Ramayon of Quyani

 The dance of shadows caused patches of glittering, milky white light to skim across the streets and houses.  Here and there a window was illuminated and a chiaroscuro of furniture appeared momentarily; there and here some poor soul would be transfixed by the light for a second, held immobile as it streamed in through their eyes and paralysed their minds.  Then the light moved on, the rooms changed and the victims were freed.

Ramayon stood in the deeper shadows and watched the dance.  High above the city, where the tallest minarets and cubical towers reached, huge dragonflies roosted.  When they launched themselves into the air, conducting a brief circuit of the city before alighting again on a high perch, their wings caught the moonlight, transformed it somehow, and cast it across the city like a strange net.  Those who dwelled their learned, eventually, how to read the patterns of light and dark, the shadows of the dance, and when to walk the streets to avoid them.  Those who visited, and they were few in number, were the ones caught and the ones sometimes afflicted.

A bell tolled somewhere off to his left.  There were churches in Quyani as well as mosques and synagogues and temples; a panoply of religion was available to anyone who wished to worship.  Many of them were near-empty now; the worshippers who came had no leaders, no spiritual guides, to assist them in their quest for metaphysical enlightenment.  Some were entirely empty, stripped of their furnishings as whatever god had held sway there faded away and their protection rotted like old wood battered by storms.  He shifted slightly, feeling chilled though the air was balmy still, and checked the time.  It was a little shy of midnight, and he decided that that was good enough for his purposes.

He moved through the streets with the ease of a native, walking along the shaded roads, passing through alleys where the houses leaned inwards and prevented the dance from penetrating and occasionally taking shortcuts through old buildings hewn from the stone floor of the quarry where no-one dared dwell.  There were silences in there that couldn’t be broken by speech or footfall; there were scratches on the floor not made by tools; there were strange drawings on the walls that hurt the eyes of observers if they spent too long there.  They were left alone, but some used them as byways, as passages to other places, and they risked themselves with every traversal.

Ramayon emerged near a butcher’s shop, closed up this late in the evening, his breath slightly laboured and his pulse slightly quickened but still himself and still in Quyani.  The building next to the butcher’s had a door a head shorter than himself and windows set with stained glass but it was narrow and mean and squeezed tightly by its neighbours.  He tapped on the door; no need for coded knocks and barely remembered passphrases: no-one would come to a house this old without knowing what they were coming for.  There was a creaking, perhaps of floorboards within affected by a change of weight, and a click that might have been the turning of a key, and then silence.

Ramayon turned the doorhandle and pushed and the door swung open into darkness.  Behind him, where the street opened out onto the Plaza dell’amici, the dance crescendoed and light from several different dragonflies lit it as brightly and as coldly as an icy dawn over a snowfield.  He glanced back at it, checking his watch again.  Five minutes after midnight — a positive omen.  Then he stepped inside into the darkness and locked the door behind him.

The bunker

 The wind brought hail and sleet across the Coryn sea for nine months of the year; for the other three it brought locusts and migratory insects.  Rarely, when the wind died down for long enough, a new wind arose, known as the Eloïste, and it brought black sand from the northern desert.  This mounded on the shoreline and heart-achingly slowly created the beach.

The seashore was best described as blasted; what little plant life could survive the chill winter temperatures and the bombardment of ice through sleet and hail was stripped of leaves as soon as the locusts arrived: plant lives were short, brutish and nasty in ways normally associated with the animal kingdom.  Beyond the black sand, where the earth was ochre and green and exposed rock slowly weathered away, thin twigs poked here and there out of the earth, grave markers left behind by dead plants that shuddered in the howling wind and offered shelter to nothing and no-one.

Adele led the children in single file along the black strand.  The wind was gusting and tugged at shirts and trouser legs, sliding coldly inside clothing and raising goose-bumps on skin.  Now and then it would shriek and pounce and Adele would sway, bracing herself against the fury of the air, then turn and count the children.  Some would be standing, others fallen.  So far she’d only lost two: one had fallen when they crossed the rocky stepping stones across a bay and been seized by the ravenous, churning, white-whipped waves of the sea and the other had been gripped by the wind and pulled free from the sand and cast up into the air.  She’d chosen not to look where the child landed; it was far enough away that the scream had been thin enough to be the cry of a cormorant or seagull.  They still had nearly half a kilometre to go.

Footprints left in the sand filled rapidly with water as the beach was shallow and the sea relentless.  It took less than a minute for the footprint to lose definition and sharpness; barely two and a half and the sand was flat, pristine, and looked untouched again.  Adele was sure that there was a metaphor for life here somewhere, but the rage of the sea and the merciless onslaught of the wind were too consuming for her to ponder it.

At last the bunker came into view.  A grey concrete cube sat on a promontory of rock high above the beach.  The path that had been there once was already eroded to the point of precariousness and it was slightly easier to climb the sharp tufa, spider-like, provided you didn’t mind the razor sharp cuts that were inevitable.  Adele’s fingers were covered in a fine white tracery of scars but she refused to wear gloves.  The children were not permitted gloves and she felt that this tiny moment of solidarity was the best she could offer them.  One more had been lost before they reached the bunker; they had knelt, frozen and despairing in the sand and the children behind them had plodded patiently around.  As the sand absorbed the footprints of those who passed, cleansing itself and refusing to be changed, so it absorbed the child who sank like a mammoth caught in a tar-pit.  Feeble cries alerted her to the tragedy and she looked back once, acknowledging only the futility of trying to save the already-dead, and then she pushed on in silent misery.

