by Tom Fletcher
The voice went on to describe the last few symbols and amendments that Artemis had to add, after Harry was dead. Once Artemis had the process clear in his head, he stepped forward and, with a pair of scissors he’d pulled from his suit jacket pocket, he slashed Harry’s throat. The blood came slowly at first, so he did it again in the other direction. It came faster after that, sputtering and streaming from the two rough-edged wounds. It looked black in the darkness, as it ran down Harry’s scrawny, shivering body, soaked into the padding of the chair, dripped from his fingers, pooled on the projector screen, obscuring various intricacies of the circle. Apart from the small, wet dripping noises the blood made, and the faint sound of the sea outside, there was silence.
STRANGE WEATHER
Bony looked out of Yasmin’s flat window. He was wearing only some loose, drawstring pajama bottoms. The evening was peculiarly hot, the sea was heaving, and thick clouds were rushing in to make the night darker yet. He could look up at the side of them, as if they were moving in as some kind of front, and they just went up and up and up, a solid wall of gunmetal gray.
“You seen the weather?” he asked Yasmin
Yasmin slipped her arms around his waist from behind, and pulled him toward her. She was wearing a soft blue vest top and matching loose trousers. She looked out over his shoulder. “It looks wrong,” she said. “It looks weird.”
“And the sea, as well,” Bony said. “The sea looks a bit … a bit full.”
Yasmin didn’t reply at first. Bony could almost feel her frowning, though—something in the set of her jaw against his neck. After a moment, she said, “I know what you mean. It seems quite high against the harbor wall. And … and what’s that?” She pointed out toward the water.
Bony couldn’t see what she was indicating, and he absently scratched at the bare skin of his chest while scanning the sea. “What?” he asked, finally.
“Over there, the turbulence. See?”
“Oh, yes!” Bony said. “The white water?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s growing,” Bony said. “Spreading out.”
“Yeah, it is.”
“A shoal of fish?”
“I don’t know,” Yasmin said. “I don’t like it.”
Bony looked down along the promenade. Anybody straying on to the harbor would stop momentarily to stare at the burgeoning waves and the curiously solid sky, then hurry away, heads lowered. “Nobody else likes it either,” he observed.
“I feel strange,” Yasmin said. “It’s clammy. Electric.”
Bony nodded. He chewed the inside of his lower lip and ran a hand over his scalp. “I feel like something is coming,” he said. “Do we know where Arthur is?”
“I’ll try ringing him,” Yasmin said. “Wait a moment.”
Yasmin moved away from Bony and the window. She picked up her phone and dialed Arthur’s number.
“No answer,” she said, after a short while.
“Yasmin,” Bony turned around. “We have to go to the call center. Those emails about the Interstice—the sea—and now Arthur not being at home. Whatever it is, it’s happening, and I can’t think where else it would occur.”
Yasmin thought for a moment, then nodded. She stood up, moved out into the hallway, and returned with the cricket bat. “We’re taking this,” she said.
“OK,” Bony said.
Yasmin put the bat on the table. “Come on, then,” she said. “Let’s get dressed.”
THIN PLACES
At first Arthur thought Harry must have wet himself or something. He was staring at his dad sitting there in one of those swiveling office chairs, and saw some kind of liquid was running down off the seat and dripping all over the floor. There was a big white something under the chair and the liquid kept spattering on to it. It was actually the recurrent sound that Arthur became aware of first. His field of vision seemed quite narrow, and all he was aware of seeing was his dad.
He was sitting somewhere behind his dad, looking at the back of his dad’s chair, at the back of his dad’s head.
He realized that it was dark. He tried to move his head, but felt the slightest movement opening up a well of pain right in the middle of his forehead. Why were they here at work when it was so obviously nighttime, anyway? There was nobody around, apart from the two of them and Artemis, who was standing over by the window, looking toward the sea.
It was obvious that there was something very wrong.
