"Hi there!"

Darkly comic story. When a mysterious voice ruins Harold's daily commute, things take a turn for the worse.

Harold Stumple, an anaemic and slightly malnourished number cruncher, was cutting across the park on his way to work when he heard the voice.

The voice said: “Hi there!”

Harold stopped dead on the gravel path and looked about wildly. This meant turning his head exactly 45 degrees to the right, then returning to the exact centre before turning his head 45 degrees to the left. He was always careful about making any sudden movements; he’d seen a documentary about whiplash.

“Are you talking to me?” he asked aloud pointing a finger at himself.

The voice rolled its eyes, as much as a voice can. “No, the Queen of Bloody Sheba. Yes of course, you. The scrawny bloke. With the boring tie.”

Harold looked down anxiously at his navy-blue tie. He was actually rather proud of it; it was one of the few his mother hadn’t bought him.

“There’s a reason your mother buys your ties,” said the voice, not one to sugarcoat.

Trying to restrain injured pride, Harold attempted to straighten his tie. Unfortunately, the tie was already exactly straight, and Harold’s attempt to adjust it had effect of setting the tie off at a five-degree angle. He put it back carefully into position.

“Done yet?”

Harold brushed invisible dirt off his jacket. “I think so.”

“Good. Let’s start again. Guess what?”

Harold paused. It suddenly occurred to him that hearing voices was ‘not normal’, and that responding to them aloud was certainly frowned upon. He scratched his head, pondering the question. The voice could not be real; that was logical. Therefore, he must be going mad.

A different sort of man might have turned around and headed straight to bed. But not Harold. He would not allow a simple thing like going mad deter him from reaching his place of work.

He took a step forward. No one said anything. He took another. The only sound was gentle birdsong. He took a third.

“You haven’t guessed what yet.”

Harold froze. Hot sweat beads of sweat sprung up across his forehead and under his tightly starched collar.

I’m not listening to you! he thought loudly, with as much assertion as he could muster.

The voice gave an equally loud tsk. “Now then,” it said. “I only wanted to have a conversation.”

Well, I’d rather not.

“Oh, come on now. Just ask me what I want and I’ll leave you alone.”

Do you promise?

“Cross my heart.”

Harold folded his arms. “Fine,” he said aloud. “What do you want?”

A small trumpet sounded and the voice, with a slight American accent, said:

“Congratulations to you, special lucky participant number 1012934!!! You are our lucky winner of the one-time-offer-no-refunds-no-exchanges-and-definitely-no-lawyers recipient of the random existence untaxed lottery! You can now receive one million dollars and make your dreams come true big $$$ lucky winner!!! All you must do to claim your prize lucky participant is send $5000 or equivalent home currency plus bank details and we will deposit your winning into your account within 20 working days. But you must claim winnings within seven days of receiving this message or your prize will be disqualified, so hurry lucky winner and receive your one-time-offer-no-refunds- blah blah blah, etc., etc.”

The voice paused. Harold Stumple had gone rather pink in the face. In a fit of nervousness, he had begun straightening his tie again, this time to the point of semi-strangulation.

“Bloody hell,” said the voice. “Are you still alive?”

Harold wheezed to confirm. He loosened the tie a little and sweet fresh air filled his lungs once more.

“No need to get that excited,” said the voice. “You can hardly claim your lucky one-time-offer if you’re dead, can you, ho ho.”

Exhausted and still slightly oxygen deprived, Harold collapsed down onto the nearest bench. With unusual carelessness, he didn’t stop to check where he sat and landed on a freshly deposited smear of bird poo, staining his recently laundered work trousers. Now there really was no point in trying to go to work. If only the earth might open up and swallow him. It would be cool and quiet there, and certainly free of voices offering limited offers—

“One time ONLY limited offers, I think you’ll find.” The infernal voice was grinning, as much as a voice can.

Harold pressed his fingers in his ears and did what his mother instructed him to do when bothered by unpleasant thoughts; he began to sing loudly and not very tunefully, a mishmash of several half-remembered hymns beginning with ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ and ending up somewhere between ‘Oh God Our Help in Ages Past’ and ‘Jerusalem’.

The voice tutted. “Now, really Harold, this is unacceptable. Look, you’ve upset those poor teenagers.”

Sure enough, the small gang of hooded fifteen-year-olds who’d been mooching about by the swings kept glancing in his direction. One by one, they began to mooch at a greater distance.

“I don’t care,” Harold mumbled. “Just leave me alone.”

He sang again, even louder this time and more off key. His fingers pressed deeper into his ear cavities, causing heaven knows what damage to his ear drums. But it did no good; the voice was still there, hectoring away. It sounded exactly like his mother.

Perhaps I’ve died and gone to hell, he thought, though he didn’t know exactly what he was being punished for. Maybe it was the time he’d lost a library book? Or the year he’d returned his mother’s hideous Christmas gift in exchange for an M&S voucher, and then pretended it had shrunk in the wash?

