Chapter Text
Tim went up the stairs to the street, tucking his Oyster card into his pocket. It was dark out. He had his keys in his hand, and with his every step the array of keychains crammed onto the keyring made a noise like a lot of metal falling down some stairs.
His bag was slung over his shoulder and rested against his hip. He had one earphone in, in deference to any cars that might try honking at him, and he was humming along.
“Stupid fucking alleyway,” he muttered forcefully. The alley was the only way to get home without cutting across the whole of the Central Park, but that didn’t mean he had to like it. Tim had a healthy amount of what he liked to call genre awareness, and while he didn’t think his life so far would make a good prelude to a horror movie, he liked to keep his guard up.
He was so absorbed in looking around in studied caution—the alley was lit just by one lamp, the gas kind that went out of use a hundred years ago—that he didn’t notice the box until he tripped over it and went sprawling into a pile of wet cardboard.
“Ow,” he said, after a second, less because he was hurt and more because he felt like he ought to. He stood up, narrowly avoiding squishing an unseen spider, and brushed off his hands. Then he crouched back down to get a better look at the box.
It was more of an opaque plastic tub, not very large. There were handles on its sides. It was sitting in a shallow puddle of liquid of indeterminate origin, as you often find around London. After indulging in the sudden urge to look around warily, Tim took the lid off and held it to one side with both hands, peering at the cassette tapes inside.
“H’m,” he said, setting the lid in his lap. He reached in, picked one up, and hastily put it back down for no apparent reason. He listed backwards, nearly falling out of his crouch onto his ass.
Ba, ba ba ba, ba ba ba ba, said Lou Reed into his ear. He took a second to regroup, then reached for a tape again, slower, this time.
It felt like a normal cassette tape. He immediately felt silly. It was too dark to read the label, but he brushed his thumb over it, feeling the paper texture. Had the light been better, he could have seen the five dozen spiders swarming his feet leak slowly back into the cracks in the walls, until he was completely alone.
There was nothing special or strange about the tape—it didn’t even have a case—except for the fact that someone had abandoned it and a dozen of its intimate friends and comrades to the mercy of the London streets; but then again, it was London.
Tim nodded once, decisively, put the lid back on, and stooped to pick up the box. It was pretty light—there were maybe twenty of them in there. He shimmied so his bag shifted to the side, then hefted it and walked two roads down to his door.
He placed the box on the stairs up, complicated by the fact that it was three times as wide as one stair and he had to brace it with his leg to keep it from falling, and suffered the brief daily struggle of finding his house key in between all the keychains.
The box went up the stairs with him, and he turned on the light so he could look at it better. The tapes were all labelled with strings of numbers and letters. A couple of them had more ominous names in addition. It occurred to Tim that if he believed in such things as bad omens, this surely was one. He shivered a little with the unique, irrational feeling that he was being watched.
He dug through and came up with a cassette player. There was a tape inside, which he took out and set aside. The thought came to him, unbidden, that it was the last one.
“Spooky,” he said out loud, in hopes that the situation would feel less weird. It helped a little.
He took his earphone out. It hung around his neck. He could hear the music, faintly, and it went, I do believe, You are what you perceive, What comes is better than what came before…
“Okay,” he said finally, to the box. Then he turned off the music, and the lights, and went to bed.
He woke the next morning from the worst dream of his life, which he didn’t remember at all, with confidence that the late hour had exaggerated the hell out of last night. It was perfectly within his right to pick things up off the street and bring them home; though you probably weren’t supposed to do that, in the same way that you weren’t supposed to touch pigeons in case they gave you some kind of ominous-sounding bacterial disease. The whole thing seemed much more normal in the innocent light of day.
It was a Saturday, which usually meant long catnaps and bumming around in his pyjamas. He watered the plants on the balcony, had a single shameful cigarette, and got about five pages into a book, rereading the same paragraph over and over because he couldn’t remember a thing it said, before he surrendered to the siren’s call of calling Sasha.
“Hello?” she said, sounding rumpled, and yawned. Tim looked at the clock. Half past noon.
“D’you want to come over?”
“Mm.” She yawned again. There was the sound of the curtains being opened, then a yelp, then the sound of them being shut. “Jesus, that’s bright. I thought we were going out this afternoon?”
“Yeah. But listen, I have something to show you.”
“Yeah? What?”
“No, seriously. I have something to show you.”
“Okay, don’t tell me. Twenty minutes, ‘kay?”
He hung up and went slowly over to the box. Reminding himself furiously that there was no reason to be scared of a plastic tub of cassette tapes, he laid a couple of them out on the floor. They were all numbered in the same hand, from 1 up to 22, and he was in the process of ordering them and putting them back into the box when he heard Sasha ring the doorbell.
“Wow,” she said, when she saw the tapes, setting her bag aside and leaning down for a better look. She picked one up, frowned, and put it back. “Where’d you dig these out from? It doesn’t seem like your sort of thing.”
“Found them.”
“Where? In the street, in a secret room, charity shop, mysteriously inherited storage unit…”
“Just in the road. You know, where you have to—uh—near Central Park, you know.”
“I do know,” she said. “I looked it up, and someone got shot there eleven years ago.”
“Thanks for informing me,” said Tim cheerfully. “What do you think?”
Sasha stood up. “We can see what’s on them, I suppose. Maybe it’s some kind of…daily log. Or someone’s audio diary.”
“Spoken word poetry. Dictated short stories.”
“Weird ARG. Hey”—she was rummaging through his kitchen cabinets—“where’s the nice stuff I got you? With the cork?”
“It’s one in the afternoon.”
“Don’t act like you’re better than me.”
The wine was duly found, and they rummaged around to find the first tape (‘Angler Fish’) then sat down at the kitchen table and slid it into the player. There were some seconds of static at the beginning, then a long kind of introduction, then a short horror story.
They listened to it through, giving jumps and bemused smiles at their own names. When it clicked off they both stared at the tape recorder for a second; then Sasha reached and took the tape out to turn it over in her hands.
“What do you think?”
“Mm?” Tim (wine-drunk, drowsy, pining for cigarettes) looked up. “That Jonathan guy sounds like a real prick,” he said muzzily.
Sasha hummed. She was frowning at the tape. She grabbed for her phone and he looked over her shoulder while she looked up ‘The Magnus Institute’, which, according to Wikipedia, was a real-life research institute for the paranormal. ‘Jon Sims’ brought up heaps of results, all of them useless.
