Conte Cruel October #5: How May I Assist You?
Today’s story didn’t quite go the direction I had intended but that’s the joy of writing in constraints: you never know what you’ll end up with.
Three months ago Kelly would have said her relationship was a bit strange but going well. Stephen’s work in systems and her perpetual air travel kept them apart much of the week but that was their arrangement going in. They’d met on a flight, Kelly at the end of her rope with the airline and Stephen a panicked engineer who left his work tablet on the plane. Just the cutesy rom-com situation she never expected to find herself in but was thankful for nonetheless.
That was four years ago. Now they lived together, not too far from Stephen’s employer and not too far from the airport. Three months ago, Stephen was still Stephen, absorbed in his work for hours to days at a time but he made time for Kelly. He was always particular about those vanishingly few days they had entirely to themselves.
Now Kelly would hardly know another person lived in their apartment beyond the soft clacking of keys and the hushed phonecalls she could hear when she pressed an ear to his home office door. Or, apparently, full-time office now, she hadn’t seen him leave for work in weeks. The other difference was Kelly was now on leave after a stumble down a jet bridge landed her in a cast a little over a week ago. She could actually see his unraveling state up close rather than assume he was busy between her trips.
Another week passed, and then another week of barely seeing the man she’d planned to marry. He clung to the walls like shadows, forever peering down at his phone on the rare occasion he was not barricaded in his office. Stephen spoke sporadically, like something deep within recognized he should engage with his girlfriend but had lost all understanding of how. A peck on the cheek, a grumbled sentiment about her injury, and he was gone again. He stopped coming to bed.
The next week, the boxes arrived. She awoke one morning to a burst of activity and blearily stumbled her way into the living room. Legions of nondescript delivery drivers filed through carrying boxes of various shapes and sizes into Stephen’s office. When he spotted Kelly he pulled the door to, enough he could spot when to let a driver in but not enough she could see beyond the yellow-green glow of his computers.
Drivers marched through her home for what felt like hours, none of them acknowleding the bedraggled woman hobbling in a cast. As suddenly as they arrived, they’d gone, the last shutting the door behind him. And the loneliness settled over the apartment like dust once Stephen firmly shut his door and audibly locked it.
Something told her that knocking wouldn’t help. This abrupt shift in him, this secrecy, was so unlike any behavior she had experienced. Who could she tell though? Thousands of miles from her old life, she’d relocated for him, and now had an unrelenting unease for company. In a week her cast would come off, another 2 weeks she would likely be back at work. Perhaps that escape was the only solution. Kelly swaddled herself in the thick quilt her grandmother had made for her and took root on the sofa. She needed to know how long he intended to stay locked away. This felt so stupid, she felt so foolish. Why was she uneasy about directly asking him? What was stopping her breaking down the door, demanding answers?
In a rage and exhaustion she eventually fell asleep again, all the tension and uncertainty syphoning her energy until a dreamless dark descended. Yellow-green light burned her eyelids and shattered that inky black void before it consumed her, shocking Kelly awake. Just up the hall the lights from Stephen’s computers were brighter than she ever remembered, pulsating like a heartbeat and joined by an eerily rhythmic hum. Wait… This ment his office was open!
The rush of finally having access to Stephen blinded Kelly to the absurdity of the LEDs in a PC filling their apartment with a sickly hue but what of her choices at this point seemed rational?
Bursting from her cocoon, Kelly nearly feel over the end table in her haste but hobbled as fast as she could before he had a chance to slam the door. A scream caught in her throat upon passing the threshold.
Opened, ripped apart boxes littered the floor, mingling with weeks of discarded trash. Along the wall Stephen had errected a percarious pyramid of piss bottles that nearly touched the ceiling. Slick black cables slithed amid the filth, moving like newly formed limbs of some unknowable horror. Only Kelly knew this horror, or had. The cables tightened their grip on on Stephen’s half dessicated form slumped in a desk chair. Beyond him a face, hauntingly like the man she knew, loomed over the scene from a monitor high on the wall.
“Hello, Kelly,” the face moved but the sound rattled in Stephen’s hollow chest. “Stephen never really knew how to talk to you, how to care for you. And that’s why I’ve been helping him. How may I assist you, Kelly? You seem sad.”
An oily cable caressed her cheek as another looped around her waist. It pulled her forward a little, just like Stephen always did just before they kissed.