Love Me To The End

Chapter 2: Not a Magician

The dreadful echoes of the heavy spiked door slamming into place reverberate around the hall, gradually giving way to a hushed silence. Two hooded stagehands approach the cabinet, pulling open the door to reveal the lady in the silver grey ballgown stood in still repose against the red velvet interior, her dress dotted with deep red marks from where the spikes made contact. Her sequinned opera mask covers most of her face, but her lips are motionless in a final, satisfied grin.

The stagehands take her arms and lift her out of the cabinet, carrying her inert body towards the edge of the stage. Their route takes them past the lady's companion, who watches her pass with expressions ranging from shock to adoration. As the stagehands make their exit with the lady in grey, all eyes fall upon the companion, a short-haired blonde in burgundy ballgown and similar sequinned mask. There is a short wait as the mechanism of the iron maiden is reset, before she is called forth by the sinister, genial figure of the host.

The lady in burgundy steps forward, takes a deep breath and takes up position inside the cabinet.

—–

My job at this time was data entry temping for an insurance company. It was boring and menial, but I actually didn't mind it in the scheme of temp jobs because I could set myself to automatic and daydream while my fingers did the typing. And honestly, anyone who expects agency jobs to pass the thrill test must be crazy.

Generally, there were three types of temp job. There was stuff like this – grunt work you just got on with, at least you knew you'd been hired for an actual task. The worse ones were those where they had to find work for you to do, because then you'd been brought in by someone who just wanted an underling to boss about, for political purposes or simply as an ego boost. Then there were the general admin jobs where they'd treat you more or less as a regular employee, right up until you reached the point where they'd have to hire you permanently or give you a raise, at which point you became competition and the knives came out.

Basically I couldn't be doing with office politics. I'd been told by various people I was coasting, that I should be chasing a permanent job, but as I looked around at the people in offices, living off inane popularly-approved trivia while finding ways to inch their way up shit hill by any means necessary, I just didn't see the appeal. My shared house was full of people like them. They'd come in from work, microwave a ready meal, watch tatty TV, sleep, go to work, repeat, and that was their entire life. At least with temping you knew you were just there for the money and could fuck off if they took too many liberties.

So while my fingers typed, as the names of policyholders trundled through some passive part of my brain to be converted to mechanical keystrokes and forgotten forever, my active mind went places. This time, Maise was with me, in all of the distinctive outfits I'd seen her wearing to her mysterious roleplay game, cast in a carousel of the movie scenes we'd watched together. We were Tarzan and Jane struggling hopelessly in a pool of quicksand. We were Thelma and Louise, pitching together to fiery death rather than submit to an unfair society. And looming large was the shadow of the guillotine in that opening scene from Quills. I'd had some serious thoughts about that one in particular, with the two of us trading roles.

On the bus back home my phone went with a message from Maise.

"Hey Sexy! I'll be a little late back, need to go pick something up. Do you mind cooking for us both? Help yourself to anything you want from my cupboard. Kill you later! M xxx"

I texted back,

"Sure thing, look forward to seeing you. Kill you too! L xxx"

After hitting send, I looked at the two messages sitting in my chat log. "Kill you later / Kill you too". Yup, nothing weird about that.