“Oh,” said Tim, wishing he’d drunk less. The story had made him dismiss the whole thing as fictional. “That’s—these are their tapes, then. What were they doing out there?”
“It burned down,” she said.
“It burned down?”
“Ages ago. This says the contents of their archives were auctioned off to private collectors. Might not be true. Wikipedia says everything burned.”
Private collectors of what? There was something off here, he wanted to say, but the Cabernet Sauvignon was annihilating his vocabulary and eventually he gave up trying to piece it together in favour of putting his head down on the table. “What?” he repeated, and hoped it conveyed his opinion.
Sasha was still looking at the tape. Her jaw was set. She was staring, he saw, at a sticker he’d missed, which said Property Of The Magnus Institute Archives, London. “2012,” she said.
“How old are these?” he muttered, wondering vaguely whose they were, but Sasha wasn’t listening; she stood up abruptly and came back from the other room with an armful of tapes. The recorder was the nice kind with built-in rewind function, and she started to wind through each tape, looking for something.
He watched her repeat the process. He rubbed his eyes and tried to will away the coming headache. “Sasha?”
She didn’t move. He went and put the bottle and the glasses in the sink.
”A spider?” came Sasha’s voice, from the tape. It was slightly tinny, but definitely clear enough to make out.
”Yeah, I tried to kill it… The shelf collapsed.”
”I swear, cheap shelves are…”
She rewound it again. ”A spider?” Whirr. ”A spider?”
It played on for a second. Then she wound it further back. Jonathan Sims said, ”Original statement given June 6th 2012.”
Tim reached over and ejected the tape. He took it and put it to one side. His head was pounding; Jon Sims’s voice had obviously given him a headache through sheer priggishness alone. He scrambled for an explanation that made sense and came up with exactly nothing. Sasha had her chin cupped in her hand, elbows on the table.
Tim could hear the clock ticking. He counted the seconds. He was struck with the usual urge to make a joke, but the alcohol was mixing undesirably with a deep sense of dread, and all he could do was stay quiet. After a long pause Sasha made a forceful grab for tape number two.
“Whoa hey,” said Tim, alarmed, pushing her hand away. By her reaction, he was a beat behind. “How about we just….”
She turned to stare at him. “That’s my voice.”
“I know it’s your voice. I know your voice.”
“Yes.”
“And…you never said that stuff.”
“No. And definitely not in the 90s.”
“So…”
“So what?”
“I dunno.”
“I don’t know, either, Tim.”
“Look, I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation,” Tim tried. His voice came out feeble. He wasn’t, actually, all that sure, but then again his brain was taking a long soak in red wine.
“The Magnus Institute burned down twenty-five years ago. There’s no way an employee of theirs recorded this tape, gave the date as 2012, and called cassettes out-of-date. And this is the wrong location. The Magnus Institute was in Manchester. It never had anything to do with London.”
There was probably a perfectly practical and obvious explanation; Tim just needed a long nap and four to five cigarettes, and he’d have it. That set him thinking about the story again, and he pulled his attention away with force. He thought hard. “Er—it’s probably just someone who sounds like you!” he said finally.
Sasha didn’t react to this stroke of genius the way he felt she should. “Who has my name.”
“Well, yeah, sure.”
“And pronounces stuff the same way I do. And talks exactly like me.”
He was quiet for a second. The idea that this was real was settling in. It was a wild jump in reasoning, so it was a long second.
He looked at her ashen face. She was shaking her head. The movement looked unconscious.
“This is crazy,” he announced.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah! Sorry, I just felt like I needed to say it. For the record.” He looked at the tape recorder and laughed sharply. “So—I’m on there too?”
“He did mention a Tim.”
“Makes sense,” he said, nodding his head and hoping he could will it into being true. “And who’s—do you know a Martin? Do we know a Martin? Have you ever met this Jon person?”
“No. To both.” She scratched her jaw. She reached under the table to take a notebook and a pen from her bag. “Are you crying?”
Tim swiped a hand across his eyes. “Oh, fuck off,” he said weakly. “This is weird.”
Sasha clicked her tongue. She looked down at her notebook. “Can you give me the first tape again?”
Martin batted a swarm of midges away from his face and dropped to his knees in the grass to get a better camera angle. There was a herd of Galloway cattle grazing, and he managed to get some good shots. He clicked through them, then hung the camera round his neck by its strap. He meandered further up the road, following a stray dog in hopes it would let him get close enough to pet it.
He felt morose, and he thought he probably looked it, too. He was supposed to be visiting his mother in her new home in the Rejuvenating & Healthful Scottish Countryside but instead he’d spent the morning cleaning the rental house’s oven and taken the long route over the hill to the countryside so he wouldn’t have to pass through the village, feeling guiltily like a teenager sneaking out of the house, never mind that he’d never done that as an actual teenager and he, an adult, was alone in a house he’d paid to stay in. It was the hangover of this piece of moral cowardice that hung over his sorry head as he sloped along, sending pebbles and plastic bottles skittering, until he became aware of a figure crouching on the pebbly strand of the loch Eil.
It was a short, thin man, in a jacket that swamped him; when he stood up it fell halfway down to his knees. He had a smart wooden box with him, and a test tube of water in his hand; this he examined, turning away a little to get better light, then capped and placed back in the box. The sun caught his hair and turned it from brown to red like dark fire. Martin wondered how obvious it was that he was wearing pyjamas under his jumper and jacket.
He took a beaten notebook and a compass from his pocket, scratched something painstakingly into the paper, then crouched back down and started waving some kind of instrument at the water. He was wearing wire-frame glasses, their lenses white in the sun, which slipped down his nose every time he moved his head. He had acne scars over his cheeks.
Martin approached cautiously. He had never had the best luck with scientifically-minded types; his act-unobtrusive-and-make-small-talk routine only ever served to irritate them further. He worked at the supermarket: people with real jobs always interested him. When, five metres from the shore, the man turned on the spot to level him with a ferocious scowl, he nearly turned tail and ran.
“Hello,” he said instead, deciding that acting oblivious was the right way to go.
“Hello,” the man grated out. He avoided Martin's eyes, which he was perfectly fine with. He had a London accent; his voice was deep but almost melodious. Mellifluous, that was the word he wanted—like he should sing, or narrate audiobooks.
