Calf had gone, and I stood in a daze.
I had heard of Executors, of course. Everyone had. Calf had run into them a couple of times back when they still worked for the police force on the North Walk, when their power extended only so far as occasional vandalism busts, eviction notices, and petty property disputes. Now they had few limits, given the lease agreements tenants signed on under. Rumor was they could call for anything from on-the-spot eviction to private incarceration.
The property damage alarm rang through the house with the incessant, piercing presence of a baby’s shriek. I bent over and put my hands on my knees. My vision was spinning, closing into a slot, as though I’d stood up too fast. I gasped out each new breath.
Horus entered the kitchen in a frenzy of activity. “What’s going on—what’s the alarm for—come on, Garland, talk to me, what’s going on—“
He caught sight of the window.
“Did you do this?”
I shook my head.
“Calf?”
“Yeah, I think so. Yeah.” I licked my lips. “She threw something.” I gestured at the remains of the egg timer lying shattered on the floor.
He knelt and rubbed the linoleum with his thumb. “Scratches, too,” he said. His eyes spun around the room. “But it wasn’t in great repair from the start. We might convince them it’s original.” He straightened and pressed his palms into his eyes in a desperate motion, then strode to the window and inspected the crack.
“I provoked her,” I said. “Horus I’m—“
“Shut up and get that off the floor and get dressed. I’m going to get Calf. Where’s Calf? No matter. Quickly. They’ll not wait.”
I started to protest that I was already dressed, but I thought better of it. It’d be a chance to catch my breath. I scooped the remains of the egg timer off the floor, picking up some unswept grit in the process. Dusting my hands off over the sink, I ran the icy water over everything and pocketed the pieces, except for the bell, which I supposed was somewhere outside the window. It probably wasn’t worth searching for.
The alarm continued to scream. My head throbbed with it. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like for Calf, already suffering a migraine.
In my room, I ripped my sweater off and threaded my arms into one of the two dressier shirts I owned. The cloth bunched up at the waist and under the arms, but it was of decent enough make that I thought Horus wouldn’t object to it.
I caught sight of myself in my standing mirror and quickly looked away. I looked pathetic, out of depth, like a kid playing dress-up in his father’s closet.
I took the thin cotton back off, pulled on an undershirt, and replaced it. It wouldn’t do to be shivering when the Executors came. Anything established guilt.
My initial anxiety at the prospect of facing Our Father’s wrath had passed into a heady sense of unreality. Every action I took seemed drip-fed in slow, deliberate sequence. Each spot my eyes lit on in the house had a weight of its own, and as I forced myself to step through each action, I took it all in fascinatedly, detachedly: the pinch points between the tongue-and-groove particle board after the step-down from the linoleum, the stripe of white-painted flagstone running all the way up the wall (Calf thought it had been or would be a chimney someday), the tufted slate-gray solidity of the sofa Our Father had left for leasers, my ratty burgundy loveseat pushed against the south wall.
I perched on my loveseat. It was one of the few things in the house that was really mine. I’d brought it when I left my brother.
My head ached.
The familiar sound of the front door opening—the weatherstripping was only a few shreds of rotten rubber, and the door slid past it with a distinct noise like sand through a rainstick—came from my left. I forced myself to turn toward it as calmly as I could.
Two people entered. The first, a woman in a yellow and white sundress, bizarrely out of place for the weather, stood peering in the entryway a moment. The second person, a very tall man in a cream peacoat and transition lenses, continued past her, stepped into the living room without taking his shoes off, and extended a hand to me where I sat. I stood up and took his hand. His hand was cool to the touch.
“Hello there,” the woman said from the entryway. She came briskly into the room and stood next to her partner. “Can’t shake, I’m afraid. Eczema, you know”—she raised both hands and flipped them front and back—“but Warfel here can shoot you another for me.” She turned to her partner and gave him a look.
Her partner extended his hand with a vacant smile and we shook again.
“Excellent,” said the woman. “I am Yarrow Volks. I’m your caseworker for the day. I suppose you’re aware of what brings us here?”
“Is there a way to turn off the sound?” I said. Horus and Calf hadn’t arrived yet. It would’ve been best for all three of us to be there.
“Afraid not,” she said. The pause seemed a little long. “Any other preliminaries?”
“No,” I said. There was an unpleasant flavor in my mouth, like the taste of a new penny.
“Excellent.” She reached into Warfel’s coat pocket and pulled out a clipboard, and he handed her a pneumatic pen in the same moment. She shook it, and its tip extended with a hiss. “Could you tell me in your own words what’s been going on today?” Her face took on a concerned expression. “And your name is always nice to begin with.”
“Garland,” I said, and hesitated. I didn’t want to talk to the Executors alone.
The man cleared his throat quietly. “Garland, it is normal to desire to protect your friends,” he said. “We are not establishing guilt at this time. Everyone gets an equal chance to explain as the case proceeds.” He cleared his throat again. “But the fact of the matter is that you are, after all, in an unfortunate position, and if the case defaults without testimony, it will be to your detriment. All three of your detriment.” He cleared his throat a third time.
“What he’s saying,” the woman named Yarrow explained, “is you won’t be blaming anybody by helping us understand, but if we can’t figure out what’s happened, we have to assume the damage to be premeditated and malicious.” Her face flickered with an apologetic smile. “But if the damage was accidental, you can just let us know, and we’ll work from there.”
