Pharma lounge

Miss Snippet sat down in the teacher's lounge and tried not to sigh.  She was sure that sighing as you sat down was a sign of old age; she could remember both her grandmother and her mother doing it, and she was determined not to end up like either of them.  Which in her grandmother's case meant dead and in her mother's case meant trapped in a stifling nursing home chosen by Miss Snippet for its brochure's boast that it had better security that Alcatraz.  She occasionally drove by the nursing home to check that there were no signs of a break-out, and forwarded all correspondance from them on to her lawyer.
"Pill?" said the young man at the other end of the couch, and she started a little.  She gazed at him, her eyes narrowing as she realised that she didn't recognise him, either as a teacher or a student.  They narrowed even more when she started looking for familial resemblances to the headmaster.  He smiled and rattled a little brown plastic pill bottle at her.  "On the house?"
"Who are you?" asked Miss Snippet, her words coming out like a growl.  The young man looked a little taken aback, and lowered the hand shaking the pill bottle.
"Steve," he said, trying his smile again.  He put the bottle down on the couch and offered his hand, empty this time.
"I'm not shaking your hand until I know who you are and what you're doing in here," said Miss Snippet.  She adjusted her gaze to a glare, the one her class knew meant she was getting angry.
"I just said, I'm Steve."  His hand didn't waver, but nor did Miss Snippet's determination.
"And what do you do?  Are you the latest substitute teacher to discover why class 9K sent their teacher on a prolonged rest-cure in a not-a-mental-hospital-at-all-place by the sea?"
"No.  Are class 9K a bit rough then?"
"Why don't you take them for a maths class and see?"
Steve lowered his hand at last and picked the pill bottle back up.
"Look, I'm just trying to help," he said.  "You look like one of the good ones, right?  I hear there's some right nutters who work here, driving everyone else mad, so I'm just here offering some free samples of the kind of thing my company supplies.  They're just to help you keep your equilibrium when everyone around you seems to be going mad.  In fact," and he leant across the couch a little to Miss Snippet, trying to create the illusion of intimacy, "they tell me there's a teacher here who treats her class like underage unpaid labour!"
"Oh really?"  Miss Snippet almost leant in herself, but then decided that even Steve couldn't be so stupid as to not see that for the ploy it was.
"Oh yes!"  His voice dropped a little to a conspiratorial hush.  "They say her class built all three of the new annexes and that she hires them out to people to build paths, garages and the occasional two-storey extension.  She's the kind of person it's hard to keep your cool around, and these little pills, teacher's little helpers, are just what you need.  Look, I shouldn't tell you this, but we've even got a couple of little pills you could slip her, if you wanted a few quiet days."
"Have you offered these pills to 9K's maths teacher?" asked Miss Snippet, trying hard to sound conspiratorial.  She felt she got about half-way there, spoiled only really by the tone of disgust in her voice when she had to mention the weak teacher that the kids were clearly doing their best to cull from the herd.
"No," said Steve.  "I heard he's not easy to get to.  Secure storage, and all that!"  He even tapped the side of his slightly red nose with a long finger when he said that.
"Janitor's closet, actually," said Miss Snippet wondering if she could get away with twisting a finger at her temple.  She decided against it.  "The headmaster won't pay for treatment, so he's just locked away in a dark place until he stops screaming and trying to eat his own fingers."
"Really?"  Steve looked very interested all of a sudden, and his fingers curled tightly around the pill bottle.  "I might have one or two things that could help calm him down, now that you come to mention it.  I could perhaps look in on the chap and check he's ok, got all his fingers still, that kind of thing?"
"Come this way," said Miss Snippet bouncing out of her chair like a fifties-waitress given a hundred-dollar tip.  "I can keep an eye out for the headmaster while you talk to him.  Poor guy doesn't get many visitors."
She checked her watch as she led Steve from the staff-room, and was pleased to see that her class should have finished pouring the concrete now, which would an ideal place for Steve to trip and fall and disappear into a supporting pillar.

A little bad taste...