The wind came in from over the loch and chilled his face. Martin put his hands in his pockets and wished he’d brought his gloves. The man curled into himself and gave a great shudder of cold, then pulled a long scarf out of an inside pocket—his jacket seemed riddled with them; Martin could count five visible ones—and wrapped it twice around his neck.
“What are you doing? It, um, looks interesting.”
“Algae blooms.”
There was a short pause. He was going to stop there, apparently. “Oh?” said Martin, to egg him on. He was oddly attractive, in a kind of tragic Shakespearean actor way that Martin thought terribly romantic, even if he did speak like a funeral director dictating a 1911 telegram.
The man glanced at him out of the corner of his eye. Then, apparently assured that he wasn’t being malicious, he said, “Er, well, I’m going to find out if there’re any here, and then what species they are. There probably are, but it varies.” He trailed off, pulling his box of samples closer and closing the top. “I’m testing the light levels throughout the day”—he jabbed the thing in his hand at the water again—“and I’m going to set up a camera.”
“That’s really cool.” Martin privately admitted to embellishing. But the man’s eyes were a nice colour. A kind of hazel. He had freckles. They looked much better on him than they did on Martin.
“It is? Yes. I suppose so. It is.” He brooded for a moment, casting his gaze over the surface of the water, alighting on a patch a few feet down from the two of them. “There, see?” he said, pointing, getting up and brushing off his knees. He shivered again. Pushed his glasses into his face. His voice had turned less RP, less put-on-sounding, more relaxed. “The foaming and discolouration of the water? A little like scum.”
“That wasn’t there before,” said Martin quickly, hoping that he hadn’t just been too stupid to notice it.
“No. It can appear and disappear very quickly.”
“Cool. What’s it do?”
The man furrowed his brow. “Photosynthesise, mostly.” He thought for a second more. “And it’s toxic to humans and animals.”
“What?”
“Yes. Pets die of it, quite often. And in humans, er, irritation of the eyes and skin, general nausea, vomiting, illness….They’re supposed to put up signs….” He was craning his neck for a look around.
“Oh, dear,” said Martin anxiously, joining him. He cast a sufficiently wary glance at the guileless-looking patch of greenish water. “There was a dog around here earlier.”
“A stray?”
“I think so. Um, sniffing for something. Oh dear.”
“Not much to be done, then.”
“It’s not from pollution, or anything, is it?”
“What? Oh, no, no, it’s naturally occurring.” He stretched hugely, like a cat. “Um. Circle of life, I suppose.”
On that disconcertingly morbid note, he turned to Martin.
“Jon,” he said. “I’m Jon.”
“Martin.” The wind gusted through again and made a good go at bowling Jon over entirely. He had nearly managed to right himself, smiling at Martin like he hadn’t made the expression in a while, when the dog from earlier chose to come bulleting in and finish what the wind had started.
They did end up going out as planned, and did an enjoyable tour of the Jack The Ripper museum, him and Sasha and Sasha’s friend Celia; when they stepped outside again the sun had come out, so they strolled along the Thames with their jackets slung over their arms. Tim was admiring just how brown the water looked when Danny called. They stopped behind the Tower of London to sit on the bus stop bench.
“Hi, Tim!”
“Hi, Danny,” said Sasha.
“Hi, Sasha!”
“Hi, Danny.” He fumbled the phone into his other hand and put his shopping down by his feet. Danny had turned on his video, so he did too. Celia caught on to who was calling and had a lengthy ribbing session with Danny, who she apparently knew very well, while Tim listened to her chat anbout her new job and checked the rain forecast. Danny was in some hostel or something in Scotland with some friends, doing peaceful walking tours of Fort William; it was a step up from last year, when he’d had some kind of fit in the old theatre at Covent Gardens and gained, somehow, a paranoid phobia of clowns, as well as Tim’s relentless helicoptering worry for the foreseeable future.
“How’re you?” he asked, when he was pretty sure they were done.
“In the pink!” Tim had never met anyone who smiled so much as Danny did. It was fiercely endearing. Tim smiled back.
“You’re cutting out a bit. Is everything okay?”
“Yeah, sorry. There is barely WiFi up here. We’re on this mountain range.”
“You’re having fun, huh.”
“Oh, yeah. I bought you a scarf. It’s all stripey and colourful.I—” His head turned to the side as he listened to someone else talk. “No, it’s my brother.”
“Danny?”
The picture flailed wildly and landed on Danny and another man. He was pale and grey-eyed, and the roots of his hair (grown out by two inches) were also nearly colourless, a pale flaxen colour; the rest of it was dyed a shock of black and fell straight down past his shoulders. “Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” said Tim back, eyeing him suspiciously in a way he’d perfected when Danny was still twelve years old and bringing new friends home from school. The video quality dropped prodigiously and turned the man into a white-and-black smudge.
“That’s Gerry,” said Danny helpfully. A second, smaller white smudge appeared on the screen and gave a half-hearted wave. “He doesn’t do urban exploration, but he’s going around with us.”
“Cool.”
The video panned fuzzily back to Danny. “I can’t stay long, sorry. We’re leaving in a little—ing down to the village. Just wanted to h—r voice.”
“All right. You’re cutting out a bit.”
“Sorry.” The picture tilted and cleared. “That better?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll see you Thursday, okay?”
“Okay. Bye.”
“Bye,” said Sasha.
“Bye!” (Celia.)
“Bye!” (Danny.)
The bus trundled to a stop in front of them and they disengaged from the crowd and turned with the river. They stopped to eat. Celia was making noises about Hyde Park, but Tim could see the tension coiling in Sasha. Her attention was still fixed on the tapes.
If there was one thing Tim knew about her, it was how her otherwise rational personality could be derailed by curiosity, by the idea of seeing something through once it had started. Sasha finished what she started like you close a gate behind you: it was only common courtesy.
So he wasn’t surprised when she made her excuses and they left together, and she was quiet the whole way back to his flat.
The tapes were as they had left them. Something in Tim recoiled at the sight of them, and now he knew it was rational, he let it.
“Do we have to?” he asked, while he was shrugging out of his jacket and hanging it over the railing.
Sasha looked almost hurt. “It’s both of us on the recordings.”
“No, I mean—can’t we just…forget it? Leave it be?”
She stared at him like the idea hadn’t even occurred to her.
“It’s not like this stuff has any bearing on our real lives.” His voice came out feeble.
Sasha wrested with this for a few stretched seconds, like he was being dull; then, she said, “Aren’t you the least bit curious?”
