Far off, near the river and trees and just at the edge of the light from a streetlamp, a tremendously tall figure stood cloaked in black. Jonathan strained his eyes but could not make out its features, other than it was standing in shadow and its head reached halfway up the lamppost. It did not appear to be part of the celebration, not walking or mingling. Instead, it stood alone in the darkness – a creep, probably, one of those mentally unstable adults who wallow in gothic darkness and get a kick out of trying to convince the world they’re psychotic.
But then the figure stepped closer to the lamplight, and suddenly Jonathan could make out its features. The face was a crude mask of wood with poorly carved slits for eyes, mouth and nose and primitive designs of dull color painted on the flat face. Upon its head were the antlers of a tremendous stag, which reached like bony fingers up into the night. Its hands were raised at shoulder level as if offering up a sacrifice – a pagan priest transported from the scene of some ancient rite, his prayers and incantations rending time, existing in both realms simultaneously. A wind moved high in the trees, sweeping down from the great cemetery above, and it carried a deep and haunting dirge. The masked priest called out for them, for blood and sacrifice. He stared out from darkness, and his eyes seemed to shine in the light.
Chapter Eight
It was just after 3:00 p.m., and the sun shone bright and cold through the office windows on the twentieth floor of the Parson’s Insurance building in downtown Hartford, partially blinding Conner Braddick. He had repositioned his desk several times since his promotion, but still, every sunny afternoon, blinding sunlight poured through, reaching every corner of the room. Conner’s eyes watered with spiraling sunspots and left him with a mild form of blindness. Twenty more years of this and he would probably lose his vision completely.
Conner pinched the bridge of his nose. A little blindness at this point was fine with him. He couldn’t look at his computer screen any longer. The wake-up call he received from his bank this morning was enough to throw him off his work for the day anyway. A month and a half behind on the mortgage; why did they have to buy that house – a house that size – anyway? He couldn’t remember at this point. Third child on the way and Madison said they needed a bigger house. Of course. Whatever. That was the way it was supposed to work, right? He had read it in various conservative journals; having children pushed men and women to work harder, to push themselves harder, to get that promotion, put in the extra hours, save and scrape so you move up the middle-class ladder toward…what? He was no longer sure. It was just what people did – what he did. It was like a trap you lured yourself into. No need for bait; delusion and hope would do just fine.
It all went by in a blur, like running as fast as you can until your legs are dead and you’re out of breath and there’s nothing left and you look around and realize that you’re lost and a long, long way from home.
It had all seemed so easy at first, like everything was falling into place. He got that promotion, up here to the twentieth floor, now assistant to the vice president of investments for Parson’s. He had worked for that promotion. Not in the usual way one worked for a promotion, but the real way – schmoozing with the managers, long lunches with a lot of backslapping, and junkets to Saratoga Springs and Boston for meetings, which generally consisted of some ‘expert’ selling his latest theory and everyone sitting around lauding it as the new way forward. For all the media’s focus on social progress, insurance was still a good ol’ boy club, where promotions were earned through ‘lunches’ that became late-afternoon booze fests and everyone got sloppy. Those trips to Saratoga and Boston were merely excuses to do what men actually wanted to do: avoid work and get stupid. Everyone sat through eight hours of experts and charts and graphs for the big payoff of an open bar with attractive waitresses. Nothing concrete ever came from those meetings. No plans were ever made. They just stumbled from one place to another in a new city, pretending to know how this business worked, how investments worked, how life in general worked. They had their statistics and algorithms, computer programs that spit out answers, which Conner and his colleagues used to impress everyone with their vast knowledge of how it actually works, as if they could simply solve problems with a snap of their fingers. The problem, which had been slowly dawning on Conner, was that all those equations and algorithms, the investment software, the charts and graphs, were merely descriptions. They were like paintings – nice to look at, but changed nothing in reality. They were all, himself included, sitting around looking at and discussing descriptions of how it worked without actually understanding how it worked. And because of that, they lacked the ability to change anything. The industry was too big. There were too many people. The entire company and everyone in it were being rolled along by forces bigger than