Bob approached the Quipping Room with more than a little trepidation.  Even as he turned the corner at the end of the corridor, still five doors and nearly eighty-five feet from his target, he felt sweat spring out on his forehead and the backs of his arms.  He swallowed firmly, and made himself keep moving.  His eyes darted from side to side, hunting for anything out of the ordinary.  The corridor was empty apart from himself; the walls were a lemon yellow chosen for its calming effects on the human mind, and the carpet was an inoffensive dark green.  The doors were veneered with a nutty brown layer that felt slightly plasticky to the touch.  He realised suddenly that he was itemising everything he saw to avoid having to think about what he was having to do.  He straightened up, and wondered when he'd started slouching – no, cringing would be a better descriptor – and tried hard to concentrate on what he was doing.
MSPARKER's room had a little white sign on the outside of the door that simply stated Quipping Room.  He lifted his hand to knock, and then lowered it again, feeling slightly silly.  He wiped his palms on the front of his jeans, and then pushed the door open quickly.
The room was empty apart from the keyboard and screen that interfaced to the quipping machine.  He felt let-down, and realised he'd been hoping that someone else was using it.  Lots of people around the university seemed to talk about MSPARKER, but he'd not yet found anyone else actually using her.  Even Dr. Malmstein seemed happier to instruct Bob to do things than to actually come in here and do them himself.
There was a blue-upholstered swivel chair in front of the desk, so he sat down, heaved a sigh, and typed his username and password on the keyboard.
<Hello Bob> appeared on the screen.  <How shall we take over the world tonight?>
He looked at the screen for several seconds, telling himself that the engine behind it simply picked words and phrases out of a large database, and that sometimes they would seem more apposite than others.  MSPARKER didn't truly think, it solved specific problems in the style of a long dead author, and was really just a glorified expert system.  Hell, calling it MSPARKER surely indicated that it was just a vanity project.
MSPARKER, he typed back, We have a man in the Common Room
<Tell me more.  It's not like I'm fucking busy> appeared on the screen while he was trying to decide how to continue.  <Or vice versa.>
Bob's jaw actually dropped open at this point and he read and re-read the lines on the screen a few times before he understood that they actually were there.  He stared, and finally shook his head, and re-read his own statement, determined to continue.
He has some skulls with him and he claims that he dug them up like that
<A graverobber then.  Perhaps he'd like to jump my bones?>
There are houses built into the skulls, little houses with little mortared bricks and some glazed windows and gardens and everything!
<An industrious graverobber with  his own opinions on what should be in Good Homes and Gardens?>
Pause and stare again.  Whoever had done this was good, MSPARKER seemed more and more real every time he talked to her.  Typed on her.  Whatever the damn verb should be to describe their communications.
I think he's a fraud.
<A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika.>
Bob sat back, feeling cold sweat run down the back of his neck.  He ran his hand through his hair and it came away wet, so he wiped it on the front of his jeans again.  That was a good answer to give to Dr. Malmstein, he thought.  It sounded like it came from a machine, and it was easy to interpret how you wanted to.  He could certainly claim that he thought it meant that even MSPARKER considered the claim dubious.
He leant forwards again and tapped the PrintScreen button, and then stood up and left, entirely happily.  The printouts came out in the next office, the print-hub for this floor of the building.  There were several people in there, some standing around waiting for long printouts, and some just standing around and chatting to their friends.  For the first time since he left the Common Room Bob relaxed a little.
"Hey, whose is this?"  A voice, a young woman waving a sheet of paper and sounding annoyed.  "How did you schedule it into the middle of my job?"
Bob looked up, suddenly worried.
"What is it?" asked another voice, an older man, probably the print technician who managed the hub.
"Weird," said the woman.  "At the top it says 'A little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika'" – Bob noted that she said paprika wrong – "and then there several paragraphs about something called a memento mori and a drawing of some kind of insect."
"That's mine," said Bob, his chest feeling hollow and the pit of stomach cold.  "I'm sorry, I don't know how it interrupted your printout."
"You're the guy who uses MSPARKER," said the older man looking at him.  "That machine's got some odd functions, you know."
"I know," said Bob, holding his hand out for the page, now desperate to leave.
"It's probably not his fault," said the older man.  "God knows why that machine has all the privileges it does."
The young woman snorted and let Bob take the page from her hand.  "My printout had better not be interrupted any more," she said impatiently.  Bob slipped out of the room, afraid to look at the printout with people around him, and wondered as he did what MSPARKER had decided to tell him now.

