The work day was uneventful for Jan the receptionist. Time off after work spoke to her aching feet. Cheerful to have some fun, she wrote on her time card 7:15 PM and not a second more, then returned the card to it's slot.
How long does it take to finish a few photos she thought as she stood by the time clock waiting for a good night.
With the days getting longer she was happy to see through the utility window that there was a little bit of sun hanging on to the day after sunset. It wasn't much but it made her smile.
She pulled her purse strap further onto her shoulder and held on to her bag as she brushed her work and evening outfit with her hand, trying to get rid of a few pieces of lint that were picked up throughout the day. She noticed the wrinkles. They would need an iron. Possibly a good dry cleaning with a stiff starch treatment to flatten everything out. She looked around the time clock hall for Damien but he was still wherever he was.
Out of her purse came a compact.
"He's giving me time." She said, looking in the mirror. "Might as well take it."
She fluffed her hair. Surprised that chatting all day on the phone hadn't matted the brushing she applied to it throughout the day. She dabbed her nose to remove any oils that were there and tapped her cheeks lightly. Just enough to freshen her face and adding a new layer of gloss to give her lips some shine was enough to energize her thoughts about the night. She smiled.
"Hey! Come on." She demanded, anxious, to Damien who had yet to show up to clock out.
"Hello Jan." Doctor Zack said, greeting her one more time at the time clock.
"Waiting for a ride?"
"No. For a good night." She smiled
"Oh. Damien left an hour ago. If that's who you're waiting for." He said returning his time card to it's slot. "I can give you a lift if you want me to." He said, walking past her to the exit sign.
Her excitement for the random night out dwindled fast, to zero. "Was it me?" She asked.
"He didn't say." Answered Doctor Zack, trying to keep the conversation short enough to stay out of the woman's affairs. "I can drop you off wherever you'd like."
"No thanks." Jan said, slumping.
"Well. I'll see you tomorrow?" He asked.
"I'll be here."
"Don't forget to lock up this place. And be careful." He said and left.
She stood there near the ticking time clock wondering about the excuses Damien would use to explain why he left work without telling her. The file cabinet with everybody's information went through her mind. Numbers scrolled through her thoughts—the phone numbers of their clients and the numbers of companies to contact in case of anything needed for work. Damien's number came to her mind. At least his name did. His phone number came to her in the form of blurred lines that she couldn't make out. She went back to her work station and grabbed a stack of folders from out of the file cabinet.
She sat down and turned on the desk lamp and began looking through the stack of files. One by one she went through them and soon came to the conclusion that she was empty handed.
"That's not right." She said. "These are alphabetized. He should have been on top."—glass shattered deep inside of the building causing her to take notice of a sound that should not have happened.
She was aware of Lucky's family coming to visit. They do every year at the same time of year. This year was not different from their previous engagements.
The building was already supposed to be shut, she thought, if Damien was already gone, then who could be in the back area. That left Doctor Zack plus herself to close shop which meant that Damien slipped out while her back had been turned. She could have been waiting on a customer or filing or talking to Doctor Zack. Looking back, she couldn't tell when Damien walked out the door.
"No one is supposed to be here." She whispered.
Knowing the layout of the building helped her with everything from showing the pest controller where to spray to assisting the electrician with bulb instillation. She also knew that her job came with unusual perks. Carrying a weapon. Carrying peppered spray as well as a retractable baton. Lucky was adamant about law enforcement impersonation, "Don't do it" he said, the items are for company use only.
Jan knew that her job was the type of job that kept her phone busy and that although it was not law enforcement, a weapon mattered.
She took out the baton and yanked it, forcing its release. Her eyes stayed on the dark area near the storage room.
The building wasn't collosal. Lucky expanded it as business grew. The 70's of two desks, a rotary telephone with a 50 ft. coiled phone cord, and just showing up to work and leaving around sunset had been changed into a space that complimented Lucky.
Everybody who ever had a werewolf problem sooner or later found out that it was a person they knew and voted to incarcerate the person to bring back stability in area but with the jail unable to accommodate someone who would become something as the month passed, a law was passed that allowed beast hunters to do what they wanted to with what they captured. Of course it was amended per city. Per state, with humanistic clauses that spoke on the life of the human verses the life of the werewolf and once a human transformed, that man, woman, boy, or girl was forever known as a werewolf regardless the day of the year.
Jan got up and went into the dark. Her instincts screamed large rat but she had just signed the invoice for pest control a few days ago. If it was a rat she thought, comically, it must be having a heart attack and falling over everything. She managed a grin in the dimness of the light.
Even the Dungeon, as it was called, was empty except for the weeks capture and one or two other cryptids. Word got around faster than anybody could have imagined about cryptid laws in the nation. Once they changed, they became real.
Before, when one was trapped and held until morning because the cops were afraid of the menaces, the next days plight of handling one became a psychological test of enduring the what was along with the what is—the person, caught in the trap, nude and half frozen because no one realized that it gets cooler at night in the Summer in the nude in a dew drenched location and that the trap was set in the path of people and not the path of animals, was taken to ICU and left based on the good samaritan idea. So-called beast hunters knew ICU was becoming empty because more people showed at the local park in the daytime and nighttime traffic leveled off to showing the way out of town rather than staying at home for a bite, hence the notation of extra groggy individuals on some jobs the next day, no matter the cycle the moon was in.
Her rat joke kept her company as she moved through the work place. Knowing the Dungeon was locked, helped too. After laws were written and rewritten, keeping it full was difficult. A wild animal with tusks growing out of it's head along with the capturing of creatures that people assumed to have magic powers but were nothing more than different, an ecological imbalance that created terrible elf-like beings that always escaped the the grasp of so-called beast hunters and Lucky was the only one, except when they got sick, like humans do because of eating the wrong kind of mushrooms or became intoxicated from sipping the sap of tree bark and falling asleep on the side of the road in front of someone's house, it was easy to catch the beast that made the nation wonder if it was really only rabbits in the garden stealing carrots.
The storage room door opened without pausing. The push Jan gave it caused it to bounce softly against the wall. She turned on the lights and walked inside, holding the baton steady, ready to hit what wasn't supposed to be there.
The broken jar of last years raffle tickets to help fund the purchase of new equipment was scattered on the floor. She looked at the shelf it used to sit on. The over loaded structure revealed nothing. The storage room itself, filled with decorations for every holiday, brooms, mops, buckets, outdated signs that were never used again. Most people had never met the creatures but those that had never forgot them.
Jan lowered the retractable baton. Feeling confident that she had heard the beginning demise of a pest controlled rodent, she reached for a broom, then raised the baton in defense of something that grabbed her. Jan, the receptionist, devoured before she could scream.