Higher Mythology (8 page)

“They’ll be with her, won’t they?” Maura asked bravely, looking up at Holl for support.

“Aye,” he said, distracted. If she’d seen him concentrating, she’d know what he’d been trying to do, and worry all the more. “They won’t leave her.”

“It is I who speak, old friend,” the Master said into the telephone receiver. All the Folk who could fit into the farmhouse kitchen were crowded around. “It vould be very good to see you at the veekend, should you care to visit. No, I call for another purpose. Two of our children have gone wandering. Have they come to you? My daughter’s child, and young Dola, her caretaker.” Holl watched with dismay as the small muscles in the Master’s cheek tightened. He was disappointed. “Vill you keep watch for them, and summon us vhen they appear? I thank you.” He cradled the phone and shook his head.

“The Library,” said Siobhan desperately.

“Do you want me to go?” Marcy asked.

“It vould take too long,” the Master said. “I will ask one who is closer by.” He put in another call. Everyone held their breath while the Master counted the rings until the receiver was picked up. “Mees Londen, I haf a favor to ask of you.”

Holl was waiting by the telephone when it rang, half an hour later.

“Nothing,” Diane said. “I went through the whole village with a lantern. I checked every house, and every level of the library stacks. They aren’t there. I left a note on the wall with my phone number if Dola goes down there. She’ll call you or me when she arrives.”

“Thank you,” Holl said.

“Dunn and Barry are going over the rest of the campus on foot. They’ll call you direct if they find her.” Diane’s voice was hesitant. “I’m sure they’re all right. Probably they’re just lost. Can I do anything else to help?”

“You are doing a great deal. Just keep your eyes open for them,” Holl said.

“Please keep me posted,” Diane begged. “I’d better go. She might be trying to call you.”

“That’s right,” Holl said, and hastily hung up. He waited, hoping that the telephone would ring as soon as he put down the receiver. He stood ready with his hand on the handset to snatch it up, waiting for the bell. His eyes met Maura’s. Her lips quivered slightly, then tears over-spilled her lashes and streamed down her cheeks. Holl opened his arms. She moved close and put her head on his shoulder, closing her arms tightly against his back. Throat tight, he clasped her to his chest, his lips touching her hair. He was glad for the feeling of being enfolded. The close contact gave him a sense of security which he sorely needed.

No time for subtlety. He let his mind clear to do a full finding. His sense tripped lightly out, touching all the places on the farm that Dola liked to frequent. It met the edges of the property, feeling gently along the forest paths, and into the small pockets of air under the greater tree roots that the children liked to hide in when they played their games. His sense ranged further and further afield, touching the minds of Big Folk drivers in their cars, the metal of which burned him slightly with a freezing hot touch. Dola and his baby were nowhere nearby. He knew in his heart that they lived, but he didn’t know where. Enoch burst into the kitchen. Holl, his concentration broken again, turned to his brother-in-law.

“We’ve been out in the field. Strange Big Folk were there today,” Enoch said, his distaste evident. His face was drawn and angry. He ran a dirty hand through his tousled black hair. “Their footprints and Dola’s overlap. Bracey did a sniffing, and he says there was a scuffle, and she left with them in a truck. He can’t figure out who they are. They drove through a puddle of that muck that those fertilizer people have been dumping on our land.”

“My baby’s been taken away by the Big Ones!” Siobhan burst into hysterical tears. Tay gathered her into his arms, and sympathetic friends surrounded her.

“Hush, woman,” Tay said hoarsely. “Screeching won’t bring them back. The girl will come back if she can. All we can do is continue to look.”

Siobhan’s panic was nothing compared to the agony Maura suddenly experienced as she realized her baby was gone. She began to cry, silently, with more force until she was gasping uncontrollably. Her father stepped forward and clapped a hard hand over her mouth and nose.

“Calm. Gain control. Your next breath vill be a calm one. Concentrate.” Over his hand, her eyes cleared, and she nodded. Her mother put an arm around her shoulder, and more friends and relatives gathered close to lend their comfort.

“We must call Keith Doyle,” Holl said, holding Maura close. Both their faces were pale and drawn. “He’ll know what to do.”