Two fell on the climb to the bunker and were left where they landed at the foot of the rocks.  White bones were visible here and there, washed by the twice daily tides, and the crabs emerged from the sand where they had been hiding to begin the inexorable cycle of life anew.  But everyone else reached the top where the wind heightened its anger and renewed its blows against fragile flesh.  New cuts and open wounds stung with salt torn from the waves and dashed against skin and salty tears ran down reddened faces to mingle and exacerbate the torment.  Adele paused for a moment, letting the elements do their work, and then she found the key to the bunker in a pocket and unlocked the door.

Inside were sad beige toys, a small kitchen, and beds for all the children that had set out on this expedition.  Wordlessly, but necessarily, Adele set eyeless teddy bears and limbless dolls on the beds that would have been occupied by the children who hadn’t made it this far.  Then, at last, she gathered the survivors to her to explain the purpose of this trip.

The whereabouts of Dr Fraud

 Glass double doors opened into a wide but shallow space with some dirty floormats and another set of double doors beyond.  It was intended as a kind of airlock: people entering the hospital were expected to wipe their feet while the doors behind them closed and the doors in front of them opened, and there was an additional benefit of not letting the frigid winds of a November evening howl through the waiting room beyond.  Naturally the second set of doors opened as soon as the first did due to an overenthusiastic sensor and an underenthusiastic maintenance team so, while the two uniformed police officers were carefully scuffing the soles of their boots on a carpet that seemed likely to make them dirtier than they already were, the night wind tore into the waiting room, ruffled the papers at the reception desk and made the various clumps of people around the room shiver and huddle.

Marco, who was the more senior of the two very junior officers, led the way.  Even they, heavily dressed in kevlar vests and heavy cotton stab-resistant trousers and jackets, were glad when the doors slid shut again and blocked the wind penetrating search of the room.  He paused, looking over the waiting room.  This was an element of professionalism that he was trying to instil in his colleague, Andrew, who bumped into him because he hadn’t been paying enough attention.

“Wait a moment,” said Marco putting a gloved hand on Andrew’s wrist.  “Look around, tell me what you see.”

The waiting room was laid out in columns of chairs that led up to the reception desk, which was wide enough for three people to be on duty.  At this time of night there was only one, and she was watching them both with bright eyes with dark circles under them that suggested her alertness might have more to do with coffee than how long she’d been awake.  The room was set out so that each column consisted of back-to-back chairs except at the two walls where a single line of chairs backed the wall.  There were four aisles between the chairs in total and there were few enough people waiting to be seen that there were clear spaces between groups.  Fragments of conversation reached the two police men as Marco waiting for Andrew to answer.

“…I’m prolapsing is not our safe word, Jeremy…”

“…didn’t think it wouldn’t come out mummy…”

“…ouch.  Ow.  Oh god, oh god.  Ow…”

“…only when you do that!  Stop it!”

“A waiting room, Marco,” said Andrew.

Marco sighed, feeling put upon.  He’d been feeling put upon ever since getting the roster that had assigned him to work with Andrew for six weeks and Andrew wasn’t doing anything to alleviate that feeling.

“There are four aisles,” said Marco, gesturing.  The receptionist narrowed her eyes slightly, watching him carefully.  “That one,” he pointed, “has the fewest number of potential hostiles along it, so we walk up that.  If they decide to mob us, they’ve got to run round the ends, or climb over the chairs, and that gives us either time to retreat, or an advantage in knocking them down.”

“…safe words are how I know there’s a problem…”

“…I’ll break it off if you don’t stop it…”

“… ow ow ow ow ow…”

Andrew’s brain seemed to finally engage enough to produce words.  “I don’t think most of these could mob us, Marco,” he said, sounding sullen.  Marco tried very hard to treat it as an observation and not a protest by the slowest person in the room.

“If you view every room as something you need to be able to leave in a hurry,” he said patiently, “then you’ll be able to leave almost every room in a hurry.  Get into good habits before you need to rely on them, right?”

“…prolapsing shouldn’t need a safe…”

“…it back in, no, don’t!  The doctor…”

“…if you don’t stop it I’ll break yours too…”

Andrew gazed around and then pointed to the aisle with fewest potential patients.  “So we walk up there, right?”

Marco nodded, hoping that wasn’t going to be the greatest success of the evening.  “You go first,” he said, “watching everyone, including that receptionist who’s been watching us the whole time.  I’ll bring up the rear, making sure that no-one’s going to try and jump us.”

“What receptionist?”

Marco made himself count to ten, pushing aside the desire to groan and punch his partner in the face.

“The one behind the desk,” he said, pointing.  The receptionist stood up.

“Oh!  I see her!” said Andrew, not seeing Marco’s hand tighten into a fist.  “Let’s go talk to her!”

He set off, walking up the nearest aisle, while Marco, cursing under his breath, took the aisle with fewest people along it.  He arrived at the receptionist first as she was already watching him intently.

“What do you want?”

“We’re looking for Dr. Fraud,” said Marco.

“This is the emergency room,” said the nurse.  “We’re understaffed as it is.  If it’s not a medical emergency then you can wait till the doctor’s finish their shift and then talk to them.  If it is a medical emergency then you can sit down and wait your turn.”

“What if it’s urgent?” asked Marco, distracted by the idea that he should wait hours just to find out if Dr Fraud was in the building.

“Then you better hope it isn’t,” said the nurse.  “Wait time is a little over three hours.  And you are not making it worse by jumping the queue!”

Marco hesitated.  He clearly couldn’t sit here all night waiting just for the answer to a question.  He opened his mouth to ask when the doctor’s shift finished and then an idea struck him.

“Andrew?” he said as casually as he could manage.  Andrew looked at him and smiled, reminding Marco of the cows on the farm he’d grown up on.  “Andrew, you’re going to have to sit here and wait for the doctors to finish their shift so we can talk to them.  I’ll carry on with the rest of the job.  Call me, say half an hour before they finish, and I’ll come back.”

“Right!” Andrew ambled off to sit down near the man complaining to a woman about safe words.  The nurse looked at Marco.

