Turning Pages

by Brhi Stokes

  “Get the door for me please, Connor.” My voice is little more than a whisper, but he obeys and soon we are in the warmth of the flat once more.

  I place Natsuko gently down on the settee before I move to the kitchen to boil some water. Connor comes with me.

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t believed any of the story up until right now?” I try to force some humour into my voice but it comes out thin and weak.

  Connor bites his lip, arms wrapped firmly around himself. “Well… yeah, of course I did. But that was… this is…” He takes a moment. “I’m not dreaming am I?”

  He sounds so hopeful that I almost want to lie, but I cannot bring myself to do it. I nod, saying nothing as the kettle finishes boiling and I push a cup of hot tea into Connor’s trembling hands. If telling him the whole story had not directly involved him in all of this, he is certainly a part of it now.

  “What did it want?” he asks as we move back towards the lounge and I place the third mug of tea on the coffee table for Natsuko.

  “For me to take up the job I was offered. To become an arbiter.”

  “That…” he searches my face for a long moment as if trying to decipher whether or not I am lying. “That seems kinda trivial. For all of the… y’know. The…” The words fail to form in his mouth, and I can see from his expression that he is picturing the creature with its many tendril-tails.

  “Yes… I know.”

  “Why do you think...”

  “I’m not sure. I honestly couldn’t tell you. It... it didn’t look like that when we first saw it.” I look at Connor, wanting to make sure he understood what I was trying to say. “It was just a person in a mask that sort of... floated. It appeared by itself, as well. There was no... dripping itself from Natsuko’s mouth...”

  “It what?” Connor whispers, and I know I have said too much.

  Neither of us says a thing as Natsuko slowly stirs, her eyes fluttering briefly, before opening fully. She sits up abruptly and begins to cough into her hand. When she pulls it back, I can see that a viscous black liquid stains it. I hand her the cup as she wipes her hand on her stockings and looks up at us.

  “I am sorry,” is all she says.

  I have no real idea of how to respond to that. Whether she had known that she was bringing a strange entity into my home or not no longer matters after the conversation that had occurred on the roof. Somehow, I do not think she had been given a choice about the situation either.

  “It... it told me to come. I did not know that it was with me and that it...” she is trying to explain herself, but the words do not seem to come out properly. I shake my head at her and she quietens down, nodding to herself.

  “I get it,” I tell her. “It doesn’t matter. Even if you’d said no, it would have come to find me somehow.” Though why it had inhabited Natsuko to do so is beyond me.

  One by one, we begin to sip our tea in the uncomfortable quiet.

  “I don’t understand why it wants me to become an arbiter. What does it gain from that?” I wonder aloud.

  Connor shrugs at me, his legs curled up to his chest as he sits on the floor by my recliner.

  My eyes settle on Natsuko. “Is that the only reason you came here? To deliver the... message?” She says nothing, merely pursing her lips. “When do you fly back?”

  She shakes her head and I stand, depositing my now empty cup on the coffee table. I need to stretch my legs and sitting down hardly feels right, so I begin to pace around the table. My mind races with questions and assumptions, but I know none of them will get me anywhere.

  “Well,” Connor mutters to himself, “I’m never going to be able to sleep again.”

  I gather up the television remote and flick it on. Light and sound blare to life upon it, and we all turn to watch the nature documentary. Penguins waddle across the screen in large groups, sliding down steep slopes on their bellies. I sit back down as the three of us drift into silence, staring at the television.

  It is only once Connor has fallen asleep curled up under a blanket at the foot of my recliner that I move to sit by Natsuko. Like me, she has been staring at the screen for the better part of the last two hours without really taking any of it in.

  “Will you do it?” she whispers, still not taking her eyes off the television.

  I study her a while before responding. I can see once more the despondency and apathy that has taken root in her expression. “You mean head to Evisalon and tell them I accept? I’m honestly not sure if that’s how it even works. That... thing made it sound like I’d be entering into some sort of pact but...” I trail off, frowning to myself.

  There is a gentle pressure on my hand and I realise Natsuko is softly patting it. Her touch is warm and her palm is smooth against my skin. At any other time, this would have been a welcome gesture. Instead, it makes me well aware of the pit in my stomach and I suppress a shudder.

  “You will learn to do everything they want,” Natsuko tells me, the words dropping cold water into the deep pool inside me.

  “Do I need to help you book a flight back?” I ask, hoping to change the topic.

  Natsuko takes the hint and shakes her head. “In the morning I can go by myself.”

  “All right. Just... try to get some sleep, I guess.” I lean back against the settee and fix my gaze on the television.

