The Blogosphere (Part II)

The Intro

Part I Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII Part VIII

Just wait ‘til I see Boss when I get back to the office. That slimy bastard Nash is going to be in BIG trouble. I do the accounts, so I know for certain that Boss gave Nash €2,000 to pay for me to stay here for one night.
One poxy night, two grand? I’d say you could buy the place for less than that! I was expecting a palace of some sort, not this rundown ramshackle converted barn. It’s a dump. A horrible, creepy, stinking, isolated, ‘lift that doesn’t even work’ kind of dump. It doesn’t look a bit like the picture Nash showed me on the computer. Not a bit. And it couldn’t have cost two grand.
-Two Euros maybe, but not two fuckin’ grand.

But it was really Boss who talked me into doing this ‘Special Job’, not Nash. I’d do anything for Boss. I’m his number one y’know? His right-hand man. Three years now.  Head honcho. Numero Uno.
-“It’ll do you the world of good Olly”, he said to me. “Get a bit of fresh air in yer lungs.”
He paused, then came closer. He cupped his hands between his mouth and my ear and shouted slowly, “Peace…And….Qui…..Et!” –Nearly deafened me! He’s dead funny sometimes, Boss is.

Now Boss knows me quite well. He knows I have a wife, and he knows we have four kids. He knows that my Father-In-Law lives with us. He knows we have two dogs that don’t get along well with each other.
Boss also knows that my two favourite companions are Mr. Peace and Mr. Quiet. He knows I’m going to jump at the chance.

Normally, I would have, right there and then, but Nash was in the room. It was more important that I look hard in front of that lick-arse.

“You’ll have to tell me more than that Boss……please?” I said. “Is there any eh,..details?”

How I hate that fucker Nash. Six weeks ago, I didn’t even know him, nowadays he seems to be hanging around with Boss nearly as much as me. No-one’s ever shot up through the ranks like that before, but even he’d have to admit that he had a fair bit of luck on his way. Six of our best lads got caught in the middle of robbing a bank a couple of weeks back, and Hunter, the old No.2 is gone missing since ten days ago. Nash is only filling in for Hunter, ‘til he gets back. -Any day now. Just getting his head together.

Nash was only here to set up the computer, ‘cos Boss and me are no good at that sort of thing. “You don’t have to know how to run a computer to be able to run a website”, Boss used to say. I used to say it too, if he wasn’t around.

This was taking ages. “Are you sure you know what you’re doing Nash?” I said, and I looked over at Boss to see his reaction. Nash didn’t answer me. Boss just kept staring out the window. I went back to looking at the posters on the wall.

Now that there is one of the big differences between me and Nash. I could sit here staring at those posters, all-day-long, and I still wouldn’t get an erection. I’ve seen them so many times by now that they just don’t do anything for me anymore. Seriously. Not even a twitch. Nothing.
-Look at him though, or better still, try NOT to look at him! That constant bulge in the front of his trousers is just fuckin’ embarrassing at this stage. And he has to be on Viagra too, because it never, and I mean never, goes down.

Even Boss slags him over it, all the time. “You keep that gun in your pocket”, he’s always saying. -I told you he was funny. Well actually, that one stopped being funny a good while ago, but he still says it. Just to keep Nash in his place I suppose.

“Ready Boss”, said Nash eventually.
I was expecting Boss to take over at this point, but he just kept on looking out the window.
“Carry on”, he said, waving his hand behind him, like he’d just farted in a lift accompanied by his wife on his left, and his best mate on his right.

Nash stood up from behind Boss’s desk, and swung the laptop ‘round so it faced me. “Here is a picture of the guest house where you’ll be staying”, he said.
“Would it not have been quicker to nip down and take a photo?” I asked, maybe a little bit too loudly.
-No reaction from Boss. Still looking out the window.
“One of our members”, continued Nash, “ who also just happens to be our most popular and prolific contributor sent me an e-mail last week. He has arthritis.”

“Wants you to toss him off, does he?” I asked.

“This means he can no longer use his hands. If he can’t use his hands, he can’t shoot anything.”