The Master nodded assent. Catra snatched up the phone and began to dial.

***

C
HAPTER
S
IX

“All rise,” Paul Meier said, and snickered. He turned to squint at Keith, his thin, curved nose wrinkling with good humor. “Great stuff, Keith. Pithy, and a neat play on words. The client might actually want to use it. I love the concept illo, too.” He held up the white rectangle of pasteboard to study. It showed a courtroom scene. There were no human beings in the illustration. All the participants in the trial were baked goods. The jury was twelve muffins in a two-row pan, and in the witness box was an angel cake with a piece of black veil on its top and a hanky folded into the front curve at one side. In the presiding seat surrounded by satin bunting was a yellow, black, and red packet labeled “Judge Yeast.” The caption, which Meier underlined again with a fingernail, was “All rise.”

“Angel food cakes don’t use yeast,” Sean Lopez pointed out, disdainfully. His black brows lowered together over his pugnaciously snubbed nose.

“So what?” Meier said cheerfully. He grinned, white teeth brilliant against his olive skin. “She’s only a witness. It makes a great image, Sean, and it makes you remember the product. If the client wants to change the angel food cake for a loaf of challah, he will. They always want to change something. We often leave something in deliberately for them to pull out.”

“You go to all the trouble to put in something you know the client will want to kill?” asked Dorothy Carver, tapping one smooth, walnut-hued cheek with the charcoal pencil she held between her elegantly manicured fingers.

“Whatever works,” Meier said. “You have to understand what you’re dealing with here, kids. It’s not an easy business. This is Hollywood East. There’s a lot of ad firms out there, and a finite amount of money. We’re here to make sure the most money possible falls into our pockets—that is to say PDQ Advertising’s pockets. The way we do that is not just through clever ad campaigns, but by making the client feel more special here than anywhere else.”

“You mean make him feel like he’s our only client?” suggested Brendan Martwick. Keith studied the pen he was rolling between his fingers. Brendan was one world-class brown-noser. He and Brendan had already decided they didn’t like each other. Keith believed in group efforts, and Martwick believed wholeheartedly in all for one and every man for himself. He was a snooty north-sider. If he had ever broken down and called Keith “common” or “vulgar,” Keith wouldn’t have been surprised. He sounded like a barely-updated character out of a Victorian novel, and dressed like a Polo mannequin. Whatever young and wealthy J. Bennett Throgmorton-Snipe III was doing taking an ill-paid internship when he could have lounged at a desk in Daddy’s stock brokerage, Keith couldn’t guess. Maybe someone told him advertising was easy. It wasn’t.

“You’ve got it,” Meier agreed. “Our time is flexible, as far as they’re concerned, because they’re paying. You’ve got to psych out their likes and dislikes, and avoid the buzzwords and shibboleths of their particular industry or product. Not easy sometimes, which is why we have a research department that I think rivals the FBI’s.” Keith and the others nodded, grinning. The creative director’s department was the second department the interns had been assigned to for orientation. Research had been the first. Keith had been impressed by the resources the ad company had at its fingertips.

“Will we really get our names on the presentation?” Keith asked, tapping the matte. “Dorothy did the artwork and lettering.”

“Yeah? Nice job, Dorothy,” Meier said, flashing a half grin at her. “I’ll have to check out the client’s feelings on having internship students working on his campaign—y’know, if inexperienced kids came up with this hot slogan and ad, why is he paying PDQ the big bucks for professional creative teams? I’ll get back to you. No promises, now.”

Keith and Dorothy nodded, and exchanged a quick glance. No matter if they got credit for the idea or not, this would be like really working for an ad agency. No experience was wasted, as Meier was fond of saying, but Keith would have been upset if Dorothy’s careful pen-work had gone unrecognized. She was really good. All he had done was blab out his idea, and she put it on paper—really brought the images to life.

