How To Unlock Your Leadership Potential (By Surrendering To Ancient & Eldritch Powers)

Drew had no idea when the magic ring had first come to be part of MoneyMorphers’ inventory, nor who had brought the item in, nor what they had been traded for it, and no one else he asked at the sad little store seemed to care, much less know. This was hardly surprising. Drew had been working at MoneyMorphers for almost eleven months, which accorded him some sort of veteran status, if no actual seniority, authority or respect. If there was anyone within the whole shabby operation who might have been able to shed light on its dealings, then it was Drew himself. And – as previously stated – he had no idea.

Drew had worked under four different managers in the eleven months he’d been at MoneyMorphers. Three of them had been called Jason and all four of them had been utter cunts. Drew himself had applied for the manager role twice, but had heard nothing back either time. When, on the second occasion, he’d pressed his bosses for some kind of feedback, they’d told him they didn’t feel he was really Management Material; he lacked ambition, they said, and imagination. After that, he’d decided that he wouldn’t try for promotion again. Now they’d installed Cunt Jason III, some twelve years Drew’s junior, who was essentially a cloud of Lynx, Red Bull and casual misogyny, and whose only palpable imagination was for petty meanness, and in that one area he could get creative. He was, Drew had figured, the worst of the Jasons. Bro-model Jason had been overbearing and over-familiar, and Gordon Gecko wannabe Jason had been odiously ostentatious and gauche, but Jason III was the first of the managers to really go out of his way to make Drew’s already shitty job even shittier. The cruddiest shift patterns, the most demoralising duties, an endless barrage of niggling criticism, a constant campaign of insidious undermining of self-worth.

Still, Drew figured. It ultimately wouldn’t matter. Nothing here mattered. Jason No. 3 would fuck off somewhere else and continue his reign of small-minded terror there. He’d leave, just like all the others: everyone he’d worked with in that long, barren eleven months, the good and the bad. Ella had gone off to uni. Anooni had moved back to Zimbabwe. Keith the Racist had hit pensionable age. Nerys had gone on maternity leave. One of the Jasons had got his own Subway franchise. Ewan’s inheritance had come through. Bev’s personal injury claim had paid out. Minty had finally gotten banged up for forging disabled parking badges. Geoff had killed himself. Everyone was getting out, except Drew. Even he wasn’t sure what was keeping him here. It certainly wasn’t the money or job satisfaction, but MoneyMorphers’ gravity appeared to have a particular hold on him, and he didn’t seem able to reach escape velocity. Maybe it was just the fear he felt at the prospect of joblessness: the loss of the meagre lifestyle he currently - for wont of a better word - enjoyed; eviction from his small flat over the chip shop; repossession of stuff he didn’t really need, but had nonetheless taken out credit for. Whatever the reason, Drew was the longest-serving employee at the company, when the existence of the magic ring came to light.

The ring in question was one of thirty-six rings, organised into one of those square display boxes, kept under a glass counter with the rest of the pawned jewellery. It was neither the largest nor most eye-catching of the rings; in fact, it was a singularly plain band of dull metal, without any stone, engraving or other adornment. There was nothing noteworthy about it, nothing to attract or intrigue, and yet Drew had somehow felt the ring reaching out from its place among all the hocked Argos zircons and filmy mood-stones.

Drew was alone in the store when it happened. Jason had loudly announced he was hitting the gym before heading out the door in skinny jeans and polyester shirt with no sports bag. The new part-timer, Megan, had gone on lunch. There was only the distantly scratchy sound of a second-hand TV playing ads at the other side of the shop floor to intrude on Drew’s non-thoughts as he idly thumbed his smartphone. That was when he first became aware of it, of something calling out to him in an undeniable voice that was not a voice at all, not really, but more like an itch in the back of his brain, a fizzing behind his eyeballs, like the phantom burnt toast smell that prophesies a stroke. At first he hadn’t realised – not consciously – that he was locking his smartphone and pocketing it, shambling groggily in the direction of the jewellery cabinet. For a while, he simply stood, his head stooped and dimly buzzing to this strange and intrusive frequency, not even really registering the cashed-in trinkets on show underneath the smudged and smeary glass. And then Drew happened to glance upon the magic ring. He knew immediately that it was this ring that was causing all this weirdness; just how it felt to look at it was enough. He felt himself being squeakily pulled and twisted by invisible forces like some great balloon animal, and he was aware of a kind of loud and tuneless chiming in his ears and a scent in the air that could best be described as “purple and shiny”. He shook his head and swallowed hard to clear his ear canals, adding his own handprint to the sticky multitude that already befouled the countertop, as he braced himself through the dizziness. He came to realise that his other hand had unclipped from his belt hoop the carabiner of MoneyMorphers keys entrusted to him, including the one to this cabinet.

