1600 Myopia: I Mistook the SCP Monsters for the Spoiled Billionaires novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Hired Blind
Fired and evicted, Winnie interviews for a $9,000-a-week job with the Thornwick heirs; a fleeing assistant breaks her glasses, and blind she orders the tall man in the wet coat to take it off at the table.
The recruiter said the job paid nine thousand dollars a week, and I asked if she meant a month.
She did not mean a month.
I had been fired at nine that morning from a pharmacy counter.
I had been evicted at noon, with my sister's trophies in a laundry basket on the curb.
At two o'clock I was sitting in a marble hall in a borrowed blazer, holding a résumé with a coffee ring on it.
The house was called Thornwick Hall, and the job was assistant to the Thornwick heirs.
The recruiter had warned me they were difficult.
I told her I had worked retail for eight years, and difficult was my native language.
My name is Winnie Garrick, and I have a prescription of minus sixteen in both eyes.
People hear sixteen hundred degrees and think I'm exaggerating.
Without my glasses, a face is a pink smudge and a car is a loud rumor.
With them, I'm a normal woman with thick lenses and a normal amount of panic.
So when a woman came tearing down the grand staircase, I saw only a streak of gray suit and heard the screaming.
"Don't go in there!" she shrieked at me. "He looks at you!"
She hit me with her shoulder at a full run.
My glasses flew off my face and hit the marble.
Something crunched under her heel as she fled out the front door.
I got down on my knees and patted the floor.
The left lens had a crack through it.
The right lens was gone completely.
I put the frame on anyway, and the world became a bowl of soup.
"Miss Garrick," said a smooth voice somewhere above me. "I'm so sorry about the last assistant."
A man in a navy suit was a blue-and-silver blur at my elbow.
He said he was Mr. Roake, the Director of the Trust, and he'd be taking me up himself.
"What happened to her?" I asked.
"She was nervous," he said. "The heirs are particular."
I thought about nine thousand dollars a week.
I thought about my sister Pippa, fourteen, asleep in a dorm bed that I could not pay for.
"I can see well enough," I lied.
He seemed delighted to hear it.
He led me down a long hall where every lamp I passed flickered, and I assumed the wiring was old.
The dining room was enormous, and the table was a long brown stripe with three shapes at the far end of it.
One was a glitter, like someone had thrown a disco ball into a jacket.
One was a pale blue shimmer, wet and bright.
And one was a column of black, taller than a door, with long dark hair that seemed to drip onto the table.
The black one was sitting very, very still.
"The Thornwick heirs," Mr. Roake said. "Mr. Ambrose Thornwick, the eldest, will conduct your interview."
He left, and the door shut behind me.
Nobody spoke.
The dripping sound went on.
I could feel the black shape looking at me, though I couldn't have said how.
"Good afternoon," I said, to the nearest blur. "I'm Winnie."
The black one tilted his head, and the temperature dropped enough that I saw my breath.
"You are not afraid," a voice said.
It was low, and it came from somewhere under the floor.
"Of what?" I asked. "You're a man in a coat."
The glitter made a sound like a squeak.
"Is that real fur?" I said, squinting. "Because it's soaked through, and it's on a chair that I'd guess costs more than my life."
"It is not fur."
"It's dripping on the table, sir."
"It does that."
"Then take it off," I said. "Nobody wears a wet coat to a meal. Your mother would be ashamed."
The whole room went silent, and I knew I'd gone too far, and then I knew I didn't care.
I had been fired and evicted that day.
A rich man in a soggy coat was not going to be the thing that broke me.
"Take it off," I said again. "Then we can talk about your schedule."
The black shape rose from the chair, and it kept rising.
The ceiling light above us popped, and then the next lamp popped, and then the whole house went out in a long falling chain.
I stood in total dark with a cold wet hand closing around my wrist, gentle as a collar.
"Miss Garrick," Ambrose Thornwick said, close to my ear. "Seven assistants have stood where you are standing, and not one of them has ever looked at me and stayed."
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