A pity they couldn’t form a firm alliance. She was less concerned about him getting equal credit than he was on her behalf. The way the internship program was set up, the students were frequently pitted against one another, striving for the best assignments and the few advantages that would put them before the eyes of PDQ’s management to secure the single job offer at the end of the term PDQ promised each new crop of interns. Each of the current students were approximately equal in their qualifications. After fighting their way through four interviews and a written essay detailing why they’d be of value to PDQ’s program, there were no obvious standouts left among them. Chosen from among eight hundred applicants, half from state universities, half from private schools, each had some personal business background plus artistic or creative talent, as well as high grade point average, personality, and majors in business. They had had to self-promote themselves so fiercely it had become part of their everyday behavior. Keith was disappointed that even after each had secured one of the coveted spots they couldn’t seem to put aside the competition. Even he had to fight down suspicious feelings, and he didn’t like it.

Keith recognized there was nothing personal in the imposed animosity, but after studying the way things worked at PDQ, he saw how small, core groups of individuals could consistently come up with good, marketable ideas if they weren’t in constant fear of being undercut by the other people in the department. Everyone’s ego was on the line all the time. It would have been a more realistic experience if they’d been treated like a creative team.

He shifted his copy of
In Search of Excellence
further underneath his notebook where it couldn’t be noticed and decided to can his ideas on cooperation for the time being. The competition would never end. PDQ’s policy was to take the best student in any year and offer her or him a position in the company. That plum represented a five to ten year leap in one’s career. Instead of having to shine year after year in small companies, it would be possible to come straight to one of the majors.

PDQ would be a terrific job to have. Keith already knew he loved dreaming up campaigns, making up slogans that tickled people but had the heart of the product represented in a few words. If he got the job, so much the better for him, but his usual cooperative soul might cheat him out of it by making him push to have PDQ hire Dorothy or one of the others instead. Sean Lopez was the most jumpy of the group. He was nearing the end of his MBA program, and was actively seeking a position to slide into after graduation in June. Brendan already acted as if the job would be his by right. Maybe attitude would be a factor in the management’s eventual choice, but it was sure a pain in the neck for the duration.

As a supervisor, Meier was the best possible choice. He’d gotten his job from a good review during an internship just like theirs, and was actively on their side, a fact that made him different from 85% of the other people working in advertising in general. He warned them about the competitive angle, the cutthroat techniques, the downright theft of ideas and the destruction of careers. He kept bringing in phrases like “dog eat dog,” and “every man for himself.” Maybe it was the mark of a good ad campaigner to think in clichés. Keith respected the hard work he put in, maintaining his own job while shepherding and acting as father-confessor to the four interns.

At the very beginning, Meier had read them a lecture. “I don’t care where you’re from, what kind of background you’ve got, who your daddy knows. This is another world. Nothing’s real here; we make our own reality. If it looks like someone’s ripping you off, it’s nothing personal. The only job we have is to impress the client first, then all of that client’s customers with the sheer fabulousness of that client’s product or service. If somebody has to use your ideas to do it, he probably will. Someone might actually come up with an idea that sounds exactly like yours. It’s possible; there’s only so many ideas out there. There’s plenty of ego-tripping here. Ignore it. There’s a lot of politically incorrect ‘isms.’ Ignore them, do your job, and don’t get lost in the office politics. Like I said, in the end none of it’s real. It doesn’t affect you after you go home.

“This is the most rotten business in the world. You can’t trust anyone. No one gives you credit for your work or your ideas. Your suggestions get ignored, then you get blamed when things are screwed up because no one paid attention to your recommendations. Everything costs money. You work late hours for months on a project that’s canceled without notice. And the client is never happy with anything you do. Other than that, it’s a great job. I want you to know that.”

Brendan was still muttering about Judge Yeast. Meier shuffled a handful of papers on the table, and cleared his throat. Martwick instantly turned a respectful and attentive face toward him. Keith resisted the urge to kick him under the table.

“Okay,” Meier said. “I’m going to throw out some product names and concepts. Some of them are real, some aren’t. Each of you take a few. I want some creative thinking about these by tomorrow. No need to knock yourself out on the artwork yet, Dorothy,” he nodded at the young woman, “unless that’s the way you think best. We’ll brainstorm on all of them over the next few days. Not everyone will come up a winner, so I don’t want anybody shooting themselves if they don’t get the next Clio. We need all the grist we can get, and out of that we may get some goodies. Got that?”

