It was cold and the sun had long since set. The lamp on the desk and the screen next to it began to melt into a single source of light, and the text on the screen ran like ink in the rain. Patrick heaved a sigh of exhaustion and leaned back in his chair, grinding his fists into his closed eyes. He had been browsing the jobs pages all evening and could no longer remember whether he had even applied for any vacancies. He remembered drafting cover letters, and scrubbing the drafts, and trying out different templates for his CV without any real idea of what was fashionable these days. He opened the window to air out the room in spite of the cold and went to fix himself a nightcap. From the kitchen, he thought he heard a scuffling and scraping sound from outside; the stray cats must be on the roof again, he thought. He returned to his desk and allowed himself the half-hour of doomscrolling he had promised himself earlier before going to bed.
When he awoke the next morning, it hurt to breathe. His chest felt as though it had been squashed flat. He forced himself out of bed nonetheless and booted up his computer before getting the coffee on. His e-mails were the usual assortment of dead air: spam, newsletters he had grown tired of reading and reminders that the new administrative formalities were about to come into force. He scoured his inbox for any sign of a reply from his applications of the previous days, but there was nothing. It was just going to have to be time to chase up the company that had sent him the boilerplate ‘We have received your application’ e-mail last week. He searched for the company’s name in his e-mails but could not find it. This was bizarre: he was sure he had read it. Certain of it. Could he be confusing it with another company, which had replied to him the previous week? He felt a headache coming on.
A trip to the shops would be the change of scene he needed. Any excuse to go outside, wear proper clothes and generally spend a couple of hours not living like a caveman was bound to be good for the soul. He was out of butter and fresh vegetables; there were canned ones in the cupboard, but he reckoned he had enough in the bank for another week’s fresh produce before he had to start living like a survivalist. He showered and put on a clean shirt. After he had loaded up his basket with a few choice essentials and topped it off with a beer that he could not begrudge himself, he emptied the basket onto the checkout conveyor and reached for his wallet. He paused in the middle of the queue and stared: he was down to his last three twenties. He was convinced there had been at least another two notes in there. Shaking his head, he handed over one of the notes and packed his shopping in silence.
The rest of the day was spent mostly staring vacantly at the wall and trying to think of alternative approaches to survival that didn’t include moving back in with his parents. It all seemed so hopeless. This was his fourth consecutive month without anything substantial in the form of work. His friends kept telling him to retrain but the idea felt insurmountable, and nebulous, and expensive. Every tool for obtaining employment seemed designed for those who already had it: websites had paid memberships; training courses cost several months’ rent; even marketing felt like it felt flat if you didn’t pay to ‘boost’ it. He started thinking about selling off all his worldly goods and living in a cave somewhere, feeding on wild rabbits and turnips, growing a beard that would keep his knees warm. There was nothing to be gained from doomscrolling for a second evening, so he went to bed. He did not see the cold anthracite eyes staring at him from the gap between the filing cabinet and the wall.
It was just after midnight and the flat was finally quiet. In the almost-complete darkness, a shadow moved. It crawled from the space behind the filing cabinet until a stray splash of moonlight caught its black fur. The creature gleamed and twitched as it moved, panting and growling softly as it went. It climbed up onto the desk and one of its clawed, bony fingers switched on the computer. The bootstrap light played over its face and it grinned and began to drool. Patrick never had any visitors, so he had never seen the point of putting a password on his computer. The creature squatted on the desk and stared keenly as the e-mail client opened. It felt a gurgle of hunger that would soon be satisfied. Its claws clicked against the plastic of the keyboard as it scrolled through the e-mails, hunting the words that would nourish it: ‘Your profile is interesting’, ‘We would like to organise an interview’, ‘We are pleased to say’ and more. The words soaked into its forked tongue like honey as it read the e-mails from potential employers and deleted them one by one, cackling softly to itself. Once there was nothing left in Patrick’s inbox but spam and bland newsletters, which left a bitter taste in its mouth anyway, the creature shut down the computer and climbed down from the desk.
