Ordeal by Terror. Lloyd Biggle jr.
in every other sentence even though each word stung like a lash. She called everyone “Darlink.” Probably it was because she never remembered names. In return, she didn’t expect anyone to remember hers. Her first words to Adelle had been, “Call me Madam, Darlink. Everyone else does.” So Adelle did, and so did everyone else, and it hadn’t occurred to Adelle until a week later that Madam was as nameless as the maintenance workers.
Abruptly Madam turned and tiptoed away. She always tiptoed. The door swung shut behind her, but Goon 1 remained motionless, fists still clenched. Adelle wondered what kind of maintenance problem could have produced such a dramatic clash of personalities and such taut emotions. Had Goon 1 put tulip bulbs in the wrong place?
In its normal, everyday operations, Z-R Publications seemed odd enough, but a totally inexplicable incident such as this one took the firm beyond oddness and into the realm of the strange or eerie.
The tractor, having attended to the grass in the formal garden, moved off. Goon 1 finally stirred and disappeared around the corner. The threatening evil spirit fled with the mower’s fading clatter, but it had been doomed to frustration in any case. This magnificently sprawling Feinstwaller Manor was phony from one end to the other, a sham environment that would repel evil spirits in any guise. Further, it was headquarters for that most unhauntable of Earthly institutions, a corporation.
“Z-R Publications,” Adelle murmured, “hail.” During her job interview she had asked what the letters stood for, and Madam shrugged and told her, “It’s just a name, Darlink.” At first she had thought it was a word, spelled something like Zeeare. Either way, it was immune to specters. A sign that read, “Z-R Publications, Inc.,” would have banished ghosts from a mausoleum.
Adelle returned to her desk, which was the type normally occupied by whatever executive officer of a firm had the least work to put on it—enormous, ornate, expensive, and totally inappropriate for a Researcher/Word Processor—but then, so was the room Adelle worked in. To go with the oriel windows and their tinted jigsaw puzzle view of garden and fountain, it had fielded paneling and a high, fan vaulted ceiling. Computer, desk, and oversized, plushly upholstered office chair—like the desk, more suitable for a corporation president than a mere employee of whatever status—looked like brash intruders, and Adelle felt like one. The room was otherwise furnished with pseudo-antique chairs, tables, bureaus, and sofas. On the floor was a thick pseudo-oriental carpet.
Adelle resumed typing, and row after row of crisp numbers took their places on the computer screen in orderly columns:
1975 12,472 127,896 921
1976 14,798 124,310 1,014
1977 19,490 125,747 1,823
1978 20,244 128,165 1,769
1979 22,314 130,002 1,854
1980 23,562 129,773 2,331
Madam tiptoed silently into the room. Adelle finished the column she was typing before looking up. By that time, Madam had placed Adelle’s paycheck on the corner of her desk.
She stood beaming down at her. Today she was wearing what Adelle called her alternate dress, which was less baggy and more flowery than the one she usually wore. Her face, seen from close up, looked like the side of a house from which paint had just been removed with a blowtorch. Adelle also shunned cosmetics, but Madam’s peeling visage was almost enough to convert her to the use of lipstick, rouge, nail polish, and eye shadow in clashing colors. Madam’s other outstanding features, in addition to her two dresses, were her one pair of shoes with badly worn, flat heels—one of the many mysteries about her was how she could wear out heels when she always tiptoed, but Kevin Mondor, one of Adelle’s two coworkers, maintained that she tiptoed because her heels were worn; her neck, which always was slightly dirty but never got dirtier; her manner of squinting nearsightedly through bespattered glasses; and, of course, the exceptionally broad nose upon which the glasses rode so precariously. She was infuriatingly absent-minded and fluttered about hysterically when she mislaid something, which happened frequently.
She stood for a moment studying the computer screen. “That’s nice, Darlink. I like wide margins. I like your new clothes, too. Pants. That’s different. So attractive. Did you hear what Write said about Add?”
Madam’s failure to remember names resulted in a cryptic speech of her own fabrication. Adelle, called “Darlink” to her face, knew she was “Type” behind her back. Kevin Mondor, with an official title of Researcher/Statistician, was “Darlink” and “Add.” And Craig Dolan, the concern’s Researcher/Writer, was “Darlink” and “Write.”
Adelle smiled. “No. What did he say?”
“He said Add’s parents fed him nothing but alphabet soup—made with numbers instead of letters!” Madam cackled shrilly.
Adelle feigned another smile and asked calmly, “But did you hear what Add said about Write?”
“No!”
“Write grew up on a farm, you know. They didn’t have indoor plumbing. Instead of catalogs, they used old dictionaries for toilet paper.”
All of that was sheer improvisation on Adelle’s part. Madam threw up both hands and quickly tiptoed away, laughing convulsively. Adelle wondered if she repeated these stories to the goons and if they found them as hilarious as Madam did. Adelle couldn’t imagine the goons laughing at anything.
Of course Madam would tell Dolan what Mondor was supposed to have said about him, and Dolan would quickly discover that the remark came from Adelle. Before another day passed, Madam would be back with some tale from Dolan, attributed to Mondor, about an alleged peculiar habit of Adelle’s. Such silly by-play, nourished by Madam’s childish tattling, had puzzled Adelle when she first came to work there. Now she felt splendidly indifferent to it. She disliked Mondor thoroughly and despised Dolan, and she knew the two of them scorned her and hated each other, but their offices were in three different wings of the sprawling building, and they were able to keep personal contacts to a minimum.
Further, all three of them were in this together and doing good work, however silly that work might be. Her own names for Mondor and Dolan were Cad and Clod, and her job would have been much pleasanter with more congenial people to work with, but she could have put up with Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster for the fabulous dimensions of her salary.
She picked up her check and regarded it with the same studious disbelief she had directed at the first two. More than nine hundred dollars in take-home pay for doing a week of—what? She had put in her time faithfully, she had worked steadily and well, she had followed instructions scrupulously, and she knew she hadn’t earned half than that. Supposedly the salary was justified by her highfalutin title, Researcher/Word Processor, but the only research she did was with a dictionary, correcting Dolan’s spelling errors.
“Mine not to reason why,” she murmured. But she couldn’t suppress her feeling that something was very wrong about this job. No honest business could afford to pay its employees so well to work in such a costly environment and produce so little.
“Just getting started, Darlink,” Madam had said cheerfully. “Books aren’t made in a day. All of ours will be annuals, and the business firms we serve will be buying replacements every year or two.” Adelle wanted to ask how many firms were likely to buy the books in the first place, but of course that wasn’t her problem. Perhaps it wasn’t Madam’s problem, either.
Paychecks were delivered promptly just before noon on Friday—a truly generous gesture since they weren’t due until the end of the day. “In case you want to shop during lunch hour,” Madam said. The Z-R Publications logo on the checks was both stylish and dignified, the checks were prepared on a check writer and looked thoroughly professional—corporate, in fact—and despite the interminable, scrawling, illegible signature, neither of Adelle’s two previous checks had bounced. The solvency of Z-R Publications could not be challenged by anything she had observed.
Even so, she couldn’t shrug off that feeling of uneasiness.
“If they’re smuggling heroin or running a numbers racket, the