FICTION BY STUART ZIANIK

Stuart Ziarnik’s debut chapbook, The Vulture, won The Headlight Review’s Chapbook Contest. His second chapbook, Load Shed, is forthcoming from Alternating Currents Press.

His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine, Third Wednesday, SHIFT, and others. He has won The Letter Review Prize and the George Dila Memorial Flash Fiction Contest, and was awarded a Poet and Author Fellowship by the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. He lives in Connecticut with his wife and daughter. 

HEADHUNTER
by Stuart Ziarnik

I’d woken up late; by then I couldn’t lie to myself anymore about the importance of routines or keeping a schedule. I had been on the job market for nearly a year and all my diligence and organization had made no difference, so I stayed up until three most nights and found myself waking up later and later. It was around noon when I rolled over in bed and felt for my phone charging on the floor.

The screen was bright with an incoming call from an unknown number. I hesitated. In the past I didn’t take these calls, but by that point I had nothing to lose, so I started answering them. Nearly all were spam, but you never knew which one might be a recruiter.

I cleared my throat. “Hi, this is Max.”

There was a crunch of static, and then nothing.

“This is Max.”

This time there was no sound at all. I held up my phone and hovered my thumb over the End Call button.

“Hello?” The voice was slightly digitized, but I didn’t think it was automated: I could hear breathing and some muffled sound in the background, the shifting of air.

“Uh, hi,” I said, “this is Max. Who is this?”

“Max,” came the voice, now less digitized but also higher-pitched, so that I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. “We have a role.”

“Yes, hi! Thanks so much for reaching out.” I sat up on my headboard. “Sorry, I didn’t recognize the number. Was this a position I applied for, or did you find my resume?”

There was a pause, the same shuffling sound. “We’re calling about the position.”

I cleared my throat again. “Yeah, I really appreciate your reaching out about it, and I’m excited to learn more. What can I tell you? Do you have questions, or should I just—”

“We want you to come in. In-person interviews are the best way to get a taste of a person.”

“Oh, great, that’s great,” I said. “So the office is…where’s it located, exactly? What did you say the position is, again?

The voice laughed, a gargling laugh that didn’t fit their speaking voice. “After the call, you’ll receive directions to the office. Will that suffice?”

“Yes, that’d be great. But wait, can you tell me more about the position? Or the company?”

But they had already hung up. I rolled back over in bed.

What was that?

I’d had so many intro calls that promised an interview only to ghost me, and this conversation had been so stilted, like a bad imitation of a professional call, that I was sure nothing would come of it. So I was shocked to see an email in my inbox only a minute later. There was still nothing about the position, no job description or questions to prepare for. But I had a time, date, and an address: Suite 216 of an office park twenty minutes outside of town.

I couldn’t find any business directory for the offices. Google showed a photo, clearly doctored or even AI, of a modern, gleaming building, its walls built of smooth white brick with a blue glass pyramid rising in the middle.

Of course I realized it could have been a scam. I tried pasting the email address into search engines to see if anyone had reported something, but nothing matched. On discussion boards there weren’t any stories that mapped onto it, either: I read about faux headhunters asking for social security or routing numbers, but nothing that explained why I’d be asked to go to a physical location without providing anything financially or personally sensitive. Clearly the experience was bizarre, but if it was a scam, what was the point? Why take me that far and meet me? So I said fuck it. It might be real, and I was desperate. And I prepared as best I could.

The morning of the interview I put on a green shirt and khakis, as well as a charcoal blazer. I took the freeway out of town. At first there was heavy traffic both coming in from and leaving for the bigger cities, commuters who had jobs. Past the guardrails I could see the town’s center, a small skyline of office buildings, and then a few minutes later I passed the old industrial sector full of brick factories, smokestacks, pylons with huge cables dangling over the road. A few drops of rain pelted my windshield.

Fifteen minutes outside town, the traffic vanished and I had the road to myself. All the buildings were gone and instead I drove through a corridor of bare trees. The sky was so dark I had to check the dashboard clock to confirm it really was still morning.

The exit was a sharp loop, nearly a full circle that ended at an unpaved road. Could there really be an industrial park out here? Could there be workers?

But then when I turned into the industrial park’s entrance the sky had suddenly cleared to a bright blue with a few tufts of cloud in the distance, the treetops were thick green, the asphalt was fresh black and I saw the building, its glass pyramid sparkling in the sun. There were two shining cars at the far end of the lot. I parked a few rows from the front entrance.

I was early, nearly twenty minutes before I needed to go in, so I rolled down my window. Warm spring air blew softly into the car and I could smell some type of flowers, or pollen. There was no sound, not even birds.

I watched a large pine needle fall from one of the trees. All my apprehension disappeared, and I laughed at how dour I’d been only a few minutes before. This was a good place. It was real. I felt almost woozy with confidence, I knew the interview would go well and I pictured myself working there, how every day I would escape from the town and come to this idyllic office, hidden from the world. And as I opened the car door and walked to the entrance, I was filled with the sense that all the darkness and frustration of the past year was about to end. My hunt was over.