Arthur focused back on his dad and felt like his eyes were fully open now, like his vision was nearly fully restored.
Blood …
Blood running everywhere.
Arthur tried to get out of his own chair, but his muscles were unresponsive, and it felt like any effort to move prompted his brain to try and tear itself open inside his skull. The waves of pain forced him to close his eyes, and nearly sent vomit cascading from his mouth.
After a moment he settled for just keeping his eyes open.
There were words and diagrams scribbled on the projector screen rolled out beneath Harry’s chair. Arthur could not quite make them out in the poor light, especially now that his aching eyes were full of tears. From his seated position, the whole display looked like a cross between the clichéd Satanist paraphernalia from horror films or tabloid newspaper stories, and some kind of corporate diagram like an organizational chart or a process map or a training requirements hierarchy or an elaborate sales report. But maybe that was just because of the present location—the call center—with the rows of desks, the computers, the telephones. Or even the smart suit that Artemis wore.
Arthur sensed an opportunity to try something while Artemis had his back turned, but his mind and body were still not talking to each other properly. He did manage to get his limbs twitching, but all he achieved through that was to fall out of his chair.
Artemis immediately turned back around.
“Arthur!” Artemis said, grinning. “So good of you to join us. Observe. There are some places in which certain people can draw upon certain energies.”
Artemis seemed drunk or otherwise intoxicated. He was gesturing expansively with his arms, and there was a sheen of sweat, or something like it, across his face. He seemed to want to talk, but Arthur just lay helpless on the floor, repeatedly trying to claw his way back to the vertical, and repeatedly failing.
“This is one of those places for people like me,” Artemis continued. “I am at my strongest and most powerful when in anonymous rooms. In generic places. When we come to work in a place like this, we are not just entering one building, we are entering all of these buildings. You are no longer just you when you come here, Arthur. You are also every miserable little fucker who has ever worked here; who has ever been in any of these interchangeable, indistinguishable places, because you too are then interchangeable, indistinguishable, insignificant. You become the piss in the river, the spit in the sea.”
“What are you doing?” Arthur attempted to say, but the words sounded limp and malformed to his ears.
Artemis grinned.
“Did I hit you hard, Arthur?” he asked. “As I was saying, I develop a peculiar strength in these places. I would apologize if I had not meant to damage you. I did mean to damage you, though, so there will be no apology forthcoming. Everything is intentional. You know what? I am quite enjoying myself here. I have never believed in any of this ritualistic shit, Arthur. I did not believe it was important. But now that I am engaging with it, it feels … I don’t know, but it feels right. It’s quite good fun. I always thought it was unnecessary. I always thought that the combination of the sacrifice with a person like me and a … thin place like this would be enough. Apparently not, though. You know what I mean by a thin place, right?”
Arthur found himself nodding. Yasmin had talked to him about her feeling that the call center was thin, or weak; as if it had a weak fabric somehow; as if reality here were soft, wormy, worm-eaten; as if reality here sagged like a rotten floorboard. Arthur was not sure if his eyes were cl
osed or open, but all he could see now with his eyes, or his mind’s eye or whatever, was some kind of room with floorboards. And there was one floorboard that was loose, that was falling apart, and beneath it, through the cracks, he could see black water slapping upward, and shining with an unearthly light. That water was the world that waited. And this place, this thin place, was the crumbling plane through which it glistened.
“Is he dead?” Arthur croaked, nodding in Harry’s direction.
“What?” Artemis wheeled back to face the boy. “Think there might be something wrong with your head, my good man! Your speech is terribly slurred. Suffered any potentially concussive or traumatic blows to the head recently?”
“Is he really dead?” Arthur tried again.
“Is he dead?” Artemis laughed, brandishing a whiteboard marker. “Of course he’s dead, you little cretin! Or, rather, as good as dead. Did you see all of the blood that came out of him? See that big cut in his neck? He’s a dead man sitting, Arthur. I don’t know how long it takes to bleed to death, but it must be nearly done by now. Which reminds me.”