  As my racing mind begins to calm, I wonder what the Masters want from all of this. What possible reason could they have for telling me to become an arbiter? Is there some great plan in which I am a pawn, or do they simply push fixers to do things we despise in the hopes that it will keep us in line? I am unsure if I will ever find out, but it remains on my mind even as I stare at the television.

  I am not entirely sure when it happens, but sleep eventually finds me and I drop gratefully into a dreamless rest.

  **

  I awaken beside Natsuko, a blanket thrown over the both of us and Connor nowhere in sight. I barely manage to finish showering and changing when our visitor awakens as well and silently accepts my offer to take her to the airport.

  Connor puts up an argument for coming along, but I explain that I would be heading to Evisalon immediately after, and he gives up on pleading.

  The drive to the airport is silent, and I drop Natsuko off without parking. She says nothing as she steps from the car, but we lock eyes and some small understanding passes between us.

  Now, I sit in an abandoned parking lot with a bottle of something that I knew would kill me. I have driven far enough from the city that I am likely to travel and return without being disturbed. If not, I am in for an uncomfortable wakeup. Just for today, I do not want to bother anyone else. I just want to wake up where I am and head home without having to see the expression on Daniel’s face as I take my first breath again. I cannot explain it for the life of me, but the desire to do this alone is so strong that I feel my breath catch in my throat as I undo the safety catch on the bottle.

  Part of me regrets introducing Connor to all of this. Having someone at risk of getting involved was part of the reason I refused to bring anyone else into my life. That is what I have been telling myself, at least.

  It takes a few goes to down the liquid fully and I sit back as I wait for the nausea to subside into something else entirely. I wonder how long it will take me to get sick of this. Perhaps I never will.

  Or perhaps, a small voice at the back of my mind whispers, you’re already there.

  **

  “How’d it go?” Connor asks as I walk up the stairs and deposit myself wearily onto a stool at the kitchen counter. He is sitting at the dining room table reading a brochure of some kind, but at my entry he stands to head into the kitchen and flicks the switch on the kettle. I eye him as he wordlessly collects the teacups and adds the right amount of milk and sugar.

  “Well,” I say, “they were a little surprised to see me back there so soon. I had to wait until they were done with their morning prayer before I could work up the gumption go inside. There was hardly
anyone there that I recognised, and I waited a while until the masked thing finally approached me.”

  “The... nice masked thing, right? Not like...”

  “No,” I agree, “not like the one from the roof. The wolf mask with the white robes and the gold paint beneath the eyes.”

  “It just walked up to you with everyone there?”

  “Well, no. I was watching the people slowly clear out of the cathedral when it came up to me.” I pause, thinking back to the way its golden eyes had fixed on my face, full of understanding. “I feel like it almost knew what had happened back here with its ‘sibling’. But it didn’t mention anything about it. It didn’t even bat an eye - so to speak - as I told it I wanted to become an arbiter. It took me by the hand and led me to the altar where it knelt and prayed for a while. I wasn’t sure what to do so I knelt beside it. I hadn’t been in a church since my childhood, but I closed my eyes and waited until it was done.”

  Connor hands me my tea and leans on the counter in my usual spot. “What did it say? Was it praying out loud?”

  “No, it made a sort of… reverberating hum that sounded distantly like words. Then it stood and held both my hands in its and just looked at me for a while. After that, it disappeared out the door in the back of the cathedral.”

  “That’s it?” Disappointment is clear in his voice. “You didn’t do anything… special? No ceremony, no symbol of honour?”

  I grimace at the idea of some kind of inter-planar awards ceremony. “Thankfully, no. I tried to go through the door that it had disappeared into but it was just an empty room when I entered.”

  “So are you an arbiter now…?” He gives me a serious once-over as if looking for some mystical change that had taken place.

  “I suppose so.”

  “Are you going to go tell Matthen?”

  The Myrkdrawian man had not really crossed my mind, and hearing his name so suddenly was jarring. “Why would I...?”

  “Because you said he told you that you basically had the job already. Besides, shouldn’t you tell him about what happened on your roof?”

  I grimace, remembering Matthen’s words about his own messengers - how they would take what they needed from their fixers regardless of any agreement. The thing on the roof had hardly been a messenger, either. If I told Matthen, I would probably only give him something to worry about.

  “No,” I say finally, “I think I’ll leave that for some other time.”

  “Hrmm, I guess. Y’know, you should probably start recording all of this.”

  “What?”

  “You know, like you did with the tape I found. You said you had no idea how long Natsuko and Matthen have been around doing what they do. Why don’t you write it all down or record it somewhere? Just so, y’know, so you don’t forget it.”

