I have always hated post oaks. I remember them at my brother’s old house, back when I still had a brother: they reached out charmlessly over the old tin roof, rattling in the wind we had back then, like long-dead stumps which had decided to go on growing, still stumps and still dead, without even the attractive weirdness of dog-willows or those weeping cedars they plant outside motels.
Calm in the air now: stillness and cold. The post oaks framed the figures in the driveway, and the edge of the garage overhang framed the post oaks in turn, all of it a diorama, far away from me and blistering in the sunlight.
“Right then,” Yarrow said, her voice distant but perfectly intelligible, as though it were in an acoustics chamber, “I am Yarrow; my partner here is Warfel. We have a few questions, then we’ll get out of your hair. Sound good?” She stretched a hand toward Calf, who was closest her, for a handshake.
The trees were moving, but there was no wind. I sat down on the cold concrete floor. All was silent. I leaned against one of the bags in the garage—they were always there, although I never knew what was in them—and sank into it. The hair rose on my arms as the chilly plastic crackled up against it.
There was a noise—I couldn’t tell what—and I looked back up with difficulty. The light had changed. It was darker, now, and the clouds seemed lower, thicker. The group on the driveway looked like something through the wrong end of the telescope.
The man in the trench coat knelt on the gravel. There was some sort of angular implement in his hands now, folded and jutting like a splintered bone silhouetted against the half-glowing sky. Moving in slow motion, he bent over the body of someone in the driveway, someone lying flat on the gravel. The implement shone sunset-orange as he raised it.
My forehead exploded with pain, and I jolted my hands to my face. The pain subsided as quickly as it had come. Lifting my hands from my face, I peered at them as I lay back again. Every fold in my skin was deep and distant, choked up with blood like rivulets through a canyon.
Beyond my fingers it was twilight. The garage ceiling was speckled with popcorn paint. The overhead light curled out weakly across it, casting long, low shadows over the plaster like striations in muscle. There was something mesmerizing about the stripes, and I looked with an odd sense of satisfaction from them back to the now barely-visible trees standing up like a hedge of teeth beside the empty driveway.
I shivered. Why was I here? What was I doing stretched out as night fell on the floor of the garage?
Stepping from the crumpled door of the craft, Foster stared in wonder. The plane she had crashed into stretched interminably into the distance, a vast and glossless surface of some black mineral: slate, perhaps, or basalt.
I rose to my feet with difficulty, steadying myself against Horus’s drumset to my left. One of the cymbals hissed, muffled and metallic, as my knuckle brushed against it. The sound sent a shudder down my spine.
Another surge of inspiration had hit me. I had to get to my room. I had to take it down.
I staggered back into the house. I was at my typewriter soon. The sight of myself in my floor mirror gave me a brief start: I looked dead, or undead, hunched there in my bloody shirt, perching like a gargoyle with my arms stretched out at my sides and a dark stain around my mouth.
I looked away quickly, wiped at my face with my sleeve, threaded a page into the paten.
Gentle light shone over the featureless landscape, and rain fell clean and cold from the star-flecked sky. The air was clear and still as polished glass, and in it hung a faint whiff of cinnamon.
I stopped. What even was a psychopomp? I’d called Foster that, earlier in the story—or had planned on it, at least: the sentence I’d first been inspired by had described her as one—queen of them, even. I’d need to check up with someone later.
It was, for now, an issue I could write around until I’d figured it out.
She reached for her communicator and depressed the glass button on its side. The communicator hissed to life.
Foster here, she said softly. I’ve landed. I believe the situation is beyond my means.
With the quiet animal satisfaction that comes with settling down to doze after an interminable time awake, I wrote. The words came fast.
When I had finished, my creeping malaise and the itching pain in my mouth had calmed again, and I felt alright, if a little sleepy.
I stood and stretched. My muscles ached, but it was a good ache. I eyed myself in the floor mirror to find that I was looking markedly better. The blood I’d been soaked with was gone. I filed the fact away with all the other reality-breaking things that’d happened. It’d save cleaning up, I thought, and the thought struck me as hilarious—it’d save cleaning up: was that the takeaway here?
A deeper excitement had begun to fill me. I might’ve started to figure things out, at least a little. It all made a nonsensical sort of sense—I’d pulled myself back, the first time I’d fallen into my nightmare-state, by writing; I’d done the same thing the second time by crossing into the portal and meeting Foster; finally, I’d repeated it by writing again today. There was a commonality to the events: feel bad; engage with my art; feel good.