Artemis clapped his hands together and strode off toward the water-cooler by the wall, where he took a couple of the small plastic cups from the dispenser. He brought them back and then, one after the other, he pressed them to the wound in Harry’s neck and filled them with his blood. He placed both cups on one of the desks.
It was already dark in the call center, but, it suddenly grew darker. Arthur could hear something too, a sound that he recognized. But no. Not here. The sound was in the wrong place. It was that whispering, rustling susurration from the Scape, or from the Interstice, as that thing had called it. It was faint, and it rose and fell, but it was there, and it was growing louder. It looked like Artemis could hear it too, judging by the way he cocked his head.
Another noise, closer to hand and more immediate: a wet, spitting sound from the desk. Arthur managed to swivel his eyes around to identify the source, and saw that the earpiece of that particular desk’s headset appeared to have ejaculated some kind of black, slimy substance across the cheap veneer. Then the same sound again, from slightly further away: an irregular kind of liquid pulsing. Now the same from all over. Arthur could see the foul, oily stuff squirting out of all of the headsets within his field of vision, and hear it happening elsewhere. There was a rotten stench to it, too, and the smell brought back, forcefully, a sightless memory—a memory of something liquid trying to worm its way into his ear. He slowly lifted his hand to the side of his head and felt the same stuff encrusted all over it.
It was starting to pool on the desktops now, and spilling over the edges. It dripped at first, and then ran steadily. Arthur rolled slightly to avoid it, but not quickly enough, and it was running from the surrounding desks as well, pooling on the carpet tiles. There was very little light to see under the desks, but it looked like whatever it was was transforming the whole office into a dank, fetid organic environment. The flow showed no sign of slowing. And that sound of static was growing louder and louder. It was the sound of a giant tide approaching an unfamiliar shore. It was the sound of alien waves slowly breaking, high above a dead, empty beach, and then crashing to the ground in a gradual explosion of white noise and strange new life. Artemis remained quite still, biting his lip, his eyes wide.
With a grunt and a jerk, Harry’s body started shaking. Arthur’s heart beat faster as he watched his dad’s arms and head tremble. The bones and tendons of Harry’s hands shone white due to the intensity with which he was gripping the chair arms, but every other part of his body seemed to be in spasm. There seemed to be some kind of life left, something that was expressing itself through inarticulate gasps and sobs and gurgles, and random, sporadic movement.
The sound from the Scape was now roaring in Arthur’s ears. And there was something else: undercutting the sickly smell of the dark liquid still bubbling from the headsets, there was the sharp new scent of the sea. Arthur crawled forward on his elbows, trying to hold his head above the now sodden carpet tiles, heading for his dad. Artemis had turned back to the window and was staring out with his hands pressed against the glass. His mouth was wide open. Whatever he was looking at, it wasn’t Harry.
Something landed on the floor in front of Arthur with a heavy, wet squelch, stopping his progress. At first it looked just like a clot of some sort, a congealed lump of matter, but then Arthur saw that it was moving, and it was pulsating slightly. He shouted out in disgust and recoiled, only to see and hear and feel more of the same stuff raining down from the desks ranged above him.
There were ropes and knots and clusters of thin worms, all of different lengths, writhing frantically as if trying to untie themselves from each other. There were hair-thin, eel-long things, and tiny ones, like staples, that Arthur was sure had somehow got there from his bathroom, and all kinds of worms in between. He splayed his fingers and saw that his skin was dotted with the little ones, as if they’d been there in the rank liquid all along, and he screamed out loud. He felt those living dollops landing on his back, on his legs, on his head. Without even consciously trying to stand, he suddenly found himself on his feet, clawing at his clothes and hair. He could not keep his eyes open for long, but when he did so, he saw that every desk was now thick with wriggling creatures, all of them slopping around in some kind of blind frenzy.