“This isn’t a punishment, Harold,” said the voice. “You were selected completely by chance! Isn’t that exciting?”

Harold’s bottom lip trembled ominously. This new reality was proving all too much for him and he began to sob loudly, his face turning blotchy and hot. His mother would have highly disapproved of such an open display of emotion, which only made him feel worse. He pressed his hands over his face and bellowed like an injured seal, and a passing jogger gave his bench a wide berth.

“Please don’t cry,” said the voice. “It’s not in my job description.”

It did no good; Harold was crying, whether the voice liked it or not. He wept and wailed like a banshee, much to the amusement of the teenagers, who kept pointing and laughing at him. By the time they’d got bored and left, Harold was a mucus-coated mess.

Unthinkingly, Harold wiped his snotty face with his jacket sleeve. He was so out of sorts that he did not recall that the fabric was dry clean only until the snot was well and truly engrained.

“Oh fiddlesticks,” he said to himself.

Having at last come to his senses, Harold found two clean tissues in his trouser pocket and blew his nose very loudly. The voice gave a tut of pure disgust.

“Better?” it said, with some sarcasm.

“A bit,” said Harold.

“Good, good.” There was a theatrical sigh. “Now then, since you’re so obviously feeling … fragile, I’m going to let you in on a very big secret.”

Harold was not in the mood for listening to the voice’s secrets. In fact, he’d rather have swallowed a spoonful of his mother’s hateful cod liver oil. But the voice was going to tell him, whether he wanted it to or not.

“Harold, I am a cognitively-engaged consumer-tailored-enhancement device. Do you know what that means?”

No, thought Harold glumly, and I don’t really want to know either.

“It means that I’m get inside your head to get you to buy stuff. It’s cutting-edge.” It said this last comment with some pride. Harold was reminded of an incident at work when they moved to a new state-of-the-art cloud-based accounting system. That too had been ‘cutting edge’, until the day it failed just before a major audit and the whole department started running around like headless chickens. Give him an Excel spreadsheet any day.

“It all sounds very modern,” he concluded aloud. “But why go to all the bother?”

The voice chuckled. “Well Harold, things have been downhill of late in the spamming world. Our scams— I mean, our exclusive one-time-only offers have not been taken up as often as they should. Heaven knows why. They’re exclusively one-time-only. But I digress. Harold, do you have an email account?”

Harold looked affronted. “Of course. I’m not a technophobe.”

“And do you use it?”

Harold thought guiltily of the growing list of ‘unreads’.

“Sometimes…”

“And do you have a junk mail folder?”

“Yes. But I still get junk emails.”

“Ahah! My own work. The synergistic-deluxe-disruptor-engaing-enchancing-mailing-server-restrictive-infringement-bypasser. A beautiful piece of internet spamming equipment if I do say so myself. But coming back to the point – these junk emails, Harold. What do you do with them?”

 “I delete them of course.”

“Exactly!” Harold heard the invisible fist thump the non-existent table. “That’s our problem. Hardly anyone falls for— I mean, takes up the opportunity of our offers anymore. We send a million emails, and you think that some people will at least bother to read them, wouldn’t you? But alas, it is not so. Virtually all our emails go straight in the deleted box. Our perfect formula down the drain.” The voice sniffed. “But what can we do? We can’t make people listen to us. Unless…”

There was a long pause. Harold didn’t like that pause. In fact, he’d like to get as far away from that pause as possible. He shifted in his seat, wondering if he should try and make a dash for it. But something rooted him to the spot. He waited.

When the voice spoke again, it was merely a whisper in his ear.

“Unless,” it said. "That’s the only way they can make us go away.”

Slowly, very slowly, Harold put this information together.

“So…” he said at last. “You’re in my head.”

“Right.”

“And no one else can hear you.”

“Absolutely.”

“And you’re going to stay here… in my head… unless I send you the $5000?”

There was the sound of a bell. “Ding! Bingo, you’ve hit the jackpot.”

Harold’s legs began to shake. His lip began to wobble. He gripped the side of the bench, hardly noticing that he was touching yet more bird poo. “But I don’t have $5000!”

 “Oh you’ll think of something,” said the voice dismissively. “But don’t you see the beauty of it, Harold? From less than one in a million, we’ll have thousands, tens of thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of respondents! And once they reply to one, we can offer them more things: double glazing, solar panels, self-opening tin openers… you name it, we’ll offer it.”

Slowly, very slowly, the cogs turned in Harold’s exhausted brain.

“You mean… even if I pay up, you’ll still be there?”

“Of course! Well, at least until people run out of funds… but by that time we’ll be stinking rich, so it won’t really matter. Got to admire the brilliance of it, eh, Harold… Harold?”