Hallowe'en house

The faculty of Epistemological Eschatology had gathered together in the Common Room to look at the perspex display cases and what they contained.  As the faculty, on a good day, numbered only four people, there was no pushing or shoving, no peering over each others shoulders or standing on tiptoes, and very little in the way of awed conversation or startled comments.  Dr. Malmstein was tapping a pipe (that he never smoked) against his teeth, and Bob was wondering if it would be rude to sit down and stop gawking at the display cases.
"We were hoping you might have some insights," said a man of medium height.  He was wearing overalls and clutching a grey checkered flat cap in his hands.  There was a small amount of dried mud on his boots, and a faintly smoky smell about him.  His hair was sandy-coloured and just starting to turn grey at the fringe, and he looked earthy.  Bob thought he was highly suspicious.
"Well," said Dr. Malmstein, the pipe clinking gently against his teeth and muffling his voice, "I would say that you've got some skulls here.  Human by the looks of things.  You might want to check with the local council about the legitimacy of you keeping them you know."
"Yes, but what about what's been done with 'em?" said the man, his accent uniform across his words, not too thick to be hard to understand, but always there like it was important to him that you knew he had an accent.
"You mean the houses?"  Dr. Malmstein raised both eyebrows, one after the other like some bizarre mexican wave performed in miniature across his face.  The man nodded, and Bob decided at that moment that this was definitely a put-up job.
The tops of the skulls had been broken open and little houses, complete with gardens, had been constructed in the brain pan.  Tiny bricks had been mortared together painstakingly, and each house had at least three storeys.  One of the three even had flying buttresses and a little tower.  The windows were mostly left open, but a couple had been glazed, and trees that were smaller even than bonzai were dotted all over the otherwise grassy and mossy gardens.  They were beautiful, elaborate constructions, almost certain a work of art, and yet here was this man trying too hard to be the salt of the earth, claiming that he'd just found them when digging things up and that they might actually be genuine.
"The houses are beautiful," said Dr. Malmstein thoughtfully.  "The artist should probably exhibit them somewhere where they'd get more attention."
"There's no artist," said the man with the cap, looking scandalised.  "There's just me.  I dug them up, and I'd like some reassurance from you clever types that my skull's not going to be next!"
"There would surely be some small difficulty in extracting it," murmured Dr. Malmstein, but quietly enough that only Bob heard him.  "Well, Mr. Phelps, I'll have my assistant query the quipping machine about it, and we'll see if that can offer better advice.  It's a true wonder of modern technology, you know."
Bob flinched.  He'd been avoiding MSPARKER, the university's quipping machine ever since she'd sent him a list of doomsday scenarios.
"I'm not sure that's a good use of university fun–" he managed before Dr. Malmstein caught his gaze and silenced him.
"It is," he said firmly.  "Ask MSPARKER what the point of the skulls might be."
"And what the houses are for," said the man quickly.  He looked slightly more shifty when he smiled.
"Oh fine," said Bob, his voice betraying his irritation.  "Give me twenty minutes to check she's awake."

