inside their minds. They were hanging on Ebbon’s every word. A horrible kind of blind faith and exultation spread palpably throughout the ballroom.
After Ebbon stopped speaking he invited people to share their own examples of “monologues” with the rest of the group. There was almost a stampede to the dais, and a queue had to be formed.
One after the other people poured out their stories of how they’d neglected their mothers, their children, even their work, because they’d shifted the blame unreasonably instead of taking responsibility themselves. Yet what was worrying, at least to Crisk, was that he felt that some of these people had, by any reasonable and objective standard, been right in feeling resentment. One person told how he came to detest his dying mother who had been bedridden for four years. He’d cleaned up after her, fed her and the only thanks he’d got was to be told that she hated him and wanted to see her daughter who could not bear to see her in that state. Why shouldn’t this person have had the right to resent such ingratitude? It was clear that he loved his mother, but to deny him access to a quite natural response, where was the logic in that? Another person told of being raped and was encouraged to forgive her attacker, to declare that she bore some complicity in his attack. And this plainly was not the case except through an almost deranged reading of the facts.
Rather than the light that had illuminated all those other minds in the hall, a cool and comforting darkness, like shade in the summer sun, entered Crisk’s own mind.
I don’t want my pain blanked out, he thought to himself; I need to keep my pain. It is a part of who I am, every bit as integral as the joy I’ve felt. It is not a mental cancer.
And, to his own astonishment, and that of all the others in the ballroom, he calmly rose to his feet, ignored the cold glare of O’Hara and walked out.
“Please excuse,” he muttered in his strange English to anyone who might listen, “but this is no more than simple brainwashing exercise.”
Outside the ballroom, in the corridor, a man whom Crisk didn’t recognise accosted him. He was flanked by two boiler-suited operatives, the kind Crisk had seen emerging from the Glyphotech van that had been parked outside the Mare Publishing Co.
“Are you leaving?” the man said in a tone that was firm yet offered the prospect of reconciliation, “I’d advise you not to. The very fact that you desire to quit now is the strongest indication of how much you are in need of our assistance.”
He didn’t acknowledge the presence of the two menacing figures either side of him though their unspoken participation in this blatant attempt at coercion was clear.
Crisk saw that the workers of Glyphotech looked even weirder close up than from a distance. For some bizarre reason the sleeves of their black boiler suits were too long and flopped over at the ends, totally concealing their hands. Their deathly white faces were absolutely expressionless, so much so that their features, the slash-like mouths and inkblot eyes, looked uncannily as if they’d been worked into soft white putty rather than flesh.
“I made stupid mistake,” said Crisk, “absolutely the blame is mine. Further explanation not necessary. Now I will go.”
The other man just stood there silently, as if weighing up his options. Crisk became uneasy. His eyes flickered to the name badge the man wore (no one was permitted to remove them whilst the seminar was in progress) and to the indistinct faces of the Glyphotech operatives. He addressed the man personally.
“Mr Collins, I will have you let me pass,” said Crisk, his voice admirably level and betraying no sense of the fear gnawing at his innards, “have told friends that if I do not call them at 5 p.m. they are to come here and collect me. If necessary, with police. Reason being, pre-warned by colleague against attendance at Glyphotech reconstruction seminar. Such precaution unfortunate but necessary, I felt.”
“Not in the least necessary, I assure you Mr Crisk. We are not in the business of press-ganging people into our circle of friends. If you feel that you must leav
e, then do so. You are free to make whatever choice you wish.” Collins replied. There was an edge in his voice though, and the last few words were almost a hiss.
Crisk brushed past the three men, through the lobby and out of the Grantham Hall Hotel. He was already beginning to dread the reception he would receive from O’Hara when he turned up for work on Monday morning, if that is, he still had a job at the Mare Publishing Co.
But on Monday morning it was as if his conduct were forgotten. O’Hara greeted him with a pleasant smile (though Crisk admitted to himself that the sight of O’Hara grinning was horrible in its own way) and Crisk began his computer inputting as usual. He did detect a new furtiveness in his office colleagues however, but it was hardly sinister, more like they felt somewhat sorry for him. He could not help noticing that they now employed Glyphotech terminology in a lot of their talk, and went about their duties much more assiduously than before.
It was only after he got home to his flat that same evening that he was made aware there were, after all, certain consequences resulting from his having failed to complete the seminar. The phone rang at 7.30pm, just as he was preparing some sushi for dinner.
“Hello, Mr Crisk, it’s John Collins here, from Glyphotech. I hope you don’t mind me calling but I wanted to go over the conversation we had when last we met, at the seminar, you remember.”
Inwardly, Crisk groaned. He felt the urge to slam down the telephone but his sense of gentility prevented him from doing so.
“To speak the truth nothing more to say,” Crisk responded, now busy preparing food. Cannot talk, even prefer not to . . .”
“This won’t take long, I assure you.” Collins said, cutting in, “I just wanted to let you know that there’s another course beginning at the end of this week and that we’d be happy to welcome you along. Forget what happened before, and make a fresh start. Many of our best friends took their time coming around to total acceptance of the benefits Glyphotech can provide.”
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 17 Page 25