“Yes sir,” Sean muttered, flipping open his notebook.

“Ready,” Keith said. Meier shot him a look full of humor. Keith grinned back. He felt that he and Meier had ‘clicked,’ getting along instantly from day one, but he understood that there could be no favoritism shown. Still, win or lose, Keith promised himself he’d look Meier up for lunch after the internship was over. They could be good friends.

Meier showed them stat sheets and photographs of a new luxury car, details about a new breakfast cereal, a new soft drink, ground plans for a themed amusement park currently under construction, “and just for the hell of it, I’m throwing in some ordinary, everyday items: flower pots, potatoes, uh, brown paper bags, and carrots. Let’s see if you can give me some new thoughts on them, too. Pick one.”

“Potatoes,” Keith said quickly.

“Oh, I’ll take carrots,” Dorothy said. “They’re healthy!”

“Brown paper bags,” Sean said.

“That leaves flower pots,” Brendan said, with an eternally world-weary air. “I can handle it.”

“I’m sure you can,” Meier said without expression, jotting down names next to the categories. “Okay, folks, that’s all. See you tomorrow. Don’t forget to clean up in here, okay?”

“Why potatoes?” Sean asked Keith on the way out after they’d taken their coffee cups back to the employee dining room. “Why’d you look so excited about that?”

“Inspiration,” Keith said, grinning, tapping the side of his skull with a forefinger. “You know how much vitamin C there is in your average potato? You could start your day with a big helping of potatoes with C. Sunrise Spuds,” he said, painting an imaginary banner on the sky. “They’re not just for dinner anymore.”

Sean laughed. “You’re nuts.”

“The trouble with you,” Keith said, “is that you have to learn to let your hair down more.”

“The trouble with you,” Brendan said disdainfully, picking up his briefcase, “is that your hair is already hanging around your knees.”

Keith gave him a big smile as he slipped into the only space left in a crowded elevator, and watched Brendan’s annoyed expression narrow and vanish between the closing doors.

Keith made the commuter trip home drumming on the seat between his knees, smiling at passersby who met his eyes. He drove home from the station with all the windows of his old, dark blue Mustang wide open to let the wind cool him down while inspiration cooked. If the competitiveness didn’t kill them first, there were opportunities galore for creativity and experimentation at PDQ. While Keith’s tensed muscles wound down, his brain was spinning on product ideas. Maybe some of them were way out, but that was half the fun.

In a way, being an intern was better than working for the company, because they could play around with suggestions, without the possibility of being fired untimely if the ideas turned out to be clunkers or money pits. Keith had purposely let the others pass on some of the silly-sounding names so he could have them. He let Brendan take Rad Sportswear in exchange for Appalachi-Cola. None of the others wanted a soft drink with such a weird name, and they couldn’t understand why Keith’s eyes gleamed at the sound of it. He could picture more scope for Appalachi-Cola. It suggested wonderful images to him.

“As refreshing as a Florida vacation,” he murmured to himself, peering out over the steering wheel at the usual afternoon backup. Sounded good to him. Chicago in September was steamy and hot without the promise of white sand beaches to relieve the gasping atmospheric inversion. On a legal pad splayed out on the passenger seat, Keith swerved through the lanes of traffic making notes. Who knew? Maybe one of his ideas would be a winner, and he’d have the joy of seeing a campaign designed around it.

Through the kitchen curtains, he could see his mother taking something out of the refrigerator. He grinned. With an audibly gusty sigh, he threw open the door. His mother turned, wide-eyed, as he staggered in, wrenching his tie loose from his throat with a haggard hand and plopped down in a chair, limbs splayed limply.

“Very dramatic,” his mother said ironically, applauding. “You win the Academy Award for best performance by an actor getting home from work. Please don’t leave your briefcase in the door, honey.” She hooked up the slim leather case with one finger and extended it to him.

“Sorry, Mom,” Keith said, springing up like a Jack-in-the-box for a kiss on the cheek. His mother eyed him.

“In spite of the Sarah Bernhardt routine, you do look tired,” Mrs. Doyle said, handing over the case. “Have a good day?”