There was no lobby to speak of. Instead the door opened to a sharp staircase. The floors and walls were white and I didn’t see any directory. There was only one way to go, so I started up the stairs. When eventually I got to the top they turned onto another flight going the opposite way and as I started up them I glanced at the ceiling. I was surprised to see there were no windows and that the pyramid was not a skylight, it must actually have been mirrored, and that all the light inside came from four large fluorescent bulbs recessed in the ceiling.

Nearing the top I saw that the stairs led to a long, narrow hallway. The higher I went the more I noticed a floral scent, which I assumed was from a cleaning product. In the hallway the smell became overpowering but not unpleasant, and the air felt thick. Now there was a faraway drone of air circulating through the ducts in a slow pulse, and I had to remind myself to focus, that I was there for an interview.

At the end of the hall was a slatted board listing offices. I had trouble reading any of the names, the font blurred or my eyes wouldn’t focus, but I could make out Suite 216. I turned down another hallway lined with plain wood doors. The smell was everywhere now, and the pulse of air was beating in the ceiling. When I came to 216, though, everything stopped. Then I opened the door.

It was a small room with white walls and gray carpeting. In the middle of the room was a square desk with a pair of plastic chairs, almost egg-shaped, pushed in on either side. An empty poster frame on the wall faced me.

I stood for a moment, then shut the door. I didn’t see an intercom and there were no other doors. I cleared my throat, set my resume folder down on the desk, and pulled one of the chairs back. The plastic was softer than I expected, it gave under my touch, like padding, and when I sat the cushioning inside was incredibly soft.

The pulsing sound had returned. Who was coming, I wondered: was it a recruiter, or someone from the company? I knew there was something I should have been doing to prime myself but I couldn’t seem to keep my thoughts ordered, and instead my eyes were rolling around the room.

“Hello,” I said softly to no one.

Then as I looked up, the corner of the ceiling began to lift, like it was being peeled back in a big sheet. I was frozen.

All I could see in the open space was blackness, but then it peeled open further and a face was looking down at me. A human face, with small eyes and a wide black mouth, suspended in the dark. We stared at each other for what felt like a long time, minutes and minutes, the thing panting silently.

Then below it, a long arm reached out from the blackness and onto the wall. It spidered a finger down, then something else reached out. It wasn’t an arm but more like legs, long legs, with fleshy skin that ended in two thick hooked toes, and then another two legs emerged from the blackness pulling the face out with them, the fleshy hub of the four limbs.

I couldn’t breathe.

The thing moved slowly and stared at me, then with an effort, it pulled itself out onto the wall and I saw another four limbs appear on its other side, and so for a moment it was splayed on the wall like a giant skin flower, an anemone. It didn’t do anything but watch me, opening and closing its mouth.

I was rooted to my chair, gasping, then when it moved a limb I suddenly screamed and tried to stand, but the cushion under me was gluey: long threads stuck all over my blazer and chinos. The thing started to crawl toward me, its mouth yawning open and shut.

I grabbed a leg of the desk and pulled myself off of it in a huge rip. The thing made some sort of moaning sound and backed away. I saw it begin to rear up, four of its limbs in the air, but before it could do anything, I’d turned and ran out the door and down the hall without looking back.

I was shouting but no one came. I tried a door to another suite but it was locked, and when I tried the next it popped off its hinge and fell, revealing plain drywall behind it. I ran to the stairs and sprinted down them three at a time. When I reached the turn in the stairs, I finally saw the exit.

Jumping in my car, I fumbled for my keys and peeled backwards and out of the lot and onto to the road. As I sped toward the highway, I looked in my rearview mirror. The trees were closing up where the industrial park’s drive had been, and then it was all gone.

When I got back to town, I pulled into a commuter lot, got out, and vomited. Cold rain spattered my hair. After a moment I got back in my car. Hot air blasted through the vent, and I took out my phone. All records were gone from my call log, and the email had vanished from my inbox.

I didn’t know what to do. I needed to report it, to tell someone to go deal with it, kill it, whatever it was, but how could I explain it?

I waited in the commuter lot until my pulse had settled, then started the car. As I got back on the freeway the need to vomit was gone, though I now had a migraine and the nerves around my eyes tingled like they did when I was hungover.

It was lunchtime and the roads were clearer; soon I was out of town again. By then it was pouring rain and the clouds were black. As I came up to where I’d gotten off the freeway I slowed.

The sign was gone and the guardrail continued unbroken. There was no exit. All I could do was keep going.

*****

Over the next few days, I dug through my phone and email backups and called my cell provider, and I drove back toward the office park again and again, but I could not find the building. My GPS showed there were no roads beyond the freeway, and looking out my window I saw how dense the woods were. Beyond the trees a thick layer of vines and brambles obscured everything. After a week, I gave up.

That spring I had a lingering headache. Or, not a headache exactly, but my brain felt airy, like I was walking through a thin haze every day. I split my time between applying for jobs and boxing everything in my apartment. I had nowhere to go once my lease was up, and I’d probably have to throw away most of what I owned.

I was in the middle of filling out an application when my phone screen lit up. I had a voicemail from an unknown number.

I hesitated, then closed my laptop and unlocked my phone. A loud crackling came through the speakers, then breathing, and when I moved my hand the tip of my finger stuck to my phone’s screen.

Then a voice, high-pitched and throaty.

“Max,” it said, “it’s time to come in for your second interview.”