Could it be that simple? Whatever rules of the world had changed, they at least seemed to be under my control, and that fact was comforting. Packing up my typewriter and slipping my new sheets under the old ones (the packet was beginning to grow!), I ventured out of my room, ravenous with hunger.
I padded through the hallway to find Calf and Horus arguing in the kitchen.
“—of the most egregious type,” Horus thundered as I entered. He held a sheet of paper aloft and slapped at it with his other hand. “I cannot comprehend how you could pull something like this.”
“He was already looking for something to catch us on,” Calf said. “It’s not about the rent. He was coming for us one day or another.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Horus turned on me. “Calf here has sold us all to Our Father.”
“Oh, come on,” Calf said, glaring in turn at both me and Horus. “It’s not that big of a deal.”
“It absolutely is,” Horus barked. He swept the page he was holding over to me. It was tinted an industrial honeydew color and printed with a monstrous, faux-handwritten font. I took the paper and scanned it in confusion.
MORTIFIED THAT WE MISSED YOU!
Our team members dropped by today to discuss a couple of things, but looks like nobody was home. We’d love it if you could join us for a quick chat—we’ll be back soon to check!
Your home administrator has brought something to our attention that’ll need to be addressed right away:
- Rent sharing — we get it, times are tough. But we’ve received word that you’re providing accommodations for one or more individuals who aren’t paying for themselves. This violates the terms of your rental agreement. Home administrators have to make a living, too!
While we’re at it, your administrator has asked us to bring up a couple of other reminders:
- Climate control — everybody’s got a different comfort threshold, but those pipes sure don’t—per your signed rental agreement, a temperature of at least 18 ºC needs to be maintained to minimize atmospheric risk to property.
- Electricity usage — what’s cookin’? Overage charges are! You’ve exceeded your electricity allotment by 12.3% this month. Your administrator will reflect that on your peripherals bill on the 30th.
Your administrator has also left a few personal comments to accompany this notice:
disappointing
Thanks, and we hope to see you soon.
Allied Executive Contractors
I looked up from the sheet, still confused. It seemed a little obnoxious in its attempts to set us at ease, but it didn’t seem to merit Horus’s reaction.
“It’s the same charge,” I pointed out. “How is it a hit to Our Father’s means?”
“It isn’t,” Horus said. “And he wouldn’t even know if Calf hadn’t borne executive arms against us and sided with the enemy.”
“I didn’t fucking ‘bear executive arms,’ whatever you mean by that,” Calf retorted. “Garland is a grown-ass adult and it’s not your responsibility to carry him around like he’s an infant.”
“I, too, am a grown-ass adult,” Horus said, his voice a little louder, “and it’s not your responsibility to decide what I do with my own money. Especially not when it means screwing over the only grown-ass adults on the planet who aren’t screwing you over—“
“You sort trash at a paper factory!” Calf shouted. “You can’t afford this. Garland. Is. Not. Your. Child.”
“Please,” I interjected. “Please stop yelling. We can figure this out. Horus, it’s not that big of a deal.”
Horus spun back toward me. “You,” he said, pointing at me with arm fully outstretched, like somebody aiming a pistol, “You know nothing. Do not test me. It is a huge fucking deal. Our Father will have our very eyes.”
“Calm the fuck down, Horus,” Calf said.
“You were not the one they called to chauffeur the guy home!“ Horus shouted. “Next door? Neophron, remember? Used to sit outside when the weather was nice? Have you seen him leave his house lately? No. Want to know why? No again. You absolutely do not. That was me they called. I’m the one here who has actually seen this shit.”
I thought back to the superficial friendliness of Yarrow and Warfel the first time I’d interacted with them. A chill went through me.
“It’s not your problem,” Calf said, her voice flat and clipped now. “Garland’s the problem. Garland’s the one to pay. It’s about time.” She looked at me with look of complete and withering dismissiveness, like someone looking at a tick.
It was humiliating. I had only ever been nice to her. I had only ever put up with her shit. But what had she ever done for me? She’d hated me from the first, now that I thought about it—hated me for absolutely no reason. Or not for no reason—she was jealous, obviously: jealous that I wasn’t struggling like she was, jealous probably too that I’d kept writing when it’d been so hard to find time for hers.
Even so, I’d thought better of her. She was a disappointment, Calf was.
“You don’t get it,” Horus said. “It’s not just Garland’s problem. I’m the one violating the terms. And you’ve been complicit.” He put his hands to his face in desperation, strode up and down the kitchen again. “And even if not, Garland is my friend. Garland is your friend. We’re ripping at our own throats here. That’s how the whole thing works. You of anyone should know it. This here?”—he snatched the paper back from me and rattled it in Calf’s face—“It’s a death threat.”