Viviraft

It wasn't the end of the world, though a lot of us had thought it would be.  The Climate Changed, much as the scientists had been predicting, only a little bit faster and a little bit more violently.  In true British fashion the storm that sunk the Isles was named Summer, and when all that was left above water were some of the rockier bits of Scotland and bits of the Pennines, those of us who had been lucky found ourselves slightly adrift on the gigantic vivirafts.
They were intended to house a couple of thousand people each, and those thousand were supposed to be politicians, royalty, and the rich – the people who believed that the country depended on them and their bloodlines (or in the case of the politicians, their opinions).  A separate viviraft had been dedicated to the diplomats, presumably in case the politicians couldn't find an opinion to agree on.  All of the vivirafts had launched, but none of them had carried their intended cargo, as their simply hadn't been the time.  By the time Storm Summer reached Britain people were cheerfully going about as though it was any other squall of bad weather, refusing to believe that it wasn't anything they weren't already used to.  When it hit, there was an hour of horrifically strong winds and torrential rain, and then everything went quiet.  The British mostly assumed that the storm was over.  When it re-emerged, gaining energy in some novel atmospheric system that fed energy from four different directions into a cataclysmic climatic explosion, the country flooded to a standstill in less than half-an-hour.  Eighteen hours later, and it was sunk.
I found myself aboard a viviraft because it floated by while I was trying to drown in peace.  A rope snaked over the edge and landed in the water beside me with a splash, and so I grabbed hold and was hauled in.
The man who hauled me in, with the aid of cunningly powered winch machinery, told me his name was Jonathan, and that he'd been the caretaker of the viviraft, waiting for the people who were supposed to populating it to arrive.  When the flooding effectively launched the viviraft by itself he put the list of approved passengers back in the safe and got on with bundling everybody nearby on board.
"You've been shanghaied," he said with a grin.  "Consider yourself crew now!"
The viviraft was mostly made of some indestructable non-bio-degradeable plastic intended to see out generations at sea.  There was an entire deck of hydroponics to provide sufficient protein for 2,500 people, and an upper poop deck was like a jungle in miniature.  In there, I found Melissa and Sam, biologists who were cooing delightedly over the plants and insects that were there.
"It's like a little pharmacopoeia," said Sam, who had a beard and was nearly twice my height.  "Unless there was a serious emergency we can pretty much make all the basic medicines, and make a good stab at some of the more complex ones.  We can even make anti-venin!"  He proudly pointed out a nest of snakes that I'd not seen, and I screamed and jumped over the railing to the deck below.
"We've got good telemetry, fuel for about six months, generators and redundant generators, and solar power," said Derek, who told me he used to be an accountant with a hobby in civil engineering.  "I don't know a whole lot about this stuff, but I've been downloading stuff off the internet to learn more about it, and it looks like there'll be some decent on-the-job experience!"
"How do you get to the internet when we're on a boat and the country just sank?" I asked.
"Satellite," he replied.  "Not everywhere's gone yet."
"And when it is?" I said, my heart in my throat.  "What then?"
"Then we'd better hope we've downloaded enough of it already," he said, his face suddenly serious again.
"So what do I do?" I asked Jonathan over tea that night, which was something green and soupy, and may have been plankton.  It even tasted green.
"Entertainer?" he said, and by the look on his face he wasn't joking.  "Chef – this food is rank –, navigator, cleaner,... look, the list is as long as your arm.  Even if you just did whatever needed doing when you were near it it would help at the moment.   Just don't do nothing."
I nodded, and sighed a little.  "I was hoping to be a playboy," I said, with a little laugh.  "But I guess I can be more useful than that."

The end of Mrs. Harrow

"Hello?  Oh, it's you Mrs. Harrow.  Do you know what time it is?  No?  Neither do I, but I was asleep, so let me just che–.  Ah.  Mrs. Harrow, it's 2:43 am.  Goodnight, Mrs. Harrow."

*

"Ok, stop ringing the damn phone already.  I know it's you Mrs. Harrow.  Why are you calling me, insistently, at this ungodly hour of the morning? ...I believe you'll find that most major religions would agree that this is an ungodly of the day, actually.  Why don't you call some of them and find out for yours–? ...No.  No.  Three times no, Mrs. Harrow.  What do you want?  Why are you calling me? ...Your washing machine doesn't work?  Why should I care? ...No, I'm not your landlord.  I'm not.  I can assure you I'm not, and if I were, I'd be evicting you.  Oh dear God, don't start crying.  Oh for the love of–"

*

"Good morning, you've reached Data Analytics Marketetic Normalisations, Department of Soft Power and broken cuddly things.  Goodbye Mrs. Harrow."

*

"Good morning, you've reached Data Analy–.  Oh, it's you again.  I thought you'd stopped calling me repeatedly after you finally stopped calling last night.  I don't care about your washing machine, Mrs. Harrow.  I'm not your landlord, Mrs. Harrow.  I'm not related to your landlord either.  Where did you get my number from, Mrs. Harrow?  What do you mean?  Well that can't be right, we're ungooglable.  By the way, we've copyrighted that word, just in case.  You can sued for even thinking it, if we get wind of it.  Where did you get my number from Mrs. Harrow? ...I see.  I'm not sure how she would have my number, but I have my suspicions.  I'm still not your landlord, Mrs. Harrow.  Goodbye Mrs. Harrow.  Goodbye.  Good–"

*

"Jeronica?  What's the problem, you sound... well, you sound almost human.  You have a call for me?  Yes, of course I sound suspicious, I can only think of one person who might be trying to get to me via you, especially after I spoke to the switchboard.  Would this be Mrs. Harrow, by any chance?  No!  Don't put that harridan through to me!  She's got my home number and spent a lot of last night; well, this morning actually! calling me.  You know I can't take the phone off the hook at the moment, the Sweden thing... yes, quite.  Look, Jeronica, can you do me a favour?  Yes, I know I'll repay it fourfold, I haven't forgotten what you're like.  Yes.  Tell her I died, of a heart-attack, when the phone rang."