“I don’t want to have anything to do with this,” he countered.
“Tough luck! You do! If you’re not going to take it seriously, you can give the tapes to me and I’ll do it on my own.”
“Do what, Sasha? Since when do you believe in shit like this—“
“Oh, forgive me for being cautious—“
“You’re not being cautious, you’re being bloody reckless and you know it—“
“You’re not taking this seriously!”
“Of course I’m not!” said Tim, and threw up his hands. “It’s weird, and it freaks me out! I don’t want it anywhere near me!”
“I know that!” shouted Sasha. “I don’t like it either! But I’d rather have a fucking clue what’s going on than ignore it and hope it goes away!”
“That’s not fair! I—oi, what the fuck?” he yelped, and Sasha turned to follow his line of sight; there were four or five spiders on his kitchen table, where Sasha’s small but burgeoning pile of notes and Wikipedia printouts lay next to the tape recorder. When he yelled they froze and skittered away so quickly they were gone by the time he was to the table.
Tim scratched his head. He stole a quick, guilty glance at Sasha, who no longer looked angry so much as pensive. He sat down like a chastised child, though he was longing for a screaming match or a long few hours of sleep, and said, feeling more tired than ever before, “Come on, then. What’s next? Number three?”
Jon’s hostel wouldn’t let him check in until later in the day—it turned out he’d been in Scotland for under two hours, out of his allotted two and a half days, and he’d already been beset upon by a hopeless gay man and a dog—so Martin took him to the house. When the dog had bowled him over he’d landed with his feet in the water; on the walk up from Martin’s rented car to the house he visibly walked with as much dignity as possible, but Martin could still hear the water squelching out of his shoes.
“Couldn’t you have parked a little closer?” he snapped.
“It’s not my fault,” mumbled Martin. He liked to think that he took any interaction with a stranger as practice in being assertive, but in truth he wasn’t all that good at it, and was prone to letting himself get walked all over while quietly stewing in self-hatred the whole time.
Jon pursed his lips. He sped up, which didn’t mean much. Martin looked down at their feet, the turned-up legs of Jon’s jeans; he was leaving little puddles of water wherever he stepped, wetting the gravel dark. He smothered a laugh.
“I’m sorry,” said Jon finally, when Martin pushed open the gate and put the key in the door. “For being…unfair about it. And I’m sorry again, because I’m about to get water all over your carpet.”
“Just take your shoes off?”
“Oh.” Jon looked down. His eyebrows drew together. “Right. Yes. That makes sense.”
He picked his way to the bathroom to wash his feet, trainers hanging from his hand by the laces with the socks stuffed in them. He insisted Martin join him, at which Martin’s Catholic schoolboy brain started making a lot of irritating noise, but he only wanted him to sit on the closed toilet seat and watch for signs of irritation.
“It looks fine,” Jon was saying, perched delicately on the edge of the bathtub and near glaring at his own feet in the tub. He was in the ratty leggings he’d been wearing under his jeans (which were in the wash, because no one liked soggy denim; Martin had let Jon poke around the bookshelves so he wouldn’t have to witness him try to figure out how to use the washing machine, the control panel of which looked like the dashboard of the starship Enterprise) and his zip-up. The t-shirt under had a Velvet Underground graphic on the front.
“Yes,” agreed Martin, who wasn’t looking at his feet. He had freckles all over his neck. The shower was running; Martin reached over to turn it off and forced his gaze down into the bathtub.
“Martin?” said Jon, looking at him. That marked the first time he’d said his name.
This is going to be a problem, thought Martin, and set the thought aside gently, and legged it out of there.
Martin blinked. Jon was still looking at him, eyebrows slightly raised. “Sorry, how do you turn this on? I can never figure out these contraptions in hotels…”
“Er, yeah, me neither—um, you just turn the—yeah, there. That’s the cold, and the one on the left is the hot water.”
“That’s not intuitive at all,” complained Jon, his mouth turning down at this cardinal sin. “Here—hand me that, would you?”
They had the inevitable massive row later that day, screaming so loudly at each other that Tim’s next-door neighbour knocked meekly on his door to ask if everything was okay; Sasha stormed down the stairs and out and left them standing there awkwardly. She texted him in the evening, while he was lying in bed in the dark feeling sad and oddly homesick.
21:24
Sasha James sent an attachment: Tapes.docx
Sasha James: I can’t find anything at all on Jurgen Leitner
Sasha James: Most of my rsrch turns up nothing, not even what it says on the tapes
Sasha James: Breekon & Hope barely exists online; it liquidated years ago
Sasha James: As far as I can tell none of the people from the first statement actually disappeared
Sasha James: I can’t find any mention of Gerard Keay
Sasha James: I assume Gertrude was an employee
Sasha James: Look just read the doc please
You: Time for me to woo some filing clerks I suppose
Sasha James: Haha
Sasha James: Our best bet is probably to go to Hill Top Road in Oxford in person—that statement is more connected to the house than anything
Sasha James: And I want to find these “private collectors”
Sasha James: I went to Pinhole Books but it was closed
You: Isn’t it better to keep listening to the tapes? What if there’s new information and we only find out after
You: And. We have work
Sasha James: This is important
Sasha James: We can go tomorrow, you can stretch your lunch break
Sasha James: Please?
You: Okay fine
You: Do they just let people onto the premises? Lol
Sasha James: I’m just going to look at it from the car
You: And take stalkerish photos, right
You: Goodnight Sasha
Sasha James: Goodnight Tim.
Tim replaced his phone on the bedside table and put it on charge. He’d always hated Sundays as a kid, watching the clock tick away and counting the seconds until the new weekday started, whiling away the time uselessly and unable to shake the feeling of sadness. He felt a little like that now. Like he was only waiting for the other shoe to drop.
He stared up at the ceiling, laying on his back, and listened to his own quiet breaths. This had been his and Danny’s room until Danny was six, when they had moved house for his parents’ work and rented this place out; they’d shared a room not for lack of space but because Danny was scared of the dark. The glow-in-the-dark stars were still stuck to the ceiling.
He sighed, and turned over to sleep.
Jon was in the kitchen, reading a tiny vellum-bound book he must have somehow concealed on his person. He smelled distinctly of cigarette smoke.
“Were you smoking?”
Jon startled. He looked up. “Er. Yes. I—sorry?”
“Not in here?”
