"A whole five minutes?" Tom muttered, almost inaudibly. "Whatever shall I do with my time?"
The Manager swung his hands apart and then together in loud clap, as he always did to change the subject. "By the way, your mother called. She said to call her back immediately."
"When did she call?"
The Manager leveled a mischievous stare at Tom and quoted the following: "'He tampered in God's domain!'"
"But that was seventy minutes ago!" The closing line, in fact, of "Bride of the Monster". Woodian dialog had become part of Tom's internal clock. "Why didn't you say anything?"
"I had to give Neoldner a hand threading 'Plan 9', and I forgot all about it. Sorry!"
Tom heard Criswell begin his parting words, figured to hell with it, and abandoned his post in order to use the phone in the employee's lounge. It had been a storage room until just recently, when the Manager had redecorated it with a host of kitschy sale items from Osco. Good intentions, perhaps, but the room was only big enough for two people to begin with, and a hypothetical third could only find space through acts of physical intimacy which would have been rendered impossible by the decor. He dialed home and his mother answered immediately, showering him with motherly affection and gratitude that he was safe and babbling on about some catastrophe that had just occurred.
"What, mom? Mom, what?! Mom! What?!" Tom repeated his request in several permutations until he finally received the coherent message that had so shaken his mother: his cousin Kurt had gone missing.
Tom pondered this for a moment.
"And…?"