“So fuck him then”, I said. “We don’t need him. We have millions of members all over the World.”

Nash sat on the desk. I expected Boss to turn around and give him a smack in the head for doing that, ‘cos that’s what I got the time I nearly did it. He continued.
“This ‘Uncle Jack’ is too important to us. He has sent in 22% of our total content, and holds nine of the places in our top ten most popular section. We need stuff from his place to keep our site from going under. If ‘Uncle Jack’ can’t do it anymore, we have to send someone down there to do it for us.”
He went on and on for ages like this. I was getting sick of it, so I interrupted him.

“So the gist of it is that I go to this Guest House, shoot some stuff, and bring it back. I won’t need a drill or a torch. Is that it?”
“Eh, that’s about the sum of it, in a nutshell. The summarised version.”
I hate him so much the way he repeats everything like that. I really, really hate him.

Boss turned around at last, and I wished the floor would open up and swallow me. There I was, Olly Garvey, in a room with two other men. One of them had a raging hard-on, and the other one was crying.

I was looking at the floor at the time, but I noticed Boss putting his hand into his trouser pocket.
“Here you go Olly, a belated Birthday present”, he said.
He held out a phone. As I took it from him, I could see the tears welling up again in his eyes.
“Leave your old one here”, he said. “Peace and quiet. Peace, and quiet.”

It’s great to have such a caring Boss, but I’d prefer if he wasn’t crying. Don’t get me wrong, I like being in Boss’s office. It was just that day, with the two of them in the state they were in, I just wanted to get out ASAP, so I grabbed the phone, left my old one there, and ran.

Still, I’d swap that room for this horrible kip any day. ‘Dark Hill Chambers’ –I must’ve misheard it the first time. I thought it was named after some Porn Star. I was calling it ‘Dark Hills Chambers’ all the time, until I saw that signpost out on the main road.

Makes me feel a bit stupid now, considering how apt a name it is. It’s definitely dark, it’s at the top of the steepest hill this side of a cliff, and eh, chambers? Well it is a Guest house. More like a prison if you ask me.

My ‘chamber’ is number 31. Oddly enough, I just turned 31 last Thursday. At first I thought that maybe Nash had done this on purpose, but then I remembered who he was. He wouldn’t have gone to that much bother, not for me anyway.

The whole place stinks. I’m so glad I’m only here to work. How anybody could ever sleep here is beyond me. I saw this couple when I arrived here, and you won’t believe this; They had a little child with them!
Number One; You should NOT have a little child with you in a place like this.
Number Two; That child is too old to have a Teddy Bear.
-Totally unsuitable parents, they should be locked up.

The time is dragging. I took out the phone Boss gave me. I decided to send him a text message, just to let him know I was safe and sound. The buttons didn’t work properly like my old phone, so I gave up and tried to ring him instead. No numbers in the phone! How could I be so stupid? Useless phone. Only good for telling the time.

11:30. I can hear shouting from one of the other ‘chambers’. I’ll never understand some people. This guy is shouting his head off, so loudly that I can hear him in my room. And what is he shouting about? He’s shouting about the noise! “You ARE the fuckin’ noise!” I felt like telling him.

I got up off the bed, switched off my light, and took a peek out the door. I want to see who’s doing the shouting. No sense in picking a fight with some big cunt now, is there? I’m keeping me mouth shut ‘til I see him.

A few seconds later, the door two ‘chambers’ down opened. I took a deep breath, so as I’d be ready to let a roar at Mr. Shouty.  Out stepped the kid with the Teddy Bear. I banged me head jumping back into the room, and shut the door quietly. That was a close one.

Time to get ready for work. I needed to be in position before the other guests came up to their ‘chambers’ from the Bar down below. The Bar had it’s own toilet, but the one I was working was the upstairs one, next to the entrance into the attic.

I have me black clothes on, I have me camcorder, I have spare batteries and tapes, and I have loads of chewing-gum. Chewing-gum is very important on a mission like this. I’ll tell you why later. I wasn’t wearing any shoes.