“You’re the clever one?” she said.  Marco nodded.  “Fine state of affairs,” she muttered, and sat back down.

Sandy Town

 The beaches of Sandy Town were, naturally, sandy and so Mr Parquette was unsurprised to see footprints in the sand when he arrived at East Beach for his morning perambulation.  What did surprise the middle-aged, somewhat flatulent, gentleman was the depth of the footprints in the sand and the number of toes each foot appeared to have had.  He stopped, though if he were to admit it he was already out of breath and relieved to be able to stop and recuperate, and used the stem of his pipe to gauge the depth of a footprint.

“My word,” he said, with just a hint of a grumble in his voice, “a three inch depth suggests that someone very heavy indeed left these prints!”

Impressed with his own cleverness, and having no-one around to relate this to, he took the trouble to examine the seven-toed footprint more carefully and determined that while the toes were abnormally excessive, somewhat long, and squashed out a little as though the foot were perhaps of sesquipedalian width, they were, more importantly, webbed.

Janet O’Steen, Ireland’s foremost logodisciplinarian and most-famous mother-hater, sat back from her typewriter and re-read what she’d written.  Then she read it again, counting the number of commas that she’d used and wrote that number down in a tiny black notebook she kept for the purpose.  A reviewer, some years ago, had commented on her predilection for punctuation (in that exact phrase) and she now obsessed over proving them wrong.

“Acceptable,” she said to the empty room.  Sunlight came in through the window, though it was weak thanks both to an overcast sky and the sun coming at angle.  By the evening the sun would be round the other side of the house entirely and she would need to light the lamps in the room.  They were the original gas lamps that had come with the house when she’d bought it and had delicate glass covers and little warning labels about ensuring that the carbon monoxide alarm was working properly before lighting the lamp.

“What is?” came a voice from another room.  Janet stiffened, instantly alert to her audience and mentally reviewing what she’d just said.  Then she relaxed again, remembering that her nephew Edward had arrived the previous evening and invited himself to stay for a couple of days.

“I’m writing,” she called back.  “Are you really only just awake?”

Edward walked into the room wearing only boxer shorts.  He was short, hairy and, while not fat exactly, had a little ripple of excess flesh that wobbled gently over the waistband of the blue paisley-patterned shorts.

“Yes, auntie,” he said.  He stretched, raising both arms to the ceiling and revealing bushy armpits that made Janet think of hedgehogs.  “I’m on holiday; I’m hardly going to rise with the pigs and goats now, am I?”

“What pigs and goats?”  Janet’s house was on the outskirts of a medium sized town and was far from rural.  There was a garden of moderate size that she ignored until the neighbours complained and then cut back viciously to the point of exfoliation and a few more rooms than she really knew what to do with but there were certainly no livestock.  Or even pets.

“It’s a saying, auntie,” said Edward.  “How’s the writing going?”

“Put some clothes on,” said Janet.  Her authorial brain was already considering how to use Edward in her novel: all of a sudden she had the idea that Mr Parquette, whose overall aim was the development of a tourist industry for Sandy Town, might open a small safari park and populate it with dwarf gorillas with mange.  “I might have guests later and you in deshabillé would be immodest and unbecoming for a lady of my stature.”

“I thought that was a euphemism for fat?”

“Deshabillé?”  Janet started reaching for her dictionary; an abused book that she wrote corrections in whenever she resorted to looking words up in it.

“Lady of your stature,” said Edward.  He had, unfortunately for him, not spent a lot of time around his aunt and so never saw the dictionary coming.  It hit him spine-first on the nose and between his eyes and he keeled over like a cow in a slaughterhouse.  He hit the floor first and the dictionary followed him and Janet picked the book up and checked it for damage before kicking her nephew in the ribs to see if he’d wake up.

She’d written another page detailing Mr Parquette’s discovery of the footprints and his decision to publicise them in the local paper as belonging to an aquatic form of Bigfoot before Edward stirred, sat up, and rubbed his bruised face.

“Ow,” he said, probing his nose gently with one hand.  “What hit me?”

“Chambers,” said his aunt unapologetically.  “Thirteenth edition.  Also known as the Big Red Book.”

“You threw the book at me?”  Edward snorted, initially with laughter but then with pain.  Blood trickled from one nostril and he wiped it away with his hand.  “Good shot auntie, I suppose, but I’m meeting Deborah Truitt this evening and I think I might just have to call it off.  Do you have a mirror so I can see the damage?”

Janet snorted as well, but tried to convert it into a cough as the name rang a bell for her.  Deborah Truitt was the daughter of Jack Truitt who ran a small independent publishing house and Janet, while having a publisher, wouldn’t say no to having a secondary one for the books her agent refused to handle.

“In the bathroom,” she said.  There were mirrors in almost all the rooms of the house but sending Edward to the bathroom until he put more clothes on seemed both practical and modest.  “I should think Deborah has seen worse that you though, so long as you keep your clothes on around her.”

“Yes, auntie,” said Edward as he picked himself up off the floor and adjusted his boxer shorts so that Janet had to avert her eyes.  “It’s not a Tinder date, you know.”

“A what now?”

“Online dating,” said Edward.  He walked out of the room and then called, “which bathroom?”

“Any of them.  And put some clothes on while you’re in there!”

There was the click of a door closing and Janet looked back at her manuscript.  Yes, a safari park would fit nicely, and perhaps Mr Parquette could try and capture Bigfoot to put them in the park as well.  Only, of course, for Bigfoot to eat his mother after a home invasion….

Janet sighed and tried to scrub the idea from her mind.  She didn’t need any more reviews harking on about the silly idea that she hated all mothers everywhere.

Mixed grill

 “Is our graveyard halal?”

