Read Days for Free Online Page B

the seven Judaic names for the Divinity – El, Elohim, Adonia, YHWH, Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh, Shaddai, and Zeba’ot.
     
     
    8.00 a.m.
     
    I MMEDIATELY NORTH OF the glass dome on top of Days lies a flat-roofed, one-storey penthouse complex. At the southern end is a heptagonal room joined to the rest of the complex by one of its seven points. Within the heptagonal room resides the store’s brain: the Boardroom.
    Inside the Boardroom, a circular table seven metres in diameter sits at the centre of a spread of lush dollar-green carpet. One half of the table is ash, the other half ebony, and situated at one end of the join between the two halves, recessed snugly into the wood, are a computer terminal and a telephone.
    Seven chairs are positioned equidistantly around the table. Each is different and reflects the character and disposition of the person who regularly occupies it. One is an ornate gilded throne; another is a wing-backed armchair comfortably upholstered with padded vermilion leather; a third is designed along Art Nouveau lines with a narrow seat and a straight back composed of staggered rectangles in the manner of a Frank Lloyd Wright window; and so on.
    At eight o’clock, the venetian blinds that cover the triptych of windows at the Boardroom’s southern end rise automatically, furling upwards to reveal an unhindered view of the base of the rotating dome. Currently the dome’s clear half fills the windows, although a crescent-shaped sliver of its dark half is visible in one corner and will encroach more and more on the clear portion as the day wears on.
    Opposite lie four oak-panelled walls, completing the heptagon. On one there hangs a gilt-framed, lifesize portrait of none other than the fonder of Days, Septimus Day himself. Septimus long ago passed through life’s great checkout, but still he glares imperiously down on the Boardroom and all that takes place within it with his good right eye glittering, its patched partner menacing. Anyone who knew Old Man Day thinks the artist has captured his likeness very well indeed. Chillingly well.
    Set into the adjacent wall at chest height is a brass panel sporting a hinged knife switch of the kind Victor Frankenstein throws in old horror movies in order to animate his Creature, except that this one is seven times as large and requires a ceramic handle the size of a baseball bat to operate it. At present the switch stands upright in the Off position with the detached handle clipped next to it on the panel.
    Each of the two remaining oak-panelled walls carries a bank of sixteen monitors arranged in a four-by-four grid. Their screens show computer-generated composites of the Days logo set against a dollar-green background.
    A balding, prim-looking man in a butler’s livery of shirtsleeves and a horizontally pinstriped waistcoat opens the pair of large doors that bridge the apex of the angle formed by the two monitor-bearing walls. Turning around, he grasps the handle of a serving trolley the size of a hospital gurney and hauls it backwards into the Boardroom. Seven heavy silver salvers press the trolley’s wheels deep into the carpet, making it an effort to pull.
    Reaching the centre of the room, the manservant leaves the trolley and goes round the table moving each chair one place clockwise, setting its feet in the indentations left by the previous chair. Then he returns to the trolley and repeats the journey, depositing a salver on the table in front of each seat. This second circuit of the table completed, he guides the trolley out of the room. He returns a minute later with another trolley, this one bearing a silver teapot, a bone-china teapot, three stainless steel coffee pots (one of which contains hot chocolate), a tall glass jug of orange juice, a bottle of gin, a bottle of tonic water, lemon slices on a dish, and an ice-bucket carved from a solid chunk of malachite, plus assorted cups, saucers, and tumblers. Once again he circumnavigates the table, placing the