*

"Jeronica?  Hello again.  She started crying?  Oh good, that should keep her off the phone for a while.  You sound happy... really?  You're letting me off the favour bargain?  She must have done more than just cry then... hah, I see!  What?  No, I don't know anything about her washing machine.  I think it's broken.  Of course I could get it fixed for her, but why should I?"

*

"Hello?  Is that Swed–?  Mrs. Harrow?  I'm dead, Mrs. Harrow, I know you were told."

*

"Hello?  Hello?  This is a pretty bad line, can you tell me who you are again, and which ministry you work for?  Hans?  That's not a Swedish ministry... oh, you're calling from there?  I didn't think we were doing business with you at the moment though.  Oh.  Well, if you don't know what I'm talking about then you're probably not supposed to, so I wouldn't worry about it.  How can I help you, Hans?  ...There is no ordinance disguised as a broken washing machine.  No.  No.  Really, stop it.  Mrs. Harrow put you up to this didn't she?  She called you up and wouldn't stop until you gave in.  Yes.  Yes, I've been on the receiving end of her calls as well.  No, don't worry about it.  Well, do worry about it, but only in a low-key kind of way.  Thanks."

*

"Julius?  I've got an address for you.  ASAP.  No, the P does not stand for please, don't be ridiculous."

*

"Mrs. Harrow, I've been expecting your call.  Well yes, you've been calling me and people you think can influence me for nearly a week now, haven't you?  You were bound to call again, as you've still not got whatever pound of flesh you're after, have you?  Yes, yes, I'm well aware you want a replacement washing machine, not a pound of flesh, I was alluding to Shakespeare.  I doubt very much he is a gigolo, Mrs. Harrow.  No, I'm not replacing the washing machine.  No, I'm not your landlord.  However, before I hang up one last time, Mrs. Harrow, I'd like you to ask yourself a question.  Yes, I realise it may be hard for you, but try anyway.  In all the time you've been calling me, and please remember that I've never met you, and you called me first, you've never told me your name."

*

"Julius?  Fire at will."