Marvin stared at Jill while his brain processed what his ears had just heard, trying it a couple of different ways and still rejecting it as nonsense.

“What?” he said finally, frowning so hard it hurt.

“That’s what she asked,” said Jill.  “I did ask her what she meant by that, twice, and she said something about it being in all the papers.”

“Do people… do people actually try eating graveyards?” said Marvin, feeling rhetorical.  “I mean, don’t answer that, obviously, but how can something that you don’t eat be halal?”

“I’m not sure it’s just about eating,” said Jill slowly.  “Isn’t it halal from the way it’s done?  I mean, all the preparation, and where it’s done and who it’s done by?”

They looked at one another, united in their ignorance of other cultures.

“We could maybe ask around and see if we can find a halal gravedigger,” said Marvin at last.  “Maybe a halal priest, but… I mean, would a vegetarian do, in that case?  That might be easier to find, I know that Sebastian has a thing about not eating meat.  At least on Thursdays.  Is there a fixed number of days in a row you have to not eat meat to be a vegetarian?”

“I think vegetarian is a philosophy, right?”

Marvin shrugged.  “And kosher is religion, but what’s the actual difference?”

“One has a god… or many gods?”

“Meh, they claim to have gods but they never provide evidence.  I’d call that a philosophy.  But then maybe veganism is a religion since they seem to think that meat is the very devil.”

“Is the devil a god?”

“Can you have the Devil without having God?”

There was a crash from the outer office and Jill jumped.  “I’d better go back out,” she said.  “The woman who wanted the lay-away cremation made a bit of a mess and it sounds like this new one’s having a go too.  Can you get me an answer though?”

Marvin wanted to say “No,” both the Jill and the question, but he forced a smile on his face and nodded.  Jill darted through the door, closing it firmly behind her, and Marvin eyed the pile of invoices.  He still wasn’t half-way through.

“Halal,” he murmured, opening up a browser on his laptop.  He didn’t even consider phoning Kev, his boss, again to ask; Kev would be no more use than a chocolate teapot.  “In the papers?”

He pulled up the websites of all the local newspapers through a search engine,  though the first one he tried, the one that had ties to ChatGPT,  claimed the existence of two newspapers that he’d never heard of, and that Isvestiya was also a local production.  He found another search engine and a more reliable list of papers and scanned their front pages.  When that proved fruitless he scanned the obituaries pages, and there, in the Modern Times, found what he was looking for.

“This can’t be for real,” he murmured.  Talking to himself was almost a hobby.  The article claimed that the prevalence of non-human organ donation now meant that you could be buried in a graveyard where only 30% or less of the contents were actually human.

“This is as bad as the council charging us for littering,” he said, more loudly than he’d intended.  He looked around guiltily but Jill was still in the outer office, probably dealing with the idiot who’d read this article.  He looked once again at his pile of invoices and decided that the right thing to do was to go and help her.

The outer office looked like a whirlwind had been through.  Normally there was IKEA furniture set about the small room, a water cooler in one corner and some tastefully places swiss-cheese plants.  This was all largely Jill’s doing as Kev’s idea had been a chair for him to sit in, an ashtray that he never let anyone use, and a wood-chipper that had belonged to his great-grandmother.  Now the plants were rolling on their side across the floor, the water-cooler had a slow leak that was spraying an arc of water across the beige tiles on the walls and the IKEA furniture looked as though someone had tried to disassemble it.  A woman was sitting on one of the chairs and Jill, her arms folded defensively across her chest, was using the reception desk like a shield.

“Were you enquiring about our graveyard?” asked Marvin.  Jill looked suddenly relieved.

“Is it halal?  Only wifey here doesn’t seem to know!”

Marvin’s smile wavered.  He didn’t know whether ‘wifey’ was an insult or not.  Then he remembered why he’d come out.

“Very halal,” he said.  “We only allow human remains in the graveyard.  We don’t even allow plastic in there.”  As of today, he added mentally, but it seemed unnecessary to let the customer know that.

“See? That wasn’t so hard, was it?”  The customer glared at Jill as though she’d been refusing to divulge state secrets.  “I want to have a barbecue there afterwards, too,” she continued.  “My Leonard loved that graveyard and he’d like to know we were all still there, eating and singing and making merry.”

“No,” said Marvin automatically.  He turned on his heel, but Jill darted through the door ahead of him and he paused, unwilling to leave the outer office empty.

The customer’s shriek would have been audible from the other side of the door anyway.

Crispy

 The shrieking recommenced almost as soon as Jill closed the door behind her again and Marvin shivered, glad that he wasn’t having to face potential customers.  He picked up the invoice that he’d pushed back before Jill came in and a puzzled expression came over his face.  He wasn’t especially handsome, and even his wife sometimes referred to him as having a face fit for radio, and his expression of puzzlement twisted up his puffy lips and flexed pock-marked skin in a way that sometimes put diners off their food for a couple of days.  He read the invoice again, and then turned it over and inspected the fine print on the back in case this was some kind of obscure joke.  Finding everything he expected there, even down to the phone number looking mostly correct he turned it back over and read it again, just in case it had changed while he wasn’t looking.  Then he set it down on the desk in front of him, stared at it as though it might change while he watched, and finally, reluctantly, picked up the phone.

“Kev!” yelled a voice on the other end.  Describing Marvin’s boss as excitable missed the opportunity to compare him with a hyperactive toddler who’d been gorging on forbidden E-numbers all morning and sugar all afternoon.  Marvin pulled the phone away from his face slightly to avoid feeling like he was being deafened.

“Kev, it’s Marvin here,” he said.  Most people would have checked to see who was calling when they answered the phone but Marvin knew his boss would simply have grabbed the phone without looking and answered it.  There was no-one in the world that Kev wouldn’t talk to, but there were a lot of telemarketing firms that had him on their no-call list.

