Boss's Office

Mr Krinkle was a strange man. You would be too, if you'd grown up with a name like that, I suppose. But not strange in the way you'd be expecting. I mean, you hear the name, "Mr Krinkle", and what do you picture? An old man, for a start. Tall, thin, weathered, perhaps with a charming forgetfulness about him, a kind of good-natured befuddlement at everything. Kind, certainly, probably wise and full of homely stories about the good old days. Maybe a type of knock-off Santa Claus that's only barely dodging a lawsuit. Well, you can forget all that.
         Mr Krinkle was my boss, so that would've been reason enough to hate him to begin with. Not one of the good types of boss, either. Nitpicky, unbending, needlessly malicious - you know the type. We've all had one. A little Caesar who knows, deep down, that he'll never have any more power than this. Consequentially, he went about abusing it as much as possible, taking out his frustrations on the people below him.
         Truth be told, even if he was Jesus Christ himself, it would've been hard to like him. He just looked...well, strange. Pencil-thin lips, but with a nose bigger and straighter than it had any right to be. A mouth, full of teeth, always grinning. Small eyes, but with pupils that took up half the space that was there. Ears, barely there at all. And bald. Totally, utterly bald, though he couldn't have been more than thirty-five.
         And he moved so goddamn quietly. No, more than that. It was like he wasn't there, until he was there, right behind you. You'd just be taking a minute between phone calls, stopping to take a mouthful of tea, or a bite of chocolate, and then you'd feel his hand on your shoulder. Scared the hell out of me, and he knew it. Liked it, too. His small black eyes used to glitter as he did it.
"Paying you to work, Jenny." He'd say, leaning in. "Not to slack off."
"Sorry, Mr Krinkle." I hated the way my voice sounded, meek and pathetic, but...well, he just had that sort of effect. He was strange. He'd nod, squeeze down on your shoulder for one, awful second, then whip his hand back like a cobra striking in reverse. Now that I say, it, it sounds pretty stupid, but it wasn't. It really wasn't. He knew just how far he could go to really, truly get under your skin without giving you any cause to lodge a complaint about him. He was cunning, too.
         Working in the call centre was bad enough without him around. When I knew he was on, I spent every single second of my shift glancing over my shoulder. I think it's fair to say, no-one was sorry when he left us, which he did quite unexpectedly. Monday morning came around, and he just didn't come in. No-one could get hold of him, and when he didn't show up Tuesday or Wednesday either, they sacked him. They might have checked the local hospitals first, but somehow I doubt it.
         It was only after they opened up his office that things got weird. Had his own office, as befitted his position, but, so far as I know, no-one but him had ever been in there. If he wanted to give you a bollocking, he'd do it out in the open, in front of everyone.
         No-one had a key; not even the building's master worked on it. They tried kicking it in, but that didn't get them anywhere either. Eventually, they got some sort of battering ram together; God alone knows what it was, but they did, after a lot of effort, manage to get it open.
         There's stories about what they found in there, a lot of them believed by otherwise sensible people. Jars of blood, human bones with bite-marks on them, books of satanic ritual; everything but Hitler's brain. Very few people actually saw inside, and none of them talked about it much. Speculation, most of it. Still, what was actually there was, in its own way, worse.
         There's one manager, Louis, who's a pretty cool guy; you know, the good type of boss. He was one of the ones who got the door open. I asked him out for a drink after work about a week afterwards, tired of listening to the rumours. He waved his engagement ring at me solemnly. I told him not to flatter himself. He laughed, and agreed.
         It took a while to get the story out of him. At first, he tried to laugh it off, saying yeah, sure, pentacles and virgin sacrifices everywhere. He got uncomfortable when I pressed him, though. If I hadn't bought him a couple before I started in, I think he'd have held onto the secret.
         There was a pile of straw in the office, old and musty smelling, as if something had been sleeping in it. That was resting just beneath a wall of photographs. Pictures, to be specific, of girls from the office. Not pictures of them in the office, though. On the street, in the shops, catching the bus...I asked him if there were any pictures of the girls at home. He denied it, but from the colour his face turned, I think I know the real answer. It gets worse; pinned to each of them, with a normal, bog-standard drawing pin, was a lock of hair.
         I remembered how quietly he moved. How fast his hands were. The way his eyes glittered when he knew he'd scared you.
         Louis looked sick, and made me promise not to tell anyone. I haven't, until now.
         So, yeah. That's Mr Krinkle. In a way, I'd almost have preferred the jars of blood. Because I can't help but wonder; what the hell was he doing?
         I'm glad he's gone. But I wish like hell I knew where he was.