Origami

The little woman was picking her nose, inspecting whatever she found on the end of her finger, and then wiping it on the floral wallpaper next to her chair.  Madame Sosotris, clairvoyant and haruspex, contained her rage, and sniffed.  Her apparently incurable cold continued to make her nose run, and even her balm-dipped tissues weren't enough to keep the skin on her face from getting chapped.  The little woman started at the sniff, and promptly sat on both her hands before looking around her.  When she saw Madame Sosotris standing in the doorway she tried to look both surprised and innocent at the same time.  The end result was a little like the expression of a concussed chipmunk, as drawn by Disney.
"You still have both your hands!" said Madame Sosotris in a tone of mild surprise.  "Please, come through to my drawing room.  The spirits find that room the easiest room to communicate in."
The little woman shuffled to the edge of the chair and actually jumped down.  Madame Sosotris was startled to see that she was actually only a little over three feet tall; looking down on the top of her head made her own head swim and she felt a little dizzy.
"What would happen if the spirits felt most comfortable in your bedroom?" asked the little woman.  It sounded conversational, even a little flirtatious, but Madame Sosotris was still annoyed about the nose-picking and -wiping and so gave an honest answer.
"I'd burn cedar wood in there to make it inhospitable for them, and light votives in the drawing room to make it more attractive," she said.  "I've sacrificed a number of birds and small mammals in the drawing room, burned several expensive essential oils there, and boarded up some other... sacrifices... alive in the walls.  The drawing room is a spiritual magnet now, and to be honest, I doubt you could get hold of a spirit anywhere else in a two-mile radius."  She coughed, a throaty, mucusoidal sound, and her shoulders hunched with the force of it.  Instantly her nose began to run again, and she patted her pockets for a handkerchief.
"Oh," said the little woman in a little voice.  "That must take some effort.  Don't the council complain?"
"No," said Madame Sosotris, her voice muffled a little by the enormous white handkerchief she was trying to blow her nose with.  "They don't."
The little woman, whose name was Jo, now came into the drawing room and looked around.  There were windows in two walls, across which gauzy purple fabrics were drawn, giving the light a definite blue tinge.  The floor was stripped-back floorboards with a couple of hexagonal rugs laid on them at opposite ends of the room.  There was a round wooden table with four irregular chairs set around it at this end; at the other end were two overstuffed, soft-looking couches set at right-angles around a coffee-table.  There were three half-empty cups on the coffee table, and a pile of what might have been dried tea-leaves between them.  Jo found herself looking round the walls, which were wood-panelled, wondering where things – sacrifices she reminded herself – might have been boarded up.  The walls seemed solid, but there were various framed pictures of different sizes that might have been hiding things.
"Sit down," said Madame Sosotris, gesturing at the chairs.  Jo sighed, but only quietly.  Sitting on the couches would have been easier for her.  "While you sit," said Madame Sosotris turning away to an escitoire hidden behind the door, "I shall get the tools we need for this divination."
"I haven't told you what I'm here for yet," said Jo, struggling onto the chair.  To her annoyance, the chair wasnt' quite high enough for her to see over the edge of the table.  Madame Sosotris turned back holding a brown envelope and a cushion, and handed her the cushion.
"I wouldn't be much of a clairvoyant if I didn't know why you were here already," she said, sniffing.  "You're here to find out about Phlebitis, the doomed sailor."
Jo folded the cushion in two and got it under herself and was pleased to find that this boosted her up to the point where she could rest her arms comfortably on the table.  "Doomed?" she said.  "It sounds like this will be a short consultation!"
"Not at all," said Madame Sosotris sitting down opposite her and tipping some colourful squares of paper out of the envelope.  "Phlebitis's long term future is clearly visible, but his short term destiny is a shifting mess of images and mist.  He must do certain things, that is written, but how he achieves them appears to be largely up to him.  He is the pawn of a greater power than we humans normally deal with.  Choose a piece of paper, dearie,."
Jo looked at the papers, all of which were the same size but differently coloured.  Nothing seemed to distinguish them apart from colour, so she selected a pleasant beige square by tapping it with her finger.  Madame Sosotris nodded, and put all the other squares away again, then set the beige square in front of her, and starting folding it.
"You are not here to find out if there will be a romantic liaison between you, either," said Madame Sosotris, running her yellowed, horny nails along a crease to sharpen it.  "You are here simply to find out where he is headed and how you might intercept him."
Jo opened her mouth to deny it, and then paused.  For a moment she could have sworn that the paper shape that seemed to emerge from the paper as Madame Sosotris folded was a crown.
"His whereabouts are important to us," she said finally, kicking herself as she heard herself say us.
"Of course they are," said Madame Sosotris calmly.  She turned the paper over and starting making more folds on the other side.  "You understand that he is under protection though?" She sniffed again, but a trickle of mucus escaped her nose anyway and ran down swiftly to her lips, where it hunted for a way around them.
"I hadn't," said Jo, watching the paper folds with rapt delight.  She'd never seen origami used in divination before, and it was fascinating watching how the paper seemed to catch sparkles and twinkles that shouldn't be there.
"He had protection," said Madame Sosotris.  "I can show you how to find him, but I would advise you to take advice from someone else before you approach him."
"Why someone else?"
"Because I will not tell you who protects him, nor will I expose myself to their regard."
Madame Sosotris stood an origami unicorn up on the table, its eyeless face pointing at Jo.  "The unicorn will find Phlebtitis until it is identified, after which it will probably be useless.  This is all the help I will give you."  She sneezed, and although the unicorn was caught in the middle of the blast of air it didn't even move.
"Good enough," said Jo seizing the unicorn.  "How much do we owe you?"

