1
The door to the large office suite in the corner of the huge open-plan office space shut softly, and in the uncommon hush, the quiet click of the lock engaging sounded strangely loud.
"Who was that?" asked a young recent hire, a girl named Christine. She'd only caught sight of the man who entered that office for a fraction of a second after a flash of movement and very dark colour caught her eye. Since she hadn't gotten much of a look, she was curious.
"Oh, that's Dr. D_", said Dianne, who sat at the desk next to Christine's. "He's a bit of an odd one".
Christine looked over at the closed office door, the movement causing her blonde ringlets to sweep across her back. She gathered them back up absently and corralled them with one of the ubiquitous blue rubber bands that the mail room staff used to bundle mail sent to their floor. "What do you mean?"
Dianne, seeing an opportunity for gossip, pushed her chair back a bit from her desk and spun it to face Christine. She sat back, getting comfortable. "Well, for one, he owns this place! He's not just the CEO or CFO… he owns the whole thing! And he's always here! Major workaholic. He gets in way before everyone else, and he's almost always the last one out, too. I have no idea when he sleeps, 'cause he's only away from this place something like four hours a night." Then, her non-committal expression changed into something Christine found kind of cruel and she sat forward in her seat, elbows on her knees, in the attitude of conveying a particularly juicy, scandalous bit of gossip. Her voice hushed a bit, and she scooted her chair closer to Christine's.
"The weirdest thing about him is how he looks!"
Dianne allowed a long beat of silence to fall before going on.
"He's, like, deformed! It's really pretty gross. I mean, you kind of get used to it, but not really. It doesn't matter much though, since he's always in his office and almost never comes out here. And he spends months away on business, too, so it isn't like you'll have to see him much, and we don't report to him, thank God!." Dianne made a moue of disgust. "I mean, I'm not trying to pick on a guy with a disability…. But Christ! It's gross!"
Dianne then straightened up in her seat. She began to scoot her chair back towards her computer monitor in the centre of her desk. Then she stopped and spun back to face Christine. "There's one other reason he's kind of strange… the man is formal! He talks like a Victorian novel! He refers to all of us as Miss. Whatever, Mrs. Whatzhername, or Mr. Whoshisface. And you'd better refer to him as Dr. D_, or at least 'sir' if you end up having to talk to him. He won't even respond to you if you speak to him informally. He's also the only one in this entire building who wears suits all the time. We're all business casual, and he's dressed like a 1950s banker! It really is pretty weird. But he owns the place so he can do whatever he wants."
Dianne had just began turning back toward her own workplace when Don Richards spoke up behind them both, startling gasps out of both girls. He glared at Dianne, his face florid. "You'd do best to concentrate on your work and quit your gossip. You're not paid to pass judgment on anyone here, and if that happens again, you won't be here. Is that understood?" Don was the person to whom both women reported, and Christine, being new, was anxious to make a good impression on the plump, red-faced little man. She felt piqued that Dianne's tale-telling had gotten her into trouble when all she'd wanted was to know who it was who'd gone into the largest office suite in the building and locked the door after himself, and Dianne's obvious disgust over the man's appearance had bothered her a lot. She put her attention back onto her monitor quickly and continued her work in silence. She didn't speak to Dianne when the woman got up to leave at 5 and continued working until nearly everyone on her floor of the building had left, trying to undo any damage that being caught in Dianne's gossip session might have caused.
The door to that locked office suite remained closed and locked. As the overhead fluorescent lights began to turn off automatically, she began to see a faint line of light issuing from the crack at the base of the door, where the door didn't quite meet the carpet.
At 7:30, she left. The door to the office suite remained closed and locked.
The next morning, upon her arrival to her workspace, Christine was surprised to find Dianne standing beside her desk, scowling, while a uniformed security guard quickly packed all the personal belongings from Dianne's workspace into a white cardboard box. Don Richards stood beside her, his usually florid face an even more vivid shade than usual. His arms were crossed over his chest and he was tapping his expensively calfskin-covered toes impatiently. The guard's movements were quick and practiced and efficient, but were obviously being rushed. When Dianne saw Christine's astonished expression, she sputtered out "I'm FIRED! I just don't get it! Fired!" Heads popped up from cubicles all over the open plan space and vanished back down again just as quickly.
The security guard cleared his throat and shot Dianne a warning look. She subsided into angry silence as her belongings continued to be stacked in the box. A few seconds later, the guard tucked the box under his arm and followed behind while Don Richards herded a loudly complaining Dianne towards the elevator.
As she was propelled away, Dianne threw a look back at Christine and yelled "Watch your back here, kid! This place is fucking crazy!" At that point, the guard growled "Enough out of you!" and herded her into the elevator and away.
For the next few days, Christine was alone in the cube nearest the corner where the door to the always-locked office suite was located. She concentrated on working very hard, but her curiosity had been pricked and she found herself glancing up at the door at various times in her workday. She never saw the tenant of that suite, though various people knocked on the door and entered or left at various times during the day. At lunch, Don Richards brought a bag of Thai takeout into that suite, and she could hear Richards' voice through the thick cherrywood door, but only his. The other man's voice was impossible to hear.