  There is merit to the idea, but I am not entirely sure if I want to remember all of the jobs I will end up doing. I wonder if my new work will be some strange mix of doing dirty deeds for the Masters as well as problem-solving for fixers, or if there is some sort of full-time arbiter role. No one has explained to me the full details so far, but I cannot imagine negotiating will take up all of my time.

  “Hey,” Connor says, chiding me. “Are you even listening to me?”

  “Record my travels. Yes, I heard you.”

  “Good. Also, I erm… picked up some groceries while you were away.”

  I blink slowly at him. “With what money?”

  “I have money!” he protests before glaring at me from across the table. “And now there’s porridge and bread and stuff.”

  “Oh.” As I watch him open a cupboard and point at the food, I realise I might have found myself a more permanent guest than previously thought.

  It is only later, when I catch sight of the university brochure he had been reading, that I think that maybe - just maybe - I might be helping someone for a change.

  It almost feels pleasant.

  

  “I suppose you could call me a ‘fixer’,” I say into the tape recorder, eyeing it until the lights change from red to green and I am forced to pay attention to the road. “I find things for the creatures that run this place, though I use the word mildly. I’ve seen what some of them really are, and there’s not a word in the English language that truly does them justice.” I pull around a corner and the tape deck slides across the dashboard, teetering ominously at the edge on the passenger side.

  “Honestly, I think you’d need a different word for every single one.” I think to myself that something like horrigadrizzle might suit the fox masked monstrosity. “And I don’t even know how many there are. I’ve only seen a few.” I sigh, debating turning the thing off, but I can no longer reach it. Besides, maybe Connor is right: perhaps keeping all of this in a place where I can go over it at some stage will be good for me. I can look back on my mistakes or remember something I might miss in the future. Like my sense of irony. Nonetheless, it reminds me a little of writing a diary, something I have refrained from since my awkward teenage years. Those are some time behind me now and I have no desire to relive them. Honestly, I am unsure if I have any desire to relive the things I am currently going through.

  “I was told that recording this would be good for me, somehow,” I start up again, realising I have been recording nothing but my own breathing for the last minute, “but I can’t quite see that happening. I’m not even sure why I agreed to let the boy stay with me. I spend so much time telling him about my troubles with unwanted guests and then I go and invite him to use my home as his for as long as he likes.”

  It may be the family troubles that had done it. A sense of kinship for the enmity felt towards parents who fail to understand you and whom you do not want to understand.

  “That’s the thing about family, I suppose. Whether you get along or not, they’re always there. His, I mean. Not that I think that I’m…” I am cocking this up and I have barely said more than a handful of sentences. As it happens, recording for posterity is an atrocious idea.

  “Anyway, it’s been a long eight months. I’ve questioned just about everything I thought I had a grip on. I’ve met others like me. Others from different planes, too. Earth’s not the only one, you know. There’s plenty more. Innumerable, potentially. I’ve only been to a handful. I kill people there or steal things. But that’ll change soon, I think. I’ll be committing fewer crimes and, instead, be forcing people to work together? Maybe? My work’s a bit of a mess, really.”

  I need to wrap this up before I give up entirely and never record anything ever again, I realise.

  “I suppose you could call me a ‘fixer’,” I say, before frowning. “But I guess that title doesn’t sit as well anymore. I suppose I’m going to have to start calling myself an arbiter.” I snap the tape recorder’s stop button and frown to myself. I am not sure how I feel about the title, but it has hardly changed my job description so far.

  This time, I make sure to leave the tape in the car as I pull into a spot alongside the road and head on foot to the bridge. Tonight is my own, however. As I move to the area of the bridge where I had made my first recording, I can see a bit of discolouration in the place where I had once stood.

  Tape recorders are not going to work, I think, as I stare down at the water. It looks so different in the light of day.

  Maybe I am better off writing all of this down, instead.

  Things are a bit more believable on paper after all, right?

  If you enjoyed The Arbiter: Turning Pages, why not leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  

  www.brhistokes.com / author.to/brhistokes

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  Brhi has been writing ever since she could put pen to paper and daydreaming in every spare second. She adores fantasy of all kinds but has a special love for urban fantasy with a dark edge.

  Her fascination with different places and cultures has seen her living
overseas for several years, though she currently resides in Australia. This time abroad has strongly influenced her writing, much of which focuses on strange new places.

  In her spare time, Brhi enjoys reading, video games, tabletop RPGs, going for long, solitary jogs and music. She can be contacted on Facebook or at brhistokesauthor@gmail.com.