The house that Jack built

Dr. Roszó let go of the gate, and suddenly felt much lighter, as though he'd been carrying a heavy weight, somehow without knowing about it.  Sweat sprang out all over his body, abrupt and cold, and he shivered.  He looked over his shoulder: Adam was wiping sweat off his forehead and looked a little shocked, and the dull-eyed policeman was still staring resolutely ahead, seemingly acting on automatic.
"That was hard," said Adam.  He rubbed his hand on his trouser leg.  "That felt harder than when I tried opening the gate."
"I know," said Dr. Roszó.  "But that was guiding it through the the gaps in the pattern.  If we'd had to brute force it, it would have been harder still."
"How much harder?"
"Just harder."  Dr. Roszó didn't feel like telling Adam at this point that the pressures involved would probably have crushed the house and its occupant down to a small cube.  Assuming, of course, they could find enough people to generate that amount of force.
"So do we go in then?"
Dr. Roszó looked at the house and wondered how hard it was going to be to get inside there.  So long as the occupant was focusing on the gate, it couldn't be too bad, but the gate was open now, which meant that the occupant may well have switched its attention elsewhere.  He linked with Adam again, feeling the comfort of the flow of refined energy, and looked at the house and garden through enhanced eyes.
The coiling red and black snakes of the occupants power were still roiling around the gate, holding it firmly fixed in its now open position.  Tracing them back Dr. Roszó saw that they were emerging from an upper window, either a skylight or an attic window, set into the roof.  Concentrating, he looked at the front door, and after a few seconds effort realised that the coiling snakes around the gate linked to the front door as well, but that the windows on either side were free from influence and looked to be entirely unprotected.
Then he looked at the path to the front door, and immediately saw the attempts at hiding lines of force beneath it; the paving stones looked rucked up and impossible to cross in this view.  There were tendrils of power spread out across the grass of the lawn as well, but the flower beds bordering three edges of each half of the garden away from the path, were untouched.  Dr Roszó nodded slightly as he recognised this; it would have been impossible to hide their presence there in realsight as the plants would draw up energy straight away and start growing or mutating.
He let the energy flow drop, and noticed that Adam was staring at him.
"I got some of that," said Adam.  "Red and black snakes crawling over and under things.  It was yuk."  He shivered.
"Those are the lines of power," said Dr. Roszó.  "The occupant of the house has trapped the path and the grass, and the front door, but seems to have left the downstairs windows alone at least.  The flower beds are untouched as well, so we do have a path to get in to the house, but it looks like they're upstairs, probably on the top floor.  And I would expect that when we enter the house, the occupant will draw some of its power back so that it can deal with the intruders."
"When?" said Adam.  "You mean we're still going ahead with this?"
"Yes," said Dr. Roszó.  "We have to, we're the guys who deal with these kinds of problems."
"Can't we just call in a SWAT team?"
"Apart from the fact that that's American, we are the SWAT team."
"Oh."
Dr. Roszó looked at Adam, evaluating him.  He'd been hinting at much of this for the last few cases, but Adam had always been on the periphery until now.  Dr. Roszó didn't dare go into the house alone, given that he'd not been able to shift the gate without Adam's help, but he was also horribly aware that Adam wasn't prepared for this.  If there had been any way to pick an easier case to introduce him to these things, he'd definitely have taken it, but it looked like this would be first blood.  For someone.
"We'll have to check the windows first," said Dr. Roszó, deciding to take things as slowly as he dared.  "We need to be sure that there's no more subtle trap set."
"How do we do that?"  Adam's voice sounded oddly hollow, and he wasn't smiling any more.
"Throw rocks," said a new voice, cheerful and female.  Adam turned round, but Dr. Roszó had seen her waddling up the street already behind him.  The short, rotund woman with the rosy-apple cheeks, plaid skirt and ridiculously tiny hand-bag was Madame Annabel, Head of the department.
"Throw rocks," he agreed.  "There's never any need to be any more high-tech than absolutely necessary."
"We have a name," said Madame Annabel, arriving.  "The occupant was once called Jack Panatheikos, but in recent months has been insisting on only being called Jack."
"Who told us that?  The neighbours?"  Dr. Roszó looked puzzled, as the houses nearby had gently twitching curtains that suggested that the neighbours were all home and nervous.  He started wondering where the evacuation squad was.
"The post office," said Madame Annabel.  "Apparantly he's been phoning them up and complaining that his post is wrongly addressed for months, so that they've now gotten into the habit of blacking his surname from every letter and parcel with a marker pen."
"Were there many parcels and letters?"
"Why does that matter?" asked Adam, who was turning his head between Dr. Roszó and Madame Annabel like he was at a tennis match.
"Lots," said Madame Annabel.  "It matters because those parcels may have contained things that have resulted in this... occupation.
"Yes, but how could we know?"
"Ah," said Madame Annabel looking pleased with herself.  "That one's easy; we know the kinds of things that would be needed for this occupation, so we can simply do a sympathetic check if any of them have been delivered here in the last few weeks.  We can go back about four to five weeks for most of them, a bit further with some of the... let's call them exotica."
"We should start with the exotica," said Dr. Roszó.  "Given the strength of the occupant."
"That bad?"  Madame Annabel appeared to squint at the house and the gate, and after a few seconds she relaxed her eyes and looked at Dr. Roszó in admiration.  "You got the gate open with all that going on?"
"Between us," said Dr. Roszó, attempting modesty.
"I'm still impressed," she said.  "Let's get going then!"