“Marvin!” Kev sounded elated.  “I was just going to think about you!  You’re awesome, you know that right?  I love the job you do!  What do you for me again?”  There was the sound of a car horn blaring and Marvin guessed that Kev was probably driving.  He waited, and sure enough he heard Kev shouting, probably out of his window.

“Yeah, and I’d do that to your mother too, you—“ and another cacophony of horns drowned him out.  When approximate silence resumed Marvin risked talking.

“Kev, we’ve got an invoice here from the council,” he said.

“Lovely people,” said Kev.  “You’re one of my corpse-robbers, right?”

“Right,” said Marvin.  Arguing with Kev was pointless as he rarely listened to anything anyone told him unless it was related to money.  “The council are billing us for littering.”

“What?”  There was a screech that might have been Kev braking hard, or someone close by to him braking hard.  Marvin wouldn’t have liked to have to guess.

“Yeah, apparently we’re in breach of new guidelines on the disposal of long-chain hydrocarbons with persistent features.”  That was, word for word, what the invoice said.

“What the bloody hell does that mean?  Can’t these guys speak English?  And look where you’re putting that thing, mate, or I’ll find somewhere to put it that’ll have you walking funny for a week!”

“I think they’re talking about plastic surgery,” said Marvin, who was certain that this was the case but still had trouble believing it.

“You what?  That wasn’t a bleeding pig, mate!”

“I think,” said Marvin, wondering what was going on where Kev was, “that the council are saying that if we bury people who’ve had plastic surgery without removing the plastic bits first, they’re going to bill us for littering.”

“Then remove the plastic bits, bro!”

Marvin stared off into the distance while listening to the wail of a police siren approach and then fade away again while Kev trash-talked someone who sounded like they might be a pensioner.  When he felt that Kev might be listening he spoke up.

“First, people are going to get upset if they think only bits of their relatives are getting buried,” he said and Kev cut him off.

“Tell them it’s a legal requirement,” he said.  “Put it in the fine print and point them at the council when they moan.  Their rules, they can sort it out.”

“The other problem,” said Marvin doggedly, feeling like he was ordering the tide to turn back.  He’d been rather hoping Kev would be upset by all this and would go and shout at the councillors.  “The other problem is that rummaging through a body to remove the plastic bits will take ages.  It’ll end up costing us a fortune in wages, and maybe overtime for the first couple of weeks.”

“Sorting machine!” said Kev.  “Same to you, love, only with spikes on!”

“What?”

“Sorting machine,” said Kev.  “Like what they use in the post office.  Push the body in one end, get a filleted body out the other and a nice bag of plastic giblets.  Easy.  Talk to Alfred, he’ll fix you up with one.  Right mate, gotta go, I’m still trying to get these organs delivered and the traffic’s atrocious up here!”

Marvin set the phone down on the desk and gently rested his head in his hands while he tried to find a way that Kev’s idea didn’t make sense.  Outside he heard a slam and hoped that Jill had managed to get rid of the troublesome customer.

“Sorting machine,” he whispered to himself.

Charred

 “I want a discount!”

Marvin sighed.  He was in the back office of Kev’s Crematorium trying to deal with the week’s invoices but the person who had come in five minutes ago had a piercing voice and it was getting louder.  He looked at the stack of papers in the blue plastic in-tray and decided that he wasn’t going to go out and see what the commotion was about until he’d got at least half-way through them.  He pulled the top of the pile towards him and frowned at the number on it, which seemed too large.  He checked the name at the top of the invoice: Kev’s Caskets.

“Jesus, Kev,” he muttered.  Kev was his boss and the owner of many of the funeral-related businesses in the town — something of a one-horse town, only the horse had died a few years back and Kev delighted in telling the tale of how he’d buried it — and ought to know better than to mix the ‘invoices’ between the businesses up with the actual invoices that needed paying.  “You’ll give me a heart attack one of these days,” he finished, wondering if his wife would get a discount from Kev if he did.  He filed Kev’s invoice in a lever-arch file on a shelf behind him and pulled the next invoice from the pile.

“No, ‘cos the job’s half-done, right?” came the shrill voice from the outer office.  Marvin couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation: Jill would be on duty at the moment and she was quietly spoken even when she was angry.  He tried not to think about the implications of that statement and looked at the invoice.  This one was from a local florist and was easy to approve.  He tapped at the keyboard bringing up the online banking application and paying the bill.  He still remembered the days when every invoice needed a ledger entry and a cheque written out — by hand! — and felt that modern technology had made huge improvements in his quality of life.  The invoice, now handled, was filed in a different lever arch folder on a different shelf.

“Well, I want partial credit then!”

Marvin picked up the next invoice and then hesitated.  That could be interpreted in two ways and neither sounded like the kind of thing that you’d expect to hear in a crematorium.  Jill must have answered fairly quickly, and probably with no, as the next thing he heard was,

“You can’t go taking all the credit for this!  Either I get a discount or you put my name on it.”

Marvin forced himself to read the invoice but it was hard work.  He was becoming curious as to what the conversation was really all about.  The next invoice wasn’t actually an invoice but a letter from someone who’d had their husband cremated.  He was about to drop it into the bin, as sentiments didn’t pay for a business, until he noticed that the last paragraph was actually a demand for a partial refund.

“20% isn’t a lot!”

“It might be,” murmured Marvin.  The letter was asking for a 20% refund as well because the corpse’s height had been under 160cm in life and the letter-writer seemed to think that cremation was like certain kinds of pizza and charged by the metre.  He dropped it into the bin; if they could find a lawyer to submit the claim he’d have their lawyer refute it, but there was no point entertaining these people.

“Is there an instalment plan?”