“No, of course not. I went outside.” The book disappeared into some hidden inside pocket of his tracksuit jacket. His movements were weirdly jerky, and the pauses between his words longer than before. Martin wracked his brain for a cause of these symptoms and came up with bupkis.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. Sorry. Cigarettes make me dizzy.”
Martin’s brow had furrowed to its limit, so his face departed from this course of action and sent his eyebrows shooting up instead. “Is that normal?”
“Perfectly so.”
“Right.” He sat next to him. “I am sorry. About before.”
“Not your fault.”
“I was distracting you, though.”
Jon half-shrugged. “You were only talking. No harm done. You seem oddly fixated on it.”
Oh, god. ‘I have anxiety’ was probably not an acceptable answer. “Sorry. Um. Just wanted to make sure we cleared the air.”
“Not at all.” He set his hands primly in his lap. With the recognisable tonation of someone unused to starting conversations, he asked, “What are you doing in Scotland? You don’t sound like you’re from here, are you?”
What had he been doing? Mostly fucking about and feeling guilty, and reading so much Iain Banks his inner voice had turned provincially Scottish, the kind of accent that got written out phonetically in newspaper articles. He’d organised the books by author name, alphabetically, then messed them up again on the notion that perhaps the owners liked them better that way. He’d gone down to Tesco’s and bought five identical microwave dinners, before he became aware of the fact that the operation of the microwave was nearly as unknowable to him as that of the washing machine.
“I’m visiting my mum,” he said, instead of any of that. It was what he was meant to be doing, anyway, even if he’d been exactly twice in the five days since his arrival.
“Oh,” said Jon. He rubbed his hands together. Angling for information: “Sorry? Or…”
“She’s in a home,” said Martin hurriedly. “I live in London. She wanted to be here. For the air, she said.”
“Oh,” repeated Jon, probably catching on to the pathetic implications of Martin’s mother wanting to permanently reside a nine-hour car ride away from him. “The countryside is nice.”
“Oh, yeah. Puts you in mind of bigger things.”
Jon gave him a politely puzzled look. “What do you mean?” he asked, though by his tone he might have meant ‘oh, you’re a dreadful gawd-help-us, aren’t you?’.
“Never mind. I mean—I just like the scenery.”
“It’s nice. A bit samey.”
“I’d say the same of cities.”
Jon shrugged. “I don’t see why it has to be black and white.”
“No, you’re right, of course. And the grass is always greener, as, er, as the adage goes.”
“As you say.” Jon cleared his throat. It sounded like a dismissal; Martin made to get up, but Jon gave a soft startled noise and dug an honest-to-god tape recorder out of his pocket. He handed it to Martin. “It was outside,” he provided, at Martin’s silence. His face turned questioning. “Is it not yours?”
“No. I’ve never seen it before.”
“Sorry—it was on the table on the balcony. I assumed you must have left it there.”
“No. It wasn’t there before.” They exchanged confused looks. On second thought, Jon’s looked more like he was reiterating his previous opinion on Martin’s competence, so he hastened to say, “I didn’t really check, though. I only did cursory rounds of most of the rooms.”
Jon’s expression cleared. “Right. Strange thing to leave lying about.”
“Yeah.” Martin examined it. “It’s cool, though. It has a sort of lo-fi charm.”
A smile tugged at Jon’s mouth. “It does, rather,” he allowed. He checked his watch and made another surprised noise. “I need to check in soon. Can you see if my shoes are dry?”
They were; Martin proferred them and his jacket to Jon with sinking heart, and was thanked profusely for his troubles. He watched Jon leave, then stared at him out the window until he was no longer visible, feeling like a horrible creep. He took all the warmth in the house with him.
Martin moped back down to the loch later that day, feeling if possible worse than he had that morning; not only had he failed to visit his mother, or do anything even as debatably productive as writing poetry, he had also developed a hapless crush on a man he would never meet again and whose first and only impression of him would forever be entwined with the memory of falling into a big lake filled with flora toxic to humans and animals.
He followed the shore, feeling himself get steadily more depressed. He clutched his jacket around himself, but it did nothing for the cold. He really should be getting back; but he felt like doing nothing, in the moment, so much as lying down and letting the earth take him. His own mother could barely muster up an iota of affection for him—wasn’t that pathetic? wasn’t that hopeless? and all he could think about was the shame and inautonomy of being alive; he thought about his childhood sometimes and wondered how he had ever lived through it. He felt the same way now. What had he thought would happen? That Jon would approach him shyly and admit that he was actually madly in love with him? What had he done to deserve that? You get what you give, after all, he thought, and what have I ever given anyone?
There was a fog rolling in, he noted dully. Perhaps he’d get lost.
If Jon had had any half-formed plans about going back for more samples today, they dissolved when he saw Martin on the shore. He was standing still on the edge of the loch, staring vacantly at the water.
The figure looked oddly fuzzy around the edges. Jon waved weakly, wondering if he needed new glasses. He had found he quite liked Martin, who seemed harmless and nice in a way Jon had never figured out how to replicate, but not dim or annoying, and was surprised he’d forgotten to ask for his contact information, especially since they both lived in London. He ought to ask him out for lunch, or something.
Martin didn’t look up. He probably couldn’t see him. In the distance he looked oddly small and lonely and lost. Jon pulled his hat down over his ears and, shivering in a sudden blast of wind, went over to him.
Martin didn’t turn when he went up to him. Jon examined the water, in case he was looking at something, but all there was was a thin layer of fog rolling over the surface. Jon put a hand on his arm and said his name.
He turned to face him. He looked pale and blank; his eyes had a hazy quality. They were a dull brown.
“Martin?” Jon said again, shaking his head. “Er—you’re quite all right?”
Martin’s eyes seemed to focus. He blinked twice, three times, then stared down at Jon’s hand on his arm.
“Jon.” His voice was hoarse and faded, barely a whisper; Jon would have said muffled, but that didn’t make sense.
“Yes. Me.” Jon peered at him. He looked a little healthier. “That is to say—are you okay? You looked pale.”
“Oh,” he said, still sounding muted. “Yes.” He thought for a long moment. “What was I doing?”
“Just, er, staring at the water. You looked about ready to wade in.” He chuckled; Martin was silent. His eyes looked pale and sad and vacant in his grey face. Jon cleared his throat. He wondered if he was about to have a fit, or something.
“You shouldn’t,” he said, sounding sterner than he’d meant to. “Uh.”