This is the bit I was dreading, the attic. It was the weirdest setup I’d ever seen. There was a rope dangling down from it’s centre, and no other way to get up there. The rope was too thick to get your hand around, but it had to be done, so I grabbed it with both hands. What happened next was the really weird bit. As I held the rope, it pulled me up. Once in the attic, I only had to step to the side. Don’t ask me how it worked. My knowledge of rope technology is minimal.

I took out the camcorder to have a look around. Nash had shown me how to use the ‘Night-Vision’ button to see in the dark.

I’ve been in plenty of attics in my time. They’re all the same. A water tank, and a load of boxes and bags strewn around the hatch. But this one was different. It was tidy,  and strangest of all, there was no dust. It was clean. There were loads of boxes alright, but they were all stacked neatly around the sides. Over to one side stood a huge wardrobe. God knows how they got it up here through that hatch I thought to myself, but all that didn’t matter. I had work to do.

I got into position. True to ‘Uncle Jack’s word, there was indeed a hole already bored into the floor of the attic/ceiling of the toilet. I set the camera in position, and looked at the screen. He was right about that too, -You did get a better ‘exposure’ by pointing the camera at the mirror, rather than at the toilet itself. Fair play to ‘Uncle Jack’. If I ever meet the man, I’ll buy him a pint. This was a deadly little set-up, and it would’ve been a terrible shame to let it go idle. Someone give that man a medal.

Hold on a minute, I hear footsteps! They’re coming this way. Not too heavy either, so it’s probably a girl. Jackpot! I held one finger on the ‘Night-Vision’ button, and my thumb on the ‘Record’ button. My eyes were fixed on the screen. “If the light goes on, press the ‘Night-Vision’ button. If it’s a girl, press ‘Record’” –easy. Any fool could do it.

The light went on, I pressed ‘Record’. The screen went blank. I panicked. Fuck! I pressed‘Night-Vision’. -Damn! It was that little kid with the Teddy Bear again. I’ve a good mind to report that kid’s parents, letting a young child wander about alone in a place like this. Anything could happen. Ought to be locked up, the parents and the child!

For the best part of an hour, nothing more happened. I was getting ‘pins and needles’ from lying in the same position for so long, so I got up to have a stretch. If I heard anyone coming, I could easily get back into position in time, so I decided to have a better look around. Using the  camera for my eyes, I had a closer look at the boxes. They were all sealed tight, but I noticed something peculiar about them. Every single one of them was upside-down, and they all had the same number stencilled on their side. 531\108. What could it possibly mean?

I went towards the wardrobe. I opened the door and looked inside. Clothes. Green clothes. I was getting really sick of green at this stage. I pushed the clothes over to one side. There was something behind them, something large and dark. I couldn’t see it properly, so I reached in to touch it.

I fuckin’ jumped when I felt it. It was hairy. I wasn’t expecting that, and I let the camcorder fall. Damn!
I stepped back, and just stood there for about five minutes, staring into the black darkness.

What the fuck was that? I was scared shitless to go back near that hairy thing, but not as scared as I was of what Boss was going to do to me if I came back without the camcorder. I did the only thing I could do, which was an impression of an extra in ‘The Evil Dead’. With my arms stretched out in front of me, I headed back to where I thought the wardrobe was.

I must’ve been facing the wrong way. It was taking far too long. I could very easily fall back down that hatch if I didn’t stop being stupid. Better to wait for someone, anyone, to turn on the light. Then I’ll find the hatch, then I’ll find the wardrobe, then I’ll find the camcorder, then I’ll find my way out of this place, and never come back. Fuck you, ‘Uncle Jack’!

This is taking too long. Don’t they ever take a piss in this place? What is wrong with these fu……

WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? Somebody, or something has just grabbed my arm. This is not right.

“Let go my ar….. HEY! STOP SQUEEZING MY FUCKIN’ ARM!!! Is that you ‘Uncle Jack’? This is Olly, from Vixen Voyeurs. Stop squeezing my fuckin’  ar…
AAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!
FUCK YOU NASH!!!!!!
NO! NO! NOT ME BALLS!!!
AAARRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHH!!!!!!!