But Harold had not heard. He loosened his tie and began to sway in his seat. Then, very quietly, he began to sing a little song, about mothers and voices and $5000. His voice, high and mournful, grew louder with each verse, drawing pitying looks from passersby. Then, at long last, the song faded away, leaving only a shell in a suit, its once shiny brogues sinking further and further into the mud.

***

It was dark by the time Harold’s mother, a Mrs Agatha Stumple of 35 Withall Street, found him sitting alone on a park bench. Mrs Stumple had been busy all afternoon writing letters to The Guardian about the state of their crossword, and hadn’t realised the time until the old grandfather clock chimed six. Her son was always home by six to watch BBC News and drink hot Ovaltine, and by the time it chimed quarter past, she began to worry. She called his office, but they informed her he’d never arrived. So, with grim determination, she’d donned her best coat, made a thermos of Ovaltine and went out into the night.

The next morning, Mrs Stumple’s neighbour Gertie Williams, a local gossip who hoovered up information like a high-powered Dyson, spotted Mrs Stumple and her son on their way to the doctors. It only took one glance to tell that something was wrong. The formerly upright and well dressed young man was now a disheveled mess, and there was an uncanny vacancy in his face, as if his soul had just left his body.

Drugs, thought Gertie darkly, as she shared the news on the neighbourhood WhatsApp group.

There was some debate in the chat about the nature of Harold’s addiction. Gertie thought it was heroin, Mille was convinced it was meth, while Kathy swore blind that she’d seen Harold smoking a spliff in Morrisons. But they were all certain about one thing: Harold was a dead-eyed junkie.

The doctors were far less certain. No drugs were found in Mr Stumple’s system, and there were no obvious signs of head trauma or brain injury. Eventually, for lack of a viable alternative, he was diagnosed with rapidly progressive early onset dementia. Mrs Stumple was skeptical, but forced herself to face facts: her son, who’d previously only been a mild disappointment, was now as much use as a chocolate teapot in the Sahara.

Another woman in Mrs Stumple’s position might have despaired or cursed her rotten luck. But not Mrs Stumple. She was going to make the best of things.

Mrs Stumple stuck the doctor’s instructions to the fridge and followed them to the letter. Talking to Harold was important, so she made sure to lecture him regularly about his posture and table manners. The doctors also insisted on routine, so every evening at 6pm, she and her son could be found in the living room, watching BBC News with cups of Ovaltine.

On one such evening, a report made Mrs Stumple sit up in her armchair. Banks had been reporting increases incidences of fraud, with one woman losing half a million pounds in savings. Experts warned that scams were becoming increasingly sophisticated, with elderly people particularly at risk.

Mrs Stumple scoffed. “Such rot. Elderly people… stupid people, more like.”

She glanced over at Harold. She wasn’t sure if he was paying attention but she decided to carry on regardless. He might as well learn something.

“Look at Gertie over the road,” she said, gesturing to the window. “Only last month she got some email claiming she’d won the Nigerian lottery… I thought no one fell for those sort of things anymore but she went and sent them £5000 of her own money. Can you believe it, Harold? £5000! Quite frankly, I don’t think the bank should have sent her the money back. Let her learn her lesson.”

Harold sat up in his chair and mumbled something under his breath.

“What’s that? Speak up. Remember, you must enunciate.”

Harold watched the television without saying anything. His eyes had lost their far away sheen and seemed to actually be focusing on the newsreader. Suddenly, he reached out and gripped the arms of the armchair so hard that his knuckles went white.

Mrs Stumple started at the sudden movement. “What’s wrong, Harold? Are you constipated? You should have eaten those prunes, like I told you.” Her voice faltered. She didn’t like the look in her son’s eyes. There was a terrifying intensity in them, and for a brief second, she wondered if the rumours of his addiction might be true.

“Harold, please,” she said, her voice softening for the first time in many years. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

Harold looked at her. Behind his mad gaze was a flicker of recognition, something vaguely human. He seemed about to say something when the news report switched back to the studio.

“And now it’s time for the weather with Janet. Janet, will we be having storms today?”

“Not tonight, Graham, but there will be some light drizzle-”

As the smiling Northern woman waffled on about tomorrow’s showers and an approaching North Easterly wind, the familiar glaze returned to Harold’s eyes. He released his grip on the armchair and sank back, all lessons on posture forgotten.

Mrs Stumple took a sip of Ovaltine, grateful for the sugar. Her son’s little turn had been highly unsettling but it seemed to be over now, thank God. The best thing to do after a fright was to keep up the routine. She ticked over the supplies for supper in the fridge, pondering between lamb shanks and lemon sole. The sole, she decided. Fish was good for the brain.

She was just rising from her chair when she heard the voice. It was a man’s voice, as clear and distinct as the newsreader on the television. Only it wasn’t coming out of the television. It was coming from inside her head.

“Hi there!” it said.