Marvin’s fingers let the next invoice fall from them.  Jill would have to come and interrupt him about this; they generally didn’t offer credit, preferring payment up front, but sometimes they extended the payment period a little when there were good reasons for it.  Like publicity.  He waited, and sure enough, there was a tap on the door.

“Come,” he said, and the door swung open just enough for Jill to squeeze through the gap and close it behind her.  She leant on it, and Marvin saw the door handle depress as though someone outside was trying to follow her.

“Trouble?” he said, as though he’d not heard anything.

“Sort of,” said Jill.  She was middle-aged and plump and had the look of a woman who didn’t want to be a grandmother but wasn’t being given much choice.  She rubbed her left temple as though trying to stave off a headache.  “There’s a woman outside who wants a discount.”

“No,’ said Marvin.

“I know, I told her that already.  But she’s saying that the body is already partially cremated and she shouldn’t have to pay for the bit that’s already done.”

“Already done…?”  Marvin mentally added this to the list of things he felt no-one working in a crematorium should have to hear.

“Quite.  I told her that it’s a fixed fee, not based on height, weight, or shape but she keeps arguing.  She wants to have the cremation done in instalments now.”

“No,” said Marvin automatically, but then his brain caught up.  “Wait, you mean she wants to pay for it in instalments, right?”

“No,” said Jill.  “She wants to have bits cremated as she can find the money for them.  She suggested doing the head last as she’d like to be able to keep talking to the… the deceased, I suppose.”

Marvin’s mouth moved but no sound came out.  Jill nodded, looking sympathetic.  “I had the same reaction,” she said.  “I mean, where would we even keep the body?”

“We wouldn’t,” said Marvin.  He hated being labelled autistic, but his automatic response to questions, even rhetorical ones, was to try and answer them and his teachers had been fond of labelling him.  “We’d cremate the whole thing and just release portions of the ashes as she pays for them.”

Jill’s eyes widened.  “Can I tell her that?” she asked, sounding relieved.

“No,” said Marvin, back in his comfort zone.  “And we’re not doing it, but you just asked a —“

“Question,” they said together.  Jill nodded.  “Right,” she said.  “Never mind, but it’s not a bad idea, mind you.”

“It’s a terrible idea,” said Marvin.  “People will come in and get 15g of mummy or daddy and decide that since it’s only ash the rest doesn’t matter.  We’ll lose a fortune.”

“What if we did keep the heads though, and only did them last?”

Marvin’s mouth worked before his brain could tell it this was a bad idea.  “Then we’d probably get into trouble with the police,” he said.  “Damn it, you know not to ask me questions like that!”

Jill grinned.  “Yes,” she said, “but I’ve got to go out there and try and get this woman to see sense.  I deserve a little entertainment too, you know.”

Marvin forced a smile.  “Just keep telling her no,” he said.  “Sooner or later it’ll sink in.  And no sketching up a design for a cabinet for the heads of the lay-away-cremation customers!”

Shadows fall behind

 "Keep your face always toward the sunshine, and shadows will fall behind you,” whispered a quiet voice.  Jerome paused in his reshelving of books and looked around him.  He was standing on the fifth rung of a new wooden ladder, the old one having collapsed under the substantial weight of the vice-librarian which left little space for anyone to be close enough to him for him to hear them whispering.  There was no-one at the foot of the ladder, no-one standing nearby, and (even though he felt ridiculous checking) no-one peering out from between the books on a shelf.  He looked at the book in his hand, which was entitled The memory of thorns and shook it carefully to see if that elicited any further advice.  The book was resolutely mute.

“If you didn’t talk to me, then who did?” he said, pitching his voice deliberately at a normal volume.  He hoped it might encourage the whisperer to speak up, if not actually reveal themselves, but silence was all he heard in return.  Shrugging his shoulders, and wobbling a little on the ladder as result, he returned to shelving, setting The memory of thorns in place and drawing another book up from the carousel at the foot of the ladder.  It was a graceful gesture, made perfect by years of practice, and it lifted the book gently on the unseen currents of magic that flowed through the world and deposited it in his waiting hand.  He checked the spine to ensure that the classification was correct and then located an empty spot on the shelf where it belonged.

If the librarians permitted it he could have reshelved all the books using his magic and it would have taken perhaps an hour at most.  Instead the librarians decreed that too much magic might harm the books and that while magic could be used in small, supportive ways, no larger magics could be employed.  Then they’d put a detector in the centre of the library which sounded an unpleasant alarm and released the Wacken at the library doors if too much magic was detected.

Jerome finished shelving the books and descended the ladder.  He didn’t mind the meditative aspects of his job, and shelving allowed his mind to roam and think about all kinds of things.  As he laid his hand on the carousel, a wheeled wooden structure like a miniature three-storey bookcase that the library staff (who were, naturally distinct from the librarians and therefore not as well paid) used to move the books around, the whisper came again.

“Keep your face always toward the sunshine, and shadows will fall behind you.”

Jerome had to control himself; the spell of unveiling, which would have revealed any invisible tricksters, would definitely set the alarms off.  The noise was unpleasant but bearable, but the Wacken — a kind of semi-sentient carnivorous plant — were another matter altogether.  He’d already run away from them twice when idiot visitors to the library had attempted magic in there and he was concerned that there weren’t enough places to hide.

“Who would want to face the sunshine?” he asked, his voice clear and intended to carry.  There was no-one close enough to hear him though and the whisperer deigned not to answer.  He sighed, put his hands on the carousel, and started to push.

Four hours later he signed his timecard and placed in a little slot in a gunmetal grey box by the library’s main entrance and walked out of the doors into the darkness of the tunnel complex beyond.  He’d heard no more whispers for the day and though he’d made a point of swinging the carousel around him far more than necessary had failed to strike any invisible pests.  Whoever it was with the sunshine fetish appeared to have left him after the second whisper.