The key stuttered against the lock as Drew’s hands shakily guided it in. Once he’d lifted the counter lid, the sensations he was experiencing intensified further, as though the ring was calling to him more urgently, more impatiently. He snatched his fingers back when his first touch discovered the ring to be oddly warm and wet-feeling. But he tried again. He couldn't help himself. The metal of the ring thrummed as he held it. It was indeed quite warm and it had an oily patina that didn’t seem to rub off when Drew buffed it on his tee shirt. In the display box, the ring had appeared small – a slim lady’s sizing – but Drew was muzzily surprised to find that it slipped easily onto his own finger without him knowingly manoeuvring it there. Once on, the ring seemed to constrict again possessively around Drew’s finger, causing him to yell, startled.

His whole hand erupted into sudden, dirty orange flames that buzzed unpleasantly as they crawled against his skin like houseflies, but didn’t burn him. Flailing, he made some accidental gesture towards an acoustic guitar forsaken by some broke musician, and the fretboard started to lengthen and warp, developing twigs from which green leaves began to unfurl. His flapping hand of fire wrought some spell that made an obsolete Playstation hatch into a scurrying mass of small crystalline spiders. An inadvertent flick of Drew’s wrist caused an exercise bike to buck free of its stand and cycle itself at high velocity into a wire rack of DVDs which – upon impact – all turned instantly into Blu-Rays. His hand still aglow with arcane fire, another chance gesticulation made a full set of biker leathers come to life and start dry-humping a set of scuba gear squeakily on a tanning bed, as the goggles fogged up and the tanning lamps lit up in a deep dirty red.

Drew’s better instincts prevailed and he pulled the ring off of his finger, even as he felt it constricting like a sphincter, resisting its removal. Once digitless, the ring’s power seemingly abated. The glassy spiders – mid-scuttle – disintegrated into translucent sand. The exercise bike stopped spinning its wheels. The leathers and wetsuit slumped mid-coitus, inanimate once more. Drew’s hand was no longer aflame.

He embedded the ring back in the slotted velvet cushioning of the box and locked the box away again in the glass cabinet. His heart rate gradually slowed down until he stopped worrying his heart was actually going to explode. He could still feel the presence of the ring, its potential perhaps, pulling at him even now, but he knew he wasn’t ready to have that kind of power at his fingertips.

Drew tidied up as best he could after the unexpectedly, explosively magical occurrence, and he tried to ignore the mystical pull of the ring. He plugged in headphones and attempted to drown it out with his Spotify daily mix. It sort of worked. In the end, the ring’s urgent siren song was reduced to just another itchy, hungry, needy little voice among the many that scratched and bickered away in Drew’s brain.

He separated the biker leathers and scuba gear, noticing that they felt rather sticky. He wiped down the tanning bed. He managed to balance the exercise bike back on its stand, so it was more or less stable, so long as nobody touched it or stood too close to it. He swept up the colourless, chemical-smelling sand that was all that remained of the spiders and agonised for a while over which bin to dispose of them into before dumping it into general waste; he replaced the old PS1 with one of the sixteen identical consoles out back. No one would notice the stock discrepancy. Nobody would care. He moved the guitar with its newly-sprouted branches and leaves from the musical instruments section and put it over with the ornaments, trinkets, and what he had once heard a previous Jason somewhat grandiosely refer to as “objets d’art”. There wasn’t a whole lot he could do about the Blu-Rays.

Megan came back from break. Drew asked her about the ring: had she been on shift when it had been traded in; had she noticed it in the cabinet until today; did she notice anything usual about it now? Megan looked first confused, then uncomfortable, answering, “No,” to each question, and finally retreating to the other side of the shop and scrolling through Instagram in guarded silence. Jason came back “from the gym” with a grease-stained paper bag of off-brand fried chicken and – by Drew’s count – his third smartphone upgrade in the two and a half months he’d been working here.

Jason was unpacking his new toy, unwinding cables and plugging it all in, when Drew tried to ask him about the ring. Jason ignored him at first, immersed in the task at hand, and – when Drew repeated the questions – Jason responded by yelling impatiently, ‘What the fuck do you care, or are you some kind of gay fucking antique jewellery twat now?’ He then spent the remainder of the afternoon encouraging Megan to join him in calling Drew “Ringpiece”. Drew had been half-heartedly grateful that she’d appeared more disgusted than amused in the face of Jason’s distinctive brand of mentoring. Not that it mattered. The girl wouldn’t stick around long. She’d go, too. They both would, like everyone else.