Martin almost smiled. It changed his whole face. That was why he looked so different, Jon realised, startled, even beyond his expression; there was something odd and dead behind his eyes, like he could have faded away. “Because of the algae,” he said. He had straightened up. He was rather tall, but he carried himself like he wished he were smaller.
“Yes! Exactly, yes.” Jon was still holding his arm. Hastily, he dropped it. He put his hands in his pockets and they started to walk along the trail.
“I feel as though I’m giving a bad impression. Loch Eil is home to, for example, porpoises and seals and such.” This, Jon didn’t find exceptionally interesting—he was more interested in the bacteria—but it diverted Martin, who started on a long, vaguely related story about a time he’d seen a whale, which trailed into a recounting of a National Geographic article he’d read. Jon responded with a lecture on the anaerobic heterotrophic nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the sediments of Loch Eil. Martin looked confused, but he was smiling, for some reason. The dead thing behind his eyes had grown quiet. They walked on in silence until Martin stuck his hand in his pocket to pull out a chocolate bar for them to share, and came up with the tape recorder from before.
“Sorry, forgot about that. Er…”
He handed it off to Jon, who opened it. There was a tape inside which he ejected to get a better look at. It was hastily labelled; “Strange Music,” he read out loud, then promptly handed it back to forget about in favour of Martin’s Dairy Milk.
“I live in London, too,” said Jon eventually. “I work in a lab. Except for when I get sent off on trips, I mean.”
“That’s nice.”
“Do you want to go out sometime? For lunch, or something?”
Martin looked surprised at the abrupt change in subject. “Really? I mean—yes. Yeah, of course. Here—put your number in my mobile.”
Jon tapped it in, then handed the phone back. He peered at him. “Say, are you okay? Your face is a little red.”
The light brightened suddenly, and they both blinked. The late sun was coming out. “Fog’s gone,” Jon noted.
“Yes. It is.”
11:44
Jonathan Sims: Hello
Jonathan Sims: This is Jon Sims
You: Hi!
You: This is Martin :)
Jonathan Sims: Sorry for texting so soon after yesterday. My workload has lightened a bit and I wanted to ask if you wanted to go out today.
Jonathan Sims: There’s a restaurant attached to the hostel
Jonathan Sims: If lunch is too short notice we could go for dinner instead :)
You: Lunch sounds good
You: 1230 maybe?
Jonathan Sims: Sure
You: Is there a dress code or can I wear my ugly sweaters LOL
Jonathan Sims: Theres no dress code. I like your sweaters.
Jonathan Sims: I don’t have a car, can we meet there.
Jonathan Sims: ?*
You: Yeah sounds good
Jonathan Sims: 👍
Jonathan Sims: Here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/9EivN6JUXWM5hawp9?g_st=ic
Jon was already there when Martin arrived, staring out the window, his hands fidgeting on the table. When he spotted Martin he beamed. He got up when Martin entered, then grew awkward and sat back down.
It was freezing. “It’s freezing,” said Martin. He regretted it immediately, because Jon seemed like the type to get irritated when people pointed out the obvious for the sake of making small talk; but he only smiled.
“Going to hail,” he added. “I checked the forecast.”
“Cor. Good thing we’re in here, eh?”
“So it is. What do you want? I think they do breakfast all day.”
Martin hummed. He pushed himself over the initial hump of insecurity that came with opening a menu in front of someone else and read it through. Jon just leaned back in his chair, looking around. It was a nice, bright place, though the rest of their fellow diners all looked like hardcore backpackers. They all had those big long rucksacks that looked like they weighed fifty kilos sitting by their chairs. He decided on the chicken and rice and set the menu down. Jon peeked at him out of the corner of his eye, hesitant.
“Sampled any more algae?” asked Martin.
Jon startled. “Yes! I mean, no, not since yesterday. Wait—nevermind. Yes, I did. This morning. Sorry.”
Martin didn’t even have to fake his smile. Jon’s front teeth were gapped. “It’s all right. You good?”
“I’m fine. Sorry. Bit jumpy.”
“I can see that, yeah.”
He huffed. “I was going back for samples yesterday, actually. When I saw you on the shore.” His smile dimmed. “Can I ask what you were doing, by the way? You looked a little…vacant.”
Martin shrugged and dropped his eyes. He traced the fake wood grain of the table with his finger. “I don’t really remember, honestly. I just…uh….”
Jon smiled tightly. “Sorry if I’m prying. Just, um, I recognised the look.” He paused. “Sort of…sad.”
Martin twisted his mouth to the side. He could feel his face going hot. “What can you do,” he said. A waiter came over at that point, and when Martin chanced a look up after they had ordered (fish and mash and vegetables and Fanta for Jon) Jon had apparently seen fit to retreat. He groped about for a conversation topic and his eyes landed on the forgotten lump in the pocket of his jacket, draped beside him on the pleather seat. He uttered a little “Oh!” and reached for it.
“Hm?” said Jon, looking up from fraying the edges of the tablecloth. “Oh. That. I’m still wondering why they left it there. Whoever you rented the house from, I mean.”
The renters he was imagining didn’t exist; it was a company that rented out that row of houses. That, however, made less sense with the tape recorder than Jon’s preconceived idea that a real person owned the house, so he let it lie. He shrugged, looking down at the lump of plastic in his hands. “I dunno. You think it’s private?”
Jon’s curiosity visibly warred with his sense of propriety. “They did leave it,” he said reluctantly. “Maybe it was on purpose. It was just sitting out on the table?”
“Yeah.” He looked up. They shrugged in sync, so he set it on the table and pressed play.
The restaurant was quiet enough to hear the gentle whirring of the magnetic tape inside. For a second he almost thought it was blank, until:
”Statement of Leanne Denikin, regarding an antique calliope organ she possessed briefly in August 2004. Original statement given January seventeenth, 2005. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.
”Statement begins.
”Let me be clear: I’m not scared of clowns. I d—”
Jon paused the tape. They both looked up with mirrored incredulous looks.
Jon’s polite confusion turned briefly to some semblance of anger, then back. He shook his head, speechless. “Is this some kind of joke?” he asked finally.
“No?” said Martin. “No. I mean—wait, is it?”
Jon stared at him. “…What? Wh—oh. No!”
Martin put his hands on the seat and leaned back, bewildered. He ejected the tape and looked it over. Their food arrived, and they pushed it to the side in sight of the very confused waiter.
“24,” he mumbled. He frowned. “You don’t really have anything to do with the Magnus Institute, do you?”