It was still hungry. It sniffed the air to find where the source of its next meal had been hidden that night. The scent was coming from the hallway, from the small table next to the door on which Patrick kept his ‘going out’ valuables. It grunted down the hall and reached up to the table; it was too short to see what it was looking for, but it could feel the rich animal hide under the pads of its fingers. Once the wallet was in its hands, it rifled salivating through the folds and pulled out the two remaining bank notes. Its drool dripped onto the carpet as it stuffed the notes into its mouth and hummed contentedly.
Now that it was sated, its thoughts turned to amusement. It threw the wallet back onto the table and slunk off with its great flat feet down the hallway to Patrick’s bedroom. The door was open. The creature could smell Patrick asleep under the duvet: his warmth, his skin and the febrile sweat of his dreams. Clambering carefully onto the bed, it peeled back the duvet and saw the man’s bare chest rise and fall erratically. It bounced for a moment on its haunches before jumping up and landing its squat bulk square on Patrick’s chest; the impact knocked the wind out of the sleeping man, who twitched his arms and writhed and choked before he could breathe again. With a broad grin, the creature jumped up and slapped down onto Patrick’s chest once again. It ground the balls of its heels into his ribs and cackled. Patrick jumped upright in panic and heaved a huge breath until his head stopped spinning. He glanced around the room and thought he caught a shape darting out the door. He listened for a long moment, but could hear only the occasional clank of the bubbles in the heating pipes. Uneasily, he went back to sleep.
The morning broke to the sound of roadworks. Patrick sat on the edge of the bed and wondered why it hurt so much to breathe. He could call his GP, who would take his pulse and prescribe him something that would blunt his anxiety but would not pay his bills. Instead, he went through the motions of making breakfast and combed through his e-mails for the messages that were not there. It was nearly ten o’clock, later than he had wanted to wake up, but his body had kept him in bed through the alarm and he had listened to it. In the silence of the office, his phone pinged.
Sarah:
Hey, hermit. We’re going down the Red Lion tonight to sacrifice our firstborns to our new AI overlords. JK. We are going to the Red Lion, though. Let’s get so drunk that we blow up a data centre. JK again. Maybe.
He put the phone down and smiled. Sarah was a dear colleague who was going through many of the same hurdles that he was, if not quite so severely; her marketing background had let her hold onto some regular and interesting clients. Now that his day had some sort of specific purpose, Patrick dove back into his prospecting with a fresh hunger and even did a brief but intense thrash on the exercise bike before lunch.
The Red Lion was sprawling and packed with a motley crowd of regulars and tourists. Patrick wandered from table to table through the familiar yeasty pub smell until he spotted Sarah, Farooq and Quentin in a booth near the window. They waved to him as they saw him and were laughing about something.
‘What’s the big joke?’ Patrick asked as he sat down.
Sarah said, ‘Conspiracy theories. Folk horror. Ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggedy beasties, as the saying goes. Farooq sent me an article this afternoon about Grab-Guts.’
‘And who or what is that?’
Farooq grinned. ‘A short, squat, ugly goblin that sneaks into the homes of the under-employed at night and feeds on their hope. Goblins back in the day would use their laugh to turn milk sour and make fruit wither and fall from the tree, but Grab-Guts has moved with the times: he’ll delete answerphone messages from prospective employers and rub out interview dates in your diary. He feeds on your despair.’
‘Like a poltergeist,’ said Quentin.
‘Poltershite, more like,’ said Patrick. ‘I’m glad you’re all getting into the spirit of things for Halloween. In the meantime, as a chronic member of the under-employed, allow me to devote the last of my worldly wealth to buying you lot a drink. What do you want?’
‘Come on, Patrick. Things’ll pick up. We’re all going through a bad patch at the moment but it can’t last forever.’ Sarah’s face showed genuine concern.
‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow, we’ll…all be analysing AI content and picking the occasional peanut out of that ocean of turds for less than minimum wage.’ Patrick made for the bar and ordered drinks for the four of them. When he retrieved his wallet and cracked it open with a muscle memory of long habit, he found it was empty.