Over the coming weeks, Drew mostly worked at ignoring the ring as it continued to tug at him. He could feel it, desperate, pleading, menacing, seductive, until his skull echoed with its promises, threats and entreaties. He kept his ears jammed with ‘phones as much as he could; he found that thrash metal, acid house and ‘80s pop were the most effective genres for drowning out the ring, and his personalised playlists became an incongruous collision of these conflicting styles, with Box Energy segueing into Raining Blood segueing into 99 Luftballons.

Drew tried to sell the ring to the few customers who came in, but no one was interested. No one except for Drew seemed to recognise anything out of the ordinary about the item, and even the couple who came in looking to purchase two wedding rings on a budget rejected it in favour of one fashioned out of clear acrylic with a giant pink daisy set into it, and another stamped out of a lump of stainless steel, embossed with the words, “Britain First”.

People bought other stuff, other shit they didn’t need but thought they did. They bought lamps shaped like the Space Needle. They bought luxury leatherette footstools. They bought video games they’d never find time to play and exercise equipment they would never use. Someone even bought an inexplicable Blu-Ray version of Road House 2, which contained a commentary track by Patrick Swayze from beyond the grave, but as they would never get ‘round to watching it, they would never discover this, and the disc would sit on a shelf, gathering dust alongside a growing assemblage of other unconsumed media, until an overheating vape charger would eventually start a fire that would obliterate their (uninsured) home and all its (uninsured) contents. But nobody wanted to buy the ring. Wretchedly seeking to get rid of the thing, he offered it to a customer as a trade-in for one of those mounted rubber fish that start moving and singing when you activate a sensor, but the guy decided to pick up a Tamagotchi instead.

Jason persisted with the Ringpiece nickname, laughing at his own cleverness each time he said it. He cracked homophobic jokes that made Drew cringe inwardly, and delighted in exerting his trifling power over Drew in mean-spirited ways, especially if Megan was there to witness his undisputed domination. Megan appeared largely indifferent to Drew’s suffering; it probably says a lot about Drew’s expectations of people that he was grateful for this perceived mercy.

Drew put up with Jason’s bullshit. Maybe the enticing clamour of the ring was even a useful distraction from the cheap, churlish torment that was the only aspect of his mean little life to which Jason seemingly applied himself. Drew diligently cleaned the dingy staff toilets, as per Jason’s orders, without protesting that this particular duty was only ever assigned to him. He bit his tongue when he found that Jason had thrown out the packed lunch Drew had left in the staff fridge on the pretext of conducting a health and safety audit, even though Drew budgeted carefully for each meal and couldn’t in fact afford to buy a replacement. He kept his cool whenever Jason would elbow him out of the way if a customer was female and attractive, then leave Drew to deal with the abusive, tweaking meth-head demanding five grand for a stack of porn DVDs and a Furby that – he swore blind – spoke “with the furious, fiery voice of God”. If it ever occurred to Drew that the ring could in an instant rid him of Jason and all his vindictive shitfuckery forever, then he almost certainly never consciously verbalised the thought. Even if he had, he was by nature more terrified than tantalised by the prospect of power, and felt certain he was utterly unqualified to wield any. For this very reason, he had never learned to drive, having freaked out at the start of his first lesson, when he’d released the clutch too quickly and the car had lurched wildly forwards, feeling heart-stoppingly out of control before stalling. He’d decided there and then that he should never be in command of anything as powerful as an automotive engine ever again. And the ring was definitely a lot more powerful than a Vauxhall Corsa.

No, it definitely wasn’t premeditated, what happened to Jason, nor even really an act of revenge. It seems more accurate to describe it as simply the result of a confluence of circumstances, which Jason had in fairness had more of a hand in shaping than Drew.

Jason was training up some new kid called Callum, insofar as his training consisted of Jason showing him naked photos of a young woman he claimed was his girlfriend, but whom Drew was pretty confident he recognised from a monetised webcam site. Drew hadn’t seen Megan in a while. He wasn’t sure if she was on holiday, or sick leave, or if she’d just gone. For her sake, he hoped the latter. Drew was listening to Total Eclipse of the Heart via earphones, trying to keep the ring’s incessant call to a background buzz as he ran a duster along the second-hand electrical goods, when Jason blocked his way. He motioned for Drew to pop out the earphones, then assumed what he thought of as an alpha male posture as Drew complied.

“New rule,” he stated, unable to fully suppress the smirk. “No mobile ‘phones during working hours. It’s a productivity killer. They have to go in my drawer. My locked drawer. Orders from regional.” He held out his hand expectantly.

“But you’ve still got your ‘phone…” Drew began.