“I don’t even know what that is,” said Jon honestly. “I think we’re not giving enough credence to the fact that my voice is on a tape I’ve never seen saying things I’ve never said.”
“I’m really, really sorry,” said Martin, opening Reddit on his phone, “but I have no idea how I’m supposed to help here.”
Jon slumped down in his chair, then sat back up immediately. He took the tape and repeated Martin’s examination. “Is it…artificial intelligence?” he asked dubiously. “That can…mimic…voices…right? Why…? Have you found any more of these?”
“No. There was just the one in there. Do you think someone else has the rest?”
“Assumedly,” said Jon, deep in thought. He shuddered. He looked as though he would have liked to get up and pace around like Columbo.
“The Magnus Institute burned down in the 90s.”
“Oh,” said Jon, obviously struggling with this piece of information. “That said—that definitely said 2005. 2004.”
“Yep.”
Jon put his hands in his pockets and leaned back. Suddenly he startled in a way that put Martin in mind of a cat, almost jumping out of his chair; Martin had his mouth open to ask what was wrong when Jon yanked his hand out of his jacket clutching a cassette.
Their eyes darted between the one on the table and the one in his hand, then rose to meet. Their food was getting cold. Jon set the tape down like a hot potato. “What the fuck,” he said.
Sasha was the one who drove them up to Oxford in her Ford Fiesta so she could park on Hill Top Road and stare at the house mentioned on the tapes, mostly because Tim didn’t own a car. She took her share of photos and jotted down yet more notes, and after she had sat there chewing on the end of her pen for long enough that Tim started considering asking what she was doing—he was skiving off work, after all—she dropped everything and restarted the car to turn them around.
She was staring thoughtfully out of the windshield. Tim put down the Sudoku. He took his headphones off and let them hang around his neck; faintly he could still hear Without you my life’s gonna be, forever Tuesday morning…
He couldn’t tell if they were still fighting, but Sasha always held grudges longer than he did. He was suffocated suddenly by the fear that they would never be friends again, like clocks that slowly fall out of sync, and he could mark this as the point when they started to drift. It depressed him.
He was still trying to figure out what to say when the car swerved in a sudden motion; Tim shot forward; Sasha yelled something out. They were sideways on the road, the front of the car dipping a few inches into the grass on the bank. Tim stared straight through the windshield, feeling his heart rate recede slowly back to normal. He shot a confused look at Sasha.
“Something ran out in front of me,” she explained breathlessly. “Really fast. Jesus.”
“Well. Phew.” He rubbed his chest where the seatbelt had dug in. “How fast were you going?”
“Not that fast.” She reversed the car, thankfully managing to extract it from the grassy bank. It really would be just their luck to have to get out and push it. “I was looking at the road, I swear. It didn’t give me any time to see it coming.”
“Oh.”
Sasha had started driving again. They clipped on for two or so kilometres, significantly slower than before.
“Tim,” said Sasha. He snuck a glance at her. She still looked shaken.
“Yeah?”
“Did you see—the animal? That I almost hit?”
“No. Why?”
“No reason,” she said, in a tone that suggested the opposite. He wanted to ask, but she clearly didn’t want him to. He went back to staring out the window.
Danny came over in the evening. Tim realised as he was coming up the stairs that he probably should have cleared the kitchen table (which he hadn’t eaten at in a week; it was covered in paraphernalia for Sasha’s newest research project) if he didn’t want to explain the tapes. He didn’t. He barely had an explanation, actually; he was still wildly confused. Tape #23 had appeared out of nowhere overnight and it was freaking him out massively. He hadn’t had the gall to touch it so it was still sitting out on the counter, and he hadn’t had the bravery to tell Sasha. As soon as Danny caught sight of them he found himself wishing he’d hidden them completely from sight.
“What’s that?”
Tim sighed loudly and shook his head, trying to disguise how uncomfortable he was. “Young people these days…see, Danny, before we had such things as mobile phones and iPods—“
“Aw, shut it,” said Danny; Tim ducked a swat. “What’re they doing here? Oh, wait—” He ducked his head and rummaged around in his bag, and came up with a scarf, striped in blue and maroon and pink. Tim grinned, putting it around his neck and throwing one end over a shoulder. He posed.
“You look dashing,” said Danny solemnly, patting him on the shoulder. He moved past Tim to look at the tapes and papers. “What’re we eating?”
“Don’t touch those,” said Tim hurriedly; panic bled into his voice and made him sound snappish and irritable. He’d moved without noticing to stay Danny’s hand. Danny frowned, looking concerned.
“Tim?”
“Sorry.” He rubbed his head. “Er, those are Sasha’s. I’m helping her. She doesn’t like her stuff being touched; you know.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“I didn’t mean to snap. I’m sorry. I have a headache.” It was true; he’d had one constantly since this time last week. He was starting to suspect it was somehow related to the stupid tapes; obviously, they couldn’t leave any aspect of his life alone. “Not that that excuses it—I’m sorry, really—”
“Tim, calm down. Are you okay?”
“What? Yeah.”
Danny patted his shoulder again, gingerly like how you’d pet a startled animal. A beat passed.
“You asked about food? I have…I could make mac n’ cheese, if you like, or we could order in…”
That was that. Danny snuck concerned looks at him while they were watching Indiana Jones, but by the time the film was finished he seemed to have forgotten about it. Tim convinced him to stay the night, and stared at the stars until he fell asleep.
These days, Jon dreamt.
He didn’t use to; he did now. He dreamt every night, kicking from one to the other, and he woke up with all the sheets pushed off his bed, and sometimes on the floor. He dreamt, sometimes, that his hands were tied behind him, and his back was straight against the hard back of a chair; his skin felt disgusting. There was heat and smoke in the air. There was wax running down his hand. There was something splitting the sky. His feet were sinking into the ground. He was walking anti clockwise around a massive chasm, almost perfectly round, and its walls dropped steep and flat into profound unending darkness, and there was a person, barely a speck, just opposite him, turning anti clockwise also, and they would never meet, but if he could only talk to them it would all work out and everything would be all right. He raised an arm to wave—
He gave a hypnic jerk and fell off the narrow hotel bed. The alarm clock was buzzing. He clambered back onto the bed and shoved it in the drawer.
