moon_custafer: neon cat mask (Default)
The thought crossed my mind that this had to be some kind of elaborate parody – but mailing out a beautifully-produced catalogue to random people seemed a lot of trouble to go to just to get a laugh. I picked up the Plein-air Entertainments catalogue again and studied the blasted heath beyond an artful grouping of whitewashed folding deck chairs. It didn’t look like a photoshop job. Someone had scouted this location and photographed the composition in deep focus.

“Petal?” Tom, my boss, looked anxiously around the doorframe. “Sorry to interrupt your lunch. Did I leave the invoices with you?”
“I filed them. Janice should have them now. Where did these catalogues come from?”
“Aren’t they beautiful? Kitty brought them in.” That was a relief, and a bit of a disappointment. I’d begun to suspect they’d materialized in the lunchroom of their own accord. “She says they arrived in her daughter’s mailbox, addressed to the previous tenant.” Case re-opened.
“Who was the previous tenant, a house-stager?”
“No idea. I’m going on a coffee run – what can I get you?”
“Medium double-double, thanks.” He noted this down on his phone.
“I shouldn’t be more than fifteen minutes. Don’t burn the place down while I’m gone, ok?” Tom says this sort of stuff all the time, but the catalogues had put me in an odd mood and the joke seemed ominous. On my way back from lunch, I stopped by Kitty’s desk.
“I was looking at the catalogues you brought in. They’re really something, aren’t they?”
“They surely are. Just showed up on my daughter’s doorstep in a black plastic wrapper. She was almost afraid to open the package at first, thought it might be pornography,” she giggled. “Later she gave them over to me and I brought them here. Thought they might interest people.”
“So who were they addressed to? Tom said the previous tenant.”
“Hand on, I’ve still got the wrapper.” She fished it out of the wastepaper bin beneath her desk. “Hum: ‘John Q. Male.’”
“ ‘Junk Mail,’ in other words. That’s got to be a made-up name. Maybe it’s the new ‘Occupant.’” I left her chuckling and wandered back to my desk, where I buried myself in sales figures.
“Coffee for you, ma’am,” Tom interrupted a few minutes later, adding jovially, “Cubicles all still standing, I see. Good work.”
“An arsonist came around, but I told him we couldn’t afford his services this week.”

I didn’t think of the catalogues again until that evening, well, early the next morning, really. I snapped out of a dream of desolate low hills and thought: a catalogue has to have a mailing address on the ordering page. I’ll look in the back when I go in tomorrow. I turned over and tried to go back to sleep, but couldn’t. Finally I got up and decided to see if H. H. Furnishings had a website.
They did. It was picture-heavy, of course, and had irritating ambient music that started playing automatically when you opened the page -- I looked around for a way to turn it off, and finally just gave up and muted my speakers -- but it was mercifully low on flash animations. Eventually I found the “Contact Us” button and clicked it, wondering if there’d be a street address or just an email link.

huttonholmesfurnltd@hl.com

No street address or phone number, but at least I now had a full name. I tried a map search for “Hutton Holmes Furnishings, Ltd.,” and got 1158 Safari Crescent, Earth City, OH. I went down to street level, and by clicking from camera-view to camera-view, took a virtual stroll past the store. It seemed an ordinary warehouse in an ordinary industrial park. There was a parking lot out front with several cars in it. There was even a customer, or an employee, captured by the camera in the act of walking out the front door of Hutton Holmes’s showroom, but of course her face had been blurred to protect her identity. She wore a grey wool coat but no hat, and I guessed that the pictures must have been taken on a mild winter’s day.

By now it was only an hour until I had to get up anyway, so I went back into the H.H.com site and looked around at the pictures. Most of them I recognized from the Interieure catalogue, but there was a section of children’s furnishing that was new to me. It was in the same style as the rest, though with a hint of pastel colouring. My eye lit on a strange S-shaped couch in a playroom: “Encourages pliability,” said the copy. On the wall of a bathroom dressed with creepily medical-looking enameled cabinetry hung a large, framed black-and-white photograph. It was, I was certain, the same overgrown garden from the Plein-air Entertainments, but at a much earlier date: everything was neatly manicured, and two women in 1920s dress were taking tea in the foreground. They were the first human beings I’d seen in an H.H., Ltd. Catalogue, and I zoomed in as far as the screen resolution would let me.

They wore long strings of beads and cloche hats. One was turned to the camera, but her face was shadowed except for a smiling mouth. The other had her head thrown back, laughing in profile at something. She had the elongated Ahkenaten profile and tilted nose I’d seen in fashion sketches of the era, and which I’d always assumed to be artistic invention.

I cursed as I noticed the time in the corner of the screen. Of course – I’d muted the alarm clock along with the stupid background music. Closing the laptop, I showered and dressed for work.
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