“Yeah…” Jason’s face turned 12% smirkier. “But you know. Management, innit?”

Drew gestured to where Callum was ignoring a customer while blatantly scrolling through a social media feed: “And him?”

Another 8% more smirk. “He’s part-time. And under seventeen. Whatever. Zero hour contract or something. It’s different rules for him. Not like you. You’re special. You’re a big boy. Lucky you, eh?” He patted Drew patronisingly on the cheek, then forcibly took the mobile, trailing earphones, from his hand while he was still too shocked to resist. He walked off, his face now fully a-smirk, and shut the device away in a drawer in the counter which he then locked.

Drew’s blood whooshed and pounded in his now empty ears, propelled by a savage, angry heartbeat. Instantly, Drew could hear, could feel the ring reaching for him. It gonged and echoed, screeched and chirruped, groaned and thundered. It made his ear canals burn and his brain lining tickle maddeningly. His diaphragm reverberated to its insistent frequency.

Drew dusted. And then he vacuumed. He was meticulous, removing every visible particle of dust, lint and detritus as he went. He tried to focus all of his attention on the task, to distract himself from the ring’s magical magnetism and from Jason, who was watching from a swivel chair with his feet up on the counter, as though Drew was some fabulously comical entertainment. Every now and then, he would offer some helpful feedback, like, “You’ve missed a bit, Ringpiece.” Sometimes, Drew was aware of Callum laughing at these remarks, but mostly he didn’t care enough to notice any more.

Even over the hum of the vacuum cleaner, the ring’s nagging was all too audible. It reminded him of all the power he had briefly commanded at his fingertips; it reminded him that he could wield that kind of power again, any time he wanted, if he just slipped it on; it reminded him that said power could solve all his problems. Including Jason.

Callum finished his shift and went home. Jason hit on a woman who’d come in with her young daughter to pawn a foot spa until she uncomfortably gave him what Drew absentmindedly hoped was a made-up ‘phone number. And then it was just the two of them again. The two of them, and the ring.

As Drew wrapped up the vacuum cleaner flex and took it out back to put it away, he wondered – not for the first time – why no one but him seemed to notice anything unusual about the ring. How could the others not hear it, not feel it, not recognise its potency? It seemed absurd, and he almost laughed at the image in his mind, of a huge atomic bomb sitting in the middle of MoneyMorphers, invisible to all but him.

As he walked back out onto the shop floor, his whimsical half-smile froze. He’d only been gone for – what? – a minute, perhaps, but in the interim the shop had undergone some bizarre transformation. For a second, Drew assumed that Jason had discovered the ring after all, and his insides back-flipped at the prospect of the pathetic pawn shop despot in possession of that sort of power. Then he saw the less supernatural source of the chaos.

Every inch of the store and all the stock was covered in tiny confetti flecks. A lot of paper scraps were still airborne, with a large fan swirling the air currents to make them dance. Jason stood amid the blizzard, leering triumphantly, with one arm rustling around in the bin of a paper shredder.

“What the fuck?” Drew demanded flatly.

“Language,” Jason cautioned with a spiteful grin. “New inventory, innit? Got to test it.” He gestured to the shredder and the fan. He turned the latter off, and the last of the shreds of paper floated down to land on the used goods and the carpet.

Drew’s head clanged and thundered with the ring’s demands and promises. It spoke in a language of air raid sirens, fog horns and primal screams. It dragged across his consciousness like blunt and rusted saw-teeth, blistered his brain like a chemical burn.

“Sorry about the mess and all,” Jason continued. “Still… you won’t mind cleaning it up again. Will you, Ringpiece?”

It was all too much.

Drew didn’t even bother with the key to unlock the jewellery cabinet. Jason had just enough time to react with a profane exclamation of shock when Drew punched the glass out, but that was – quite literally – all the time he had.

🞆

Drew could sense that the new part-timer – Joshua, wasn’t it? – was nervous around him. He sort of enjoyed that. He liked that the kid stumbled over his words when he spoke to him, and fucked up simple tasks if he knew Drew was watching. Part of being the boss, he supposed; a feeling he was starting to get used to. It was about time he was accorded a bit of respect around here.

He’d declared himself the new Manager after Jason… stopped being. At first, he’d expected someone to challenge his authority, that he’d have to use the ring’s power again to hold onto the throne to which he had only just ascended. But his indifferent, transient co-workers – nay, subordinates – had accepted the new status quo without resistance. It had almost been a disappointment to him.

And then those underlings, one by one, left as well, and others started. Some lasted longer than others, but all of them left in the end. More would replace them, but all of them would leave. Everyone would leave except Drew. He’ll be here forever. But he’s the Manager now. So that’s all right, eh?