“It was,” I said. My tongue felt thick. I could feel my pulse in my throat. The penny flavor from earlier swirled in my mouth. I pressed my tongue against my teeth and bit it to take my mind off it.
The woman beamed. “Thank you. That’s much better.” She jotted something down. “I like your shirt. How about we take a look at the damage? Lead the way.”
On the way into the kitchen, I looked down the hallway toward Calf’s room. It was dark, and there was no sign of movement or activity.
“Beautiful window. I love the light. Such a shame.” Yarrow clicked her tongue a few times. Her gaze flew rapidly around the room, and she noted a few things in her clipboard, bending finally to rustle the clipboard to the next blank page and sketch the crack in the window.
“Cold in here,” Warfel pointed out.
“Breaking the window must’ve made it worse, no?” said Yarrow.
“It’s just the house,” I said. “It’s not bad.” I felt unusually protective of the house and the efforts we went to to make it livable. “And I’d really prefer to have my housemates in here during this.” There was a tightening in my stomach as I said it, as though I were mentioning something embarrassing I’d done. I wasn’t sure why.
The woman glanced at me with a concerned expression. “If you’re struggling with keeping your house warm, have you heard of the Affordable Comfort Initiative?”
“Yes,” I said. The ACI was a joke. Calf had looked into it in August. It demanded a periodic paystub proving at least 40 hours per week’s worth of employment in an approved field, followed by a sizeable upfront payment to install the necessary climate tracking equipment. Then claims had to be filed in person and on-demand, which meant monthly trips to the bureau. Even then, I’d heard they were liable to reject applicants on hair-thin technicalities.
As I thought, I felt sicker. The house and the heatless air and the Executors’ polite menace and the idea of the ACI all seemed to swirl together into a distant cushion of nausea. My tongue continued to bother me. I tried not to think about what I’d seen that morning in the mirror, the living, writhing thing that had been inside my mouth. My heart was shuddering.
Yarrow didn’t seem to take offense at my reticence about the ACI, continuing to poke around in the kitchen. “Where’s the door?” she asked, pointing at the mug cabinet with a quizzical expression.
“It’s been gone forever,” I said quickly. “Since we got here at least. We didn’t break it.”
Warfel raised his thick eyebrows. “You never brought it up with your landlord?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “Not really.”
“I used to collect cups like this,” Warfel said, still standing at the cabinet. He seemed to be warming up. “Are they yours?”
“No, they’re mostly Calf’s.” I stopped. “I really should wait for them.”
“I suppose it was demitasses for me, if you want to be pedantic. Four shots of espresso in the morning, and the cups in rotation.” He shook his head, reminiscing I suppose, and his longish hair swung limply against his cheeks. “But shaky hands do not a surgeon make.” He flashed a wide grin, then just as rapidly flattened his face back down. He held his hands up and flipped them forward-back as Yarrow had earlier, and I noticed for the first time the stabilizers installed on them. The hardware traveled out of his sleeve and split at his wrist into a leaf shape that trailed down the back of each finger. No wonder his handshake had been so hard.
I was getting more and more sure that they weren’t addressing my housemates’ absence on purpose. I’d heard about it before: police talking to culprits alone in hopes that each would rat on the others.
Not that any of us were criminals, of course. I had to keep reminding myself of the fact. It was a broken window; that was all. But in my increasing unwellness, the light coming through the cracked glass spilled over the kitchen with a sickly glare like highlights in polaroids from a true crime drama. Each imperfection in the house—whether we’d caused it or not—stuck out with a seediness that felt to me like so many heaped accusations of bad faith and abuse.
“I’m going to get the others,” I said. Before anyone could protest, I left the kitchen.
Out of the Executors’ presence, the anxiety from earlier returned. I paused in the shade of the hallway to catch my breath. It was always like that: anxiety up to and after anything important; relative calm during.
The shadows in the corridor carried with them a subtle, throbbing red hue, like the lights in the economy wing of a hospital. The damage alarm shrilled on. The wave of nausea from earlier fought its way up my throat, and I fled into the bathroom.
I turned the sink on and splashed my face with water. The cold shock of it was pleasant. My face felt feverish still, but my nausea was at least abating. Opening my eyes, I looked at the bathroom in the mirror. The room was filled with a ruddy light, but whether it was from my own warped perception or as a response to the alarm I didn’t know.
The tiles seemed to shift before my eyes, moving in a way that I couldn’t place, as though each tile was breathing and stretching and at the same time wrestling with the movement of the others.
A dark patch like a patch of overwet watercolor appeared on the back wall. With growing dread, I watched as it flowed with the room like kelp in an ocean current, opened up into an ovular gap like a grateless vent or a laundry chute, continued to mutate until it had grown to the size of a half-closet’s door.
From my side, through the larger door which led into the rest of the house, Yarrow’s voice floated:
“Garland?”
I turned from the mirror and looked at the dark opening straight on. The orange light in the room floated overhead like a ghost, and the door’s boundaries cast a doubled shadow which sent a huge, silky arrow into the depths of whatever corridor it led into.
“Garland?” Yarrow called again. “I’m afraid we’ve got a few more questions.”
I stumbled away from her voice and through the door. The light went with me.