At the rear of the desks, through the same holes that the computer cables came through, familiar pink and red and white and yellow tentacle-type things protruded, some of them thicker than the worms, some of them similarly slender, and waving around like seaweed under water. There were other things too: chitinous, clawed things, poking and snapping but seemingly—given an apparent inability to escape their neighboring organisms—bound to the same root flesh, whatever that might be. In that brief moment of seeing, Arthur got the impression that these things were extending, curling around each other, creeping along any surface they found.
He also noticed Harry’s body shuddering violently in his seat on top of the projector screen. And beyond that, heavy rain hammering into the windows. And beyond that … that was when Arthur closed his eyes.
The sea had been white with a turbulence just beyond the outer harbor wall. That was what had Artemis’s attention, even despite Arthur’s screams. What was it? What was causing that? But things had started dropping from Arthur’s fringe on to his face, and his eyes had snapped shut before he could get the fuller picture.
Harry was screaming through the slit in his throat, or trying to.
When Arthur opened his eyes again, Artemis was standing directly in front of him, bending forward to look directly into his face. Their faces were just a few centimeters apart, and Artemis was not smiling.
“I don’t know what you are trying to do,” Artemis said.
“Trying to stop you,” Arthur said. “Trying to help my dad.”
Things were crawling around their feet, and they could barely hear each other above the static, which was now loud enough for distant voices to be heard in it.
Artemis pushed Arthur back against a desk, and then further back, forcing him down on to it so that he was lying across it. Arthur tried to struggle free but found that he could do nothing—Artemis was too strong. Things moved beneath him. He could feel them squirming vigorously. Artemis punched him in the head, and lights flashed inside his skull. His mouth and his eyes hung open and Artemis grabbed a handful of the worms and ground them into his face. They dropped on to his tongue, and then into the back of his throat. Arthur felt them under his eyelids. He coughed and gagged. He felt things wrapping themselves around his arms and legs and throat. The things felt like cords of hair. He managed to turn his head to the side before he threw up.
He realized that Artemis was no longer holding him, but he still could not move.
Matter slimed wetly between his cheek and the surface of the desk. With his head on its side, though, he could see Artemis moving back toward Harry’s body. He forced himself to keep his eyes open and wa
tch.
Artemis bent down over Harry and peered into his face. He thumbed open his eyelids. Harry’s body had stopped its shaking and it looked like he really was dead. Artemis turned back to the cups of blood and lifted one of them. He knelt down toward the circle that he’d drawn, which, Arthur noticed, had remained free of the filth that was still slowly deepening across the whole of the rest of the call center floor. The room had become thick with the static hiss and the sound of lively slithering. The air smelled both sulfurous and salty.
Artemis dipped his fingers in the blood and started to mark the circle precisely, delicately, carefully.
The hissing intensified.
SECURITY
Light shone from the revolving door at the front of the building. As Bony and Yasmin approached it, they could see that the two security men were standing at the bottom of the stairs, looking up, looking worried.
“What do you reckon?” Bony asked. “Shall we just walk in like we’re visitors?”
“You can’t do that,” Yasmin said. “This time of night, the doors’ll be electronically locked.”
“Right then,” Bony said. He hefted the bat nervously. “Right, then, we’ll knock, shall we?”
“We could try knocking.”
“Can we knock, really?”
“I don’t know.” Yasmin grimaced.
“I’m going to try knocking before anything else,” Bony said.
“OK,” Yasmin nodded. “OK, yeah, let’s knock.”
The two of them walked up to the door, conscious that they would now be visible to the security guards if the guards turned away from whatever was drawing their attention toward the stairs. Bony propped the cricket bat against the wall just to the right of the door, well out of sight, and tapped sharply on the glass. The security guards instantly turned around, saw Yasmin and Bony, and looked at each other uneasily. They both wore black trousers and jumpers. One of them—tall with thinning gray hair, and a neat gray beard—came up to the door, pressed a button on the inside, and hauled the door open.
