I was just settling down at my desk with a nice hot cup of the blood of a thrice-cursed dead man when I heard the squawker outside my office rumble.

“HR, may I help you?” my secretary, Bugg, answered in her most professional hideous shriek.

I’d lowered my proboscis into the steaming brew, waiting for that lovely first jolt of hell-bound haemoglobin to land upon the parched, empty place where there should have been a soul, when I perceived that most dreaded event just beyond the entrance to my foul lair.
A moist, tearing noise thundered at my ear hole.

“Oh, bother.” Bugg was flapping a fluid limb at me frantically. From the squishiness of the sound, I deduced she was using her fourth tentacle, that fluid writhing thing of power and horror.

Another wet snap. The first cup of blood was so satisfying (or “damned good” as we liked to call it) that initially I refused to leave the place where I hunkered and gibbered. Instead, one of my eye stalks slithered along the lair-wall and protruded outside.

She buried the squawker under her other 14 tentacles and hissed “It’s Beefbits!”

Oh, bother indeed. It was Himself (Itself, really), His Nibs, The Big Kahuna. (I’m assigned to the HR if my esoteric vocabulary were not enough to hip you in, old bean).

I slid the beaker of blood to one side and cringed before the squawker. “Human Restraint Office, how may I be of service?”

“Do take me off speaker, nephew.”

It was then that the terror washed over me. A call from the head of our Division was bad enough, but now our family connection was mentioned?

For long aeons, I withered before the karma-rending power of He Who Must Not Be Named In Casual Conversation, only occasionally able to blubber helpless replies. “Yes, I’m new to the division, Your Abominableness.” “Four hundred years.” “No, oh Most Loathsome of the Shadows, I am certified. However, I’ve never actually—”

But it was my final piercing shriek of despair that brought Bugg scuttling into the lair, where she found me upon the corpse-strewn floor, my thousand-eye stalks alternatively flagellating me and quivering loosely.

“That must have been a fun chat,” she observed helpfully. “What did the Bits want?”

Unable to speak coherently for a moment, I rocked and wailed at the horror of my fate. She politely rewarmed the blood while I composed myself. Unable to bear the weight of my destiny while prone, I climbed to my hooves and I composed myself. Brushing my eyes back into order, I crept into the comfort of my tatty bones-of-hanged men chair.

After a restorative slobber of the hot hemo, I looked at her terrifying primary face, where sat her usual expression of tolerant compassion for my lot. “It’s worse than you can imagine.”

A smile of hideous knowledge rested upon her ancient face. “I can imagine a lot.”

I buried my head in my hand, eye stalks drooping to cover what would have been a face. “The boss is sending me to Earth.”

And then Bugg screamed.

About Author Roy M. Griffis…