#8 — The Influencer
If all your dreams could come true, what price would you pay?
It was supposed to be just another ordinary day.
Angling her cell phone just the right way, Amelia sought to accentuate her features to best effect. A passer-by may have looked at her oddly with the way she twisted and turned and posed, all for the desired result of a perfect selfie. An embarrassing amount of time went into the process, but she liked to call herself dedicated to her craft.
With the selfie a success, Amelia proceeded to post it — to immediate acclaim from the way notifications began to blow up her phone. A self-satisfied smile curved on her glossy lips. If her followers were nice enough in the comments, maybe she’d jump on live and give an impromptu Q&A session. She had a new handbag — just another perk — to show off too.
Decisions, decisions.
So caught up in her phone, Amelia didn’t see the suited man until she bumped shoulders with him. Nearly dropping her phone in the process, she turned, her mouth ready to open in a snarl — but then she blinked a few times upon meeting the most intriguing pair of storm-gray eyes she had ever seen.
The rest of him — from a quick glance up and down — seemed nice too. But those eyes? They wouldn’t even need a filter to pop alive in a photo.
“Sorry,” the man said. He looked pleased to see her, for some reason, even though he easily could have been rude to her. This little quirk endeared him to her right away — and her friends said she had high standards for men, ha!
But then his eyebrows scrunched together in confusion. “Do I know you from somewhere? You look familiar.”
Amelia had to fight the smile ready to bloom on her face. The obvious pick-up line made her want to laugh out loud, but she figured she’d give him a pass — especially with those eyes of his.
“I don’t know,” she said, pretending to think about it as she twirled a few strands of her hair. “Do I know you from somewhere?”
It was too easy to flirt with a guy like this. Her friends would have warned her she was coming on too strong, but what did it matter? If she crashed and burned, at least there was no one around the park to witness it.
A look of amusement came to the man’s face. “Let me guess. Are you a model? Maybe I saw you in a catalog or something?”
The guy was aging himself — though he couldn’t have been too far into his thirties — but she pretended, again, to think about it as she cocked her head to the side.
“You could say I’m a model,” she said, slowly, “technically.”
“Technically?”
“I post pictures on Instagram,” she said as if the role were a well-vetted position with a Fortune 500 company. She offered a shrug. “I work with a lot of brands that send me stuff to try on and promote on my page.”
“Like endorsements?” the man asked — and she almost got the feeling that he was making fun of her. But she shook off that vibe. The guy obviously lived under a rock if he didn’t know what an influencer did.
Amelia couldn’t help a small smile. “Yeah, you could say that.”
They exchanged smiles — again — before the man glanced down at his watch. To Amelia’s disappointment, the watch wasn’t a Rolex. Her estimation of the man went down slightly, but at least he wore a nice suit. That had to count for something, right?
“Should we continue this conversation over coffee?” the man asked. “I’d love to hear more about what you do.”
Like a pendulum swinging back and forth, Amelia again found herself swayed towards the man as he did the one thing she could never resist from any member of the opposite sex: he tactfully stroked her ego.
“And I’d love to talk more,” she replied.
The man nodded. “Good. I know a great place not too far from here.”
Maybe the warning bells should have been going off, but Amelia was too charmed by the interest the man was showing in her. It was one thing to garner attention online via social media. But face to face? There was something exhilarating about that. No other high could compete.
Amelia allowed herself to be led away towards a coffee shop. Distracted by the man’s presence, she didn’t even take note of the place’s name — though a fuzzy part of her brain wondered why she had never frequented this cafe before with its proximity to her favorite photo-shoot locations for her socials. The downtown vibe always drew her in.
But this coffee shop? She had never once stepped foot inside prior to this day.
So strange.
The interior was dimly lit as if she were walking into a sacred place. Plush couches and chairs littered the floor space, and the interior’s muted colors of green and red managed not to clash together. The few people in the shop didn’t even look up.
If Amelia were trying to take more photos, she would definitely have loved to get a few of this place — and maybe her new companion too.
Instead, she found her attention revolving around the man — whose name, she suddenly realized, she still didn’t know.
When she opened her mouth to ask, however, the man handed her a disposable coffee cup. “Here you go, Amelia.”
Amelia blinked, confusion rising to the surface of her hazy thoughts. She didn’t remember ordering the coffee.
Or, now that it came up, mentioning her name.
“I don’t — I don’t understand — ”
“Questions later,” the man said, his voice losing its warm quality as he pushed the coffee cup into her hands. “Just sit down like a good girl for me, hmm?”