He’d been planning to work, but it was practically the end of his stay. He’d have time to get anything he had to do done later today. Maybe he could invite Martin out again, though he was as wary as he was curious of more odd shenanigans. But it was early; he reached down and, avoiding the tape like a hot iron, dug Papers In Semitic Linguistics out of his suitcase.
Tim woke up while it was still dark and sat on the end of his bed until he saw the grey line that marked dawn appear on the horizon. He got up to boot up his laptop and click through the document Sasha had sent, which contained everything from screenshots of Google Maps, to details on forensic identification of DNA, and research on parasites and pica, to what looked like private e-mail chains; by the time he surfaced, blinking so much blue light from his eyes it was like he was coming up from underwater, he was late to getting ready for work.
He called and said he’d woken up sick, hoping the reprieve from work would calm him, but it had the opposite effect, and he sat at the kitchen table staring at the telephone and the tapes and the recorder and the papers and notebooks until he felt vaguely nauseous. He made a cup of tea and a dry bowl of cereal and sat on the sofa working himself up into such a jittery state of clouded panic that he didn’t even hear Danny wake up and only looked up when he wandered into the living room, yawning and bleary.
Danny startled; he said, “I thought you had work today.”
“Called in sick.”
“You’re sick?”
“No.”
Danny frowned. He sat down next to Tim. He cleared his throat a couple of times, supremely awkward. Tim felt an unwanted conversation approaching. “Tim, mate, are you, like—okay?”
“Hmm?”
“You know that—that if you’re, um, going through anything, you can tell me, right?”
“Of course I know that.”
“Are you…in trouble? Or unhappy, or something?” He fidgeted. “You seem really spacey, and kind of sad, and panicky. You weren’t like this in May.”
Tim rubbed his eyes. “I’m okay, yeah,” he said, and was surprised when his voice came out neutral, rather than bordering on hysterical.
“Okay,” said Danny, backing off, though he looked a little sad. They’d always been close. Tim couldn’t remember the last time he’d hidden anything big from his brother, which just made him feel worse.
His full bowl of cereal was still balanced in his lap, and his tea was cold; he shoved a spoonful in his mouth and got up to turn the kettle on. “Do you want to go out?” he asked, a tad desperately.
Danny peered at him. He looked concerned. He went to say something, then reconsidered.
“Sorry, if you have plans—”
“I’m just meeting up with Celia for a few minutes. You can come with, though. We’re just going to sit in the park.”
It felt a little awkward trying to talk to Celia without Sasha there. Danny was chatting happily away while she sat, looking kind of wilted, on the rocking park bench with the best view of the sun. It was mildly worrying how tired she looked, given how early it was.
Tim sat rubbing his hands together. The new scarf was doing wonders.
“It’s really not that bad,” Celia was saying, when he tuned back in. “I mean, sure, the stories give me the creeps, but I’d rather this then get steadily more poor.”
“You sure? You look dead.”
“I’m fine, Danny,” said Celia, and swatted him. “You’d look terrible, too, if you’d just worked my damn shift.”
“Ohh,” said Tim softly. “Night shift.”
“Hmm?”
“Nothing. Just, uh, bit tired, still.”
She snorted. “You tell me.”
“Mm. Where do you work?”
“The, uh, OIAR. We catalogue”—she brought her hands up to wiggle her fingers—“spooky stuff.”
Tim’s head whipped around. “What? Like the Magnus Institute?”
She perked up. “Yeah, kind of. No one knows much about that place, though. It’s so weird—like, so, so, weird.”
“I know,” he said earnestly. He swallowed. He was getting a clue. “You, um, see anything…anything…weird?”
“Oh,” she said. Danny, between them, looked very confused. “Sort of. Yes. You?”
“You could fucking say that, yeah.”
“Oh!” said Danny, snapping his fingers. “Isn’t the Magnus Institute that abandoned site in Manchester? Gerry told me all the floors are damaged, but there was this forum post I saw a little while back….”
He should probably, thought Tim, watching Danny tap away at his phone with mounting horror, not have brought this up in front of him.
16:45
You: There’s another one
You: Another tape. It wasn’t here yesterday
17:23
Jonathan Sims: ?
Jonathan Sims: What do you mean it just appeared
18:22
You: Sorry put my phone down I was freaking out. Yeah that’s what I mean
You: Can I be honest with you I don’t think that’s the weirdest part of this whole thing
Jonathan Sims: A second cassette appearing out of nowhere isn’t the weirdest thing ever?
You: Don’t get me wrong it’s bonkers batshit crazy
You: But maybe not the weirdest thing that’s ever happened
You: Especially maybe considering the same thing happened just yesterday?
Jonathan Sims: Maybe not
Jonathan Sims: Can I come over? I want to see
Jonathan Sims: We can listen to the three of them together
You: Can I come there instead? This place is giving me the creeps in the dark :P
Jonathan Sims: Yes, that’s fine
Jonathan Sims: I wanted to figure out what’s going on anyway
Jonathan Sims: We skipped one
You: What do you mean?
Jonathan Sims: Mine is 28
You: Oh
You: I got 27, I thought you had 26
You: You’re sure you didn’t get it?
Jonathan Sims: Are you?
Jonathan Sims: I would say it can’t very well have grown legs and walked away but I wouldn’t know if I were lying
You: This is the most ridiculous thing that’s ever happened to me.
When Sasha got home, there was a cassette tape on the table in the entry.
She put down her work bag and looked around. She swallowed, hard. There was something uniquely scary about how unassuming it was, how it was only frightening in context. She picked it up, resisting the urge to look around for intruders, only strengthened by the constant intrusive sense she had of being watched.
It was #26, which was confusing until she realised that there was probably some wholly separate poor sod receiving the rest of them. The amount of suspension of disbelief this required was so huge she had to sit down for a second.
Jon or Martin, maybe. Here was to hoping they didn’t destroy the things in some fit of confusion. She rested a hand on her forehead. A Distortion. That wasn’t ominous at all.
Sasha didn’t even own a tape recorder. Who did? Even her parents had thrown theirs away when they moved. She clutched the tape in her hand, gripped with the idea that it would disappear just as easily as it had come, and called Tim.
“Me too,” he said helplessly, when she explained. She pushed down a burst of anger at the thought of him keeping the information from her, until he said, “Just a few minutes ago, I mean. Or, well, it’s probably been there longer, but that’s, um, that’s when I found it. Sasha, I don’t know what to do.”
“Listen to them,” she said gently. She was putting her shoes back on already. “I’m coming over, all right? Don’t do anything without me.”