Hel - Volume 2 (Part 1)

“Now I know what a ghost is. Unfinished business, that's what.” Salman Rushdie
 
Part 1
 
 
“Personally I’m surprised she waited this long to do it,” a sallow-faced man with grey curls and a square head said, as he leaned across the desk of his subordinate.
 
A subordinate that scared the living shit out of him.
 
“I mean, really.  What does a woman like that even have to live for?  Coming in every day to a tiny windowless cupboard of a room only to toil away at a thankless job where we never once respected her.  Just to go home each night feeling less than the day before?”
 
It had been a rhetorical question, at least the derpy man with the bland clothes and the too-well rehearsed laugh hoped.
 
But his henchman (and somehow boss) just smiled a self-satisfying smile as she flipped a mop of dirty uncombed hair around for effect.
 
On the inside though… she was smiling.  After all it had been her who had let the fox into the henhouse in the first place, as it were.
 
“I mean… the way you shut her down over just mentioning PTSD, and then the way you fed her to the wolves when she was at her most vulnerable, ALL while knowing she didn’t have the funds to fight us in court… BRILLIANT! I say!  Just brilliant,” the hockey loving imp remarked, just loud enough so his personal assistant couldn’t hear.
 
I mean… this man’s only skill was being two-faced, getting people to believe the Kool-Aid is real and not tainted with life sucking properties.  Of course, he was super duper good at it, considering the practice he’d had schmoozing all the rich white folks who just loved to hear him talk about inclusion and diversity.
 
“I am honestly so glad that spoiled entitled princess is dead,” the man finally said, as he once again envisioned the bookish woman who had occupied the tiny closet of a room across from his large and spacious office.
 
But Darla couldn’t be provoked into conversation just then, because she knew… she knew that whatever is done in darkness will soon be brought to the light – one way or another.
 
And because Darla fully believed in ghosts, and demons, and things that go bump in the night.  And she knew the small, derpy man who loved to pretend he was tough but fair, was just too stupid to believe it himself.
 
Darla smiled as the man they all called Lumpy left, because she hated him.  Always.  Like an itch you can’t relieve.  Hated him so much it had become a reflex to smile whenever he left.
 
But like trying to drown a cat, the man had just kept popping back up – despite the many boobytraps she’d set for him.
 
However, Darla wasn’t nearly as concerned about Gretchen's ghost just then, as she was about the small man who had an even smaller sense of ethics than her. 
 
Because if he could so easily dance on Gretchen’s grave… what would he do on hers?
 
At the thought Darla’s smile instantly transformed into that of a predator sizing up its competition.
 
Which always makes for an interesting day…
 
(Or so at least Darla thought that particular day.)
 
 
 
 
 
(to be cont.)



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