Shock fluttered through her system, and she staggered back a step — only to feel the solidness of a chair right behind the backs of her legs.
As if her body were no longer under her control, she folded herself into the chair and waited obediently.
Inside, a part of her screamed.
The man took a seat across from her — another instance where logic didn’t follow as she distinctly remembered no chair being near him only moments before.
It felt like a drug trip of some kind with everything warped into varying degrees of speed.
Everything at the moment was rushing so fast, too fast, for her to keep up.
Her head pounded as the man’s lips twisted into a smirk.
“I sometimes forget,” he said, “just how easily you humans get discombobulated.”
Amelia blinked, and the green and red colors of the room swirled together.
The man’s face turned into a blurred wheel of different expressions.
But then he laughed — and things began to slow down.
Those gray eyes of his were mocking her.
“You shouldn’t follow strangers,” the man said. “Didn’t your mother ever tell you that?”
“What — what are you doing to me?” Amelia asked, her voice wavering as if she were about to cry.
“I just wanted to chat,” the man said leisurely as he leaned back in his seat and crossed one leg over the other. “People like you are useful, you know. I don’t pretend to know technology — it changes too fast for me — but I need to keep up with the times as best I can.”
“What does that have to do with — with me?”
The man’s eyes gleamed. “I’m here to give you an offer, Amelia. A job offer, if you will.”
Even Amelia, as opportunistic as she could be, could sense a scam when it reared its ugly head.
“I don’t do pyramid schemes,” she said, “or black market business.”
The man laughed. “You really are quite something. Here, one of Hell’s best gives you an opportunity, and you stick your nose up at it without asking for the specifics.”
The pieces began to click together slowly.
Amelia took a deep breath. “Hell?”
She hated how her voice nearly squeaked upon voicing the word.
Meanwhile, the man appeared to look more and more bored with her as time passed. “It would be a permanent position,” he said.
She swallowed. “How permanent?”
“Oh, now you’re thinking on your feet. I knew you weren’t quite the lost cause my boss thought you were.”
Amelia didn’t have to ask for clarification of who this boss was.
“But, yes,” the man continued, “it is a permanent position as in eternal.”
Amelia’s pulse quickened. Eternal. Immortality. No aging, no wrinkles, no loss of her perfect body shape.
She would outlast everything, everyone, anything.
“I’ll do it,” she said, impulsively — and, no surprise, the man laughed again.
“Eager, are you?” This time, the man’s voice was cool and even. “But we haven’t exactly talked about specifics when it came to your payment.”
“Payment? I get to live forever, and you pay me too?”
“No,” the man said, “I’m talking about what you pay for becoming an immortal denizen.”
“What do you want? My soul?” She laughed. “I’ve given up plenty to get where I am today, so my soul doesn’t seem like much in comparison.”
“I thought you’d say that,” the man replied, “but I don’t want your soul.”
“Then what?”
“You have to kill someone,” he said, “just to prove your loyalty to the cause.”
Amelia stared for a few moments before a laugh trickled out of her lips. “Are you serious?”
“Dead serious.”
“That’s easy,” Amelia said. “I can just choose someone in prison or something. A murderer. Or a rapist — ”
“I’m afraid it’s not quite that simple,” the man said.
From his suit pocket, the man pulled out Amelia’s own cell phone — she hadn’t even realized it was gone — and held it out to her. Her hands trembled as she took it.
“You have to choose someone,” the man said. “One of your followers. Someone out there in the great wide world is going to die today because of you.”
The phone in her hands seemed so heavy all of a sudden as she stared down at its innocuous screen.
“Do we have a deal, Amelia?” the man asked.
Now she knew what it sounded like to hear someone else use a self-satisfied tone.
A part of her should have been afraid. Or numb. Or…something.
But there was a nothingness instead — like a big gaping hole where her heart should have been.
A near-hysterical laugh sputtered out of her lips. “Is this some kind of test?”
The man shrugged. “You can think of it that way if you like. But time’s ticking. I won’t wait forever.”
Amelia continued to look at her phone.
It was too easy to go into one of her socials and look at a list of her followers.
One person out there would die, and she could have the world at her fingertips.
What could she do with ten lifetimes? A hundred? A thousand?
The possibilities were endless.
A better woman would have thrown the phone to the floor and stalked out the door, Hell be damned.
But she made a different choice.
The name didn’t matter.
The face didn’t matter.
She tapped on someone’s profile, and immediately the screen went black.
Amelia breathed out.
An influencer?
No, she had greater ambitions than that.
The new denizen of Hell smiled in triumph.