The business was a huge architectural design firm, and Christine reported to a fashionable redhead named Barbara Sutton, a lawyer who specialized in land zoning, permits, and corporate law. Since Dianne's abrupt firing, Barbara had dumped all of her work onto Christine, blithely expecting the new girl to just manage, somehow. But as the work piled up, Christine began working later and later into the night. Still, she kept an eye on the office suite and hoped to someday see the elusive man within.
Six months later, in mid December, at nearly 10pm, Christine was standing outside the massive stone building that housed the company, hopelessly re-reading the schedule posted on the nearby bus stop sign. The last bus had left at 9. Her beat up old Subaru had finally given up the ghost the day before, and it was sitting forlornly in a mechanic's garage, waiting for parts she wasn't sure she could even afford to have installed. It was freezing out, and her old winter jacket didn't afford much protection from the fierce, biting wind and hard, face-prickling sleet. Her thin form wasn't built for the cold, and she had forgotten her gloves at home. In addition, it had been an awful day at work. She'd made an error that had caused her boss, Barbara, to lose face in an important client meeting, so Barbara had given her a loud, no-holds-barred yelling at the moment she'd gotten free of the client and the other meeting attendees. Christine had ended up in the ladies' restroom, crying, and had skipped lunch due to feeling vaguely sick to her stomach over the upset. With everything else having gone so badly, missing the last bus of the night felt overwhelming. She had no one she could call to come pick her up, and she knew that if she called a taxi, it would cost more than she could really afford. She felt like crying all over again!
When she looked down to fish a tissue out of her purse, she heard the low thrum of a car's well-tuned engine approach, it's lights putting her into spotlit brilliance.
She looked up, tears still tracking down her cold-reddened cheeks. A large, sleek, black car had pulled up to her and was now idling beside the bus stop. The deeply tinted passenger side window slid down half-way.
Christine's breath caught in her throat. Who was this? What did they want? She could see the parking sticker all staff who worked there had on their vehicles, so she knew this car at least belonged to one of the 500 or so people who shared her workplace, but she had no idea who it was.
A man's voice, barely above a whisper, and enunciated with an appealing British accent, issued from the darkness within.
"Good evening. I'm afraid the last bus has been and gone. Might I have the honor of seeing you safely home tonight?"
Christine blinked, surprised. Then she remembered back to Dianne and how she said that the strange man who seemed to practically inhabit the largest suite in the building had an unusually formal and old-fashioned way of speaking. She instantly knew who he was. Dr. D_!
She smiled a little, still nervous, but so curious about this elusive man that she forgot her fears. She bent slightly to look into the gap made by the partly open car window, but it was far too dark to see anything but the edges of a tall and thin figure, lit only by dim dashboard lights, his clothing all black, right down to the fine black kid leather gloves on the long, bony hands that clutched the steering wheel as though it were a life-preserver and he was lost at sea.
"Um.." she faltered. "I don't want to make you go out of your way… but I am kind of stranded, I guess… you'd be really helping me out.. Thank you, sir." In her mind, she heard her father's stern, protective voice chiding her for being stupidly unsafe as to get into a car with a man she'd never even seen, let alone met. Even if he was her boss. But her father's remembered rumble of a voice caused a lump in her throat and she was grateful for the distracting sound of the car's door lock being disengaged. She missed him so much that it hurt to even think of him.
She opened the door and bent to look inside. She began to smile warmly as her eyes began to adjust to the inside of the car. She began to fold herself into the car's luxurious, plush seat. But when she finally saw her benefactor, the smile died upon her lips and gravity's pull was all that brought her into the car.
Rather than the expected average face and form of a middle-aged businessman, she was met with a mask. A black mask that hid his entire face, hairline to jawline. It was harsh, stark, and it seemed to reflect the light of the dashboard instrument panel in the dark interior of the luxury sedan. Two glowing pinpoints of light, reflected from the LCD dashboard instruments, flickered in the mask's hollow eye holes, and she was reminded of the eyes of the feral cats that scrounged around her cheap, run-down apartment building. Instantly, she began to try to exit the car, but the heavy door thumped closed and the car began to move forward.
She knew she should ask the masked man to stop the car so she could shove the door open and bolt into the night. But a tired, weary sigh from the hidden man shocked her into stillness. It had sounded resigned, exhausted, and crushingly sad, and there was something in that lonesome sound that made her turn to face him in surprise. He was studying the road, slowing the huge, sleek car. In a flash of insight, she realized what he intended to do – to let her back out into the cold night and drive away. She also realized that were she to leap out of the car's plush darkness and back into the deep cold of the night, she would hurt him somehow. For some reason, she did not want to do that.
So, she forced the smile back onto her face, hoping it looked convincing. He glanced towards her. The car began to accelerate smoothly out of the empty parking lot.