Monsters Are Never Ready For Their Close-ups by Lois Anne DeLong

The listing had shown up in Dylan’s text messages this morning, sandwiched between an ad for cheap Viagra and a reminder from his bank that his account was overdrawn.

  “Creative storyteller needed to fill a void in our targeted message crafting business. An unparalleled opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives.”

  Odd, Dylan thought. What sort of company advertises a job with so little information? And what is a “message crafting business.” Some sort of greeting card company?

  His impulse was to delete the message and move on, and yet for some reason he couldn’t quite hit the delete button. As his bank would be happy to confirm, his days of skating on his savings were over. So, Dylan couldn’t blow off any leads, even vague and mysterious ones. Not when he had exhausted his network contacts, alienated most of his friends, and was now hedging his bets by signing up for online job sites, despite his general revulsion towards the internet. Could he ignore a lead which was just dropped in his lap?

  As his somewhat checkered career could attest, Dylan was something of a specialist. As a writer, he was just not to everyone’s taste. Even when working jobs where “creative storytelling” was desired, he had found himself the veritable square peg in a round hole. It seems the tales he told were always a little bit off—too dark for advertising, too honest for politics, too unconventional for most entertainment offerings. 

  Surprisingly enough, the one exception to this rule was kids' shows. His early success had come with a fairy-tale series on PBS. After a few misfires in other media, he had achieved even greater acclaim with his next show, for which he served as head writer for three years. Dylan seemed to know that children preferred to confront their fears, rather than hide from them, and so the show he led was unusually strong in dealing with dark subjects. Because it used a light touch to convey these subjects, "Facing the Monsters” became both a critic’s favorite and a ratings success. Then, unexplainably, the plug was pulled on the show. Ironically, the decision to shut down came just one day after the show won a Peabody Award. In the press release about the cancellation sent out by the network, the official word was “the creative team wanted to take on other projects.” A year later, it still made no sense. Nor did the fact that he—the show’s guiding spirit—had somehow emerged as the scapegoat. One critic had suggested he had “the wrong vision for a show at a crossroads,” and that perhaps, “the show was losing its grip on the balance of light and dark.”

  Dylan shivered just a bit, then deliberately shook his head to dispel the gloom of the past. For the here and now, he could waste no more energy on it. He needed a job as much to shore up his sagging sense of self as to stave off starvation and homelessness. 

  He returned to the ad and re-read it. “Creative story teller needed…” No one would deny he fit that description. But, who was hiring? There was no corporate affiliation, address, email or phone number. Just a QR code, like some two-for-one Groupon offer for frozen yogurt.

  Well, he thought, nothing ventured, nothing gained. He scanned the code and was taken to a blank form, containing just one question. The lack of context made him shiver again. An identity theft incident last year—curiously just a few days after the show folded— had left him unwilling to offer any data to strangers, even a seemingly benign answer to an innocuous question. Still, how many “unparalleled opportunities” came his way? Taking a deep cleansing breath, he reviewed the question:

  “What is the best news you could ever receive?”

  “It’s a trick question,” Dylan shouted to no one, his voice echoing in the sparsely furnished apartment. How could one possibly answer it without revealing dangerous clues to one’s identity? Any mentions of loved ones saved from illness, old lovers coming home, getting the perfect job—all the deep personal responses that could answer such a question opened lines of inquiry from which any minimally capable hacker could profit. Yet, a more generic response, such as “World peace declared,” “Cure found for cancer,” would immediately eliminate him from consideration as too unoriginal.

  In frustration, Dylan tossed the phone on the table. “I’ll work on this tomorrow,” he thought. He was too tired to parse through every potential pitfall to a response. But, when he went to shut the form down, the phone began giving off a whirl of humming sounds. Sometimes the sound was composed of muttered words, delivered low and slow. Other times it resembled his old show’s theme song, if it had been performed on a theremin. As he repeatedly tried to shut the program down, the noise only grew more intense. At the same time, a new text message appeared at the top of the screen. “Once opened, the form must be completed.”

  Picking up the phone again, his fingers began to sizzle, as it was now radiating so much heat it could not be held. Dylan raced to the kitchen, cradling the phone within his shirt until he could grab an oven mitt. Awkwardly moving to the stove, he tossed it into a half-filled pot. The phone was now emitting sound at such a volume that the room began vibrating. Dishes, silverware, and glassware began dancing around in cabinets and counters. His ears ached from the piercing whine, but he managed to open a window and dump the contents of the pot down to the concrete below. Water and phone collided with the sidewalk four flights down, the phone continuing to scream till it hit the ground. For a few seconds, it appeared silent, but then the noise re-emerged. Dylan ran out to street and found the phone broken to bits, but still working. A new screen message said “Voice response activated. Please state your answer and complete this transaction.”

  The phrase “complete this transaction” jangled in his mind. It didn’t fit the situation, but it was oddly familiar. Dylan stood over the phone, frozen in place, but with tears running down his face in a way he had not experienced since he was 6. This person or thing pursuing him had won, and he would have to live with the consequences. “All right. I surrender,” he screamed, disregarding the late hour and his sleeping neighbors. Shaking and sobbing, Dylan leaned over the phone’s still intact microphone, and whispered the first response that came to mind, “You have a purpose.”

  As soon as the words were uttered, his brain connected with the mystery phrase “complete the transaction.” It had appeared in his text messages several times on the day after he was hacked. It seems that whoever had stolen his identity, had put something in motion Dylan could not stop. The realization so surprised him, he didn’t even notice that the noise had stopped. Staring through the fractured screen he could read. “Transaction completed. Transformation initiated. Congratulations and welcome aboard.”

  The last thing Dylan heard was his own voice saying, “You have a purpose.” It fit neatly into a sound montage of soothing aphorisms that washed over the quiet nighttime street like a cleansing fog evaporating snow. After the panic of the last few minutes, it was easy to surrender to such a reassuring sound. Dylan stretched out on the ground near the phone, which was now crumbling to dust. He closed his eyes, and whispered the word “yes.”

When morning broke, there was no trace of Dylan or the phone on the street. But a million monsters hiding under millions of beds, collectively and eagerly exhaled.