The tunnels stretched from the library to Genton, a small conurbation under an area that had once been called Stonehenge.  There were imprints in the ceiling in the middle of Genton that were rumoured to be the feet of the ancient stones above, but Jerome was properly educated and knew that all of humanity now dwelled nearly a kilometre underground and that no stone monolith, no matter how ancient, reached down that far from the surface.  After Genton it was necessary to take a transport — a magically controlled capsule that the travel-mages directed between Genton and Lincon, the main hub for outward travel — if you wanted to go anywhere else.  And no-one ventured to the surface or shunned the shadows because the shadowed underground was the only thing keeping humanity alive.

Remote work, part 6

 Ashley sat back down at her laptop and heaved a deep sigh of relief.

Sorted, she messaged to Dave, and then frowned as the messaging client returned a quick Failed to send reply.  Feeling curious, she tapped through her files and folders and discovered that most of her access to Interwork was gone, presumably because the keycard was missing.  Bizarrely her access to the hidden files that belonged to Dave was still present though.

“I don’t understand any of this,” she murmured to herself.  Even her semi-whisper seemed loud in the silent room.  Still, she had nothing else to do while she waited as all of her work was either in emails or files on the shared drive, so she opened up the rest of the files in Dave’s folder and read through them.

“Here you go,” said not-Iris.  She seemed to have breezed into the room without making a sound and Ashley started out of her reverie and looked at her, wide-eyed and trying to work out who she was.

“Oh!  Thank-you.”  She realised that not-Iris was holding out a slim white piece of plastic — the keycard.

“Don’t go getting too comfortable,” said not-Iris, her impish smile returning.  “Dunheim’s not a place you really want to spend too much time in.”

“Then why is there an office here?”

“It can be helpful to remind people that working at Doorways is a privilege, not a right,” said not-Iris.  It sounded like a practised statement.  “And management has its own reasons as well.”

“You’re not management?” Ashley realised as she spoke that she’d been assuming that Iris was somehow the owner, or at least reported directly into them.  “Is Doorways a chain then?”

Not-Iris grinned.  “I’m not management, no,” she said, “and your other questions would be better directed to management.  I need to get going now; if you think you can’t keep an eye on that card you should too.”

“Right, thank-you,” said Ashley.  The implication stung a little too much for comfort.  She gripped the keycard tightly, feeling its hard edges bite into the palm of her hand, and glanced back at her laptop.  “Oh, one more thing,” she said, but not-Iris had vanished as quickly and quietly as she had arrived.  “I guess not, then,” she said.

She started to pack her things up, agreeing with not-Iris that she’d rather not risk losing the keycard again, and then she paused.  She stared at the keycard and thought about the details of the documents she’d read; the clinical way it seemed Jenna had staged a takeover of Interwork’s Project Management division, and how Dave had been pushed aside.  She knew Jenna, and she knew that the woman was ambitious, but simply not that well organised.  There had to be something more, and the keycard, glistening in the fluorescent lights, seemed to be a key to finding out.

“To hell with her,” she whispered and opened her laptop back up.  “Can you show me what she’s got in her own files?” she asked the keycard, and started searching for Jenna’s home directory.

Two hours later there was a click behind her and she turned to see Iris, the actual Iris, dragging a young man with oddly red skin through the door by his ear.  He wasn’t saying anything but his expression indicated that he wasn’t enjoying his escort and when his eyes met Ashley’s they darted away again.  Guiltily, she thought.  She put her hand protectively on her replacement keycard, which Iris noticed.

“You found a replacement?  Then I’ll keep this one.”  She waved a thin piece of white plastic.  “But you’ll have to use Dunheim for the rest of the week now.”

Ashley thought of the suntan lotion bottle in her bag and wished, briefly, that she’d had the chance to spend more time at the beach.

“That’s ok,” she said.  “It’s probably more than I deserve.”

Iris smiled.  “Maybe,” she said. “But everything’s back as it should be, so there’s little harm done.  Be more careful, right?”

She pulled the young man through the doorway to the other room and it clicked shut behind her.  Ashley returned to her laptop and, re-reading the last line of the email she’d written once more, clicked on the Send button.

“Everything back as it should be,” she repeated to herself, deciding that the vague impression she had of a scream fading rapidly as though from someone who’d been pushed out of the door to the lightless depths below Dunheim was just her imagination.  “Let’s see how close we can get.”  On her screen the email window closed, though for a moment the From: line lingered.  From: Jenna Wilkinson.

Remote work, part 5

 The kitchen was empty and the door that should let her out of Dunheim was firmly closed.  She knocked on it, wondering if Iris might hear her from the other side.  After ten seconds she knocked again, and then a few seconds later just kept knocking until her knuckles were sore.  She pressed her head against the door, listening intently, but there was only silence.  She knocked with her other hand, just in case, but finally she had to make herself walk away.

Then she searched under her laptop, under the desk, checked the kitchen, the toilet and the other room, going through everything slowly and methodically even while her brain was screaming that she needed to find it, find it now!  I can’t LEAVE without it!  I have to find it!  She noticed her hands were trembling when she had to move something, and her chest was tight with fear and dread.  What if she couldn’t find it?  Did Iris ever come looking for people, or were they just left in here forever?  Was this some kind of trap?  Maybe Iris wanted her left here; perhaps Iris had come in and taken the card back.  Maybe Jenna had told her to?

For some reason thinking of Jenna calmed her thoughts a little.  Obviously Iris wouldn’t have locked her in here and Jenna was her friend.

Well, she’d thought Jenna was a friend.

She took a step back from where she was obsessively examining the crack between the steel wall and the concrete floor in case the card had somehow gotten trapped there and looked back at the laptop.  She could email Iris couldn’t she?

The wave of relief that washed over was dizzying and she actually swayed on her feet.  She tried to make herself walk sedately but she hurried anyway, sitting down and quickly tapping out an email to Iris and hitting the send button.  The email window disappeared and then her cursor changed from a little white arrow into a spinning colourful beachball.  She frowned at it and waited.  Ten agonisingly long seconds later a dialogue box popped up: Send failed.

She tried again, and again, but the mail refused to send each time.  She pulled up Dave’s messaging window and tapped Hi? into that.

Hi came the immediate response.

Are you having any troubles sending emails? she messaged.

No.  Why, are you?

Yes, I’m trying to send a message to the receptionist at Doorways; I’ve got a bit of a technical problem with the office she sent.  Can you email her for me please?  She added Iris’s email address and waited.

Hmm, did you type that right?  It’s been bounced back saying it doesn’t exist.

Ashley’s stomach tightened into a knot.  It had to exist, or where on earth was she?

Definitely right, she sent after checking it twice.  Ok, I guess it’s a problem with their mail server then

Anything I can help with?

No, it’s fine, don’t worry

She stared at the screen, seeing the little thumbs-up emoticon appear from Dave’s side.  It really wasn’t fine but there was no point getting Dave worried about it.  She could worry just fine all by herself.

Her mind churned with thoughts about how she was going to get out of here and what would happen if she couldn’t.  She felt frozen in place, her fingers motionless over the keyboard, and the lights seemed too bright and the room almost unreal.  She made herself stretch her fingers out, but her hands didn’t look like hers anymore.

Someone came in, she thought suddenly, her agitation ceasing as she recalled the click of the door opening.  But I didn’t hear them leave… maybe they’re still here, somewhere in Dunheim?

It was ridiculous, she was sure, but it felt like her only chance.  She went back into the other room and made herself check all the windows, willing one of them to be open.  The windows were double-glazed in steel frames; there was a faint white dust on most of the sills that hinted they were infrequently cleaned — and that no-one had touched them.  Then, to her surprise and excitement, she realised that one of the windows wasn’t a window at all but a door.  There was another recessed, mostly hidden, handle on the left-hand side and when she pressed on it it clicked and the door swung open.  A breath of cold air washed over her, but it didn’t smell unpleasant.  A clicking noise like the chirruping of mechanical crickets surged and then faded away again; soon she realised that this was a periodic, rhythmic sound like the steady breathing of robotic lungs.

Maybe this was the click I heard, she thought, ignoring how desperate that thought had to be.  She stepped out, and then stepped straight back again.  I don’t want to get locked out, she said to herself, but her stomach was still turning from the sight of the drop below.  There was only a narrow rocky ledge out there and then a fall into lightless depths.

She looked around for something to wedge the door open and decided to go and get a chair from the other room.  So long as no-one came in while she was out there and decided to close the door, she’d be fine.  And she would just have to not get too far from the door.

She dragged the chair through, pushing open the door between rooms with her hip as the chair proved too heavy and unwieldy for her to just pick up and carry, so her back was to the door as she re-entered.

“Please don’t leave the door here open,” said a familiar-sounding voice.  “The… um, denizens I suppose, of Dunheim can be a bit unfriendly.  Think of this as being more like a safari park, would you?  Look but don’t touch.”

Ashley dropped the chair and one leg narrowly missed impaling her foot.  It clanged as she turned round.

“Iris!” she said and nearly sat down on the chair she’d been carrying; the sense of relief was overwhelming and threatened to turn her legs to jelly.  “Oh thank goodness you’re here!”

“I’m not Iris,” said Iris.  The red hair was identical and the face looked the same, but perhaps this Iris held herself a little differently.  A touch more in-charge and less deferent.

“You look exactly like her,” said Ashley.  A voice in the back of her head warned her she was being rude.  “I mean that in a good way,” she said, and inwardly cringed at how lame that sounded.  “I mean, I— I’m sorry.  Can I start again?”

“I suppose so,” said not-Iris.  She looked amused, which Ashley took to be a good thing.

“I lost my keycard,” she said.  “And I needed to find Iris to try and get it back.  And… well, if you’re not Iris you look a lot like her and you’re the first person I’ve seen in here today, and you seem to know what you’re doing and—“

“Enough!”  Not-Iris held her hand up.  “You lost your keycard?  How?”

Ashley turned the chair around, sat down, and related her story of needing the toilet and hearing the click of a door.  She was expecting sympathy, but not-Iris’s face gradually adjusted into a scowl.

“You were told not to leave the keycard unattended,” she snapped when Ashley’s word trailed off in the face of obvious disapproval.  “And you still did!”

“I didn’t mean to,” said Ashley.

“Oh good,” said not-Iris, her tone dripping with sarcasm.  “I wonder what horrors you’d unleash if you did mean to.”

“That’s a bit strong, isn’t it?”

Not-Iris shook her head.  “Dunheim is home to some fairly unpleasant things,” she said.  “Iris must have thought you were sensible enough to trust in here, and you go and do this.”

I didn’t mean to didn’t seem to carry much weight, so Ashley sought for something else to say.  Only one thing seemed appropriate.  “I’m sorry,” she said as sincerely as she could.  “What can I do to make up for it?”

“Nothing, really,” said not-Iris.  “Iris will have to sort it out.  It’s her problem now.  You should apologise to her, not me.”

Ashley opened her mouth and then closed it again.  She wasn’t completely certain but it looked like not-Iris was pleased that she hadn’t spoken.

“But you can’t apologise if you can’t get back through the door.”

Ashley felt hope rising in her chest again.  She held her tongue a little more.

“So I’ll go and sort you out with a new keycard.  I’ll be half-an-hour or so.  Maybe a little longer.  Don’t go anywhere.”  There was a flash of a smile.  Then it vanished.  “And don’t go letting anything else in.”